The Poetry of Archibald Macleish

by JOHN CIARDI

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH at sixty-one has compiled a rare total of successful careers, but the true career uniting all his public courses has been as spokesman for the American Dream. Thomas Jefferson has had no truer and no more admirable son.

The extent to which MacLeish has carried his public concern and his role as liberal spokesman into poetry has often made him a center of controversy, and all the more so in that MacLeish himself, while often practicing poetry as public speech, has recorded some of the most moving poetic statements in favor of the essential privacy of poetry. Thus in his “Ars Poetica” (1925) he wrote: —

Yet within a few years of this poem MacLeish had taken up his advocacy of poetry as Public Speech.

What we have therefore in the Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin) is a body of poetry divided between two opposite theories of poetic responsibility. Should the poem “mean” or “be”? Should it arrive at perception or at a message? Should it explore the enduring and ever-personal emotions of individual sensation and individual loss, or should it accept the challenge of specific political assignment ?

Speaking as one reader, I believe that MacLeish has written a number of lyrics — at least an irreducible half-dozen among which I would include “The Silent Slain,” “You, Andrew Marvell,” “The End of the World,” “L’an Trentiesme de mon Eage,” the “Ars Poetica,” and much more recently “What Riddle Asked the Sphinx” — which must certainly endure as long as poetry is read and the cadences of American and English speech are valued.

This, of course, is the real accomplishment and all further considerations are relatively small indeed. But if my appraisal is sound, it must certainly be significant to the theory of poetry as Public Speech, that none of these successes are “message” poems. Rather, they are all poems of the most intensely personal feeling whose central subject is the sense of the passage of one man’s life under the shadow of a mindless eternity which moves on to the obliteration of the individual.

The failures on the other hand are overwhelmingly in the poems of public statement. “The Spanish Lie,” “The Young Dead Soldiers,” and “Brave New World,” for example (all from Actfive, published in 1948), are forthright orations on political causes, and about as disastrous as poems can be. They seem not to be sprung from the poet’s being, but rather to be pushed from his sense of duty. Nothing in them compels and intoxicates in those suprarational ways that inform the finally successful poem.

A poet must, of course, be judged by his best, and especially so when the best is as compelling as are MacLeish’s successes. It is in fact, only as one realizes the nature of those successes that he can realize the nature of the failures.

MacLeish’s first poetic accomplishment was the capture of the rhythmic line that emerged beyond juvenilia and the Eliot influence in Streets in theMoon (1926) after some promise of it (at least in retrospect) in The Happy Marriage (1924).

Actually there are two grand lines in MacLeishs style. One is the drawn-out wavering series of rising inflections, MacLeish’s “rising” line. This is the line of “The Silent Slain” (We too,we too,descending once again), of “L’an Trentiesme do mon Eage” (By hands,by voices, by the voice), and of “The End of the World": —

The other is the staccato, broken line of such poems as “Epistle to Be Left in the Earth,” the MacLeish “chop" line: —

. . . It is colder now,

North by the Great Bear.

we are drifting

MacLeish has used both lines (and frequent combinations of the two in a single poem) to great effect. Few poetic craftsmen have been more painstaking. None, I think, has approached his success in handling deliberate monotony as a device with which to generate emotional force. “You, Andrew Marvell,” for example, is composed of thirty-six rhythmically almost identical lines that make up into a single (and incomplete) sentence.

The emotional power of this line is in its ability to take over the reader’s vocal chords; you can almost taste the saying. The effect of the deliberate monotony is a sense of enormously charged restraint, of great emotion held back. When the line fails, it tends to choke up with the overintensity of the emotion. When it succeeds, no poet can be more simply and movingly eloquent.

The measure of poetry is the depth of communicated feeling with which the poet enters his experience. What measures the depth of the feeling is the persuasiveness of the rhythm, for rhythm is the final measure of a poet’s success. Only when he has gone into his perceived world with more than his consciousness can he show that completeness of experience that speaks from a captured rhythm. This capture is the true accomplishment of MacLeish’s style.

In The Hamlet of A. MacLeish published in 1928, and in the thirties, MacLeish went on to various adaptations of his grand line. In the Hamlet the rising line is tuned close to the dramatic line of the great tradition and with impressive success. The Hamlet speaks and reads with a sureness that does not diminish. I wish some fine actor had made a recording of it: it would make a magnificent album. In Conquistador (1932) it is adapted differently, this time more openly; there is a wider sway to the cadence. But once again the success is indisputable.

The “Bernál Días’ Preface to His Book” survives as especially powerful.

It is precisely because a compulsion is lacking in the rhythms of the Public Speech poems that they remain dull. One can only conclude that however much the Scot’s conscience may drive and the Jeffersonian dream urge, the poet has engaged his social themes with his mind only. His glands and nerve-ends do not respond. It is good duty; it is not love. So it is that the rhythmic power of the personal poems becomes the windiness of the “Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City” (1933), of “America Was Promises” (1939), of “Colloquy for the States” (1943), So it is that disaster strikes Actfive, leaving us with pages of inert rhetoric but with no engagement of those life sources which are the man inside the man. One can agree with the Public Speech poems, but one is never quite convinced that they exist.

Then, at the very moment when all seems lost, the miracle happens back. MacLeish stops saving the world and saves himself. I do not mean to imply that he has lost his social concern as a citizen, but the evidence of the new poems is indisputable that whatever the citizen gives to duty, the poet is more universe in himself than all the world combined. MacLeish has learned again what poets are. The lyrics of Sew Poems (1951-1952) can stand with the best of the earlier work, and his “What Riddle Asked the Sphinx,” which appeared in the Atlantic, may well be the best short poem he has ever written: —

And concluding: —

This is not the old MacLeish, but a new one, a tighter and sparser MacLeish, but once again the master of a rhythm which is its own compulsion. One feels the same resurgence in the new play, The Trojan Horse, in which the “chop” line is softened into a magnificently viable speaking line.

These captures along with the resurgence of that rare and difficult, second lyricism that fills New Poems add up to the most exciting poetic resurgence since Yeats found his late style. The poet seems finally to have spat out the orator’s pebble and to have found again his own private tongue. “From here on,” MacLeish told a reporter after winning the National Book Award, “I’ve got to run like a rabbit.” The new poems achieve that urgency.