The Poet on Capitol Hill
Morton Dauwen Zabel
I
DURING
TilE PAST
eighteen months Americans have Witnessed
an event that constitutes an unmistakable milestone in their cultural
history. A poet has become a national leader-not a poet of mere
household or academic honor like Whittier, Longfellow, or Bryant
and not a leader of dishonored prophecy and unacknowledged
legislation like Whitman, but a poet of recognized standing and a
leader of official rank. Mr. Archibald MacLeish has been made
Librarian of Congress. He has been saluted by the President of
the United States and received the nation-wide acclaim of press and
public. He has signalized his unprecedented honor by publishing
-under the titles
America Was Promises
and
The lrresponsibles
1
- -two addresses to his fellow-citizens on the destiny of their nation
and the duty of its people. His further speeches on American
ideals and institutions are being printed by the United States Gov–
ernment Printing Office.
2
Nor have these writings followed the
tradition of conventional ceremonial amenity. They are a poetic
call to arms, a rallying-cry for the American way of life, an indict–
ment not only of the powers of darkness that threaten Democracy
in the old and naw worlds but of Mr. MacLeish's own fellow-writers
and scholars, " the irresponsible!" who "freed themselves of the
personal responsibility associated with personal choice. They
emerged free, pure, and single into the antiseptic air of objectivity.
And by that sublimation of the mind they prepared the mind's
disaster.
778
"Nothing," says Mr. MacLeish, "is more characteristic of the
intellectuals of our generation than their failure to understand
what it is that is happening to their world.'" Indulging their taste
for objective truth, morbid self-examination, and disillusioning
criticism, some of them have written a poetry of despair and dis–
gust, others novels that "were not only books written against the
hatefulness and cruelty and filthiness of war. They were also books
2
