[In the following excerpted review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Siegel forms a list of MacLeish's most enduring works of poetry.]

The New and Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish contains 493 pages of poetry chosen from eighteen volumes (not including the dramas) and covering fifty-nine years of a career practically coeval with the modern period. MacLeish has been involved with nearly every phase of American poetic and political life of that period. Every high school junior (at least before the scores declined) puzzled over “Ars Poetica” and the meaning of the famous lines, “A poem should not mean / But be.” What is a reviewer to do besides celebrate such an event?

To begin, he may remind the reader of the obvious: MacLeish is often, if not consistently, the most brilliant of craftsmen, the most musical of lyrists, the most protean of voices, even to the self-confessedly imitative. The Collected Poems are well-chosen to represent a poet by turns lyrical, dramatic, elegiac, hortatory, satirical, philosophical romantic, classical, colloquial, elegant, vague, and painstakingly lucid. It is in hope of identifying what is most permanent here that I invoked Emerson and the loosely defined “tradition” that is more a company of the spirit. Throughout the Collected Poems transcendental notes are sounded, some almost as consciously Emersonian as the recent “Two Women Talking,” where one declares, “Men usually find / what's waiting for them in the mind”, and concludes, “It's what they dream of picking that they pluck.” In the early Einstein, wherever the sage moves “the bubble of the world / Takes center and there circle round his head / Like golden flies in summer the gold stars.” No matter that Einstein rejects subjective reality or that, for MacLeish, consciousness does not endure: while it lasts its fragile bubble contains the stars and such meanings as man makes of them. For him as for Jonathan Edwards, nature is full of human significance; whether read as moral or amoral, it is the soul writ large:

The fly against the window pane
That flings itself in flightless flight,
So it loves light,
Will die of love and die in vain.

The lines about the fly and its foiled access to the light suggest that MacLeish is a visitor of the dark side of the New England consciousness, in company with figures such as Robinson and Frost. If Robinson may be characterized as an inverted transcendentalist (who said that the world is a Hell of a place and therefore must mean something), and Frost as a cryptic with a finger to his lips (“We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”), then MacLeish may be viewed as a listener on the edge of the Void, evoking a presence through an acute sense of its absence. “It is always the same,” his Hamlet complains. “It is always as though some / Smell of leaves had made me not quite remember; / As though I had turned to look and there were no one” (italics mine). Here are fallings from us, vanishings: “Things he had loved because he knew them lost, / Things he had loved and never yet had found”. As in the well-known “End of the World,” the poet stands at some cosmic vantage point, focussing at one moment on “The armless ambidextrian … lighting / A match between his great and second toe” and the next on “the black pall / Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.” Nothing, the Void, is the screen that outlines the image in sharp relief before swallowing it. The flare of an intensely clear image on the one hand and the subsequent “crumpling … dark” on the other are the poles of his best poetry.

Ironically, it is in this position that MacLeish has been least comfortable. He has described the subjective poet as “a candle consuming its own fat” and regarded most nineteenth-century poets as hemophiliacs of self-pity. The attitude of cosmic despair (frustration is a better word, for there is light, even if the fly cannot get to it) is one he disowns in his essay Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry, but he disowns it by reference to a beautiful metaphor that betrays his disclaimer. He writes here that the poet “need not affect a strangeness from his time, need not go mooning through an endless attic with the starlight clicking on the roof.” This image evokes for me the best of MacLeish's poems. The clicking starlight suggests those laser-sharp images that cut against, but are inevitably lost in, darkness, whose source the poet does “not quite remember.” Does the disclaimer here suggest that the poet is eschewing an attitude only too natural to him, one which might have violated his strong public conscience and caused him to “affect a strangeness from his time”?

It is this tension between image and Void that creates the great poems, usually those more formal lyrics where the balance between them is maintained. Any brief list of the author's most-celebrated poems will suggest the truth of this contention: “You, Andrew Marvell,” “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments,” “The End of the World,” “Calypso's Island.” Odysseus in this last one yearns for Ithaca, “Where the grass dies and the seasons alter: // Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.” Process, change, decay are likewise balanced in “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments” by the isolated, vivid image:

I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlet:
I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
Nor the click of your shoe.

Each image is silhouetted against the void before the poem releases it, “as the moon releases / Twig by twig the night-entangled trees”. This is the voice of the “Greek Anthology,” marvelously anonymous, conscious as the shade of Achilles of what it means to wear the sunlight for a while. I think that this is MacLeish's best voice, elegiac and lyrical, however irrelevant to the demands of the time—of any time. Unlike T. S. Eliot's, his pessimism is not cultural, but cosmic, though his intense evocation of loss fills the void with mysterious presences not accounted for. “It is very cold,” finishes the bemused author of the “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” “There are strange stars near Arcturus, // Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.”

Even when the meaning of a poem is the supposed failure of meanings, the images remain to console us. The attitude toward them reflects the nether side of the transcendental impulse, a lean and jealous positivism often noted in the New England character (like Frost's, MacLeish's by adoption): “Good fleece on that flock over there, Jethro,” the Vermont joke goes. “Yep, leastways on this side!” is the careful reply. Everywhere here is a fierce love of the particular, of “real things”, as listed in “Land's End”: “Riders, running of dogs, deer-fall”; the weight of a bird, of a woman's breast, in the hand, “and love, the weed smell of it: / Front against front”. But these particulars are charged by anticipation of the Void, which, like an Aeschylean chorus at the poet's back, soughs of an unknown transcendence. Such is the case in “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” where the few valued facts, “The earth is round, / there are springs under the orchards” and “The loam cuts with a blunt knife”, are lovingly hoarded against the encroaching cold, strange stars, and voices “crying an unknown name in the sky”. Rarely is there an experience of joy that transcends things, though in “What Must” the lover feels a love “That has no season in the earth”, one “That cannot flower like a tree / Or like one die / but only be.”

