THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
17
The courage and death of duped heroism seem now to have become
a justification for the dupers themselves and a reproof to the "civil–
ized beings" who profess to know how drastically both the dead
and the living were hamstrung.
Yet
1935
found him denouncing the "propaganda machinery"
which riles up the "deepest human emotions ... in time of war ...
of
any
war," defending the "realistic and skeptical journal,"
declaring "absolute hostility" against the "menace of militarism,"
and promising himself that he would "do everything in my power
to prevent the United States going to war under
any
circum–
stances."37 Perhaps Mr. MacLeish's trapeze has never served its
uses more brilliantly than during his astonishing gyrations on this
single theme.
It would be equally entertaining to trace his acrobatics on
other questions, but space forbids. His veerings on matters of
personality and literary taste are instructive. In
1928,
during one
of his rants against criticism, he singled out Edmund Wilson as
a notable example of ·critical ineptitude, whose distinction only
served to make "national calamities" of his "misfortunes," 38 but
in
1934,
in denouncing the leaders of the revolutionary movement
in America-those "writers and journalists who shape its thought
[and] are for the most part intellectual terrorists, seizing whatever
concept will most effectively destroy" and who advocate a cause
"conceived, delivered, and nurtured in negatives; its impulse is
hatred"-he graciously excepted Mr. Wilson from this category
as standing among those "who are preserved from hatred by the
pure integrity of their minds.
..a
9
Mr. Dos Passos wa:s also exempted
because he was "moved by a generous passion for justice profound
as the instinct of an animal"
40
-though in
1940
he is listed among
. "the honest men ... writers of great skill, integrity, and devotion,"
who have nevertheless written "words which have borne bitter and
dangerous fruit" and which "have done more to disarm democracy
in the face of fascism than any other single influence."
41
Mr. MacLeish's allegiances among poets have been similarly
wobbly. In
1932
he was still defending Eliot:
The truth is that all that is living and substantial, rather than
doctrinaire and dead, in the current cant of social criticism, has
long since found an expression in poetry. Mr. Eliot said more
