[In the following essay, Cavanagh analyzes MacLeish's effort to compose a Modernist epic poem in Conquistador.]

Since its publication and Pulitzer award in 1932, MacLeish's Conquistador has been neglected by critics, a neglect that seems increasingly unreasonable as commentary on a few other long poems grows almost daily. The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Bridge, The Cantos, Paterson, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: apparently there exists something resembling a canon of modern long poems, which in a way is a sad and premature phenomenon. In attending to these poems, we have slighted other equally ambitious and interesting long poems from which we still have something to learn. Conquistador has been neglected for a number of reasons. From the beginning, the poem's critics have misconstrued it a Poundian or Eliotic poem—in other words, as a rather derivative 1920s poem that happens to appear in 1932. Some critics, moreover, have found the poem difficult to understand. For example, Grover Smith finds that the poem offers its readers only “an unrelieved sense of total confusion.”¹ Allen Tate praises the poem's technical accomplishments, but finds it likewise “void” of meaning.² Above all, no critic of the poem has seemed quite comfortable with MacLeish's subject, the Spanish conquest of Mexico. For instance, it seems odd that someone like MacLeish with strongly liberal sympathies should apparently aggrandize imperialistic causes; it is moreover frustratingly unclear why he chose to write this story, instead of one closer to the American experience. The poem seems to be wanting in a moral as well as cultural foundation.

Surely, however, Conquistador is worth our trouble. MacLeish wrote it at the height of his powers and it contains some of his finest poetry, as Tate observed when he praised the poem for revealing “the most significant metrical innovation of its generation with the exception of Hart Crane's blank verse.” But the poem is thematically significant too; it should not be viewed as another echo of The Waste Land, but as a poem that, like The Bridge, attempts to answer Eliot's poem and combat its influence. It is now clear, as it was perhaps not clear a half century ago, that MacLeish intended Conquistador to be the signal of a new post-Eliotic era in poetry, an era that he thought would be characterized by communal heroism rather than by nostalgia and despair. With this in mind, he turned his attention to the ethos of epic poetry. What should engage our general interest in the poem is MacLeish's attempt to restore some prominent values of traditional epic poetry in the service of a cause that he regarded as very “modern.”

To understand what MacLeish means by “modern,” the prose he wrote during and after the period of Conquistador should be examined. The prose makes it clear that this poem is a far more polemical one than it appears to be. The poets of the 1920s, MacLeish charges, were fundamentally nostalgic.³ They modernized poetry or at least changed poetry's appearance, but they could not face the modern world—in particular, industrialism and democracy. Like their nineteenth century predecessors, they turned inward and they worshipped the hierarchical past. Eliot and Pound fostered innovation but they did not direct it toward the communal realities of the new age. Their poetry, MacLeish asserts, was “formed … by the literary necessities of the world before the war,” chief of which was the necessity of the artist to resist modern social and cultural change.⁴ MacLeish's assessment of The Waste Land helps us understand what he thought was “new” and “old” in poetry:

As the greatest of their (the modernists') poems prove, The Waste Land is a poem which sees the contemporary world as the wreckage and scattered ruin of many great and fallen cities, and Eliot's masterpiece, though its influence fell forward into the years which followed its publication, was actually a termination: a lament and a prayer. Nothing could follow it but darkness and a prayer. Or a new beginning.

It is this new beginning which constitutes the great poetic labor of our day—a labor which involves the acceptance of change, not as the disastrous end of one mentality, but as the possible commencement of another. Unless poetry can not only perceive, but also feel, the race of men to be more important than any one man, we are merely fighting back against the water.⁵

One need not accept this view of the 1920s, of course, in order to see how it casts some light on MacLeish's intentions in Conquistador. It suggests that MacLeish was not downcast at the beginning of the 1930s; like other optimists of the time, he may have seen even the American financial crisis as a necessary and desirable failure—a failure of wealthy “individualists” that would facilitate a transfer of power to the “people.” At any rate, for him, the “new world” needed a poetry that would be sympathetic to average humanity and to the common values of industrial democracy. The voice of this poetry had to be centered in down-to-earth experience, what MacLeish refers to as the “common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon.”⁶ The new poetry should not be too “fine” for the world; it should be neither nostalgic, nor melancholy, nor private. The appearance of Conquistador at this time leads one to see that, for MacLeish, these new necessities pointed to epic poetry as the “great poetic labor” of the new age.

