[In the following essay, Pritchard illuminates the qualities of MacLeish's character that inform his poetry.]

Archibald MacLeish died last April just as he was about to be honored on his ninetieth birthday by a large gathering at Greenfield Community College (near the MacLeish home in Conway, Massachusetts) to which he had given his papers. His death prompted few attempts on anyone's part at revaluating his achievement as a poet, or even at thinking twice about his career as, preeminently, America's elder statesman of poetry. Increasingly since the death of Frost in 1963 he had played the role of America's poet laureate without portfolio. If Richard M. Nixon requested a poem from him on the occasion of the moon landing of 1969, MacLeish, a lifelong Democrat, courteously obliged; after all, the President in his inaugural address a few months previously had already quoted from his poem about the Apollo Eight mission. He was equally ready to celebrate the city of Boston (with “Night Watch in the City of Boston”) at the behest of a Bicentennial committee in 1976. There has scarcely been a poet of this century more ready to write poems employing public speech in the services of saluting heroism, political commitment, sacrifice in the service of some high ideal. And MacLeish's just published Letters reveal the kind of distinguished person he was in the habit of communicating with: Henry Luce, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Felix Frankfurter, McGeorge Bundy, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson—in addition to various distinguished poets and novelists headed by Pound and Hemingway.

This willingness to consort with the high and mighty, along with the penchant for noble, large-sounding affirmations of the deathless spirit of man, or poetry, or America, caused many students of modern poetry to treat MacLeish's own work with condescension at best. Here I must account myself one of those students. It was amusing on occasion to see the poet—acting as suave public moderator of a symposium on verse drama at the Harvard Summer School—slightly discomfited, when after he thought to conclude the discussion by artfully suggesting that perhaps all the participants would write their next play in verse, Lillian Hellmann shot back, “Well, I damn well won't!” But it was not only aspiring critics like myself (who loved John Ransom's poems, so how could I love MacLeish's?) who judged his poetry or his rhetoric less than matchless, as we note from the responses of distinguished literary contemporaries. Pound, to whom MacLeish confessed his deep indebtedness and to whom he sent his long poem Conquistador after its completion in 1932, thought the poem was (in MacLeish's words) “damn bad” and told him so. MacLeish wrote back, thanking Pound “quite honestly” for the criticisms, saying that he had been asked to write something about the Cantos but that “You would probably prefer the praise of someone whose work you respected.” Courteous as always, the reply is nonetheless painful. Hemingway, for whose work he had the most profound respect (“The world of this book [he said of A Farewell to Arms when it appeared] is a complete world … to subject the whole experience of a man's soul to the pure & perfect art of your prose is a great, a very great, achievement. I send you my complete praise & profound respect. You become in one book the great novelist of our time”) paid him in return with the following observation to Malcolm Cowley in 1945: “Does Archie still write anything except Patriotic? I read some awfully lifeless lines to a Dead Soldier by him in the Free World anthology. I thought good old Allen Tate could write the lifeless-est lines to Dead Soldiers ever read but Archie is going good. You know his bro. Kenny was killed in last war flying and I always felt Archie felt that sort of gave him a controlling interest in all deads.” Very funny, and more than a touch cruel, it is I'm afraid accurate as a response to MacLeish's poem “The Young Dead Soldiers.” Robert Frost, who had a few years previously amused or annoyed a Bread Loaf audience by setting afire some paper while MacLeish was giving a poetry reading, was moved during a conversation with some Harvard students about J. B., to name the following list of related phenomena: “Sociology, and the New Deal, and the New Testament, and Archie, and so on …” I think it fair to say that as more public distinction accrued to MacLeish, the more he became available for satiric and condescending treatment by fellow artists like those just mentioned, or in clever parodies and withering reviews by Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, and others.

As is evident from the letters, early on in his career he was haunted by a sense of having come too late, and though a modern theorist like Harold Bloom would find such fears entirely natural and unavoidable, they seem to have been especially sharp in MacLeish's case, as when he wrote Amy Lowell in 1924 about how it was impossible for him to write Imagist poetry and how his own words “were all ships which have carried ivory & peacocks between England & the Levant for two hundred years.” What can replace them, he asks? Not “Eliot's multisyllables” and not the “commercial-jargon impersonalities of Miss Moore.” He says he has decided to stop writing, and will learn Italian, read Dante, Laforgue, de Gourmont, and other English poets: “But I am more than haunted with the fear that it is too late. That this rhythm & vocabulary which my intelligence knows for second rate are me, my ‘style,’ all that I have.” A later letter to Amy Lowell mentions his “basic problem of verbiage,” and in the same year he wrote John Peale Bishop about the problem of coming after Eliot. Eliot had opened a world to him from which he couldn't “retire”—but what then was he to do?: “Recognize the great man's prior claims and shut up? And what if we can't shut up? Talk about the tragedy of the man who is ahead of his age: it is nothing to the tragedy of the man who comes after the man who is.”

