Actfive and Other Poems, appeared. Although written as a play in three scenes and using the language of stagecraft, this work is usually considered a poem, one expressing disillusionment with American politics in action, for MacLeish had believed very strongly in Roosevelt’s idealistic program for economic and social reforms.

In 1950, the first of MacLeish’s two theoretical analyses of poetry appeared, Poetry and Opinion, followed eleven years later by Poetry and Experience (1961). In these essay collections, MacLeish expanded on his theories of “private” and “public” poetic worlds, extending his classroom work as a professor at Harvard to a larger reading audience. As if being a literary essayist, poet, playwright, and journalist were not challenge enough, MacLeish at this time in his career also wrote several screenplays and television scripts and made innumerable contributions to periodicals both in the United States and abroad. In 1966, he won an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary for his 1965 screenplay The Eleanor Roosevelt Story.

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Archibald MacLeish’s seemingly unlimited energies were spent in an amazingly broad range of activities directed at the reconciliation of literature and public service. He was an indefatigable lecturer in halls and on university campuses throughout the United States, exemplifying his informing belief that artists cannot indulge themselves by retreating exclusively to a private “tower of ivory” (the title of his first poetry collection) but must use their “gifts” (the title of his first published poem) by addressing themselves to current public issues in the larger world in which they all live.

In both his prose and poetry, MacLeish drew on his wide-ranging intellectual and aesthetic resources to recast the American legacy of myth, history, and folklore into powerful and moving parables for troubled times. The British critic John Wain has observed that “MacLeish . . . has certainly made it a central part of his business to ‘manipulate a continuous parallel’ between the immemorial and the modern.” This tendency is most evident in MacLeish’s verse drama, and it is here that his achievement in twentieth century American literature is most significant. Until the appearance of J. B., there had been little work of any importance in this genre, and the success of this monumental epic of philosophic rationalism encouraged others to explore new possibilities for poetic drama.

The popularity and critical acclaim earned by MacLeish’s exemplary J. B. proves that he not only mastered the techniques of stagecraft but also, and more important, created a responsive, humanistic, yet classically theatrical work that speaks to common experience while at the same time engaging each member of his audience personally. In an age geared to mass audiences and noncontroversial, often mindless yet commercially successful productions, MacLeish’s courage in refusing to compromise his beliefs and values is remarkable in itself.

In addition to some twenty volumes of poems, Archibald MacLeish presented innumerable lectures to college students, librarians, and the general public. Some of these are recorded in the volumes of prose essays he published, many on the public role of the poet as guardian of his own society. Several others concern social issues of the 1930’s through the 1960’s. The essays analyzing poems and commenting on the responsibility of the poet, such as Poetry and Opinion: The “Pisan Cantos” of Ezra Pound (1950) and Poetry and Experience (1961), illuminate MacLeish’s own work as well as distinguish him from such contemporaries as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

The other major literary genre in which MacLeish worked was verse drama. One of his earlier works, Nobodaddy: A Play (pb. 1926), whose title is derived from William Blake’s name for the Old Testament God of vengeance and restrictions, presents an interpretation of the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel. A closet play, it dramatizes the relationship between self-conscious humanity and indifferent, alien nature. In 1934, he collaborated with Nicholas Nabokoff on Union Pacific: A Ballet, but much of his creative energy in the 1930’s was devoted to writing hortatory verse plays, such as The Fall of the City: A Verse Play for Radio (pr., pb. 1937) and Air Raid: A Verse Play for Radio (pr., pb. 1938). These works approach propaganda in their enthusiasm for the freedom of democracy and their attempts to warn Americans against the dangers of fascism.

Of the later plays, The Trojan Horse (pr. 1952) presents implicit criticism of the McCarthy era while This Music Crept By Me upon the Waters (pr., pb. 1953) dramatizes the individual’s quest for happiness and the transitory, paradoxical nature of that happiness. J. B.: A Play in Verse (pr., pb. 1958), MacLeish’s most popular and widely read play, is an adaptation of the story of Job to modern American life; it ran successfully on Broadway for ten months.

Archibald MacLeish’s reputation has remained undeservedly small in view of his contributions to both literature and public life. In addition to his achievements as a writer, MacLeish was highly successful in government and academic posts. Although academic scholars have paid relatively little attention to his work, he received many awards and honorary academic degrees, including—among many others—the John Reed Memorial Prize (1929), the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1932), three Pulitzer Prizes (in 1933 for Conquistador, in 1953 for Collected Poems, 1917-1952, and in 1959 for his drama J. B.), the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine (1941), the Order of Commander from the French Legion of Honor (1946), the Bollingen Prize (1953), the National Book Award in Poetry (1953) for Collected Poems, 1917-1952, an Antoinette Perry (“Tony”) Award in drama (1959), an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for The Eleanor Roosevelt Story (1966), an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1966), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), the National Medal for Literature (1978), and the Gold Medal for Poetry, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1979). He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1933 and served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1946-1949.

MacLeish is probably most noteworthy for his refusal to “escape” into his art, for his effort to be a whole human being: husband, father, teacher, soldier, and public servant, as well as poet. Unlike Eliot and Pound, who longed nostalgically for the lost order of past European culture, MacLeish committed himself to the New World—to both the present and the future. He sought, through experiments with traditional verse forms and metrics, to adapt the techniques of poetry and drama to the American idiom and contemporary life. He wrote not for posterity but for his contemporaries. As Hyatt Howe Waggoner points out in The Heel of Elohim (1950), MacLeish was the only poet of the early twentieth century who understood and wrote about the modern revolution in physics, the space-time continuum, and the four-dimensional universe. This pervasive awareness of profoundly shocking scientific discoveries may turn out to be one of MacLeish’s major contributions to modern literature, but most significant is MacLeish’s attempt to fulfill the ancient but neglected tradition of the poet as prophet—in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words, the poet as “unacknowledged legislator of mankind.”

The modern critical consensus is that MacLeish has written some magnificent lyric poems, that the longer works, such as Conquistador, are flawed, and that some of them, such as The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, tend to be derivative. Given the size of MacLeish’s corpus, its variety, and the topical political content of some works, it is probable that decades must pass before he can be judiciously ranked as a writer. As a whole man, speaking to other men of his time, he must be admired. He not only reflected on the timeless paradoxes of being human but also acted as a Socratic gadfly, pricking the consciences of his fellow citizens of a threatened republic.