MacLeish's emphasis on communal values calls to mind E. M. W. Tillyard's observation that epic poetry is typically “choric.” Epic speaks for the accepted patriotic ideals or for the accepted metaphysic of the times. The epic poet is “centred in the normal, he must measure the crooked by the straight.” He must speak for, as well as to, his people, and his sentiments must not seem capricious or private. Tillyard insists that subjectivism and the cultivation of the abnormal and perverse have made genuine epic disappear in our time.⁷ Roy Harvey Pearce seems to agree with this view, maintaining that Whitman, Pound, Williams, and Crane failed to create “true” epics (though they wrote great poems in the process) because as Americans and as moderns they could not believe in communal heroes and consequently had to fall back on themselves as heroes.⁸ To put it another way, they had to define themselves before they could define their communities. In Conquistador, as if in fulfillment of his own literary strictures, MacLeish works in the opposite direction: to define the community in the belief that it is fruitless and reactionary to worry about the individual; in defining the community MacLeish also defines his individual.

Conquistador sets out to designate l'homme moyen sensuel as the proper voice of the community. This intention is apparent if one examines MacLeish's use of his primary source, Bernál Díaz del Castillo's The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Originally an officer under Cortés in the Conquest, Díaz decided to write his own history after reading another, “official” account of the Conquest by Francisco Cópez de Gómara, Cortés' former chaplain. What disturbed Díaz was Gómara's exclusive attention to the leaders and the important events, and his ignorance of the average soldier. In his preface, Díaz observes that, although his own account of the Conquest is not an authoritative history, it will have a value of its own: it will offer another perspective on contemporary history.⁹ MacLeish's Díaz, who tells the story of Conquistador, is not nearly so modest. MacLeish's character asserts that his own history is the history, and he accuses Gómara of total negligence for giving little or no regard to the way in which the average man experienced the Conquest. This boast, of course, is an imperial one; it is the kind of boast that one sees at the beginning of the traditional epic, in which the poet argues for the new and all-surpassing importance of his interpretation of great events. To appreciate MacLeish's account of the Conquest through the eyes of Díaz, however, the reader should try to imagine The Aeneid as written by, for example, Palinurus, one of Aeneas' followers. The Díaz of Conquistador provides few names and dates, no detailed analyses of battles, no discussions of military strategy, and no real insights into the various purposes of the expedition. The poem offers no overview; in its place one gains the day-to-day impressions of soldiers in a strange land. Even so, Allen Tate accused the poem of being subjective; after all, the reader does see everything from Díaz's perspective. But Tate is misleading. One does not have to attend to Díaz as a particular person. His character is not remarkable; his psyche does not sustain our attention; his personal history is not given. The reader is not invited to see him as very much different from any other soldier in Cortés' army. The predominant pronoun of the poem, in fact, is not “I” but “we.” Díaz is not the subjective modern that Tate so much feared but a communal narrator. The average conquistador has much in common with Yeats' “Primary Man” (and Yeats' influence on MacLeish at this time and later in MacLeish's career cannot be exaggerated): he is strong, rude, and free from spiritual malaise. He is whole in himself because he is totally obedient to fate, totally dominated by the physical world, and totally at home in its mystery. He is not bothered by a sense of ideal beauty or abstract truth. He sees history, MacLeish would seem to imply, as primitive man saw it and as all men should see it. He is one of the “people.”

For MacLeish, Conquistador is a “modern” as well as a “choric” poem because it takes one back to a simpler—yet more mysterious—and radical existence, one which all men under their veneer of civilized mores strongly desire to reassume. It is the task of the truly “modern” poet to elicit this primitive sympathy which binds us together, and therefore “real” modern poetry is both very old and very new. MacLeish insists on having it both ways: St.-John Perse, MacLeish argues, writes profoundly about his own world when he writes in Anabase about primitive people in Central Asia.¹⁰ The reader can reconcile MacLeish's communal primitivism with his celebration of the “new age” by recognizing, apparently, that the democratic society as MacLeish envisions it (more like a communistic society in some ways) is the society where human history began and where it will end. What characterizes this society is the sense of communal adventure—the thrill of living dangerously in unknown places. For MacLeish, all men are equal in the presence of the unknown. Such thinking is totally foreign to the orthodox-thinking historian Díaz, a Catholic, who believes in hierarchy, and who, to judge from The Discovery and Conquest, joined the expedition not so much to gain adventure as to make money. MacLeish is indebted to the historian Díaz for his straightforward account of the Conquest, but the Díaz of Conquistador is a character with entirely different values.

