SOURCE: Lane, Lauriat, Jr. “MacLeish at Work: Versions of ‘Bleheris’.” English Studies in Canada 13, no. 1 (March 1987): 79-90.

[In the following essay, Lane investigates MacLeish's revisions of the tale of the Grail knight Bleheris in his The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.]

By 1926 Archibald MacLeish had left well behind both his career as one of Boston's promising young lawyers and the later Victorian/E. A. Robinsonian poetry of his The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (1924). In 1923 he had moved with his family to Paris; in 1925 he had published his first wholly successful major poem, The Pot of Earth, and earlier in 1926 his first major collection, Streets in the Moon, which included Einstein. A year later, December 1927, Houghton Mifflin was to accept The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

Formally and thematically The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is more ambiguous and complex than either The Pot of Earth or Einstein. Including MacLeish's Hamlet among his evidence, Leslie Fiedler gives four reasons why the story of Hamlet appeals to the American literary imagination: (1) “anguish and melancholy,” (2) “the notion of suicide,” (3) “the inhibitory nature of conscience,” and (4) “an oddly apt parable of our relationship to Europe.”¹ In the fourteen contrapuntal parts of his sequence MacLeish expresses these general concerns through both Shakespeare's Hamlet and his own more contemporary, more personal doubts and despairs.

For Conrad Aiken, who may have been too close to the poem in literary time and space, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish was only “a kind of brilliant pastiche … full of beautiful things … so full of echoes as to be positively prismatic with them; not only prosodically and verbally but even in the very frame of the idea, the approach.”² Such “echoes,” of course—pace Aiken—may produce quite genuine effects, from witty tribute to absorbed eloquence. Even Aiken asked “whether his ‘echoes’ might not, by a future generation, be actually preferred to the things they echo.”³ Often, for MacLeish, such echoes are a form of brilliant, purposeful parody, and additional stylistic power more recognizable fifty postmodern years later for what it is. Granting “that this book is influenced by Pound and by Perse (and by Aiken himself) in four specific sections,” MacLeish went on, “But the experience I thought was mine, the emotion mine, the poetry mine.”⁴

Part Three of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish narrates the sea and land journey of a Grail knight, Bleheris, whose active quest, despite its final failure, contrasts—as do the Persean migrations of Parts Six and Nine—with the more passive, inner despairs of the main poem's MacLeish/Hamlet. Certain obvious debts to Eliot and Pound in Part Three should not obscure how much MacLeish goes beyond these debts. Just as MacLeish's use of Frazer in The Pot of Earth diverged importantly from Eliot's in The Waste Land, so does MacLeish's use of Weston's From Ritual to Romance in the Bleheris narrative. For Eliot suffuses such materials—the waste land, the empty chapel—within a total archetypal metaphoric poem made up of many myths; whereas MacLeish, in both his poems, adopts and adapts the complete myth provisionally, as one possible answer to the questions put to the poet, and to us, by the poem's action and inaction. And the presence of Pound in the poem's rhythm and language, what MacLeish called its “mode,” is much more complex than the simple “emulation” claimed by K. L. Goodwin.⁵

Pending the possible availability of manuscripts of this or other MacLeish poems, the three published versions of the Bleheris narrative give as good an example as we have of how MacLeish worked with and through such echoes to confirm his own poetic voice (or voices). The earliest version, which I shall call “Bleheris I,” appeared in 1927 in an anthology of current poetry with the title “Bleheris.”⁶ The second, which I shall call “Bleheris II,” appeared in 1928 in section 3 of the first edition of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.⁷ The third and last, which I shall call “Bleheris III,” was in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish as revised for Poems, 1924-1933 and for later collected editions.⁸ The origins and revisions of this insert tale have great interest both in themselves and for the tale's significance in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

MacLeish kept the sea and land journey, with some revisions, through all three versions. He kept the chapel episode the same through two versions but changed it significantly for the third. He changed the castle episode from the first to the second version and omitted it wholly from the third; hence, in spite of its great interest, it would be unknown to readers of any of MacLeish's collected editions. Let us look more closely at the relation between the three versions of “Bleheris.”

