SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Review of Poems, 1924-1933, by Archibald MacLeish. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 44, no. 3 (June 1934): 150-59.

[In the following review, Zabel traces MacLeish's development as a poet through the early 1930s and the publication of Poems, 1924-1933.]

“My development as a poet is of no interest to me,” says Archibald MacLeish in the preface to his Poems: 1924-1933, “and of even less interest, I should suppose, to anyone else.” What his statement lacks in candor it makes up in optimism. For this collection of his best work in ten years shows that like any serious and respectable poet, he has been interested to the point of painful obsession in his “development.” Self-knowledge (if not self-reverence and self-control) has been his involuntary goad in all the work he can now “read without embarrassment,” whether disguised by literary anthropology in The Hamlet, by American nostalgia in New Found Land, by romantic heroism in Conquistador, or, in “Cinema of a Man,” by post-War miasmas of exile and bewilderment, the poet plodding through simple sentences and assorted geography with “Ernest” (“they are drunk their mouths are hard they say qué cosa They say the cruel words they hurt each other”) toward the oblivion of racial orphanage and the Nirvana of dead time.

To such an exhibition the public can hardly be expected to remain indifferent, particularly when Mr. MacLeish's plea for indifference is offset by his recent labors as scourge and fury among literary critics and Marxists. Adding to this the fact that he has written a portion of fine verse, and given himself more systematically than most of his contemporaries to the ordeal of his craft and personal predicament, one is obliged to consider the present Foreword as another installment of his rather evasive prose work, of his Challenge to the Age whose energies might better go into his poetry, since both History and Controversy, outside his verse, have left him somewhat the worse for his struggles with them.

Those struggles, however, underlie both his poetic “embarrassment” and his claim to dignity. They are a clue to his value as a contemporary. They are the result of several typical experiences: his obligation to forge a spiritual doctrine in the absence of both inherited belief and social necessity, his acceptance of an esthetic method before he had either moral or doctrinal matter to justify it, and notably his enlistment (widely advertised in this book) as a Paris exile some ten years ago and the consequent pathos of distance and sentiment that has troubled his ultimate conflict with America.

One of the oddest aberrations in our cultural history was the great exodus to France of 1918-1929, when literature, to be written, had to be written in Paris. Those were the days when American art moved from the Middle West to the Left Bank; when farm-hands hurried from Ohio and Wisconsin to get in on the Dada movement; when Gertrude Stein brandished the torch that lately sputtered in the grasp of Amy Lowell; when Kiki was the toast of Rotonde and Coupole; when “Ernest” proudly wheeled his well-filled go-cart among the occult biologic growths of the Dôme of an evening to partake of a whiskey and parental pride; when transition was young, nothing was sacred, and money was cheap; when whole generations got lost and Jimmie the Barman was accumulating his heady memoirs. These are just now being published, it happens, with an introduction by Mr. Hemingway, valedictorian of the period—“This Must Be the Place”: Memoirs of Montparnasse, by Jimmie the Barman. One fruitful passage suggests admirably the spirit of that heroic decade:

Walking ahead of me was Flossie, both of us on our way to The Dingo. As she came abreast of the bar entrance, a handsome Rolls-Royce drove up to the curb and from it stepped two lavishly dressed ladies. They looked at The Dingo questioningly. They peered into the windows. Flossie, seeing them, looked her contempt. As she passed into the bar she tossed a single phrase over her shoulder: “You bitch!” Whereupon the lady so addressed nudged her companion anxiously. “Come on, Helen,” she said, “this must be the place!”

Under much the same inspiration our writers decided that Paris must be the place to produce novels and poetry. This was the setting which Mr. MacLeish, after academic beginnings, war-service, and law-work, chose for his poetic discipline, and its spell upon him, to boast or exorcise, has been his chief spiritual problem ever since.