Conquistador does not celebrate the Spanish cause in the Conquest. This fact is discernible in the text of the poem, but it becomes obvious if one studies the ways in which MacLeish uses Díaz's history. Three quarters of The Discovery and Conquest is given over to an account of the Spanish march across Mexico towards Tenochtitlán. Not long after the Spanish arrive at the city, they become suspicious of the Indians and kidnap Montezúma to insure their safety. The Indians are displeased and open hostilities follow. The two sides battle for the city and the Indians are overwhelmingly victorious; they drive Cortés and his men from the city. It takes a year for the Spanish to regroup, plan a strategy, and, in a brutal campaign, to recapture the city—this is the “Conquest.” Fully one quarter of Díaz's Discovery and Conquest describes these hostilities between the Spanish and the Indians. MacLeish's Díaz, on the other hand, treats them very briefly; indeed, only the slender last book of the poem provides an account of the year's siege of the city, and the “Conquest” itself is related with weary irony:

And we marched against them there in the next spring:
And we did the thing that time by the books and the science:
And we burned the back towns and we cut the mulberries:
And their dykes were down and the pipes of their fountains dry:
And we laid them a Christian siege with the sun and the vultures:
And they kept us ninety and three days till they died of it:
And the whole action well conceived and conducted …
And the whole thing was a very beautiful victory:
And we squared the streets like a city in old Spain.
And we built barracks and shops: and the church conspicuous:(11)

Díaz's history is about soldiers who happen also to be explorers. Conquistador is about explorers who are soldiers when they have to be. The poem is not really about military conflict; it is about the malaise and insecurity that attend exploration. At one point in The Discovery and Conquest Díaz tells of a minor rebellion: seven soldiers approach Cortés after the journey west is underway and ask for a ship so that they might return to their homes in Cuba. Cortés initially grants them their wish. Later, however, after conferring with advisors who warn him against setting a bad example, he rescinds his permission. There is no choice involved; they may not go.¹² In Conquistador there is no mention of Cortés' change of mind; anyone is free to go back if he wants. Cortés even offers the men food to take with them. Of course, no one will leave without shame:

Take what you will of the store: a keel's burden:
Spain is east of the seas and the peaceful countries:
The old tongues: the ancient towns: return to them!
Why should you waste your souls in the west! You are young:
Tell them you left us here by the last water
Going up through the pass of the hills with the sun:
Tell them that in the tight towns when you talk of us!
The west is dangerous for thoughtful men:
Eastward is all sure: all as it ought to be:
A man may know the will of God by the fences:
Get yourselves to the ship and the stale shore
And the smell of your father's dung in the earth: at the end of it
There where the hills look over and before us
Lies in the west that city that new world
We that are left will envy your good fortune!

[CP, (The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish) 303-4]

If Cortés' irony calls to mind the irony of the Homeric chieftain in The Iliad, one must also observe that Cortés is not a traditional epic hero in Conquistador but a primus inter pares who speaks to his men not as soldiers, as in The Discovery and Conquest, but as fellow explorers and adventurers. In Díaz's work Cortés enforces duty to God and to the Emperor; in Conquistador he persuades his men by invoking the mysterious ambience of the “western lands.” MacLeish's explorers gain a measure of heroism because they seem to have a choice.

