SOURCE: Lane, Lauriat, Jr. “‘Intimate Immensity’: On the Poetics of Space in MacLeish's Einstein.” Canadian Review of American Studies 14, no. 1 (spring 1983): 19-29.

[In the following essay, Lane analyzes the spatial imagery and dialectic pattern of MacLeish's long poem Einstein.]

In 1926 Archibald MacLeish included in part two, “Several Shadows of a Skull,” of Streets in the Moon, one longer poem, Einstein.¹ Published separately three years later,²Einstein has been included in every collection of MacLeish's poetry since.³ Twice it was gathered with other longer poems in a separate section; in the latest edition it is placed chronologically with the other poems of the 1920s. It has been anthologized in a few collections of American poetry.⁴ But it has not, to my knowledge, received extended critical attention. Nor has it been fully appreciated for what it is: both one of MacLeish's most distinguished longer poems and one of the most distinguished longer American poems of this century.

.....

The title and part of the approach of this paper come from Gaston Bachelard, who discusses “intimate immensity” in the eighth chapter of The Poetics of Space in terms strikingly close to the procedures of MacLeish's poem.⁵ For Bachelard, “immensity is a philosophical category of daydream” (p. 183); “a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness” (p. 184). Thus “it is through their ‘immensity’ that these two kinds of space—the space of intimacy and world space—blend” (p. 203), in images such as Baudelaire's “vastness” or Rilke's trees or, in a brief allusion, Thoreau's Walden Pond (p. 210). Bachelard ends this chapter: “But poems are human realities; it is not enough to resort to ‘impressions’ in order to explain them. They must be lived in their poetic immensity” (p. 210). As must MacLeish's Einstein.

MacLeish's protagonist is professionally a mathematical physicist; in this poem he is much closer to Bachelard's “daydreamer” or Emerson's “Man Thinking.” Yet late in his life Albert Einstein replied to a psychological survey of the mental processes of mathematicians in terms that do suggest the procedures of Einstein. He stated that for him “the psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined,” and that “it is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements.” However, he went on, “the above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”⁶ To which might be added the final sentence of Einstein's “Notes on the Origin of the General Theory of Relativity”: “But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light—only those who have experienced it can understand that.”⁷ MacLeish's poem presents its protagonist at those stages in his “associative play” that a poet's words could best describe: stages shortly before Einstein's space hardens into the “words or other signs” that would be “conventional” to the mathematical physicist and his audience but beyond or at least alien to the imagining poet and his audience.

Of course MacLeish's Einstein does not chart any close correspondence to the actual psychological, epistemological or spiritual conditions under which Albert Einstein achieved his Special Theory of Relativity as he walked through the streets of Bern from 1902 to 1905.⁸ Rather, MacLeish has chosen one of the representatives heroes of our century to dramatize in a poetic meditation one more of those moving encounters of the individual soul with the not-Me comparable to Emerson's Nature, Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's “Song of Myself,” The Education of Henry Adams—even Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. Such works are as important to an appreciation of Einstein as the facts of its hero's actual life or the complexities of the theories of relativity. Had MacLeish written Einstein in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, rather than at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth, its hero and its title might well have been: Emerson.⁹

Bachelard's ninth chapter is “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,” one way of describing the encounter of the self with the not-Me. For Bachelard as for MacLeish and his hero, “simple geometrical opposition” is a “false light,” a “cancerization of the linguistic tissue,” in place of which “it is preferable to follow all the ontological deviations of the various experiences of being” (pp. 211-13). And how better achieve this than through the poet's “exaggerating” imagination: “The phenomenological gain appears right away: in prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of reduction” (p. 219). In Einstein and through Einstein, who is both Carlylean hero and Emersonian representative man, MacLeish conveys his drama of the intellect and the soul amid outer and inner space. He conducts protagonist and reader outward and inward, literally and metaphorically, through a series of imagined “ontological deviations” complex and convincing enough to do full poetic justice to MacLeish's physical and metaphysical narrative of “a day in the life of.”

