[In the following review of Poems, 1924-1933, Jones comments on the symbolic poem The Pot of Earth and MacLeish's more social works, such as Conquistador, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, and the verse play Panic.]

It would perhaps be unfair to label Archibald MacLeish with even so inclusive a tag as metaphysical, were it not that the best metaphysical poets have also been poets of sense, and their work often simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Certainly the term is not meant to indicate any bounds limiting Mr. MacLeish's work but to suggest that pervading quality which, together with another, an Americanism that is the very antithesis of the popular one-hundred-per-cent variety, gives character to a body of work that is extraordinarily diversified.

Of Mr. MacLeish's peers in American poetry—and there are only two—Mr. Frost cultivates a fairly wide but a compact domain: his poetic realm does not include colonies; and the late Edwin Arlington Robinson, though he wandered farther in time and space than Mr. Frost does, and colonized in so far a region as that of King Arthur, yet disciplined his colonies strictly in terms of his own code. Both have been more or less men of one voice.

Mr. MacLeish on the other hand has been a poet of many voices, and in his Poems, 1924-1933, a gathering of all the poetry by which he wishes to stand, remains so in spite of the deletion of those voices which he learned from others in his salad days. I do not notice in the collection anything from The Happy Marriage, published in 1924. Everything in that early book is on a high technical level and many of the poems might easily prove irresistible to some industrious anthologist, the opening lines for instance of “The Tomb of the Abbess of Tours”:

Over the hills and very far away,
Far, far away and centuries ago,
She was so young, so swift to love—so slow. …

or the lyrical:

Here, O wanderer, here is the hill and the harbor,
Farer and follower, here the Hesperides.
Here wings the Halcyon down through the glamorous arbor,
                    Here is the end of the seas.

But were those verses included in an anthology, they would almost rank as anonymous: theirs is a voice common to many years of English poetry.

It was not long, however, before the man who had written them was finding his way into the present. Mr. MacLeish was born in 1892 near Chicago, the son of a Chicago business family. He went to Yale, studied law in Harvard, lost a brother in the war, went into it himself, after first doing some work in a French hospital unit, and, on his own testimony, wanted to write verse but did not at first write the kind of verse that he himself liked. After some practice of law he returned to France with his wife and two children, traveled, and came back to America in 1928. By that time he had sloughed off his early influences, and had done so without falling into a too exclusive idiom of his own. Archibald MacLeish is now the master of an exceptionally wide range of poetic vocabularies, both verbal and rhythmic. He is modern, almost journalistically contemporary in his interests, yet he has never cut the cord binding his vocabularies to the traditional past. There is in his work none of the Spencer-Auden-Lewis type of obscurity.

The first poem by Mr. MacLeish that I read came out in a very small volume published less than a year after The Happy Marriage (which itself had been preceded by a very small Yale University Press collection which I have never seen). This poem, The Pot of Earth, reads as compellingly today as when it was first published, and is rightly included in the one volume collection.

A superficial, and, I am sure, an accidental, resemblance to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land caused some critics at the time of publication to say that the one poem was inspired by the other, but this judgment could, I am convinced, only be made by one who had not read both poems through. Beyond the fact that both use the symbolisms of ancient religion as recorded by Frazer, the resemblance ends. While Eliot's poem is a critique of our own day, with the symbolism rather arbitrarily used, Mr. MacLeish finds one major symbol, of the tragic predicament of all mortals, who must breed and pass, and tells the tragic tale in terms of the life of a modern girl, whose own fate is pictured before her in almost the self-same terms that once adumbrated the fate of all who live, namely, the dumb and eloquent language of the garden of Adonis. That toy garden, as one might call it, is described by Frazer in a few words which Mr. MacLeish places before his poem:

These were baskets or pots filled with earth in which wheat, barley, lettuces, fennel, and various kinds of flowers were sown and tended for eight days, chiefly or exclusively by women. Fostered by the sun's heat, the plants shot up rapidly, but having no root they withered as rapidly away, and at the end of eight days were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis and flung with them into the sea or into springs.