There are other telling liberties taken with The Discovery and Conquest. The historian Díaz offers very little comment about the propriety of kidnapping Montezúma, nor does he question the morality of the subsequent siege and capture of the city. He seems not to regret the actions of his compatriots except insofar as they did not on any particular occasion attain their practical goals. MacLeish's Díaz, on the other hand, bitterly regrets the initial Spanish decision to stay in Tenochtitlán, the decision that made the kidnapping necessary which in turn brought about the war. This is more than regret for a tactical blunder. The war against Tenochtitlán results in a conquest and Spanish enrichment, but colonization brings an end to exploration. In seeking security, the Spanish abandon their own values. The journey should have gone on; the way was not to the city but through the city to the west. Explorers do not have homes; this is the inescapable lesson of Conquistador. “Real men” as Cortés puts it, are nomads who do not “take the God among them,” who willingly live in poverty and fear, and who resist civilizing influences. They must perpetually search for something that can never be attained; the excitement of insecurity is their only reward. In these conquistadors, then, we recognize the new / old man of MacLeish's essays:

The common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon, of time, of disappearance-and-their-place-knowing-them-no-more. The salt-sweating, robust, passionate, and at the last death-devoured lives of all men always.¹³

The Spanish conquest of Mexico was a convenient vehicle for MacLeish's thoughts about history. In his poetry and prose during the period of Conquistador and later, one observes MacLeish referring very frequently to history in geographical terms. The east is usually equated with the secure past, whereas the west suggests the life of exploration, the world of the unknown future. The east is the narrow land that constricts; the west, the “nude” land that promises. History is a journey westward, or at least should be. For MacLeish, America was the quintessential western land; it always promised something that eluded its explorers. It was a land for adventurous and rugged believers, not for prudent and efficient investors. America was, as he tells us in America Was Promises (1939), a land of the “People” and “History was voyages toward the People” (CP, 364). The “People” discovered America, but they eventually allowed the prudent to rule it and ruin its beauty and promise. America Was Promises ends by exhorting the people of present-day America to learn from those people in the past who lost their freedom. What they must learn is that history is a continuing journey toward what is rightfully theirs.

Listen! Brothers! Generations!
Companions of leaves: of the sun: of the slow evenings:
Companions of the many days: of all of them:
Listen! Believe the speaking dead! Believe
The journey is our journey. Oh believe
The signals were to us: the signs: the birds by
Night: the breaking surf.
America is promises to
Take!

[CP, 367; my italics]

The western land, however, is also more than America; the experience of America is a microcosm of all human history, as the poem makes clear. Mexico was also once a land of the “people”:

And they waved us west from the dunes: they cried out
Colua! Colua!
Mexico! Mexico! … Colua!

[CP, 362]

Conquistador is about a conflict in history. From the very beginning of the poem, Spain and all lands to the east are regarded as “wastelands,” a word that is highly noticeable in any poem of the 1930s, given the fame of Eliot's poem (the word does not appear in The Discovery and Conquest). The “Prologue” to Conquistador presents the voice of the modern poet as an Odysseus seeking direction from the “speaking dead”; the reader is invited to see the rest of the poem as Bernal Díaz's ancestral advice and counsel. The “Prologue” is designed to echo an episode in both The Odyssey and the Cantos in which Odysseus, seeking advice from the dead, is told that he is destined to be a traveller again after he returns to Ithaca. But the “Prologue” should also call Eliot to mind insofar as it involves a Tiresias figure. Indeed, it is hard to read Conquistador without noticing how much Díaz is patterned after the characters of Eliot's early poetry—Tiresias, of course, but also Prufrock and Gerontion. Eliot's characters are all weary people who have, so to speak, “come back from the dead” to “tell us all.”

Díaz is temperamentally very different, of course; in fact, it is questionable whether he is really like Tiresias at all, despite the obvious parallel. If one examines the entire underworld scene in The Odyssey, he is arrested not so much by the speech of Tiresias as by that of Achilles. Upon meeting the warrior, Odysseus expresses great envy of Achilles' royal power among the dead. Achilles' answer is swift and scornful: don't be a fool—there is nothing in death, no real power, and no wisdom from accumulated experience that can compensate for the loss of life, even the most wretched life. It is tempting to regard Díaz's entire narrative as simply a longer version of Achilles' speech. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that MacLeish could have been unaware of this parallel. Like Achilles, Díaz values experience alone; throughout his story, he reiterates how he was once a lord of the earth for simply being alive and in touch with the physical world. Having lost his life, that is, his youth, Díaz has lost everything.