I. “BLEHERIS I”

Bleheris's visits to the chapel and to the castle seem to derive ultimately from Wauchier de Denain's continuation of the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, in which Gawain has these particular adventures, and where we are told that “Bleheris” first told the tales. The best original manuscript of the Perceval and six other manuscripts were in the Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. 12,576),⁹ where MacLeish worked in 1923-24 at a program of self-education:

I am now at the labor of learning Italian with a view to reading Dante while at the same time reading Laforgue in French (a terribly difficult task) and working over such pre-Chaucerian stuff as I can unearth in this world capital. That for pure letters. My theory is to follow the trend from Anglo-Saxon and Provencal (if I can get at them) sources through Dante and thence through Petrarch and the Pleiade into Chaucer (pre-Pleiade of course) and Surrey and then down. It means a reading knowledge of four languages counting O.E. and Prov. as two. At the same time I want to do the Golden Bough and follow that line. Eliot uncovered something when he did the Waste Land and it would be the purest folly not to pursue it.¹⁰

In theory, then, MacLeish could even have read, or tried to read, the appropriate verses in manuscript or in an edition in middle French, but it seems unlikely. He could easily have acquired what knowledge he required from Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (by way of Eliot's notes to The Waste Land); supplemented, perhaps, by a passage or two from her translation, Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle.

To illustrate this, I have taken the appropriate phrases or sentences out of From Ritual to Romance and rearranged them in the order of MacLeish's “Bleheris”:

Bleheris, who enjoyed a remarkable reputation as a story-teller (194). The story-teller Bleheris could be converted into an Arthurian knight (202). Here the hero sets out on his journey with no clear idea of the task before him (12). He is overtaken by a terrible storm, and coming to a Chapel, standing at a crossways in the middle of a forest, enters for shelter. The altar is bare, with no cloth, or covering, nothing is thereon but a great golden candlestick with a tall taper burning within it. Behind the altar is a window, and as Gawain looks a Hand, black and hideous, comes through the window, and extinguishes the taper, while a voice makes lamentation loud and dire, beneath which the very building rocks. Gawain's horse shies for terror, and the knight, making the sign of the Cross, rides out of the Chapel, to find the storm abated, and the great wind fallen. Thereafter the night was calm and clear (175). The misfortune which has fallen upon the country is that of a prolonged drought, which has destroyed vegetation, and left the land Waste (20-21). The hero's abortive visit to the Grail Castle (16). There is a Dead Knight upon a bier (115). The presence of a weeping woman, or several weeping women (49). Found in juxtaposition assigned to women in the Grail ritual (169). But Lance and Cup, though the most prominent of the symbols, do not always appear alone, but are associated with other objects, the significance of which is not always apparent. Thus the Dish (76). Finally, a Sword appears (76). And a hale king (122). [Bleheris] ought to have enquired concerning the nature of the Grail (12). Bleheris was of Welsh birth and origin (193). At Ross in Pembrokeshire (197).¹¹

To this material MacLeish adds the detail “the spear haft bleeding, blood / Oozing from ash bough,” which he could have derived from Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle: “… suddenly he beheld there a lance, the blade of which was white as snow, … thinking that never had he seen so great a wonder as this lance, which was of wood and yet bled without stanching.”¹² MacLeish's possible use of Weston will be illustrated as we consider, with direct quotation, the respective versions of “Bleheris.”

MacLeish begins all three versions of this first-person narrative with “Now is Bleheris speaking in the book.” Why Bleheris, rather than the better-known Gawain, or Perceval, or Galahad? First, MacLeish chose to make Bleheris both author and hero for a narrative that formed part of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, whose hero was also, in certain senses, its author, and whose author, its hero. Second, Bleheris would have none of the well-known literary and mythological associations of the other three heroes in the original texts and in such divergent modern versions as Tennyson's, Wagner's, and Weston's From Ritual to Romance. The obscure and more modest feats of such an unknown knight would contrast all the more significantly with Hamlet's only-too-well-known, self-absorbed troubles. Third, even if “Bleheris I” were originally only a separate, Poundian exercise in “translation,” later fitted into The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, at that time MacLeish had every reason to speak through a relatively unknown poet/hero. And finally, as Bleheris's the story could not so easily be linked with the many other, quite different stories told of Gawain, Perceval, and Galahad.

