PARTISAN REVIEW
virtue, emotionally it becomes a defect, a sterility. But the problem is
faced only emotionally, not intellectuaIIy. MacLeish makes no attempt
to find meaning in his own experience, in the experiences of the men of
his time. Meaning is always stated as something outside himself, a quality
residual in nature and savages and the past, something almost physical
and alive. But the key word that may unlock: the secret is, in these times,
unutterable. He reproaches dead pacts for not transmitting it. He gropes
for it in the racial unconscious.
It
is always the same.
It
is always as though some
Smell of lea..es had made me not quite remember;
As though I had turned to look: and there were no one.
It
has always been secret like that with me.
Always something has not been said.
In
Conquistador
the intellectual detachment from experience and the
emotional quest for meaning find their most unified expression. The mood
of the narrator is elegaic; despite all the shining immediacy of the Imagery,
the actions seem dream-like and arbitrary. Arid the nostalgia is reaIly
carried to the second degree. For although MacLeish has let us fight at
the hot gates and in the salt marshes of Eliot's dry old man, although he
has given us a heroism that is not of the mind, but of the muscles and
intestines, we are confronted with something still more vital and abysmal
in the life of the Aztecs:
.... and the boy was slain!
The belly arched to the stone k:ni fe: I remember
They sang and were glad as a small child in the sunlight
And they ate the limbs for a feast and the flesh trembled
This respect for the wise hands of savages, the significance of names,
the divination by birds, the cults of heroism and blood, comes largely
from Frazier's
Golden Bough
and from Perse's
Anabasis.
It runs through
the
Hamlet,
the
Pot of Earth,
and the many earth passages in the other
poems. Because of MacLeish's abject intellectual surrender (remarkably
demonstrated in a review of Stephen Spender's poetry in the .Fall
Hound
and Horn)
it has served to give a sellse of mystery and emotion and
terror to poems in which there is no response to the more significant ex–
periences of reader or author.
In his use of this Romantic device,
MacLeish has allied himself, despite the purity of his poetic intentions,
with a tendential philosophy. It is the philosophy of occultism, of the
myth, the night, the chthonic denial of the reason, that Thomas Mann
has described so well in his essay on Freud.
It
is the philosophy of
Fascists.
We are interested, because of this, in noticing that with the changes
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