MacLeish
THE art of the distinguished American poet Mr. Archibald MacLeish has been inclined to change, not just in quality, but in its adoption of different ends. His journey into style, beginning in 1917 with a gauche attempt at the musical, the antiquated and the picturesque, called the Tower of Ivory, and reaching just before the war an extreme of political rhetoric in America was Promises, seems like a large and sometimes indecipherable circle which has now, with the publication of Actfive, been nearly completely described. For in this volume he has almost abandoned the attitude whose climax was once expressed in his prose as " The loud-mouthed, disrespectful, horse-laughing challenges to those who tell us poetry is ' pure.' " His poetry is no longer desperately conscious of America and of being American: it is " purer " than anything he has written since the Tower of Ivory, but it has also now become mature in the employment of materials and techniques of a much wider scope.
His fame was first made by The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, a com- mentary in a symbolist manner on what has been called the " eternal Hamlet," but really on a Hamlet visualised in the light of modern psychological and anthropological studies. Edmund Wilson's parody. The Omelet of A. MacLeish trades on the occasional doubts as to whether the obscurity of this poem may not be a mask covering oblivion. Soon after writing it Mr. MacLeish is said to have recoiled from the traditions of France, and turned his atten- tion to his own continent: "She's a tough land under the oak-trees mister." Here he found that the iambic metre had a distorting effect on the American language. His verse was toughened and extended in its range by the free use of Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and terza rima. He turned from narrative to poetic drama, to radio-poetic-drama, increasing the strength and fluency of his rhythms. At the same time he took up his country as his theme, and made several efforts to achieve the ".poetry of public speech," bearing in mind as a model the political poems of Yeats. The climax of this endeavour was that poem with the oddly cacophonous title America was Promises, published in 1940. Certainly there is an enthusiasm behind this poem which is unusual in modern verse— a kind of public and political enthusiasm which one tends to regard with excessive scepticism.
In the new volume this strong oratory, and its unfortunate, though complementary, trick of using restraint to make it seem as though a lot was being restrained, are employed sparingly. The political interest has altered from an interest in what America might be, to what the world has become. For the first time the private symbolist and the public rhetorician are fused into one person, who no longer seems to be goading his tongue into speech. One is to imagine a stage of the world set in the present, with all the heroes dead, and all the actors afraid to emerge from the wings. Actfive describes the last scenes in the imagined " tragedy of our time." The heroes that have failed, the gods no longer given credence, the heroes of the modern age, are investigated in their turn. All are tested and found faulty. Man is depicted as the subject of the play, but all that is left of him is the murdered corpse. The commentary —for there is no drama—is fluent, although some of the similes reproduce themselves too rapidly. The tension is not slackened by the difficulty of immediately grasping the sense, but somehow over- rides it: the idiom is involved, rather than obscdre. Were each image taken separately, no poem would be more luminous. The final scene concludes the act with a solution that cannot be properly translated into prose. There is a limpid recollection of childhood, and a rediscovery of its images (as well as the images used by Yeats in '99), and of its capacity for divining the supernatural in things: Only that there sounds between The painted waves upon the shore The shudder of a surf not seen.
It ends with the notion of belief residing, after everything else has fallen down, in " the flesh and the bone." Although some of the things that the author of the Tower of Ivory once visualised are here cast up upon " a painted sea," everything is presented at last in a style that looks on the surface as though it had t flawless ease, but is in fact a style from which nearly all but the essential has
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