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intensified by the effect of juxtaposition, although these are the familiar
methods of poets by whom he has otherwise been influenced. Sometimes
his words hit hard because of this care. In straight narration or descrip–
tion this connotative barrenness, the steady clicking of bright counters,
grows often monotonous and unrewarding. In emotional passages it can
lead to vacuity. Cunsider the end of this selection from the
Hamlet:
... I have suffered. I have lost
A child, a brother, friends. And do foreknow
My own corruption. There are also stars
But not to listen to. And the autumn trees
That have the habit of the sun and die
Before times often. And at night. And skies.
And seas. And evening.
At times this "and" rhetoric, the "words clean of the wool," the
spacing, the Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English effects are used very
beautifully, as many critics have pointed out. But they permit no intel–
lectual participation on the part of the spectatoli. They permit one only
to look and to wonder, as at the sequent events of chivalric romance. "Such
a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it," T. S. Eliot
wrote of Perse's
Anabasis,
a poem to which MacLeish through all his
work is greatly indebted. "There is a logic of the imagination as well as
a logic of concepts." But in MacLeish's poems there is neither a con–
ceptual nor an imaginative development; they are as static and circular
as his globed fruit.
Only in the elegaic poems like
You, Andrew .lI1arvell, Immortal
Autumn
and
The Too-Late
lJ(jrTl
do these methods support the intention.
In them the remoteness of the object 'and the unchanging quality of the
perception make such a manner right. In a poem like
Einstein,
however,
which is conceptual, which plays with the irreductibility of the living
Einstein to physical formulae, the lack of progression makes the elabora–
tion merely fanciful after the first statement of the theme. In
Hamlet,
the most personal of the long poems, the same defect makes the emotion–
alism seem gratuitous and self-indulgent, like the posturing of O'Neill's
weaklings. Because the emotions are uncontrolled and uncomprehended,
they are forced to borrow implication. Not even so passive a quality as
sensitivity is personal and directional in MacLeish. The Hamlet frame is
used as such frames are used by other moderns like Eliot and Joyce, part–
ly for contrast, partly to hold the thing together. The poem is essentially
undramatic.
MacLeish is not unaware of the lack of meaning, of significance,
within his poems. Although in his critical theories it is expressed as a
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