SOURCE: Whittemore, Reed. “MacLeish and Democratic Pastoral.” Sewanee Review 61, no. 4 (October-December 1953): 700-09.

[In the following review of Collected Poems, 1917-1952, Whittemore highlights the pastoral element in MacLeish's poetry.]

Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems, 1917-1952 contains perhaps eighty poems written since the publication of his earlier volume of collected poems (1924-1933). It also contains twelve poems written in the period covered by the earlier volume though not to be found in that volume, and several pre-1924 poems that, in 1933, MacLeish presumably thought of as juvenilia. Conversely only one poem, “Insomnia” (a poor poem), is to be found in the 1933 volume and not in the new one, so clearly the new volume gives a much more complete account of MacLeish's activities than the old. That it does not include his wartime radio verse plays (Air Raid, etc.) is a fact I can't bring myself to worry about, since his long-poem ventures are amply represented otherwise by everything, that I know of, from The Pot of Earth to The Trojan Horse.

In the old volume MacLeish asserted at the outset that “this book is not a ‘collected edition’ of my poems nor does it purport to trace my development as a poet.” In the new volume he asserted nothing, but I think I can safely say that it is a collected edition and that it does trace his development as a poet.

So much for the news.

Reading it as a prospective reviewer I was immediately depressed by the variety of materials MacLeish was presenting for review. A reviewer's lot is a hard one (though not as hard as the lot of the poet reviewed) when he is faced with thirty-five years of continuous production. Like a tourist under the guidance of Messrs. Cook, he has entirely too much at his disposal. He must choose between the tour of the Louvre and the tour of the bars. So I was, as I say, depressed; I don't like to be picky. First I considered picking the best poems and setting down a few wise words about them. Without much effort I produced the following list: “Invocation to the Social Muse,” “End of the World,” “You, Andrew Marvell,” “Lines for a Prologue,” “Critical Observations,” “Eleven,” “Voyage West,” “Journey Home,” “Where the Hayfields Were,” and “Crossing.” It wasn't a list I was prepared to go to court about, but it was a list of poems I would have been happy to include in the anthology of modern poetry I have not yet been asked by a publisher to edit. The real trouble with the list was that I didn't have much to say about it after I had listed it. It was a dead end; the poems represented, though good poems, did not make a thematic or rhetorical group out of which I could draw something significantly MacLeishian. All I could do with the list was say to myself that it was a good list and a longer list than I would be prepared to draw up for most modern poets. This was something, of course; it served to remind me of that which a good many critics these days need to be reminded of, the poetry of MacLeish; but it wasn't enough for the solemnities of a serious review. Was it? Anyway I gave the list up.

Secondly, I considered dividing MacLeish's poetry up into various phases. Phases were old and reliable and MacLeish had certainly had phases. He had had an Impressionist phase and a Public Speech phase and a Nationalist phase and a Riviera phase and a good many others. His present phase, perhaps the least distinct of all of them, appeared to be a phase of Uncertainty, since most of the poems composing it were tentative, slight, occasional pieces lacking both the persistence and the garrulous ease of earlier MacLeish. I thought of concentrating on this present phase.

But no. The trouble with the phases, ancient or modern, was that I didn't really believe in them. They kept vanishing or quietly merging with one another. Their integrity as units was suspect. I gave them up with regret.

Thirdly, I considered discussing MacLeish as a pastoral poet. I will admit that I was driven to this by an irrelevancy, my present surroundings, and that possibly MacLeish is not a pastoral poet at all. My present surroundings are California where, as everybody knows, versions of pastoral are constantly thrusting themselves into view. The vegetation shading my sombre windows, for example, has been bred out of the desert by the watering and care of thousands of gardeners scattered liberally northward from La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fé. If it were not for these gardeners the vegetation would, I am told, rapidly be replaced by desert again; but because of them the vegetation is not merely suitable for shading my windows; it is also pretty, and the landscape which it composes satisfies completely my notion of a pastoral (a literary pastoral) scene by being both picturesque and homemade. Faced simultaneously with this landscape and MacLeish I could hardly avoid putting them together.