In November 1926 MacLeish wrote Pound offering to send him “this piece being one which owes much—if not all—to a certain rhythm in your IInd Canto which said rhythm saved my for the time being life.” Or, as he put it in his next letter, “I can at the present time send you (a) either certain longish but self-supporting sections of my sequence, one of which seems to me to show signs and traces of the excessive admiration in which I hold your cantos, but is nevertheless, I believe, my own, or (b) the batch of short pieces intended for the Miscellany.”¹³ “Bleheris” did, of course, eventually join (b), the short pieces intended for Louis Untermeyer's Miscellany. In December MacLeish replied to Pound's criticism “that I have not found my own speech” by admitting “I accepted your road & your way of going it completely and altogether,” but also insisting “I have always felt (even in a poem like Bleheris, & even facing the patent debtorship) that the stuff was my own.” And, at more length:

Mode of Bleheris. I have not adopted this mode. I should never write another poem in that manner. The reasons why I adopted it here are stated in the foregoing read in the light of the subject matter of the piece. (And there's an odd thing. I know the sea & sailing extremely well. But when I tried to make it as real in words as it was to me in fact I could only use the mode which had before made it verbally real to me, viz. yours. I imagine—but without data—that I know sailing better than you do).¹⁴

MacLeish's reference to “IInd” canto may be a slip of the pen for Pound's translation of Book XI of the Odyssey, which appeared as Canto III in Lustra and as Canto I in later gatherings of cantos:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also …(15)

Yet Canto II does have such lines as:

Water cutting under the keel,
Sea-break from stern forrards,
                                        wake running off from the bow …

To conclude this episode of modern literary history, in January 1927 MacLeish wrote to Robert N. Linscott, “Pound liked the Bleheris fragment & crapped on the rest. Pound has too many rules.”¹⁶

Bleheris's sea journey remained unchanged between I and II, and was changed only in style and descriptive detail for III. It has no obvious source in Weston—certainly the voyage is too universal an archetype to require one. And, as he wrote Pound, the experience was already familiar to MacLeish. Yet some geographical details of the voyage do have a curious resemblance to those of the first part of Octhere's first voyage (as given by Hakluyt):

Whereupon he tooke his voyage directly North along the coast, having upon his steereboord alwayes the desert land, and upon the leereboord the maine Ocean: and continued his course for the space of 3. dayes. … Whence he proceeded in his course still towards the North so farre as he was able to saile in other 3. dayes. At the end whereof he perceived that the coast turned towards the East, or els the sea opened with a maine gulfe into the land, he knew not how farre.¹⁷

MacLeish might also have read the passage, at Yale or in Paris, in an early edition of Sweet's or Bright's Anglo-Saxon reader.

Bleheris's telling of his voyage does have an appropriately Old English flavour: from Pound's cantos and also, perhaps, at a greater distance, from Pound's “The Seafarer.” In October 1926, moreover, MacLeish had asked Maurice Firuski for “what you can find in the way of early English (O.E.) poetry published with translations but giving some idea of O.E. verse forms.”¹⁸ This request, too late for “Bleheris I,” suggests some acquaintance with Old English writings, as proposed in MacLeish's self-education syllabus of 1924. The direct or indirect influence of Anglo-Saxon prosody is also strong in Bleheris's heroic journey through the waste land:

Grass neither nor weed, leaf or stalk never,
Rocks there only, clay cracked in the sun heat.
So still on. Three days rode in the desert,
Steel at noon searing the dry flesh,
Thighs burned under metal, midnights cold,
Cold iron at foot, sleeping in horse cloth.

(228)

Through all three versions Bleheris's sea journey had essentially the same function and effects. It replaces the mythical apparent abruptness and arbitrariness of the Grail romance's (and The Waste Land's) symbolic journeyings and encounters with a more extended, purposeful, experiential, “earned” destiny. As such, Bleheris's journey would compare with the anabasic sea migrations in Part Nine of the poem and, like them, contrast in voice and deed with MacLeish/Hamlet's own indecision.