This was a wise formulation. MacLeish did not “shut up,” of course, but nothing he wrote in the 1930s and the war years which followed showed a resolution of the problem of “verbiage” or of coming after Pound and Eliot. Perhaps there was no possibility for a resolution in the terms he set it, or perhaps he had already resolved it by writing a poem which couldn't be confused with either of those intimidating modernists, nor with Yeats. I have in mind the poem “Eleven,” from Streets of the Moon (1926) in which the young child

                                                            … would leave
On tiptoe the three chairs on the verandah
And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn
Push back the shed door and upon the sill
Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes
And enter and with outstretched fingers feel
The grindstone and behind it the bare wall
And turn and in the corner on the cool
Hard earth sit listening. And one by one,
Out of the dazzled shadow in the room,
The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades,
Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe
Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines
Glinting across the curve of sickles—shapes
Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron
Friendly with earth. …

Here he made use of the same “ships” which had carried all that English poetical freight so well for so many years, and there is no way that the poem could be saluted as a new development in American writing (as, say, Edmund Wilson had just saluted Hemingway's In Our Time). As with all MacLeish's poems—early or late—there is a principled avoidance of what, in a letter to Allen Tate in 1932, he called “the personality of the poet” in its more dramatic form—the anguished “I” making dramatic capital out of its difficulties. “Indeed,” wrote MacLeish, “it seems to me that the personality of the poet is merely the instrument, the voice, and that its qualities will enough color his poetry without a conscious and introspective labor of self-exploration and self-definition.” In “Eleven” this coloring is attractively evident, even as the words and rhythms are those familiar to traffickers in English poetical freight. That the poet who wrote “Ars Poetica,” with its fancy talk about how a poem should be “palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” should have written “Eleven” at about the same time, goes to show how much more interesting MacLeish's poetical practice could be on occasion than was the presumed “pure” program he laid down for it in “Ars Poetica.” It is unfortunately the latter poem rather than “Eleven” by which the anthology reader will encounter MacLeish.

“Eleven” was not an isolated piece of good work. Unless one is enslaved to modernist ideas of what a poem must or must not do, the rhythmic impulse of these opening lines from “Cook County” (published in Poems 1924-1933) can be admired:

The northeast wind was the wind off the lake
Blowing the oak-leaves pale side out like
Aspen: blowing the sound of the surf far
Inland over the fences: blowing for
Miles over smell of the earth the lake smell in.
The southwest wind was thunder in afternoon.
You saw the wind first in the trumpet vine
And the green went white with the sky and the weather-vane
Whirled on the barn and the doors slammed all together.
After the rain in the grass we used to gather
Wind-fallen cold white apples.

As with “Eleven,” there is little interesting to note about the poem's form. Its power is a matter of sensations presented, Hemingwayesque—if perhaps ennobled by the long sonorous verse lines—and as with “Eleven” quite untouched by ironical contemplation whether Poundian or Eliotic, of the materials it presents. Surely they are remembered materials (MacLeish grew up in Glencoe, Illinois) which are celebrated lyrically without a trace of criticism or ambivalence (“Pony Hill” is another possible example of this celebration). These poems seem to me immensely preferable to the anthologized early MacLeish we have been given for years—“Ars Poetica,” the over-praised “You, Andrew Marvell” with its reference to Ecbatan (which annoyed Pound, who felt MacLeish was poaching on his sacred places!) but also “The End of the World” (“Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot / the armless ambidextrian … etc.” or “Immortal Helix” (“Hereunder Jacob Schmid, who man and bones …”) or the portentous “Immortal Autumn,” which a contemporary called the most moving poem written by anyone in MacLeish's generation. MacLeish had no gift for the satiric in his poems (though the letters show an occasional good hit) and unlike the remembered particularity of “Eleven” and “Cook County,” “Immortal Autumn” strikes the vatic note which would too often become his key signature:

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far horn-winding fall.
I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.
I praise the fall: it is the human season.

Those last words—the perfect title for an inspiring book of verse by some humanist or other, perhaps by MacLeish himself.