After putting them together for the wrong reasons I began to think there were also right reasons for doing so. MacLeish's connections with Yale, Harvard, Washington, and Farmington, Connecticut, were no deterrent, since pastorals have traditionally emerged from such places, not from places where there are shepherds and sheep. Even less discouraging was the absence in MacLeish's poetry of traditional pastoral settings or devices, since William Empson in his book, Some Versions of Pastoral, had opened the way—obscurely to be sure—to finding pastoral in everything and calling it Covert Pastoral. There seemed to be little to prevent a discussion of MacLeish as a pastoral poet, and a good deal to sustain one. The images to which he was most attracted, for example, and from which he expected the highest dividends appeared to be images from nature—the moon, trees, leaves, stars, wind, surf, sunlight and earth. And the theme dominating all his phases appeared to be essentially pastoral: life is richest and best in its elemental forms. Lastly, his rhetoric seemed to indicate that he was steadily, perhaps obsessively concerned with making the poet, himself, into the spittin' modern equivalent of a simple shepherd. Indeed in the mythmaking about himself he was far from content with the conventional pretense, not seriously insisted on in most pastorals, of the poet's being an uncouth swain. He felt obliged like Whitman to drive the notion home again and again. He wanted to be thought of as just a simple man with an “audience of men like other men who understand the sun on the side of a wall, and the shadow in the shade of a tree, and the feel of things, and the thinking of things, naturally and simply and with the hands and the mouth and the eyes.”¹ His insistence upon this did not make him at all like Whitman, but it put him, with Whitman, in with that body of poets who do not wish to be thought of as Literary, the body of poets who produce much, as it seemed to me, of what Empson called Covert Pastoral. Yes, the more I looked at the California landscape, the more convinced I became that MacLeish fitted in.

It was not and is not to his discredit that he appeared to fit in, but his fitting in led me immediately into difficulty with the phrase Covert Pastoral. I didn't care what Empson meant by it, but I began to wonder what I meant. There was certainly nothing Covert about MacLeish's pastoral assertions. In his Baccalaureate poem (printed in Tower of Ivory, 1917) he observed that, after the college learning from New Haven had gone down the drain, there would remain

                                        other, magic things—
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotten harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings …

In “Eleven” (Streets in the Moon, 1926) he described a child tired of things of the mind who went out of the house to find an old gardener “smelling of sun, of summer,” with whom the child sat,

Happy as though he had no name, as though
He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
Like a root growing.

In “Seafarer” (Poems, 1924-33) he advised voyagers in this life that the important things to learn were “to walk / The roll of earth, the pitch and fall / That swings across these trees those stars” and “to sleep against the ground.” And in a recent poem, “Where the Hayfields Were,” he described an old man and his daughter who, in the process of burning off a meadow, left an impression with him not unlike that left by Wordsworth's solitary reaper:

Slightly she danced in the stillness, in the twilight,
Dancing in the meadows where the hayfields were.

These poems, moreover, taken pretty much at random from different periods of his work, were not thematically exceptional. They were the norm, and their pastorality was positively aggressive. I began to think that Covert Pastoral was the wrong phrase.

Not entirely. Though the pastoral themes were overt, the insistence, previously mentioned, upon the poet's being a pastoral figure was extremely deceptive. Empson had observed that most pastoral was about the People and about the virtues of their simple, close-to-the-earth lives, but that it was not normally by them or for them. The tricky part of MacLeish's case, however, was his insistence that his verse was both by and for the elemental man. Thus he constantly framed his poems as addresses to elemental persons of one hue or another. In “Memory Green” he addressed

          … you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse
Or you in Paris on the windy quay,

“you” in this instance being the incoherent people of the world who feel things. In “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments” he addressed an elemental Woman whom he said he preferred not to describe in the conventional (contrived) sonneteer's manner, since she was no contrivance but Real:

I will [instead] say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair.

In “Sentiments for a Dedication” he addressed the men of his own time, the living men:

O living men Remember me Receive me among you.