As O. B. Hardison has observed, the notion that epic literature must show a positive attitude toward the world and human endeavor was quite general among Renaissance critics; and subsequent critics of epic, such as George Steiner, E. M. W. Tillyard, and Maurice Bowra, emphatically agree.¹⁴ “Positive” does not mean “optimistic,” but, rather, disposed to revere man simply because he is alive, as well as to revere the things in which man interests himself. One recalls Mark Van Doren's remark about the Tolstoy of War and Peace: “I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.”¹⁵Conquistador is a poem that very conspicuously praises living man and his interests and the palpable world around him. If there is what Tate called a “void” in the poem, it is a “void” of traditional doctrine that Díaz hurries to fill with pleasurable sensations. Like Gerontion, Díaz is a broken man. But unlike Eliot's little old man, he celebrates man lost in nature, living in harmony with its unknowable order, and “faring forward” into uncertainty. Reading the poem as an answer to Eliot's negativism about the world, one recalls the line of MacLeish's modern master, St.-John Perse: “C'est là le train du monde et je n'ai que du bien à en dire.”¹⁶ Eliot's characters want to die; Díaz wants to live.

Only Díaz's conclusion to the poem sounds like a confession of defeat; he is old, after all, and has nowhere to go. Díaz, however, is not really defeated. The cause of exploration in his lifetime is defeated, but history will proceed eventually toward the west and the “people.” Díaz's world resembles the world imagined by Yeats in “Lapis Lazuli” where “all things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.”¹⁷ That the adventure of the conquistadors came to nothing in coming to something (the building of a Spanish civilization) is not irredeemably tragic if a people in future ages can learn something from the experience. Díaz's narrative is exhortative: like the traditional epic, it may remind the reader of human vulnerability but, more importantly, it wants to remind him of human potential. If one is not excessively literal-minded, he will understand that the way of the “people” can be essentially the same in every age, despite superficial differences of locality and historical circumstance. Only the “speaking dead,” MacLeish implies, can make us see this truth; it is then up to us to find in our own time our own mode of journeying westward. One should gain from the poem what MacLeish calls, in a letter to me (dated 29 November 1975), “the American metaphor in which the journey is always west and in which the victory sometimes (often) seems to defeat itself.”

Nor should this manner of reading an epic poem seem strange. It is the way a Roman of Virgil's time would have read The Aeneid; it is the way a Christian reads Paradise Lost. An epic is usually written in the understanding that what happens in it cannot literally happen again. The Roman of Virgil's day realized that he could not be expected to do what Aeneas did, but he should have inferred that his task was to imitate the virtues of Aeneas in a way appropriate to his age. A look at MacLeish's entire career as an essayist and poet indicates that he did not cease to regard the ability to live with rapid modern social change as a kind of journey into the unknown. His most recent book of essays, A Continuing Journey (1967), is about a geography of the mind. In this sense the world of Conquistador, though very “old,” is also very “new.”

MacLeish, then, wanted to establish a scheme of history that was both progressive and regressive. One can argue that he wanted to establish a myth, but his myth is essentially antimythological. He wanted to argue the existence of a real historical process in which the human race is driven by some unknowable powers, known in the poem simply as “Fates,” periodically to renounce the mythologies of the immediate past in order to better realize the “otherness” of the world. The “otherness” of the world, as previously pointed out, is emblematized by the “west” and the journey toward it is also a journey backward into time, toward a kind of prelapsarian Eden of effort, adventure, and danger that bears no relation to the traditional Eden as conceptualized, for example, in Paradise Lost. If this idea of the “west” in our lives is a myth, MacLeish would presumably argue that it is the most valid, because the most enduring, of all our myths, and valid likewise because it is the myth we all have in common.

Given these intentions, why did MacLeish choose the story of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico? The answer to this question will help us to understand the ambivalence, hesitation, and downright confusion with which the poem has been received since its publication. One apparent reason that MacLeish chose to write about the Spanish Conquest is that the story, or at least what was for him the essential story (exploration and ultimately the “tragic” settlement of Tenochtitlán), was far more unified and capable of poetic treatment than the story of the American Westward Expansion. MacLeish wanted epic unity; what he considered the tragedy of the American experience was far too diffuse for direct treatment in a narrative poem, and narrative was important to him because he regarded its imitation of action as a crucial contribution to the exhortative tone of a work that emphasizes the action of exploration as an end in itself. Another reason that MacLeish chose this story is, clearly, that Díaz's account of it is an anomaly among great accounts of military exploration and conquest in that it is written from the point of view of a participant who regarded himself as an average soldier with the average man's interests in mind. MacLeish wanted to authenticate his “choric” interests and what he perceived to be those of his age by reference to historical precedent.