The poetics of space in Einstein could be categorized in more detail and then discussed by category. The overall dialectic of inner and outer space could be extended along a range of categories: soul, mind, body, sensation, intention, cityscape, landscape, “skyscape,” and a universal, conceptual space which might circle back to our initial innermost space. Each of these categories of space could in turn be approached—in a scheme roughly charting the course of European scientific thought and the progress of Einstein—as being literally and symbolically, static or mechanic, then organic, and finally atomic. Categorical discussion, however, would do little to convey the intricate, interwoven quality of MacLeish's exploration of inner and outer space through the length of Einstein. Better, then, to consider the text of the poem as it presents itself to us, but beginning—perhaps surprisingly—with its gloss.

The gloss to Einstein, its most obvious formal characteristic and its most eccentric in several senses, offers commentary a convenient way into the poem. The gloss may seem almost incidental to a first reading of the poem and secondary to later ones. Yet it is a witty, epigrammatic prose poem in its own right and is significantly counterpointed against the expansive, meditating blank verse of the main text. Moreover, it contains the main text in a number of interesting ways, from topographical annotation to allegorical or direct commentary. Recast into a single paragraph, as a separate prose poem, it reads as follows:

Einstein upon a public bench Wednesday the ninth contemplates finity. Einstein descends the Hartmannsweilerstrasse. Einstein provisionally before a mirror accepts the hypothesis of subjective reality … rejects it. Einstein unsuccessfully after lunch attempts to enter, essaying synthesis with what's not he, the Bernese Oberland. Einstein dissolved in violins invades the molecular structure of F. P. Paepke's Sommergarten. Is repulsed. To Einstein asking at the gate of stone none opens. Einstein hearing behind the wall of the Grand Hôtel du Nord the stars discovers the Back Stair. Einstein on the terrasse of The Acacias forces the secret door. Einstein enters.¹⁰

Unlike the poem the gloss is full of names and, again unlike the poem, names of presences rather than of absences. In addition to the redundant, obsessive, mock-heroic citation of the name of the hero beyond all syntactic need, there are the various place names. Such names ground Einstein's meditations on an implied Bern cityscape that, if MacLeish had so intended, could try for the Joycean realistic particularity of Leopold Bloom's Dublin.¹¹ At the same time some of the names suggest witty aptnesses that border on the allegorical. In “essaying synthesis with … the Bernese Oberland” Einstein, like many previous pilgrims of thought, looks unto the hills. How archetypal a garden is “F. P. Paepke's Sommergarten” despite its literal artificiality? Or the near-Eastern “Acacias”? Should the “Grand Hôtel du Nord” imply the fixed pole star MacLeish writes of in other poems and by extension the starry heavens (here explicitly cited) whose order Einstein radically unfixed? Even more conjecturally, when “Einstein descends the Hartmannsweilerstrasse,” may we entertain and be entertained by appropriate thoughts of Eduard von Hartman's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869)?

Other spatial details in the gloss carry significant overtones. The everyday “public bench” is also ambiguously meditational, even devotional. Einstein's domestic mirror is by tradition magical and symbolic. “The gate of stone,” “The Back Stair,” and “the secret door” all can have the same immediate symbolic force as the spatial details of Eliot's Ash-Wednesday. Neither the ivory gate of false dreams nor Sweeney's “hornéd gate” of true dreams,¹² but a more elemental and unyielding portal. “The Back Stair” adds a surreptitious, humorously subversive note to the obvious Dantean and Eliotic echoes. “The secret door” of traditional symbolic and sacred space can be “forced” only by the twentieth-century Einstein.¹³ Thus the gloss both grounds and extends the meditative burdens of the main poem, even to the point of such explicit explanations as “accepts the hypothesis of subjective reality,”¹⁴ “essaying synthesis,” and “invades the molecular structure.” Moreover, returned to their original place beside specific lines of verse, the various elements of the gloss add tangentially to the detailed, line-by-line Bachelardian phenomenology of Einstein's spatial imagery, to which I now turn.