And in “The Old Man to the Lizard” he addressed a lizard, a “natural” if there ever was one,

                                                                                          tell me, lover of
Sun, lover of noon, lizard,
Is it because the noon is gold with
Flame you love it so?

A different mode of address which he used frequently produced much the same effect. Instead of addressing an elemental “you,” he merged the “you” with himself and talked about an elemental “us.” Thus, in “America Was Promises,” he said

and we move on: we move down:
with the first light we push forward,

thereby identifying himself with all other Americans, all of whom were taking part in an elementary evolutionary movement into the west, the future, the unknown, the what-all. And in a poem entitled simply “Men” he said,

Our history is grave noble and tragic
We trusted the look of the sun on the green leaves,

thereby making it understood that he too was one who trusted the sun's look. The device was a familiar one, of course; it was the device used by Antony when he said to the crowd, over Caesar's body, “I tell you that which you yourselves do know”; and it was the device used rather less effectively by Coriolanus when he attempted, only half-heartedly and under advisement, to persuade the same old crowd that he was a “man of their infirmity.” Unlike Antony and Coriolanus, however, MacLeish was not a character in somebody else's drama; he was the dramatist, and he apparently wanted not merely the crowd on stage (Americans, Voyagers, Lizards and Promenaders on the Friedrichstrasse) but also his literary audience to think of him as being incapable of using an oratorical device. Or, to put it differently, he wanted to appear in the guise of the good and simple Othello who, on stage or off stage, was really capable of only a “round, unvarnished tale.” Even to the elect he wanted to appear as common.

I say this under advisement, for it seemed to me that he never actually appeared this way. The primitive in MacLeish was outweighed in every poem by his tremendous verbal sophistication. I could not imagine a very substantial audience for his poetry other than the elect. Who among his elemental American listeners could have been expected to know that MacLeish was addressing him when using the phrase “voyagers in these leaves”? And what soldier would have realized that he was included when MacLeish said, “we too have heard / Far off … the horn of Roland in the passages of Spain”? Constantly, while professing simplicity, MacLeish indulged in the complex forms of statement of his non-pastoral poetic compatriots. Constantly he was referential and indirect when, for his announced purposes, he should have been simply reportorial, specific, straightforward. This was not, I felt, an indication that his pastorality was so much waste effort, but it was an indication of confusion, on his part, about where the effort might reasonably have been expected to have any effect. Empson's assertion that pastoral was not by or for the People could only, apparently, have served to make MacLeish mad, and yet the assertion was just as true when applied to MacLeish's pastorals as when applied to Milton's or Spenser's.

Thus, Covert Pastoral. Perhaps after all the phrase was badly chosen; perhaps Hair-on-the-chest Pastoral or Democratic Pastoral would have described MacLeish's verse more accurately. He was not trying to hide Pastoral; he was trying to deny the literary shenanigans which have traditionally enshrouded Pastoral. I was reminded of the difficulty most elemental persons, like myself, have before those elemental pictures in the Museum of Modern Art. Underneath them a printed card normally announces that their creator has attempted “to regain a primitive sense of awareness” by concentrating on “essentials” and abandoning mere “representation.” Something like that anyway. The statement always seemed ridiculous to me. It was all very well to abandon mere representation, but it was a mistake to regard the abandonment as a primitive action. It was a very sophisticated action; it was an action going beyond representation, an action involving abstracting the essence of something from the something. Similarly, in pastorals an abstracting or idealizing process was involved which was caviare to the general, nothing to the million. MacLeish was therefore misled in expecting the million to identify themselves with his voyagers in the leaves.

There remained to be considered, however, the effect of MacLeish's delusions—assuming I was correct that they were delusions—upon the poetry itself. Though fashion made it pleasant to note that MacLeish's preoccupation with extending the audience for poetry had led to a great waste of his talents, I didn't believe this. In the first place waste was what MacLeish had, I thought very properly, noted among those contemporaries of his who were contemptuous of their audiences. As an editor of a little magazine I could only agree with him that the vacuum into which most contemporary poetry set sail was fabulous. And in the second place MacLeish's preoccupation with his audience seemed to me to have had one tremendously important effect upon his writing which was not a bad effect, not wasteful. It had made him write with the intent of persuasion. What he attempted to persuade people of was not, in some cases, to my liking, but what he tried to do rhetorically when he undertook persuasion seemed to me to be elementary and admirable: he assumed he was addressing not the air but someone; he assumed, therefore, that he had a responsibility to that someone as well as to himself. These assumptions, far from leading to waste, served to direct the rhetoric of many of his best poems.