In those days his idea of poetry was almost purely esthetic. He argued for “mere poetry, poetry made out of poetry, poetry without sex, smirks, or graces, poetry without the sentimentality which passes among us for ironic, poetry without tags of wit.” In view of the twin threats of propaganda and vulgarization which, then as now, aim to dispossess poetry of its essential purposes, his stand was a worthy one. Its weakness lay merely in what it denied in his own character, and what serious decisions, of inheritance and moral responsibility, it left him unprepared for. For these decisions the writers of the desultory Twenties substituted two literary methods: the elegiac and the hard-boiled. They were combined in The Sun Also Rises, Trinc, and The Hamlet. “Make us tough and mystical,” said Phelps Putnam, and MacLeish:

O play the strong boy with the rest of them!
Be hard-boiled! Be bitter; Face the brassy
Broad indecent fact and with ironical
Contemptuous understanding take the world's
Scut in your hands and name it! Name its name!

This was the pis aller of Montparnasse and Minetta Lane, a new version of the fustian desperations of Montmartre and Shropshire. Beyond those despairs lay the dignity of the stoic tradition, and since hard-boiledness is a strenuous way to keep up one's belief in the deflation of all values but the physical and the esthetic, heroic pathos was substituted in the form of bull-fighters, drunkards, Spanish imperialists, or mere silent men lying flat on the ground, listening to the pulse of centuries, or marking the universal sunlight in its blind measurement of man's insignificant hours. From such impersonal fortitude MacLeish shaped his first serious conceptions of art and human idealism.

From the start his technical labor had been sensitive and passionately sincere; but both sensibility and sincerity come to their supreme test in the solution of an inner, specifically personal problem. To externalize them in the interests of a general depersonalization of the human consciousness is to strike at their very life. This may be done by social propagandists in the cause of public reform or revolution. Or it may be done, as he has done it, in the interests of a more abstract sense of universals, the poet sinking his moral personality in the total consciousness of humanity, and in what is conceived to lie behind it—the unconscious life of nature and the universe. It is notable that after 1923 MacLeish's poetic masters were men who aided him toward this gradual surrender of private intelligence: poets who, like Fraser's anthropology (which he followed Eliot in using for the symbolism of The Pot of Earth), relieved his private agony by opening up prospects of great involuntary human struggles, prospects of man in his most impersonal condition of consciousness against a background of racial transitions and wide-flung geographic movements. Here he could escape the threat of futility by submitting himself and mankind to an unfathomable universal will.

It is no longer A Man against the stars. It is Mankind: that which has happened always to all men, not the particular incidents of particular lives. 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. Man in the invisible sea of time that drowns him. …

The poets who helped him to this submission were the Cendrars of Transsibérien and Kodak documentaire, Apollinaire in Alcools and Calligrammes, and Perse with Anabase. To these Eliot, with Gerontion, added the appropriate tone of ironic elegy, and Pound, with the earlier Cantos, the proper method of historical imagination. The result was the work of MacLeish's early maturity, the lyrics in which he caught pathos before it suffered distension and critical inversion, poems that celebrate with great verbal beauty a surrender to the mystery of existence and the processes of physical anonymity. This was “Le Secret Humain,” and it was the consolation of his Hamlet:

We know what our fathers were but not who we are
For the names change and the thorns grow over the houses.
We recognize ourselves by a wrong laugh;
By a trick we have of resembling something. Otherwise
There are strange words and a face in a mirror.
                                                                                                                                                      We know
Something we have forgotten too that comforts us.

It found its finest form in “You Andrew Marvell,” its humorous expression in “Mother Goose's Garland,” “Immortal Helix,” and “The End of the World,” its tragic scale in “Land's End” and “Tourist Death,” and in Einstein, an attempt to harmonize with the abstract ultimates of science:

                                                                                                    He can count
Ocean in atoms and weigh out the air
In multiples of one and subdivide
Light to its numbers.
                                                                                If they will not speak
Let them be silent in their particles.
Let them be dead and he will lie among
Their dust and cipher them—undo the signs
Of their unreal identities and free
The pure and single factor of all sums—
Solve them to unity.