The poem begins with the symbol and then abruptly swings us into the contemporary exhibition of its reality:

Silently on the sliding Nile
The rudderless, the unoared barge
Diminishing and for a while
Followed, a fleck upon the large
Silver, then faint, then vanished, passed
Adonis who had lately died
Down a slow water with the last
Withdrawing of a fallen tide.
That year they went to the shore early—
They went in March and at the full moon
The tide came over the dunes, the tide came
To the wall of the garden. She remembered standing,
A little girl in the cleft of the white oak tree,—
The waves came in a slow curve, crumpling
Lengthwise, kindling against the mole and smouldering
Foot by foot across the beach until
The whole arc guttered and burned out. Her father
Rested his spade against the tree. He said,
The spring comes with the tide, the flood water.
Are you waiting for spring? Are you watching for the spring?
He threw the dead stalks of the last year's corn
Over the wall into the sea. He said,
Look, we will sow the spring now. She could feel
Water along dry leaves and the stems fill.
Hurry, she said, oh, hurry. She was afraid.
The surf was so slow, it dragged, it came stumbling
Slower and slower. She tried to breathe as slowly
As the waves broke. She kept calling, Hurry! Hurry!
Her breath came so much faster than the sea.

Not only in natural accident, however, is the old fertility symbolism still to be seen. The rites of Adonis have, as rites, never ceased. And one day as this girl walks home from school, a Syrian immigrant woman gives her a bloodroot flower:

With white petals and the scarlet ooze
Where the stem was broken. She said: In my country
The feet of spring are stained with the red blood,
The women go into the hills with flowers
Dark like blood, they have a song of one
Dead and the spring blossoming from his blood—
And he comes again, they say, when the spring comes. …

And the girl, troubled by this so obviously natural and true symbolism, bringing as it were to a focal point of consciousness the forces beginning to awaken in her, for she is at the age of puberty, feels herself drawn into a sinister and fatal rhythm. And having consciously identified this rhythm and its symbolism, the girl is able to express her own tragic predicament—her sense of the antithesis between escape from the life cycle through sterility and a participation in it which would in turn lead to participation in death and corruption also. She is able to express it, but not to escape it, or even to choose which horn of the universal human dilemma she shall be impaled on.

In one passage where the girl directly addresses the power she feels compelling her, the author has made a very effective use of the device of consonance, hitherto used in contemporary poetry, as far as I can remember, only by the late Wilfred Owen, a British war poet. This device consists in the substitution for rhyme of end words whose consonant sounds repeat but whose vowel sounds differ, the result being something more veiled and dubious than rhyme and yet just as compelling:

“… Oh, wait, I will gather
Grains of wheat and corn together,
Ears of corn and dry barley.
But wait, only wait. I am barely
Seventeen: must I make haste?
Tomorrow there will be a host
Of crocuses and small hairy
Snowdrops. And why, then, must I hurry?
There are things I have to do
More than just to live and die,
More than just to die of living.
I have seen the moonlight leaving
Twig by twig the elms and wondered
Where I go, where I have wandered.
I have watched myself alone
Coming homeward in the lane
When I seemed to see a meaning
In my going or remaining
Not the meaning of the grass,
Not the dreaming mortal grace
Of the green leaves on the year—
And why, then, should I hear
A sound as of the sowers going down
Through blossoming young hedges in the dawn—
Winter is not done.

Consonance is not the only device which makes these lines musical; they are tied and cross-tied throughout by alliterations, especially of w and wh sounds.

Then the winter symbolism of a purely individual life is sharpened. The girl is walking on the seashore:

Certainly the salt stone that the sea divulges
At the first quarter does not fructify
In pod or tuber nor will the fruiterer cull
Delicate plums from its no-branches—Oh,
Listen to me for the word of the matter is in me—
And if it heats to the sun it heats to itself
Alone and to none that come after it and the rain
Impregnates it not to the slightest—Oh, listen,
You who lie on your backs in the sun, you roots
You roses among others who take the rain
Into you, vegetables, listen—the salt stone
That the sea divulges does not fructify.
It sits by itself. It is sufficient. But you—
Who was your great-grandfather or your mother's mother?