In Poetry and Experience MacLeish holds up for emulation an ancient Chinese general by the name of Lu Chi, who between battles found time to write poetry: “Far more than either Aristotle or Horace, Lu Chi speaks to our condition as contemporary man”, bringing us “timely bits of intelligence from beyond the mountains which the pursuit of poetry must cross.” With admiration for MacLeish's continuing career of service to the Republic, and the admission that he does bring us “timely bits of intelligence”, one can praise his public voice while preferring the private, more timeless one. Nevertheless, he has often caught the temper of the time and the appropriate emblem of it. In his poem “Long Hot Summer” the Dutch elm disease becomes the symbol of our dying cities, as “The beetle of God … under the bark” exposes us to “the heat and the hate and the naked sun.” “Never again”, he laments, “when the hate overwhelms us / cool elms.”

The two dozen or so new poems partake of that high, almost whimsical wisdom we associate with Frost's and Yeats's last poems: the great plain lucidities. Consider “The Old Gray Couple”:

Everything they know they know together—
everything, that is, but one:
their lives they've learned like secrets from each other;
their deaths they think of in the nights alone.

There is explicit homage to Frost and Mark Van Doren as well as fun at the expense of critics who have tried to pin down the poet's “catbird” voice (“Critics on the Lawn”). There are abundant old medallions for the thumb. In “Pablo Casals”: “no / winter leaf against the winter snow / was ever veined and fragile as his hand”. Another image, with its reserve of power, reminds us just where most recent anti-war poetry fell short. Locked “in the house of state” are “three names” “not to be spoken”:

The first is old,
black and gold,
cool as lacquer
smelling of plums.
This name is Cambodia.

The poems before Conquistador I would include in that inevitable list one makes reading through a Collected Poems are “The Silent Slain,” “L'an trentiesme de mon eage,” “Immortal Helix,” “Eleven,” “Signature for Tempo,” “Memorial Rain,” The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, section 9, and, of course, those mentioned above. Conquistador, now approaching its first half century, holds up very well. This epic-lyric of the conquest of Mexico, based on the recollections of the foot soldier Bernál Díaz, barrages the reader with colors, smells, sounds, tastes until he reels like one of the conquerors from the sun and from the gold. But the images do what they are meant to—hide the narrator from the void underlying this elegy for a beautiful but hapless civilization. The overall strategy of Cortez—even the geography—remains appropriately vague as the images cover our senses thick as gold-dust Montezuma. What Díaz and the author finally lament is the loss of the friends and intensity of youth. Compared to this lament, political and moral soundings are faint indeed. “The sad thing is not death”, the old soldier confesses, but “the life's loss out of earth”, including “All that was good in the throat: the hard going: / … The quick loves: the sleep: the waking”.

MacLeish's two other ambitious long poems, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928) and Actfive (1948), if comparatively disembodied, remain memorable for their wrestling with cosmic and social issues. The post-Relativity Hamlet observes, “We have learned the answers, all the answers: / It is the question that we do not know.” Actfive opens to Man as an ideal “murdered”. After some epigrammatic examination of bogus substitutes, the poet finds existential, lower-case man standing “Where once the dreams stood guardian in its place”, feeling “Some resolution to be dutiful and good / Owed by the lost child to the dreadful wood.” As at the end of J. B., man is at his best amid ruins, with no comfort but his will to love.

After 1950, perhaps feeling less pressure to make public statements in poetry, MacLeish relaxes into shorter poems that often realize the clarity of focus, the perfection of form of his very best. My lengthening list includes “The Learned Men,” “Epitaph for John McCutcheon,” “The Steamboat Whistle,” “The Signal,” “Poet,” and “You Also, Gaius Valerius Catullus” (a note too seldom struck). In this last he mildly upbraids the “Fat-kneed god” for bringing him “into that one's bed / Whose breath is sweeter than a grass-fed heifer”, and implores him, “Dump me where you please, but not hereafter / Where the dawn has that particular laughter.” Songs for Eve—Blakean, Emersonian—are all interesting. I favor 1, 9, 10, and 15. Emerson, from not too different a perspective, might have riddled about a creature who “couples astraddle / But thinks it is moth / That on heavenly wing / Can fly and can fling.” From The Wild Old Wicked Man I cherish “Spring in These Hills,” “La Foce,” “November,” “Arrival and Departure,” and “Late Abed,” where the poet celebrates lying in the warm sheets “(warm where she was) with your life / suspended like a music in the head, / hearing her foot in the house.”

In recent years it seems that the poet has largely accepted his observation in “Invocation to the Social Muse”: “He that goes naked goes further at last than another.” There is a greater sense that “The things of the poet are done to a man alone / As the things of love are done”, while “his knee's in the soft of the bed where his love lies.” That quick, particular image, like some fragment of living sculpture, seems more alive than a man dressed in the clothes of his age, however eloquent the Hamlet, Einstein, or existentialist Everyman.

“But the Secret sits in the middle and knows”, Frost wrote, perhaps thinking of that smile of Emerson's no one has explained. On the dust jacket of his Collected Poems Archibald MacLeish shows a light about the mouth equally enigmatic, reminding me of a sentence of Chesterton's: “We sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.” Whatever the meaning, in his best poems the naked knee, lips, or leaf placed against the eternal sky are the more present, the more real for their fragility, as if lit by a strange transcendence. Surely, whatever else is true of these poems, Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken, Look! They are there!