Certain specific aspects of the voyage add to this contrast. Wind and water embody a more powerful and mysterious directive than the wanderings of a knight's steed. In a line that remained unchanged through all versions Bleheris sails past “Hills and a morning tower in the sun”: refusing, for all its morning imagery and mythical authority, this non-Christian, Yeatsian, symbolic point of epiphany,¹⁹ one that recurs later in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish with ironic force (parts 5, 10). Although lacking the precise literal/symbolic geography of the Ancient Mariner's voyage out, for example, Bleheris's more impressionistic navigation does suggest a significance. Setting out from a western shore like some voyager to the Western Isles or the New World, he sails instead toward the unknown north (northwest in I and II) for two nights and two days, then east by north for a night, and on the third day sleeps while an east wind drives him, like some Greenland Viking, to a western land with fog, pines, grey sand, and a gravel beach onto which he is lifted, at dawn on the fourth day, by the seventh wave.

He is thus brought, by the elements and by his own skill and endurance, to a harsher, more mysterious land of northern myth, into which he rides for a day and a night to the chapel. At the chapel he encounters the dead hand in all three versions, and a burning candle in I and II that the hand puts out. He then, in I and II, rides westward for three days through a waste land and comes to a deserted city and a king's house. There he encounters, in I, a dead knight with women about him, a procession bearing cup, spear, sword, and dish, and “a crowned King walking,” all out of Weston. The dramatized author/reader asks Bleheris:

                                        (Did you not speak to them?
Did you not ask, not ask? Did you not
Speak to it. …)

(230)

But Bleheris says only:

                                        I saw these things Bleheris.
I made this book at Ross in my old days.

These final gratuitous one-and-a-half lines, that appear only in “Bleheris I,” are to me the strongest single piece of evidence that MacLeish drew on Weston rather than some other source for “Bleheris I.”

II. FROM “BLEHERIS I” TO “BLEHERIS II”

For the second version of “Bleheris,” included in the first publication of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, MacLeish changed only the climactic visit to the Grail castle (Weston's term for it). After an old man had taken the reins of his horse, Bleheris addresses the reader in ten lines added to this version:

Now I beseech thee, thou, unknown, whosoever,
Stranger or still as I born by the sea stream,
Thou that readest these words, pray for my rest now.
Dangerous deed it is, rune to discover—
Craft to utter in word: dangerous cunning
Unknown thing to make known. Never man
Thickened by truth say ever. (Nevertheless
Many in older time knew of the mystery:
Priests, keepers of rule; few now and poor men.)
You that can understand—pity the stones!

(13)

In these even more strongly, more awkwardly, and more derivatively Anglo-Saxon accents he emphasizes his special role as poet/hero. He also shows his awareness of the ancient Mystery traditions Weston found behind the Grail legends.²⁰ The dead knight mourned by women in I has vanished from II: “A room, but empty, but no man there, no one” (13), and the more primitive “spear” of I has become the more chivalric “lance” of II.

The “crowned king walking” (230) of I has become the “dead king, crowned” (14) of II. By this important change MacLeish removed an apparent contradiction commented on by Weston: “the presentment of this central figure is much confused; generally termed Le Roi Pescheur, he is sometimes described as in middle life, and in full possession of his bodily powers. Sometimes while still comparatively young he is incapacitated by the effects of a wound” (118-19). Ritually viewed, however, as Weston does view it: “Fisher King, and Maimed King, representing two different aspects of the same personality, may, and probably were, represented as two individuals, but one alone is disabled. … Thus the Bleheris version … is, ritually, the more correct” (122). MacLeish may not have understood Weston's full argument in Chapter IX, “The Fisher King” (113-23). More likely, for “Bleheris II” and its ironic role in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish he chose to cut off the ritual mid-way, before the Fisher King could be restored by the quest and questioning of Bleheris to life and fertility.