It is noteworthy that this poem, written from the point of view of the woman victim of nature, should show us the other side of a shield which the majority of poets have industriously polished on one side but never turned around. Once indeed, Mr. MacLeish uses the same figure for his obverse that a contemporary poet, Lascelles Abercrombie, uses for the bright side. The girl speaks of the generations of men as a “ripple of thin fire burning Over a meadow, breeding out of itself,” while the individual is not the fire itself but momentary and unreal, merely, changing the figure,

… the shape of a word in the air
Uttered from silence behind us into silence
Far, far beyond. …

While in the “Hymn to Love” Abercrombie writes, perhaps unconsciously from the man's point of view instead of from the woman's:

We are thine, O Love, being in thee and made of thee
As thou, Love, were the deep thought
And we the speech of the thought; yea spoken are we,
Thy fires of love outspoken.

That the poem ends with the girl a physical victim to nature's rhythm of living, begetting, and dying, does not of course, make it any the less universal in its treatment of the human dilemma.

Mr. MacLeish's succeeding volumes of shorter poems were followed in 1932 by Conquistador, a long poem for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Here he again breaks fresh ground technically, forging an instrument by means of which, an old soldier who had followed Cortes into Mexico may give expression to his own participation in the conquest. Bernal Diaz del Castillo writes in old age under the spur of the indignation aroused when he reads the official history of the conquest, which like all official histories has been written in political terms. But Bernal had fought with weapons in hand, bled real blood, been assaulted in all of his five senses by the horrors, the beauties, the shocks of wonder, belonging to the strange land through which so painfully he fought his way. And he will tell us of “That which I have myself seen and the fighting. …”

A doctrinaire critic complained when the poem was first published that the author had written not a major but a sentimental poem: that he had envisaged only the surface aspects and not the significance of the conquest. The point is hardly well taken, for the theme of the poem is confessedly the actual sensuous experience of a participant:

These things were real: these suns had heat in them:
There was brine in the mouth: bitterest foam:
Earth: water to drink: bread to be eaten.

The poem is written in a terza rima with assonance instead of rhyme, and although there is no schematized alliteration, there is enough use of it to give the feeling of Anglo-Saxon verse, as we may see in this statement of Cortes' justification for massacring the Cholulans:

For indeed he had read in their hearts as a split cod
And he knew their souls by their slime as a snail his journey—
How they had salt for our flesh and a boiling pot: …

When Conquistador was published, we were already launched upon the depression, and a seeming majority of the younger critics had already been swept into the Marxian camp, whence they were proceeding to judge contemporary literature from the point of view of the class struggle. These critics classified Mr. MacLeish as belonging to the ivory-tower school of poetry. His reply was a witty poem, “The Social Muse,” in which he compared the poets to the licensed ladies who follow armies—but who are not given combatant status:

It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers:
Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas—
Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers: …

Furthermore:

He that goes naked goes farther at last than another:
Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they'll jimmy his
Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month:
(Who recalls now the address of the Imagists?)
But the naked man has always his own nakedness:
People remember forever his live limbs.

The Marxians, however, do not admit that a poet can be neutral. Apparent neutrality in the social struggle is disguised hostility. And so, one day, a Marxist who had read a little Freud announced the horrible truth about Mr. MacLeish. It was after the first publication of a short series of poems, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City—occasional in a sense but included in the collected edition. Mr. MacLeish contrasted in these poems the real America, the great sprawling roof of half the world, with the feverish and sectarian activities shown in the famous frescoes and adumbrated in the discussions surrounding Riviera's fight with the Rockefellers. Unfortunately he satirized the foreign-born revolutionaries in the language of those among them who lived on the East Side in New York:

Aindt you read in d' books you are all brudders?
D'glassic historic objective broves you are brudders!
You and d'Wops and d'Chinks you are all brudders!
Havend't you got it d'same ideology? Havend't you? …
For Marx has said to us Workers what do you need?
And Stalin has said to us Starvers what do you need?
You need the Dialectical Materialism.

To the Marxian mind there was only one explanation of this. Anyone who in the same verse poked fun at dialectical materialism and at the accent of the East Side Jew had a “fascist unconscious”

Mr. MacLeish did not think it necessary to deny the charge—but some of his friends not only denied it for him, but asked all the Jews they knew, who had read the poem, whether they felt outraged by it. I do not remember that any of them did.