.....

Einstein's initial stance “between the sun and moon” is in many ways premodern, pre-scientific, and almost pre-adult, pre-thought. This poem indeed begins at the beginning. For our first awareness of these two features of our own skyscape comes very early in life and may be instinctive, even tidal. And the earliest astronomical “scientists” observed and responded to the orderly daily and monthly movements of sun and moon.¹⁵ At the same point in history and possibly long before these two heavenly bodies held the elaborate mythological identities still well-known to readers of literature and mythology and still, according to Jungian theory, alive and potent in our collective unconscious.¹⁶ Sun and moon are also, of course, recurrent through MacLeish's other poetry, with similar identities. Einstein's initial stance, then, is on the one hand stark and absolute and on the other familiar, even familial. This spatial stance, these spatial companions, locate physically and phenomenologically the “secrecy,” the identity, from which Einstein begins his daily journey of thought, his encounter with the not-Me of external, extended space. They might also suggest the starting-point of the poem's linear chronology: the moment between moonlight and sunlight, dream and thought, night and day, rest and quest. This initial spatio-temporal identity is reinforced half-facetiously by Einstein's evolutionary status: “if only that / His father was an ape” (ll. 3-4).

MacLeish then develops Einstein's “something inviolable” with a cluster of spatial images that mix Shakespearean, subjective suggestiveness with objective, Laforgean wit, that modulate from “sweet music” to shoes and, later, coat and trousers. On the one hand music makes Einstein's inner space “sound hollow” and somehow inhabited behind the Shakespearean “seamless arras,” with its possible echo of Hamlet's “I know not ‘seems’” (I.ii.76), by “a living something.” All this is appropriately conveyed in a passage, too long to quote in its entirety, of richly musical blank verse. But this first, apparently subjective identity is nevertheless unreceptive (“no doors … no windows”) to such outer forces as sunlight and “the mirror moon.” And so Einstein's self remains, at this early point, “small and tight,” objectively “contracted into space / Opaque and perpendicular” (ll. 13-14), projecting outward only to cast a shadow, and with shoes—in a strikingly modern defamiliarization of ordinary space—“bearing up against the sphere” (l. 16).

Next MacLeish affirms tentatively, by a kind of dialectic denial, some of the immensities of outer space-time: “for he ends / If there why then no farther” (ll. 17-18). “Ends” in the poem puns wittily against “finity” in the gloss, undercutting the literal authority of both. “Contemplates” in the gloss prepares for Einstein's inner meditative progress beyond mere finity, as do the eloquence and thematic authority of the poem's images of that outer reality conditionally denied him: universe, time, Jehovah, stars, sun, and “the middle serpent” (ll. 18-28). These images, many of them spatial, negate the negation of “his boundaries” and set up a dramatic irony between the crabbed positives of his limitations and the expansive negatives of his prospects. This irony is at once matched by the tonal irony of the reaffirmation of “his detachment,” by which his shoes and coat and trousers fit and orbit mock-heroically against “the orbit of the earth,” “the surrounding cosmos,” and “the revolutions of the stars” (ll. 32, 37, 39). Thus are we brought to the first crisis of the poem.

For how can Einstein, as he must, be made to move forward out of this apparent personal and philosophical impasse? How can he, and through him the reader, bring his inner intimate space into significant dialectic with the surrounding outer immensities now so ironically distanced from him and from us? We must reduce the ironic distance between us and Einstein that MacLeish has maintained so far. We must combine esthetic appreciation of Einstein's almost comical subjective-objective impasse with emotional and intellectual empathy for his encounters with the not-Me. In short, we must join him. Only thus can we experience fully Einstein's quest and MacLeish's poem.

