THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
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filled with passionate contempt for the statements of conviction, of
purpose and of belief on which the war of 1914-18 was fou.ght. .•.
The post-war writers whose work educated a generation to believe
that all declarations, all beliefs are fraudulent, that all statements
of conviction are sales-talk, that nothing men can put into words is
.worth fighting for, and that there is a lowdown to everything–
those writers must face the fact that the books they wrote in the
years just after the war have done more to disarm democracy in
the face of fascism than any other single influence."
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An indictment of writers and scholars equal in severity to
this has seldom been heard in public places in modern times, in
America or elsewhere. Perhaps the maledictions of Hitler and
Goebbels alone have surpassed it within living memory.
It
revives
the decree passed by Plato against poets in
The Republic.
Mr.
MacLeish, having already honored his literary profession and his
government by bringing these hitherto unreconciled forces into the
harmony of his own personal success, . has honored his age by
making a moral pronouncement on the duty of the artist to the state
which will cause his name to resound in the records of history.
His contemporaries owe him the honor accruing to a remarkable
feat of personal heroism and originality, and his texts the duty of
close study. The honor has been loud and nation-wide during the
past year. Perhaps the moment for studying his words more 'closely
than a first hearing permits has now arrived.
The idea that the poet is the enemy, outcast, and "marked
man" of society is apparently fixed in the history and moral doc–
trines of Western culture at the depth of fetish, but when we see
at close range the actual fortunes and opportunities of poets, the
public enthusiasm they have aroused in the literary revival of the
past quarter-century and the popular adulation heaped on charac–
ters like Frost and Miss Millay, it's hard to believe that the idea
is still current among serious thinkers. Yet while our age has given
its poets a favor and publicity beyond the privilege of earlier
generations, its serious use for them remains uncertain and suspect.
They're all right as long as they behave, keep their place, stay out
of the way, and stroke the public ego at the right moment. But for
a poet to maintain a serious critical reputation, to draw practically
all the available public honors and channels of influence into his