His longer poems from the 1930s had an uneven reception. Conquistador was praised by Tate for its “flawless craftsmanship” and excellent management of terza rima, but Tate also judged it sentimental and as hovering over nothing of substance. Previous to that, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928) had been devastated by R. P. Blackmur in Hound and Horn, judged by him to be fraudulent and “personal” in the most vain, self-posturing sense. Finally, in the New Yorker in 1939 (could such a thing happen today in that well-mannered magazine?), Edmund Wilson, who had given measured praise to MacLeish twelve years previously, wrote his amusing and quite scornful parody, “The Omelet of A. MacLeish,” some lines of which will give its flavor:

Anabase and The Waste Land:
These and the Cantos of Pound: O how they came pat!
Nimble at other men's arts how I picked up the trick of it:
Rode it reposed on it drifted away on it: passing
Shores that lay dim in clear air: and the cries of affliction
Suave in somniferous rhythms: there was rain there and moons:
Leaves falling: and all of a flawless and hollow felicity …

In the margin, Wilson supplied glosses à la Coleridge: “MacLeish breaks an egg for his omelet”; “He puts plovers' eggs and truffles into his omelet”; “He slips in a few prizes for philosophers”; “The omelet becomes a national institution and gets into Fanny Farmer.” Wilson's poem caught well the portentous self-questioning toward which his subject was inclined:

And the questions and questions
                                                                      questioning
                                                                                          What am I? O
What shall I remember?
                                                  O my people
                                                                      a pensive dismay
What have I left unsaid?
                                                  Till the hearer cried:
“If only MacLeish could remember if only could say it!”

Wilson's conclusion was that MacLeish's career demonstrated “That the poet need not be a madman or even a bounder” and that all in all he was

A clean and clever lad
                    who is doing
                    his best
                              to get on. …

In response, MacLeish wrote to Hemingway a satirical poem about Wilson, speaking “As one on whom / The Triple Stinker publicly hath stunk,” but otherwise refrained from comment. Yet though Wilson was wholly sarcastic in hanging the clean-living award around MacLeish's neck, there was an engaging side to MacLeish's civility, as when—a year or so before the Wilson parody—he wrote, a propos an exhibition of his own works at Yale, that “There is a point beyond which mediocrity cannot be inflated to look like the real thing, and I think that point has been well reached at Yale in the Rare Book Room.” Here was a fully engaging and humorous modesty, well-bred in the best sense.

These traits of character, this liberal and modest decency of response were born out in a confidence he dropped to Paul Engle when MacLeish was working at the Library of Congress in Washington during the Second World War, having resigned from something called the OFF (Office of Facts and Figures—“one of the deepest satisfactions of my life,” he wrote McGeorge Bundy). Engle had enclosed a poem of his own and made some remark about Frost, and MacLeish attempted, candidly, to say why Frost's poetry had not meant all that much to him: “I don't, as I think you know, share the more enthusiastic view about his poetry. In fact, his poetry has meant little or nothing to me since North of Boston and even North of Boston didn't really get under my hide.” And he went on to speak about the “mysterious thing”—how much “Robert desired fame.” In his public statements about Frost and in his exemplary encouragement of him to help in the freeing of Pound from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, MacLeish came to some kind of terms with him; yet that poet's example of the speaking voice, the “sound of sense,” had indeed not gotten under MacLeish's hide, as had not the witty-cruel way of saying, or re-saying, things Frost had made himself a master of. (When in conversation somebody mentioned to Frost MacLeish's famous ending to “Ars Poetica”—“A poem should not mean / But be”—Frost suggested, as a rewrite, that “A poem should be mean”). That was a way of behaving, or writing, not to MacLeish's taste.

So it is odd and moving to encounter something like a Frostian poem in MacLeish's late and probably best book of poems, The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968). The Yeatsian title acknowledged the poet whom MacLeish most admired during his late years, and Yeats's presence was pervasive, indeed oppressive, in a collection of short lyrics he published during the 1950s called Songs for Eve. In “The Wild Old Wicked Man,” MacLeish curbed his desire to speak largely and grandly about men and women, love, death, mankind; to my tastes at least, the best poem in the book is a wholly modest, subtle, heartfelt one which goes as follows:

Mark's sheep, I said, but they were only
stones, boulders in the uncropped grass,
granite shoulders weathered to the bone
and old as that first morning where God was.
And yet they looked like sheep—so like
you half expected them to startle,
bolt in a leap because some tyke
had barked, because a bluejay darted—
dart of shadow under blue of jay—
or someone shouted by the water trough,
slammed a car-door, drove away,
or squirrels quarreled, or a gun went off,
or just because they must: that terrified
impulse to be somewhere else
browsers and ruminators seem to share
as though they knew, they only, the sky falls
and here is dangerous (as of course it is).
But Mark's sheep never startled from the grass.
They knew their place, their boulder's business:
to let the nights go over, the days pass,
let years go, summer, autumn, winter,
each by itself, each motionless, alone,
praising the world by being in it,
praising the world by being stone.

