[In the following review of New Found Land, Zabel concentrates on MacLeish's poetic style—which he finds to be strongly influenced by other poets, especially T. S. Eliot—and foresees the possible “dissolution of a fine poetic talent.”]

Mr. MacLeish's new book [New Found Land] is made up of fourteen poems, beginning with the familiar “You, Andrew Marvell” of five or six years ago, and ending with several poems in a somewhat later manner which have appeared in periodicals during the last year. The collection is distinguished, however, by a style which, for all its slack and discursive rhetoric, carries a definitive accent, unmistakably Mr. MacLeish's own. Even where certain external effects carry one back from these lines to the Swinburnian distension in the meters of The Happy Marriage or The Pot of Earth, there is no confusing the early uncertainty with the later stylistic sobriety and deliberation. MacLeish still handles his line with a kind of amateurish laxity from which the experimental note is not likely to disappear. More than any other poet of his standing, he has retained his affection for Eliot's early idiom. But this leaning, as it now reasserts itself after the discipline of The Hamlet, is less a matter of expression than of temperament; less, that is, to be seen in his phrases than in his themes. Apparently MacLeish intends to remain an elegiast, commemorating in his sombre and muffled oratory the historical melancholy of mankind, deliberating on the flight of illusion and the death of heroes.

If any doubt remains that Eliot's influence is still an open secret in the poems of New Found Land, one may pass from their colloquial-heroic intonation to an inspection of their anthropology. Here Frazer and his colleagues still furnish the properties and symbols. Here, as in The Hamlet, the sun supplants the water allegory of The Waste Land, and the cosmography is expanded to include a wide scattering of terrestrial and stellar geography, the historical background meanwhile becoming a sort of panorama of man's physical progress on earth. MacLeish has inherited Eliot's predicament without approaching Eliot's conformity to a newly discovered doctrine of being and destiny. He stops short at a compromise which may be considerably more rational and persuasive than Eliot's latterday submissions, but which, fundamentally, involves no greater assurance of esthetic and spiritual integrity. He stands on a star revolving among planets, still cloaked in the polite bewilderment of Senlin facing the dawn or Prufrock walking by the sea. In the present volume he offers, from the midst of his perplexity, no solution beyond embracing the sun-warmed earth, cleaving to his faith in the common heroism of men, and waiting passively for such gleams of higher intelligence as may be communicated to him through the ministries of friendship, art, and love.

In his last two books MacLeish has shown, in a score of poems openly and in most of the others implicitly, his desire to lose personal identity in the common body of humanity. Apparently he reached a climax, emotionally and conceptually, in his poem called “L'An Trentiesme de Mon Eage” where his earlier irony began to soften into a querulous and wandering nostalgia, expressed with remarkable beauty:

And I have come upon this place
By lost ways, by a nod, by words,
By faces, by an old man's face
At Morlaix lifted to the birds.
.....By words, by voices, a lost way—
And here above the chimney stack
The unknown constellations sway.
And by what way shall I go back?

This poem remains the pivot of his subsequent thought. It has been his patient attempt to answer its last question. The Hamlet has been the most ambitious part of the program—a minor epic-allegory wherein men, devising their common destiny under the sun, find ultimately their only brotherhood and heroism in sorrow, and their hope in the creative fruition of natural processes. The serio-fantastic analysis of the Einstein (elsewhere carried to the point of travesty in the humorous pieces, or again expressed with sharp refinement in “Ars Poetica”) has yielded to a style expressive of this theme of mute inglorious heroism. It is this style whose character is fully developed in New Found Land. The tone is persistently autumnal, the cry nostalgic, the content excessively miscellaneous. Unquestionably the lines have a flowing searching order—the curious and unflagging impulse which means style. It is, on the whole, the most successful attempt thus far to convert Eliot's nervous lucidity, Aiken's tinkling languor, and Robinson's clipped aphorisms into an amalgam which will constitute a genuine rhetoric of elegy.

The fact remains, however, that one of the first sources of stylistic durability in a poet is the “rebellious labor” which is motivated by some unequivocal form of private moral resolution. If MacLeish's style never gains the firm edge of individuality, and if his slow sentences with their too casual and unpunctuated phrases are unquickened by decisive impulse, it is because he has been too willing to lose himself in the crowd of men whose greatness lies only in unconscious union, or to surrender to the vast historical memory, inchoate and unanalyzed, which he has made his principal theme. Streets of the Moon is likely to remain his best volume (barring the unpredictable), because in its finest poems he exhibited a sensitive formal mastery, and a genius in understatement which the present “American Letter” and “Cinema of a Man” have probably disabled permanently. Today only the fragments of this unusual style remain; its beauties have been lost in catalogues and inventories.

The temptation to sound a warning against the complete dissolution of a fine poetic talent into verbosity and tedious repetition is irresistible, even when Mr. MacLeish's errors exasperate rather than dismay. His creative processes are synthetic, and his poems are mostly documentary in substance. Like Hemingway in prose, he urges the immediacy of his sensations by presenting them on a level of detached observation, connected by coordinating conjunctions and the simplest prepositions, but no longer by conventional periods and commas. If this method involves grave doubts in a novel, there can be no question of its dangers in a poem. The flat monotony of this style is capable of the finer moments in “Return,” “Memory Green,” and “Immortal Autumn”:

I praise the fall it is the human season now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough

But too often it achieves only the open banality of “You, Andrew Marvell” (where the mechanism and the moral alike revolve with the naïve inconsequence of Mr. Wilder's recent fable); or the limp humility of “American Letter” whose theme, tiresomely reiterated, is “It is a strange thing to be an American”; or the sheer parody of “Men”:

We believed in the feel of the earth under us
We planted corn grapes apple-trees rhubarb
Nevertheless we knew others had died
Everything we have done has been faithful and dangerous

Few sensibilities can survive such monotony. This fluid ambiguity is charming only until it obliterates the design of a thought. That design, often brilliantly achieved in Streets of the Moon, reappears in “& Forty second Street” and in the “Poem Dedicatory,” the latter a kind of ejaculatory apostrophe which threatens to break heartlessly and insignificantly at the end of every exclamation, but which achieves succinctness. There remain “Reproach to Dead Poets,” some lines in Part I of “Land's End,” the grave beauty of “Immortal Autumn,” and six fine line-couples in “Anonymous Signature” to assure us that Mr. MacLeish is not closing his accounts in this book. He has a serious task ahead if his future work is to rise above the threat of anonymity and indecision which at present overshadows it. From the first there has appeared in his work a strain of genuine nobility; to lose that quality, particularly in that full stature which Mr. MacLeish once promised to give us, would be to lose one of the finest personalities in recent American verse. Not with complete confidence yet with a considerable reliance on his creative responsibility, we await the larger projects upon which Mr. MacLeish has been engaged for some months past.