That the tempest was artificially stirred up—even if in a fairly large teapot—is perhaps obvious. If it does not seem so, let the doubter prove it by a glance at the dedication of Mr. MacLeish's latest work, Panic, a poetic play which has actually been a success in New York. This play is a study in realistic yet symbolic terms, of the clash between the haves and the have-nots brought forth by the collapse of the banking system—which Mr. MacLeish does not have to exaggerate so very much to make it serve his symbolic purpose. It is dedicated to John and Katy Dos Passos—which if Mr. MacLeish really were a semi-Fascist would be crossing the no-man's land with a vengeance—and its words are such as should forever wipe out any idea that Mr. MacLeish is, as a man or a poet either, on the aristocratic side of the battle line:

Why should I explain to you that Those who are not known have returned to us again? You also have seen them from no chair in no window but suddenly as men learn everything—as though the mind were, as it well may be, I do not know, a swarm of invisible apprehensions which like insects devour in silence and secrecy the whole house: for it falls in an instant's illumination and a collapse of darkness.

The characters in the play see these unknown from the chairs in their directors' room, and then the unknown invade it, tell them their order is over; and one of them, a blind man, feeling the face of McGafferty, the chief banker, tells him that he speaks truth when he says that the proletariat—his followers in that room—are weak and helpless. Nor can these men say when history will strike for them—as Marx has said it must. But the real point is not their helplessness, or history's ambiguity. The real point is present and immediate:

                                                            The prophecies come true
Not of themselves but of the ears that hear them.
The violence works in the blood. The living inherit the
Hard speech of the dead like the seed of a pestilence.
They carry it close in their mouths and their breath feeds it
You yourselves will feed it and will die.

And later he says:

You yourself—desiring your own death—
Neither wealth nor richness of earth nor turning of
Wheels perfectly under the acre roofs nor the
Proud piling of ingots prevails over the
Mute will your mind to suffer destruction.
No power of force or of violence can weaken the
Willingness in your own mind to die.

To generalize the poetry into philosophy, this is simply a translation of Marxian dialectical materialism into psychological dialectic in which Marx is no longer a pointer out of the economic necessity which will bring the masses to power, but a symbol which evokes the under-dog's will to live, while the capitalists, as symbolized by McGafferty, lose their symbols when their structures crash, leaving them helpless before the will to die which is in each one of us, only kept in check by this or that faith: and his faith, McGafferty tries to keep to the last moment but cannot, so kills himself.

In this play, as always, Mr. MacLeish has forged a special instrument for his special task. He tells us in a preface that blank verse as developed in the Elizabethan period did express the rhythmical idiom of the time and place, but does not express American spoken rhythm which is excited and nervous where the Elizabethan was violent but deliberate. American speech falls from a stressed syllable, instead of rising to one. Its characteristic and its beauty is in the sharpness and distinctness of its stress. Mr. MacLeish therefore eschews syllabic regularity and counts only by accents, arranging his lines and his phrasing so that his rhythm is predominantly falling—either trochaic or dactyllic. In the speeches of the bankers emphatic lines may have as few as five syllables, but all of them will be accented.

The result is not only a successful reading play but one which carried its New York audiences.

In a very large sense that play may be called occasional, even as in a fairly large sense, the Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City may be called occasional. Both are sharply focussed on special circumstances but the light turned on those circumstances is that of the poet's “Americanism,” an attitude given a more general expression in a poem, “American Letter,” written during his European sojourn and conceived in terms which give us a strong contrast to the spiritual exile of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, both of whom have cut that umbilical cord of home connection which Mr. MacLeish has never severed. When we read the poem, however, we can see how weaker spirits might well be tempted to cut it:

It is a strange thing to be an American.
Neither an old house it is with the air
Tasting of hung herbs and the sun returning
Year after year to the same door and the churn
Making the same sound in the cool of the kitchen
Mother to son's wife. …

But instead of a country we have a half world to live on, “the open curve of a continent” and we do not live among brothers with a common and inherited speech but among men, uniform in dress but speakers of a learned rather than a native tongue, in a land and a people that is not one land and one race. But all we can do—apart from exile—is to accept it, and in the Frescoes the poet does make his acceptance, seeing at last his country as a unified figure—a great brown nude reclining in the sun, the scent of her hair of dust and of smoke, but seeing too that:

She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country.