THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
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League of American Writers during the 'Thirties. His literary
productions include lyric verse, epic, satire, elegy, defenses of
poetry, a ballet, poetic drama, verse-plays for radio, book reviews,
essays, expert technical journalism, a canvass of the religious inter–
ests of American youth for
McCall's Magazine,
articles on labor
and civic issues for the
Survey Graphic,
political and literary criti–
cism for
The Nation
and
New Republic,
articles in
Life
and
For–
tune,
and an edition of the papers of Justice Frankfurter, a for–
mer teacher of the poet, whom
The New Yorker
has rudely de–
scribed as having "wangled" his former pupil's latest job for him.
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He has been saluted as "a poet, a scholar, and a gentleman" by
President Roosevelt, and hailed by Dr. Herbert Putnam, at a ban–
quet in the Knickerbocker Club of New York, in terms of richest
encomium:
There is first the Scot in him-shrewd, austere, exacting, but
humorous. There is the poet in him-whose stuff is not made of
mere dreams but of realities-the contrasts of beauty and ugli·
ness, joy. and despair, success and failure. Then the humanist,
keenly sympathetic to all that calls for social sympathy. The
lawyer-trained to analysis through determination of exact issues.
The soldier, pledged to duty under discipline.. The athlete–
pledged to fair play. And finally there's the orator, capable of
vivid and forceful speech.
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Thus equipped Mr. MacLeish arrived in the autumn of 1939
at his present post in Washington. He did not arrive there unpre–
pared or abashed. He sees his destiny as divided yet united in its
aims. He is both poet ·and librarian, and for both these professions
he makes what are unquestionably the highest claims that have been
heard in our century-claims enhanced to the pitch of evangelical
eloquence by Mr. MacLeish's burning sense of how desperate and
tragic the century has
b~come:
We live in a time of crisis ... a crisis not of the hands but
of the heart.
It
is a crisis of hunger-but not a crisis of hunger
created. by any doubt as to our ability to feed ourselves.
It
is a
crisis of cold-but not a crisis of cold created by. any doubt as to
our ability to put roofs over our heads or clothes on our backs.
. . . It
is a crisis. in other words of which the entire cause lies in
the hearts of men. The failure is a failure of desire ... a failure
of the spirit: a failure of the spirit to imagine; a failure of the