MacLeish had also suggested by a kind of homespun topology a literal, physical interface for Einstein's inner and outer realities (ll. 33-39). He now identifies just as literally—“his hands and face go naked” (ll. 39-40)—a window in this interface through which these inner and outer realities could “converse.” This naively empirical, humorous conceit—for it is little more—does nudge the poem onward. For it admits another cluster of metaphorical spatial images to convey intimately if unanalytically the shape of Einstein's next speculations, his “hypothesis of subjective reality.” As he walks he takes “within his skull” the “shadows” of

          what encloses him, as rough and smooth
And sound and silence and the intervals
Of rippling ether and the swarming motes
Clouding a privy:

(ll. 41-44)

The final, human detail hints as did the gloss an everyday life, even for Einstein, behind the inner life of the poem.

Making these shadows as much his own as he can, by geometric forms (ll. 46-47) as well as metaphorical images (ll. 48-49), Einstein tries to force his subjectivity back upon the objective world, to make it his, in a passage whose language, imagery, sound and rhythm rise to an eloquent Wallace Stevens-like celebration of naturalistic rapture:

Here do trees
Adorn the hillside and hillsides enrich
The hazy marches of the sky and skies
Kindle and char to ashes in the wind
And winds blow toward him from the verge, and suns
Rise on his dawn and on his dusk go down
And moons prolong his shadow. And he moves
Here as within a garden in a close
And where he moves the bubble of the world
Takes center and there circle round his head
Like golden flies in summer the gold Stars.

(ll. 56-64)

But the moment, charged though it is with symbolic mythic detail, “disintegrates,” like the ashes and bubble it also contains, at the same moment as Einstein, in the gloss, rejects the hypothesis that lay behind this ecstatic vision. For another space surrounds him, of darkness, shadows, moon and night that plunge, fall, loom and sink. Under its baleful influence Einstein realizes the failure of his first spiral of thought, the first stage of his journey:

So he knows
Less than a world and must communicate
Beyond his knowledge.

(ll. 72-74)

The ambiguous ellipses and paradoxes of this passage convey the uncertainties and contradictions of Einstein's own intellectual stance at this point.

“After lunch” Einstein begins his second raid on the not-Me. The poem's strong syntax with its many spatial indicators grows even stronger. From the opening MacLeish had maintained careful yet complex syntactical and frequently spatial links between one thought and the next, one image and the next. These links provide four of Donald Davie's five pleasures of syntax in poetry: subjective, dramatic, objective, musical and mathematical.¹⁷ As detailed analysis would show, the syntax of the poem articulates, variously, the dramatic accents of Einstein's intellectual agon, the contours of his engagements with external reality, the modulations of his feelings, and the verbal patterns that give us esthetic satisfaction like that Davie finds given by mathematical propositions.

This time Einstein, like some Old World Thoreau or Whitman, “attempts to enter … what's not he”:

          Outstretched on the earth
He plunges both his arms into the swirl
Of what surrounds him

(ll. 74-76)

and again we have the vivid, self-affirming spatial negations (grass, soil, air, light) whose “denial” dialectically moves the poem forward (ll. 76-83). It does this, in part, by counterpointing against the historical present of the poem's traditional meditative indicatives a more insistent, more ambiguous, more Whitmanesque spatially-directed syntax:

          Put out leaves
And let the old remembering wind think through
A green intelligence or under sea
Float out long filaments of amber in
The numb and wordless revery of tides.

(ll. 83-87)

These new syntactical forms of the verb, both imperative and, in the context of the previous indicatives, elliptically subjunctive, convey by their syntactical ambiguity Einstein's own mixture of uncertainty and commitment, of energy and frustration. The faintly doubled syntax of “leaves,” “wind” and “filaments” adds to the ambiguity of subject and object.