MacLeish changed the very ending of II as well. This time Bleheris is addressed not by a parenthetic dramatized author/reader but by a half-line out of Hamlet: “Did you not speak to it” (I.ii.214), thus giving the query Shakespearean, more independent, more universal authority. And this time:

The dead king lay there, secret, his mouth sealed,
His eyes closed up with silence. And my heart
Beat. And my breath came. And I cried aloud
Asking the question. …

(14-15)

The ellipses are the poem's. And what follows is another passage from Hamlet: “… peace! I pray you all / If you have hitherto concealed this sight …” (I.ii.243-44). This “quotation” is directed with interesting ambiguity both to Bleheris just before and to the dramatized author/reader just after, whose “page / Wrinkles with light.” It links even the digressive Bleheris narrative more firmly to the Shakespearean sub-text of MacLeish's text. Above all, it leaves the ritual result of Bleheris's question, like so much else, a mystery to the protagonist of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

III. FROM “BLEHERIS II” TO “BLEHERIS III”

For the third, the last, and the definitive version of Part Three of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, MacLeish made two kinds of revisions, thematic and aesthetic. He cut all of the waste land, the ruined city, and the king's house. He thereby brought Bleheris's adventure more into proportion with the other longer parts of the complete poem. He got rid of the more obviously derivative matter in Bleheris's narrative, derivative both in content and in style. More important, Bleheris's visit to what Weston called the Perilous Chapel had been a preparatory initiation, perhaps an Underworld visit,²¹ before achieving the Grail castle. Now this visit itself is the climactic event, the whole point of the voyage, the height of the adventure, and the only meaning Bleheris's quest can have for the complete poem and for MacLeish/Hamlet.

For these new purposes, MacLeish made further aesthetic revisions to the language, sound, rhythm, and detail of the sea and land journey to the Grail chapel. He intensified the physical, existential actuality of crucial acts and strengthened the supporting sound patterns. Bleheris's commitment of himself and his horse to the ship, in I and II:

So entered: and at dusk
The land breeze, warm at first, smelling of furze root,
Cool after.

(225; 7)

became, in III:

And sail was set on the ship and I led the beast by a
Rock's bridge and I cut rope and the wind was
Off shore smelling at first of the furze root,
Afterward cold:

(114)

In I and II:

                                        And the wind held all that day
And the sea was with us, the wind sweep
Crossing the smooth surge.

(225-26; 8)

was condensed in III to:

                              And the wind held all that day
Heaping the wave tops westward,

(115)

and on a smaller scale, “the lee rail / Down, the wake washed out by the sea scud,” became: “the lee rail / Free by a strake, the wake washed out by the sea-scud,” and “Luffed to reef her” became “Luffed to have reefed her,” again improving detail or sound or both. One more example from the sea journey: “Taking her aft, lifting slow with the bilge water” in I and II; in III, “Taking her stern, the lift logged with the bilge water.”

The ten lines in I and II (226; 8-9) that described Bleheris's coming to the unknown country were rearranged and rewritten for III into a much stronger version of this liminal event:

Rain and the wind gone east, the gear wet,
The bow sheer down with water. And I slept
And woke past sunset and I saw the sky
Gold, and against it black, and the black, land:
And the scud blew over it blurring the golden light.
And all that night the surf was through the sea mist:
The pine tops combing through the fog at dawn.
And I struck the sea with the oars but the ship lifted,
Grinding on gravel, and the bow fell off
Waiting the seventh wave and leaned and rode with it

(115)

The clotted atmosphere of the country, in I and II:

Wild-pig, fox-foot, nor birds but three silent,
Nor live thing other but bat on oak branch—no
Cry but of gulls above over the leaf sea,
No sound beneath but hoof on mould and hum
Of soft flies rising sleepy from sap ooze.

(226-27; 9)

is condensed and made even more mysterious in III:

Dog foot, wolf, nor birds but three birds silent,
Nor any live thing other but the bat,
Nor sound but bat's sound nor the whine of flies.

(115)

The actual arrival at the Grail chapel was changed from:

                              So rode on and before me,
A long way off, door framed, dim in the forest,
A light, and called and no voice and rode shouting
And found there, trees over roof, the walls leafy,
Door-sill deep in moss, a church, within
Bare floor, bare altar,

(227; 10)

to:

                                        And I rode and there was
One light lingered through the shut of dark.
That light I followed. And I found a door:
And past the door a church nave: and the church
Empty, the sill moss growing on the stone:
And one bare chapel.

