THE POET ON CAPITOL HILL
7
Swept as he is by the zeal of his callings, the supremacy of his
responsibilities, and his dramatic sense of world
cri~is,
it is no
wonder that Mr. MacLeish should have risen to indict American
writers and scholars as "irresponsibles," men who "prepared the.
mind's disaster," and whose work in disa.rming democracy in the
face of fascism surpasses "any other single influence."
Poet, scholar, gentleman, and librarian, he has become a
major American prophet and Voice of Destiny. He is a phenomenon
of our time and culture, and his case bears looking into.
II
When a man appears before the public as convinced of his
mission of salvation as this-when he addresses his contemporaries
in terms of stinging rebuke and indicts their cynicism as Americans
and their irresponsibility as thinkers-we naturally ask for his
credentials. We look (especially in these days of intellectual strain,
emotional violence, and public terrorism) to the consistency of his
arguments, his past performances as thinker and citizen, and his
record in matters of sincerity and logic. Our age ·is rich in political
and spiritual conversions. It is crowded with warring leaderships.
We have seen every conceivable variety of quick-change act,
trapeze-swinging, and bandwagon-jumping, and expounders of new
truths and revelations are subjected to a scrutiny less urgent in
heartier times. It is true that Mr. MacLeish does not encourage
such inspection. "My development as a poet is of no interest to me
and of even less interest, I should suppose, to anyone else," he said
seven years ago,
11
but, as was remarked at the time, what this state·
ment lacks in candor it makes up in optimism.
However, if he insists, we shall not go back to his poems,
whose "statements of conviction, of purpose, and of belief" are
necessarily conditioned by the subtleties and complexities of the
poetic medium. We tum to utterances that enjoy the advantages of
direct and unequivocal declaration-to his
pros~.
Here we may
expect to find evidences of responsibility that are not involved in
the difficult agony of the poetic experience. He admits that he too
lapsed from responsibility in the post-War years. "I am not under–
taking to judge these writers. I have no right to judge them. And
if
I did my hands would be tied because I felt as they did and