In preparation for this more radical gesture and metamorphosis, Einstein has abandoned his erect stance for a prostrate penitential and erotic one. Literally Ovidian and metaphorically Thoreauvian, he becomes, like the speaker in James Dickey's “In the Mountain Tent,” for a time one with organic, inanimate nature. Yet embracing the not-Me cannot provide him with “meaning” or “utterance” to satisfy his quest for a “name,” a frame of intellectual acceptance. Even a second commitment of this subjective energy and its special syntax to images of memory and presumed autobiography (ll. 96-99) cannot prevail.¹⁸ The poem returns to the characteristically negative indicatives (ll. 100-03) of its recurring dialectical dilemma.

Einstein's violin is a familiar icon in formal biography as well as twentieth-century folk mythology:

He had his music. But this, as he would explain on occasions, was in some ways an extension of his thinking processes, a method of allowing the subconscious to solve particularly tricky problems. “Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work,” his eldest son has said, “he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.” Einstein himself once remarked that: “Music has no effect on research work, but both are born of the same source and complement each other through the satisfaction they bestow.”¹⁹

MacLeish uses the violin to complete Einstein's second Romantic try to commune with objective reality, to make it somehow his own. The violin, explicit in the gloss and foreshadowed in the poem by “sweet music” (l. 4), “intervals” (l. 42), and “three notes” (l. 99), becomes Orphean and Aeolian, acting on nature and acted upon by nature, artificially constructed out of natural materials.

Yet MacLeish avoids any over-obvious mythological heroics or a pat biographical truth of correspondence. This time Einstein does not play but listens as “she plays.” The situation, with its similarities to Stevens' later singer at Key West, emphasizes Einstein's passive receptive role over his active projective one. Thereby it leads through the recurring impermanence and inadequacy of these experiences and on to Einstein's third and final attempt. The powers of music like those of physical nature and memory can bring him momentary communion, expressed spatially:

          When he a moment occupies
The hollow of himself and like an air
Pervades all other.

(ll. 115-17)

But the objective actuality of the violin's music shivers the subjective “reverberations” of Einstein's “air” (musical and elemental) “Back to a rhythm that becomes again music and vaguely ravels into sound” (ll. 120-21).

As if to mark this latest impasse, gloss and poem, prose and verse, exchange roles: the gloss's symbolic “gate of stone” is explicated by the poem's “So then there is no speech that can resolve / Their texture to clear thought and enter them” (ll. 122-23). Once again unable to “enter” literal and conceptual space, despite the powers of music, the meditating MacLeish/Einstein pauses to lament—as did James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams and other American writers before MacLeish and since—the loss of “words” once known at Chartres, Rome and Eleusis. The poem reiterates its burden in the by-now-familiar dialectic negatives:

          Now there are no words
Nor names to name them and they will not speak
But grope against his groping touch and throw
The long unmeaning shadows of themselves
Across his shadow and resist his sense.

(ll. 129-33)

By now Einstein has moved from an initial enclosed identity outward toward reality by ways successively empirical and romantically naturalistic, only to find each of these ways blocked by the resisting powers of outer reality. He adopts a third strategy, that of the mathematical physicist:

Why then if they resist destroy them. Dumb,
Yet speak them in their elements. Whole,
Break them to reason.

(ll. 134-36)

In a long passage of restless, irregular verse (ll. 135-54) in which we hear the rhythms of calculating prose against those of poetic meditation, Einstein, the latest of Democritan atomists, attempts to “cipher” a “them” that gathers syntactically all the external spatial phenomena, from motes to stars, previously introduced into one side of the poem's dialectic. In a positivistic imitation of sexual generation he “lies upon his bed” and with subjective exertion “conceives the universe.” The witty ambiguities of this long passage intermingle the reference worlds of everyday moral, musical and mathematical expression, in such terms as “count,” “numbers,” “dust,” “factor,” “obliquity” and others.