“Invocation to the Social Muse,” for example, was addressed to a Senora Barinya. The girl was unimportant except as an object to address, but as such an object she served to establish immediately that the poem written to her would have to be aimed at her. In view of the fact that there was very little modern poetry aimed, in this sense, at anything, and in view of the fact that the aim made possible a very intelligently unacademic discussion of an academic subject, the girl seemed to me to be an important part of the poem. It didn't matter whether the aim was good or not (who cared if she was convinced?) and it didn't matter whether the girl was real or fictitious. What mattered was that the poet had concerned himself with more than saying what he personally found “sufficient”; he had concerned himself also with saying it in public.

There was another senora in “Voyage West,” of less importance but useful as a point of rhetorical focus. There was Andrew Marvell himself, by implication, as the addressee in “You, Andrew Marvell.” There were the dead poets in “Reproach to Dead Poets,” the crew of Columbus in “Lines for a Prologue,” and the lovers in “Selene Afterwards.” And there were also of course all the voyagers, the People of the American Front poems. That the voyagers and dead poets addressed never, probably, received the messages didn't mean that the messages weren't addressed. They were; and because they were they were framed in the form of public, not private messages.

Allen Tate's assertion, in The Forlorn Demon, that the poet is primarily responsible to his own conscience, was not something I was anxious to dispute. Even less did I wish to dispute with him about the dangers attending the poet's taking on other responsibilities than this, the responsibilities, for example, of persuasion. The dangers were unquestionably great. They were the dangers the teacher faced when he tried to sell Yeats to his Sophomores, the dangers the politician faced when he tried to sell himself to the People, and the simple dangers of salesmanship. They were, moreover, greater dangers for the poet than for the others because the poet was, as MacLeish himself put it, “strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers.” He was obliged constantly to remember that,

The things of the poet are done to a man alone
As the things of love are done—or of death
                                        when he hears the
Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick only.

What I did wish to do with Mr. Tate's assertion, however, was to suggest that perhaps MacLeish's concern with the problems of persuasion as well as of conscience was a healthy one and not something to be dismissed as mere “tub-thumping.” “Tub-thumping” was a nasty word anyway for a potentially respectable poetic activity about which, so far as I could see, one could only be severe in severe cases. If some of MacLeish's poems were severe cases, some of them were perfectly healthy. Even some of his American Front poems were a good deal more than tub-thumping.

“America Was Promises,” for example. There MacLeish had felt it necessary not simply to describe the promises America had been, but also to exhort his readers to make those promises come true. The exhortation was, I supposed, tub-thumping; the last hundred lines of the poem were the lines of a bully who just wanted his own way. But the first hundred lines were as good as any MacLeish had ever written, and it was not at all easy for me to see where persuasion ended and bullying began.

Thus, the difficulty. Against the objections to MacLeish's public pastorals, and against the objections to tub-thumping included in the pastorals, there stood the first hundred lines of “America Was Promises.” There stood also the lines to the senoras and dead poets. These had been written as public speech. These were lines of persuasion. And they were, it seemed to me, very good lines. Certainly, then, one couldn't say that MacLeish's impulse to write publicly, not merely to converse with his conscience, was in itself bad. Nor could one say that the impulse had been unproductive. Quite the contrary. It seemed to me therefore that my list of MacLeish's anthology poems—a list I was prepared to add to or otherwise adjust for my pugnacious readers—made the dangers of Democratic Pastoral and Public Speech, in MacLeish's case, worth facing.

Note

1. Not from a poem but from a dissertation by MacLeish on the audience for poetry. In Furioso, Volume I, Number 1.