What might have influenced MacLeish the most, however, was the condition of the Mexican landscape itself at the time of the inception of the poem. The locus of Conquistador was, as MacLeish knew, relatively untouched by civilization when he began to think of the poem; it was still more than reminiscent of the landscape that Cortés encountered centuries earlier. One would think that such considerations would hardly have mattered to a poet with a universal and timeless theme, a poet who regarded exploration as a metaphor for a state of mind, but it seems that, metaphor or no metaphor, MacLeish could not envision, much less write, the poem without feeling that the exploration of a strange, uncivilized land was still a literal possibility—indeed, something that he could experience himself, even though he may not initially have intended to explore the route of the conquistadors. The history of the writing of the poem seems to testify to the importance of the specific place in the poem. MacLeish began the poem in Paris in 1928, but the writing went badly because, as he has acknowledged in a letter to Drewey Wayne Gunn, he felt himself too distant from the landscape.¹⁸ He subsequently went to Mexico and traveled the route of the conquistadors. Apparently, his actual experience of the landscape made all the difference, for he finished the poem only a few months after he returned to the United States. In the letter to Gunn, MacLeish recalls that the Valley of Mexico “even at that late date was heartbreakingly beautiful.”

One could argue that MacLeish had the Spanish Conquest in mind initially, that the landscape was incidental, and that a visit to the landscape only provided an inexplicable impetus for him to start work on a poem whose theme he had worked out long before. If, after all, Conquistador is a metaphorical poem that asks the reader to act out the past in the present, specific time and place cannot be important. Moreover, as MacLeish has insisted in a letter to me, it is not a nostalgic poem, by which I assume he means a poem simply about the past. Nevertheless, Conquistador is in some degree a nostalgic poem simply because in fact it celebrates its particular landscape and because it gives one the impression that he will never know its like again. Embedded in the poem is the assertion that one must be willing to live in change, yet practically every line of the poem asks the reader to mourn for a landscape and a way of life that will never be recovered. Repeatedly in his narrative Díaz praises the virgin quality of the country:

the shine of the
Sun in that time: the wind then: the step
Of the moon over those leaf-fallen nights: the sleet in the
Dry grass: the small of the dust where we slept—
These things were real: these suns had heat in them.

[CP, 266]

Conquistador finally presents a sharp dichotomy between the primitive landscape as an end in itself, and as paysage moralisé. It is this dichotomy that has made the poem's critics uneasy, though none of them mention it. This dichotomy is present in MacLeish's essays, but, again, is never made explicit; MacLeish seems unaware that his sentiments diverge in opposite directions. For instance, in his essay, “The Unimagined American” (1943), MacLeish urges that Americans forsake their past for a newer, imagined America. Here, as elsewhere, he stresses the idea of “faring forward.” “Faring forward” involves a casting away of the image of America's agricultural past which, with its untouched beauty, its clear air and pleasant barns and villages, is purely “nostalgic”:

No one has dreamed a new American dream of the new America—the industrial nation of the huge machines, the limitless earth, the vast and skillful population, the mountain of copper and iron, the mile-long plants, the delicate laboratories, the tremendous dams. No one has imagined this America—what its life should be. …¹⁹

