BOOKS
POEMS:
192.J.-1933,
by Archibtdd iI1ocLeish, Houghtoll
1Hifflin
Co.,
$3.00.
\VE
KNOW
what Archibald MacLeish thinks about MarxIsm. He
has said it in several poems and in several essays. He has made images to
express his feeling. He has spoken of Marxism as seagulls' dribbling, or
the attack of a dangerous sow. H
i~
malice has been such that he had,
in much recent work, abandoned his poetry to it. These attacks have
been ably answered, or characterized, from the Left, but they have had
the effect of making MacLeish perhaps the first poet to be mentioned
when one is listing the writers of the vocal opposition or when one is
thinking about Fascism in America. For this reason it is profitable to
look through MacLeish's work before he began, as he puts it, to bear
arms and mix in maneuvers, to see what qualities he lacks or possesses as
a poet that might consign him to this role.
It is noticeable that those who have complained most loudly and with
the least impressive logic at the release of new social forces in literature,
have been, like MacLeish and Krutch, the champions of an insulated art.
I mean those who make the only legitimate effect of a work of art the
perception of its qualities, who make it remain an identity inside and out–
side the mind of the observer, and not translatable into any terms of non–
artIstIc experience. "A poem should be palpable and mute as a globed
fruit," MacLeish writes in
Ars Poetica.
"A poem should be equal to: not
true." There is a distinction, of course, between this purism as it is
developed in MacLeish's work, and other contemporary forms of aesthetic–
ism where art is made, in fact, to carry more than its proper load, where
it is made the solution to non-artistic problems. In Proust, mastery ot
experience, of the objective world, is possible only through the passive and
idealistic re-ordering of it in art. In many of the conservative poets and
critics, volitional and intellectual values have been transferred from the
content, which is largely negative and nostalgic, to the form. In MacLelsh,
aestheticis~
is not a solution, but an evasion, and beauty is not a result,
but an alternative. At the end of the famous
Frescoes
after a good deal
of unpoetic invective, he anticipates the expected replies by stating his
pleasure in sensation : "There is too much sun on the lids of my eyes to
be listening."
This flight from meaning to a beauty without significance is reflected
not only in the larger content of MacLeish's poems, but in his rhetoric,
his rhythms, his imagery. His words are never symbols, they are kept as
free as possible from suggestive accretions, and images are almost never
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