Unfortunately MacLeish soon permitted his compliance in this “pure and single factor of all sums” to undermine the personal resistance upon which such surrender, stoic or otherwise, counts for salvation. “Men” brought the idea to the brink of parody, and Conquistador allowed the lavish beauty of its materials to become vitiated by the huge extension and dilution of an epic scale unsupported by adequate epic motivation. Moreover, the surrender of real certitude and “intellectualism” communicates itself to style. MacLeish's earlier style grew into an astonishing beauty that contradicted the prejudice of anyone who knew the contemporary sources from which it derived. His real task was to preserve its integrity. But his progress in anti-intellectual humility meant also a progress in stylistic self-effacement. This is apparent not only in the disorganization, the overplayed repetitions, and the symbolic vagueness of Conquistador, but in the progressive tyranny of his models. Worthy models are the right of every worthy poet; but in Conquistador the exhausted echo of the “old man” theme of Gerontion, and the overplayed effect of historic rumination borrowed from the Cantos, showed clearly that the models had deadened an ambitious creative purpose. And when, in the Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, we find a device of the Cantos baldly reproduced:

To Thos. Jefferson Esq. his obd't serv't
M. Lewis: captain: detached:
                                                                                                              Sir. …

we are led to wonder why Mr. MacLeish, who likes “that clean sharp stroke which is heard when the axe goes into living wood” should be so indifferent when he hears the axe sink into Ezra Pound's neck. “Critics moved by a love of poetry,” he says, should

point out the excellence of the work, the way in which, with honesty and self-respect, the man handles a long and eloquent line, a firm and vivid phrase and a vocabulary not filched from the thesaurus—

or, presumably, from his fellow-poets. Implicitly he demands that the absence of these poetic virtues be similarly pointed out. A poet who aims at them resolutely need waste no petulance on critics who are trying to rescue poetry from the vulgarity of “Couturier criticism” or “The Literature Business” which he himself has deplored.

MacLeish's irresolution has been emphasized by the serious direction which his work of the past five years has taken. Physical stoicism and obsession by time had come to him too easily; they began to stir uneasy scruples in his thought. To feel, “face downward in the sun … how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on” was a beatitude disturbed by a sensation that is likely to disrupt the stoic peace of soul:

These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems
I have the sense of infinity!

Infinity, paradoxically, is likely to drive a man back to the local and specific accidents of his own life and self. MacLeish, in European expatriation, was troubled by his duty and birth-right: “It is a strange thing to be an American.” Returning to America, he was plunged into the crisis of the past five years. To him this crisis could not be relieved by the technical or forcible reforms of economic socialism. It is a crisis between the fundamental pioneer idealism of “The Farm” or the selfless heroism of Conquistador, and the industrial greed he denounces in “1933” or the revolutionary violence satirized in the Frescoes. But between these antitheses his judgment is too satisfied with abstract canons of honor—canons which risk committal neither to a positive moral dogmatism nor to a practical social risk. He invokes “Time which survives the generations” when he argues on economics, and “disinterestedness” when he defines the poet:

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.
.....There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style:
.....Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him. …

Or, more explicitly:

The intuitions of the poet are valid and may be accepted only because his loyalty is to his art, because his sole test of the acceptability of a word or a phrase or a poem is the test of his art and not the test of his politics or his social indignation. This is not to say that the true poet is without prejudice. He has of course the prejudices of his blood, his countryside, his education, if you will, his “class.” But … there remain certain individuals who believe that the first and inescapable obligation of the poet is his obligation to his art; who believe that the fact that the practice of his art is difficult in no way releases him from that obligation; who believe that the desertion of his art for any reason, even the noblest, even the most humane, is nevertheless desertion.

This is nobly expressed and it involves an inevitable esthetic loyalty, but MacLeish's practice shows too clearly how for him art, like human stoicism, becomes an evasion of the specific responsibility to which a poet, no less than the humble honest man, is committed. Poetry, like moral and social life, is an art of concrete conditions, whose style and function are achieved when conceptual and ethical abstraction is tested by vital and practical experience. It is as easy to fail in that test through an exclusive esthetic idealism as through propaganda. Like Jeffers and Lawrence in their different ways, MacLeish has brought a keen sense of experience to an abstract vagueness of use. This sense need not be degraded to uses he cannot admit or acknowledge, but “self-respect,” “firmness,” and “vividness” stem from positive determination, from the isolation and not the loss of self. Such identity is expressed and realized in art, but it is not initially determined there, and this determination produces the real Hamlet, not the cinema of Hamlet. It starts in the personal, intellectual, and social circumstances of which MacLeish has tried hard to dispossess himself. Where he has succeeded, his verse dwindles toward apathy and diffusion. Where he fails, his work finds the sincerity and beauty upon whose final triumph will depend the poetry his admirers, and the defenders of American poetry, must hope he will write.