(116)

This last major aesthetic and thematic revision shows every aspect of MacLeish's poetic skills. Like other revisions from II to III, it gives natural emphasis to the first-person narrator. It gets rid of the unfortunate sound effects and excessive, irrelevant foliage of II. It gives the all-important light more emphasis, suggests Bleheris's entrance into the church more exactly, singles out the Grail chapel within the ruined church, and adjusts the syntactical and line rhythms more subtly to the movement of the sense.

For “Bleheris III” MacLeish made one more, thematic, revision that changed the essential force of the chapel itself, of the whole narrative, and of the narrative in relation to the complete Hamlet of A. MacLeish. For the initiation ritual of I and II Bleheris found in the chapel only “tall on golden stick / One candle burning” (227; 10), and it is this candle that the dead hand puts out. Now Bleheris's encounter is mythically false but thematically more definitive:

                                                            And I saw a cup
Crimson and burning and a flame of candles
Burning before it. And I knew that cup.
I knelt there thanking Jesus Christ.

(116)

For early, surviving fertility symbols out of Weston by Frazer, MacLeish has substituted the later, more orthodox Christian Grail out of Tennyson by Malory; brought, by tradition, to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea.²² In MacLeish's final version of this narrative Bleheris finds the Grail only to lose it, rather than the one candle:

The nails gone, shriveled, a dead hand, and droop
And close about the vessel. And the flame
Leapt and the night had all. Then silence.

(116)

By this crucial change MacLeish/Hamlet's concerns in the complete poem are contrasted with Bleheris's more exact, orthodox quest. But when Bleheris loses the Grail to the demonic dead hand (of doubt?), contrast turns into comparison: his loss becomes analogous to whatever belief it is the protagonist of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish has lost in his turn. For III MacLeish has added to the significance of this loss by glossing it, rather than the Grail castle of I and II, with Horatio's lines:

                                                            … both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes.

(I.ii.209-11)

MacLeish ends this third and last version of the narrative of Bleheris's aborted quest on an almost Frostian note of natural order:

Came to a clearing in the wood and reined
And saw the storm had passed there and the sky all
Clean, the stars out …

(116)

but one which is not, we remind ourselves, the ending of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish:

It is time we should accept …
                                                                                                              Thou wouldst not think
                                        How ill all's here about my heart!

Notes

1. “Caliban or Hamlet,” Unfinished Business (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 99-100.

2. A Reviewer's ABC (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 282.

3. Ibid., p. 283.

4. Archibald MacLeish, Letters, 1907-1982, ed. R. H. Winnick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 222.

5. The Influence of Ezra Pound (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 180.

6. Louis Untermeyer, ed., American Poetry 1927: A Miscellany (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), pp. 225-30.

7. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), pp. 6-15.

8. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), pp. 6-9; Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 202-04; Collected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), pp. 228-30; New and Collected Poems 1917-1976 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 114-16. All quotations from the third version are from New and Collected Poems.

9. Jessie L. Weston, The Legend of Sir Perceval (London: David Nutt, 1906), I, 28-29.

10. Letters, p. 125.

11. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920; New York: Doubleday, 1957).

12. Jessie L. Weston, trans., Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle (1903; New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 22.

13. Letters, pp. 186-88.

14. Letters, pp. 191-92.

15. Ezra Pound, Lustra (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1917), p. 198; Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1948), p. 3; see also Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), items A17 (Quia Pauper Amavi) and A26 (A Draft of XVI Cantos).

16. Letters, p. 194.

17. Richard Hakluyt, Voyages, 8 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), I, 57. In July 1926 MacLeish indicated at least his general familiarity with such material by asking Lewis Galantière to order for MacLeish's son “any titles in the publications of the Hakluyt Society which you think he could go? … I fancy there are some. If not in that series perhaps under the general head of voyages” (Letters, p. 179).

18. Letters, p. 186.

19. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 203-06.

20. From Ritual to Romance, Chapter X, “The Secret of the Grail (1) The Mysteries,” pp. 137-48.

21. From Ritual to Romance, pp. 184-86.

22. Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913; New York: Haskell House, 1965), pp. 53-62; From Ritual to Romance, pp. 160-61.