“mark's sheep”

Here, to one reader's ear and eye, MacLeish's best poetic self was expressed, and it had little to do with modernism, nothing at all with Conquistador. There is no reason to tie it to Frost's insistence on the sound of sense (and I suspect the plangent repetition in the final lines would have bothered Frost, as it does me slightly); but surely this is a poem which shares qualities with the man who wrote the complicated, thoughtful, sometimes ironic, sometimes troubled letters MacLeish wrote. If it is, as I assume it to be, “about” Mark Van Doren among other things, it is a wholly appropriate tribute to that uneroded face and intelligence, and to the impressive calmness one suspects to have been Van Doren's. But it is beautiful—and surprising too—for its fine poise between public and private, and for the way, within its stanzas and rhymes and nicely managed syntax, that a quality of life is made memorable through a small and witty fable. The personal reference is unmistakeable, and “Mark's sheep I said,” is in some ways the most telling thing any “I” of MacLeish's ever said.

“Mark's Sheep” is a poem of his old age, and there would be ones to come, like “Crossing” and “Hotel Breakfast,” which caught poignant moments of mixed memory and desire in the private life. The public or official life in the 1950s was high-minded: a letter to an editor begins, “What I wanted, as of course you understood, was a clarification of our conversation at the Century” (this about a prospective volume of poems, discussed at The Club); while talk about the Function of Poetry, or of Harvard, is equally lofty, as most strikingly demonstrated in these sentences concluding a letter to Bundy, written in a spirit of optimism just after Nathan Pusey was installed as President of Harvard (with Bundy as Dean of the Graduate School):

I feel in my bones a new age—a new era. Not only the vitality you both have and the complementary intelligence which so patently create a new kind of thinking. … It is the fact that this Harvard cares about values. … Keats is right in the great Ode—the human equation combines with the order imposed by nature, the order imposed by the imagination. When one can say, understanding what he is saying, that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beaty, one has spoken like a man.

As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1950s, I must confess to having missed out on that new era, as well as all that institutional caring about values, Keats, beauty, and truth. Perhaps it was going on in Eliot House, to which in the following fall MacLeish was inviting J. Robert Oppenheimer to dinner with an “agreeable party,” then for talk with “some twenty boys” afterwards, a conversation which would carry on from dinner “in the hope that some of the lads might eventually join us but with no insistence that they do unless so moved. It would all, in other words, be as easy and civilized as we could make it …” Not “palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” those occasions! Somehow one hopes that a few of the equivalent of Mark Van Doren's sheep were there to keep things a bit stony, to not let Beauty become Truth, Truth Beauty, without some recalcitrance.

MacLeish was most admirable when, in his art or his life, he resisted the temptation to unionize Beauty and Truth, or their siblings. In his later years, as earlier, this did not often happen; but when it did, the effect is more startling and enlivening than one could have imagined, given the “official” ring of so many letters and the noble, often monotonous tone of so many poems. So in a late poem called “Family Group” he managed to write about his brother dead in World War One in a way that is freshly affecting:

That's my younger brother with his Navy wings.
He's twenty-three or should have been that April:
winters aged you, flying the Dutch coast.
I'm beside him with my brand-new Sam Brown belt.
The town behind us is Dunkirk. We met there
quite by accident, sheer luck.
Someone's lengthened shadow—the photographer's?—
falls across the road, across our feet.
The other's afterward—
after the Armistice, I mean, the floods,
the week without a word. That foundered
farmyard is in Belgium somewhere.
The faceless figure on its back, the helmet buckled,
wears what look like Navy wings. A lengthened shadow
falls across the muck about its feet.
Me? I'm back in Cambridge in dry clothes,
a bed to sleep in, my small son, my wife.

The fine thing about this poem, and what makes it so different from anything MacLeish would have written in his earlier days, at least about his brother's death, is of course its final two lines where there is presented—with whatever implications of dumb luck one can invoke—the sadness and the undeserved good fortune of life.

A final moment, not surely to be reckoned with by biographers of MacLeish (R. H. Winnick, editor of the letters, is preparing an authorized one) but good for showing the distinguished man and poet in a little-known and for that reason attractive light. Two graduate students in English at Harvard have encountered one another in the stacks of Widener Library, have realized that they were undergraduates together at another Eastern university, and begin, rather loudly, to trade stories and memories from the good old days. The problem is that their loud conversation is taking place virtually on the doorstep of Professor MacLeish's Widener study. He, perhaps composing a sequel to J. B., or some poem or speech or other—perhaps just plain reading Dante or Yeats or Li Po—has at all events suddenly had enough. The door opens, revealing to the surprised, voluble graduate students, Harvard University's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric (angry), who glares at them solidly, then booms out with unconcealed irritation, “Will you two please shut the hell up?” Along with the things for which Archibald MacLeish will be remembered, I would hope this moment of rash, unsympathetic, undemocratic temper may be granted a minor place.