This statement is not inconsistent with the MacLeish of the Conquistador period, despite the new emphasis on industrialization: such is the new age toward which Americans, as historical explorers, must “travel.” Here, however, the dichotomy in MacLeish's thinking strikes forcefully. It is “right” for the conquistadors to travel on because, if they do, they will only be moving back to an element, nature, in which they will be, paradoxically, at home if not comfortable. Americans must move, however, into an industrialized and hardly natural, or pastoral, future full of “huge machines, the limitless earth, the vast and skillful population, the mountains of copper and iron, the mile-long plants, … the tremendous dams.” It is easy to see that MacLeish attempts here to endow this “new world” with the sublimity of traditional epic, but is his imagery convincing? If machines are huge, if the population is vast, if there are mountains of copper and mile-long plants, how can there also be limitless earth? In fact, for all of his praise of the new industrial world, MacLeish never embraces it concretely in his poetry; he is never an “industrial poet,” but he is very frequently, especially in Conquistador, a pastoral poet. In short, the rapture that accompanies MacLeish's description of the nearly primitive landscape of Mexico begs the reader to ask if he was himself entirely at peace with this “new” America or indeed with any kind of imaginable future. His description of the Mexican landscape as “heartbreakingly beautiful” suggests to us that he thought that he was seeing it for the last time and that nothing would quite compensate for its loss. One is forced to admit that Conquistador, in its unmistakable praise for a primitive world that is nearly lost to this time, is in one way a nostalgic poem, and that MacLeish's view of history is riven by a conflict of mind and heart.

If one judges Conquistador by the standards of traditional epic, he must confess that it does not very strictly measure up, but he need make no such judgment. MacLeish has very conscious affinities with the moderns, chief among which is an instinct for lyric poetry and a tendency to regard experience as an end in itself. Clearly this work is in a class apart from poems such as Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Keats' Hyperion; it is not a pastiche. MacLeish was not hounded by the ghosts of Homer or Milton and in writing his poem he was not attempting entirely to defy the poetic “tradition” of his own time in favor of an outdated genre. He set himself against some of the attitudes and practices of his contemporaries, including their “subjectivism” and “negativism,” but he was not unappreciative of what Pound, Eliot and the others had up to that time done. He was particularly sensitive to Pound's innovations. The poets of the 1920s, MacLeish observes, hoped to compose a poetry

… based upon the phrases of living speech, alive still with the emphasis of breathing mouths. They failed, however, to understand that it was insufficient merely to release the good cloth of poetry from the silly starch of nineteenth-century etiquette … and bad taste. They did not understand that it was necessary also to find for that released language a new form capable of fixing and accentuating its living rhythms, and that Pound had found that form.²⁰

MacLeish wrote Conquistador in the belief that he was going even further than Pound in finding that “new form” which would “fix” the “released language” of modernism. In so doing, he seems to have wanted to liberate modernism itself from what he thought was its simple posture of reaction to the past. He wanted to give modernism a purpose and he apparently felt that he had to give it an age-old context to do so, which is what epic poetry nearly always attempts to do. His poem is an attempt to make an amalgam of the old and the new, and in this respect he seems to have been influenced by Eliot's idea of the value of tradition in poetry. Epic was important to him because he saw it as a vehicle for urging a reluctant generation to travel into the “new age.” In writing his poem, however, he also, perhaps sometimes unintentionally, gave modern nostalgia a dimension of heroism.

Notes

1. Archibald MacLeish (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 28.

2. New Republic, 1 June 1932, pp. 77-78.

3. A Time to Speak (Cambridge, 1940), p. 56 passim. A Time to Speak is a collection of essays from the previous decade. See especially “Nevertheless One Debt,” “Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry,” and “Poetry and the Public World.”

4. Ibid., p. 92.

5. Ibid., p. 57.

6. Ibid.

7. The English Epic and its Background (London, 1954), pp. 7-8.

8. The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), pp. 133-34.

9. Bernál Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York, 1970), p. xxxiii.

10. MacLeish, p. 53.

11. The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish (Boston, 1962), p. 350. All subsequent quotations are cited by page as CP.

12. The Discovery and Conquest p. 99.

13. A Time to Speak, p. 57.

14. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, 1962), p. 71. George Steiner, “Introduction: Homer and the Scholars” in Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George Steiner and Robert Fagles (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962). Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London, 1957). Tillyard, The English Epic and its Background.

15. Quoted by Clifton Fadiman in his foreword to Tolstoy's War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, 1942), p. xxvi.

16. Collected Poems (Princeton, 1971), p. 110.

17. Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1956), p. 292. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.

18. American and British Writers in Mexico: 1556-1973 (Austin, 1974), p. 150.

19. A Continuing Journey (Boston, 1967), p. 90.

20. A Time to Speak, p. 59 (my italics).