BOOKS
in the political situation, there have been changes in the location of
MacLeish's earth. In the earlier poems it was Asiatic in geography, and
remote in time. The
American Letter
announces the poet's return to
America where he must remain unless he is to live as a shadow, but a
country, as MacLeish describes it, that is neither a land nor a people, a
country where they do not keep words spoken in common, and where they
are not like in their ways of love. And although he is not "a sold boy
nor a Chinese official," the poet is filled with nostalgia for countries of a
richer past. In the
Frescoes,
however, he has sifted the American soil,
and found in it many things-Indians and explorers, laborers and capital–
ists, exploitation, struggle and hope. But as in all his work he is incapable
of resolving these elements aesthetically. He presents merely imagistic
evasion. To the financier brigands he can only say:
Men have forgotten how fuU clear and deep
The YeUowstone moved on the gravel and grass grew
When the land lay waiting fer her westward people!
To the revolutionaries:
I t may be she can change the word in the book: ...
It
may be that the earth and the men remain ...
In ]933 we find more active counsels. Elpenor teUs the migratory
Ulysses of the depression, of plenty contrasted with want, of the impos–
sibility of returning to what we had before, of the need of moving forward.
But the way is blocked by adolescent revolutionists, by doctrinaires, teachers
of hate and class war with Heaven-on-earth at the end of it, by deter–
minists:
Or Tiresias: he that in HeU
Drunken with blood: foretelling the
Future day by the past:
Serving time for a master:
Teaches your living selves
That the dooms of the Fates are inevitable?
You have only to push on
To whatever it is that's beyond us
Showing the flat of your sword and they'll
Lick sand from before you!
The destination of Uly:;ses is not stated; it is simply another blank image,
a clean place, an unploughed land under the sun.
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