Thus newly empowered, Einstein once again stands and projects his inner intellectual, conceptual self upon a relative world now “conceived” into a mode more receptive to such acts: “And with his mind relaxes the stiff forms / Of all he sees” (11. 156-57). He is surrounded, or surrounds himself, with an intensely imaged space, whose vivid objects display their fluxional life by a series of kinetic verbs:

Sweep over into movement and dissolve
All differences in the indifferent flux!
Crumble to eddyings of dust and drown
In change the thing that changes!
                                                                                There begins
A vague unquiet in the fallow ground,
A seething in the grass, a bubbling swirl
Over the surface of the fields that spreads
Around him gathering until the green
Boils and under frothy loam the rocks
Ferment and simmer and like thinning smoke
The trees melt into nothing.
                                                                                Still he stands
Watching the vortex widen and involve
In swirling dissolution the whole earth
And circle through the skies till swaying time
Collapse, crumpling into dark the stars,
And motion ceases and the sifting world
Opens beneath.

(ll. 161-77)

The verbal and rhythmic eloquence of this climactic passage is characteristic of Einstein. As are the combination of the spatial intimacy of ground, grass, fields and rocks with the immensity of earth, sky and stars. This combination is reinforced by MacLeish's abstractly stylized presentation of the poem's concrete particulars.

MacLeish concludes Einstein's detailed phenomenology as it began, in spatial images. “Infuse,” “within,” “back” and the possible Joycean pun of “spin” reassert the centripetal pull and recoil of Einstein's subjectivity. “All else,” “on the dark” and “withstands” imply the objective “circumference,” as Emily Dickinson would call it, that “still … denies him” (1. 183). Other images—flesh, brain, motes, suns, bones, dark, dust—familiar from earlier in the poem, recapitulate in equally familiar rhythms its literal and symbolic texture.

What of the “something inviolate,” the “living something,” of the last line of the poem? At the beginning of the poem (ll. 2-3) only Einstein's individual stance “seems to keep / something inviolate” and this only conditional on “the stubborn, atavistic ape within” which Grover Smith (p. 23) seems to find still conditioning the poem's outcome. Also at the beginning of the poem (1. 9) the “living something” is within an Einstein whose “seamless arras” walls up any door or window that might admit the not-Me. By the end of the poem the status of both these “somethings” has changed radically. Now the “which” that “seems to keep / something inviolate” catches up syntactically not only the complexly significant preceding lines but, by extension, the whole action of the poem. As a result this “something inviolate” is not confined to Einstein's individual identity but can include the not-Me as well. In turn, by its ambiguous syntax “A living something” is both appositive to the final version of “something inviolate” and independent, self-sufficient, referentially open-ended, a recognition and affirmation of total, “living” reality.

One final question: Does Einstein combine the self with the not-Me, or subsume the self within the not-Me, enough to convey or imply some identifiable world hypothesis, to adopt Stephen C. Pepper's valuable concept and its attendant discriminating, pluralistic categories?²⁰ It would be partly redundant to reexamine the details of Einstein in light of this question; space (of this essay, that is) does not invite such lengthy and systematic reconsideration. But as a short way toward an answer consider the following, from Pepper:

Contextualiam is constantly threatened with evidences for permanent structures in nature. It is constantly on the verge of falling back upon underlying mechanistic structures, or of resolving into the overarching implicit integrations of organicism. Its recourse in these emergencies is always to hurry back to the given event, and to emphasize the change and novelty that is immediately felt there, so that sometimes it seems to be headed for an utter skepticism. But it avoids this impasse by vigorously asserting the reality of the structure of the given event, the historic event as it actually goes on. The whole universe, it asserts is such as this event is, whatever this is.

(pp. 234-35)

Could we have, from the point of view of Pepper's four “relatively adequate” world hypotheses—formism, mechanism, contextualism and organicism—a better descriptive commentary on MacLeish's Einstein? For Einstein embodies through the experiential vividness and authority of its poetics of space that particular vision or hypothesis of the world as event that Pepper presents as contextualism (pp. 232-79) and to which he gives—or so it seems to me—a tentative preference.²¹

This implied world hypothesis of the poem Einstein is not necessarily that implied by the uncompleted speculations of the historical Albert Einstein. But this possible disparity need not trouble us. Rather, it exemplifies that complex dialectic between the scientist's and the poet's view of things, between the truths of correspondence and of concern,²² that is also exemplified by the “intimate immensity” of the poetics of space in MacLeish's remarkable poem.

Notes

1. Streets in the Moon (Boston, 1926), pp. 43-53.

2. Einstein (Paris, 1929).

3. Poems: 1924-1933 (Boston, 1933), pp. 67-75; Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston, 1952), pp. 225-32; Collected Poems (Boston, 1962), pp. 251-58; New and Collected Poems 1917-1976 (Boston, 1976), pp. 137-46.

4. The most interesting example is Conrad Aiken, ed., American Poetry 1671-1928 (New York, 1929), pp. 339-45, which uses the version of Einstein that appeared in Streets in the Moon.

5. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1964; rpt. Boston, 1969), pp. 183-210.

6. Albert Einstein, “A Mathematician's Mind,” in Ideas and Opinions (1954; rpt. New York, 1973), pp. 35-36.

7. Ideas and Opinions, p. 283.

8. See Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (1971; rpt. New York, 1972), pp. 72-87, 113-20, for a summary account, and pp. 272-370 for Einstein's world fame by the time MacLeish wrote his poem.

9. Of whose poetry MacLeish has made an eloquent LP recording complete with a short jacket essay confirming his admiration (Caedmon TC 1359 [New York, 1971]).

10. All quotations from Einstein are from New and Collected Poems, pp. 137-44. Verse quotations will be given line references to the poem's 186 lines. For Grover Smith, Einstein's gloss has “the double purpose of punctuating the stages of consciousness and locating these in the mind of one individual” (Archibald MacLeish [Minneapolis, 1971] p. 25).

11. One of the two epigraphs to Streets in the Moon is from Paddy Dignam's funeral; Joyce and Ulysses occur elsewhere in MacLeish's poetry and prose. Grover Smith has drawn a general parallel to Bloom (p. 22). One also wonders, in Joycean terms, what relation, if any, “the gate of stone” has to the fact that according to Ronald Clark the entrance to Einstein's apartment in Bern was, and is, “protected by stone arcades, supported on stout stone pillars” (p. 85).

12. For a summary history of these images, see Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1966), p. 49 and notes; see also Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1956), p. 46.

13. For the symbolic door see Bachelard, pp. 222-24, and Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (1959; rpt. New York, 1961), pp. 25-27.

14. The original version in Streets in the Moon read “ultimately before a mirror accepts the hypothesis of exterior reality” and did not have the next gloss, “… rejecs it.” The gain in thematic and dramatic precision is obvious.

15. See William Cecil Dampier, A History of Science (4th edition, 1947; rpt. Cambridge, 1966), pp. xxv, 2-3.

16. See for example, Eliade, pp. 156-58, or at the opposite methodological pole, Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Le sexe des astres,” in To Honour Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1967), II, 1163-70, as translated in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York, 1970), pp. 330-39. For a discussion of these and certain other images in Einstein, see David Lutyens, The Creative Encounter (London, 1960), pp. 83-89.

17. Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London, 1955), pp. 67-95.

18. “He followed the normal student pursuits, picking up on the Zurichsee a passion for sailing that never deserted him,” (Clark, p. 50) and “soon afterwards another influence entered Einstein's life. From the age of six he began to learn the violin” (Clark, p. 29).

19. Clark, pp. 140-41.

20. Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley, 1942).

21. Pp. 147-48, et passim. See also Stephen C. Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), pp. 54-73. In this connection, note Arthur Mizener, “The Poetry of Archibald MacLeish,” Sewanee Review, 46 (1938), 505: “Always the thing MacLeish has clung to as most real, as the thing he could trust, has been his apprehension of the quality of things, of their nature, not as a concept, as a unit in a logical intellectual structure, but as a felt experience.”

22. Northrop Frye, The Critical Path (Bloomington, 1971), passim.