1. Conclusion
CONCLUSION
After finishing this thesis on Archibald MacLeish’s poetry, I think it is
high time for shedding some lights on the findings of it as it is a must for any
thesis to have some findings for which it was basically conducted. The first of
these is the fact that after studying the biography of MacLeish in detail, it is
found that, like any other poet, MacLeish has his merits and demerits; he has
some good aspects for which he should be praised and some defects for which
he should be blamed. He was influenced by some factors as well as some
persons. To a great extent, he was influenced by the milieu he was brought in.
An inescapable influence that shaped his character was his mother. She opened
horizons of literature for him wide-open during the early days of his boyhood as
she acquainted him with the great works of literature like the Odyssey, Divine
Comedy, Treasure Island, and the works of Shakespeare. No one can appreciate
the value of such works as MacLeish himself because the first time he knew
their value was in Hotchkiss School where he was to study these works his
mother acquainted him with in the nightly reading sessions everyday.
Another influence his mother exerted upon him was how to be of service
to others; a feature that characterized MacLeish all over his life. When
Hemingway was injured in the Westover, MacLeish traveled in a very bad
weather in order to see his friend though his friend was unkind. Another
incident reveals the gentleness of MacLeish, when Ezra Pound was confined to
the asylum of Saint Elizabeth Hospital because of his Pro-Fascist inclinations
and being accused of high treason of the United States, it was MacLeish who
spared no effort to release him and help him to travel to Italy, though Pound
never said a word of praise for MacLeish or of his works. He used always to
criticize MacLeish's writings. When MacLeish was asked to defend the "Pisan
cantos" after the book had won the Bollingen Prize for poetry, he never
196

2. Conclusion
hesitated and defended them in the most objective way in his book Poetry and
Opinion.
His public sense was a necessary attribute for a person whose mother was
a woman like MacLeish's mother. She was the first woman to raise funds to
establish her seminary a full-fledged college in the State. She was the principal
of the first school of girls in Illinois. She founded a society for brotherhood
among the white and the black to help decreasing the racist attitude of the white
man during this early period in the history of the States. That is why MacLeish
took public service as a creed.
The close relationship between MacLeish and his mother lasted for a very
long time, as she was his resort at times of troubles. After his graduation, he felt
that he could not take a decision while his vision of life was like a moon in full
eclipse, so he asked her what to do. She instilled in him how to leave the world a
better place that is why he involved himself in the public service.
MacLeish's interest in places is a remarkable feature of his poetry. Since
he was a child, he had always been attracted to places. In his boyhood, he was
used to resort to the shed house whenever he committed mistakes. He took
refuge in the tool shed, where there were earthenware pots with a little dried
earth in the bottom, envelops of dried seeds smelling of dust, and an old pipe
where he could see the gardener bent over the rosebushes and hear the spinning
pigeagons above. This can be seen clearly in his poem "Eleven". He could never
forget his birthplace Cock County with the landscape all around and Lake
Michigan and their house up there. In his poem "Cock County" MacLeish
remembers the different winds: the northeast wind blowing the oak-leaves pale
side out" when the door slammed together". When he grew up his interest in
places formed a renewable source for his poetry. One of his most famous
197

3. Conclusion
volumes Streets on the Moon is greatly influenced by places even the first item
of the title revolves round a place. "You Andrew Marvell"; is another poem
MacLeish wrote during his visit to Iran in which places played an indispensable
part and shaped the final image of the poet's sense of time and place. In this
poem the poet gives the characteristics of time to place and vice versa that you
are unable to distinguish which is which. The poem is full of the names of
oriental names of cities no European has seen before. Places like Shiraz,
Kirmanshah, Sicily and so on, constitute the broad lines of the loom of the
poem. In the "Hamlet of A. MacLeish" he was influenced by Perse's migration
poem "Anabase"(Anabasis) with certain emphasis on the movement of people
from place to place and the fall of civilizations.
The impact of place can be clearly seen in a poem like "Conquistador".
MacLeish had already visited the locus of the poem. When he began to write the
poem, the writing process went badly until he paid a visit to the valley of
Mexico. He was greatly influenced by the charm and beauty of the place; he felt
that the conquest itself was still a literal reality as the place was untouched by
civilization from the days of the conquest until his visit. MacLeish commented
that the Valley of Mexico was heartbreakingly beautiful. After this foot and
mule investigation to the traces of the Spanish conquistadors MacLeish finished
his poem a few months later.
In His volume Frescoes of Mr. Rockefeller's City the reader can find
another evidence for that. During his visit to Mexico, he met Diego Rivera who
was employed to paint murals for the Rockefeller's center. The murals did not
gain the favor of the patrons as they differed with them ideologically, they paid
the painter and had the murals destroyed. MacLeish thought he should depict in
in verse what the murals said in paintings.
198

4. Conclusion
Another great influence on MacLeish was that of the great modernists
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. These two poet-critics were of great and permanent
influence on MacLeish. He admitted to his friend Amy Lowell that he could not
see the world except through the eyes of Eliot. The great poet was the first
model that shaped the poetry of MacLeish. He supplied MacLeish with a
comprehensive vision for both life and poetry. The first time MacLeish fell
under the influence of Eliot, though with a lesser degree, was in his happy
marriage volume. In two passages of the volume he was influenced by Eliot's in
his "Sweeney" period and the other passage with his "Portrait of a Lady". The
second time the influence was so great that critics, if not readers, read the poem
as an echo of the original. In "The Pot of Earth" MacLeish was greatly
influenced by Eliot's "Waste Land". In almost every thing like diction, tone,
imagery, and drawing on the same source which Eliot drew heavily upon, The
Golden Bough. Another influence of Eliot appears in the Hamlet of a MacLeish.
The volume is greatly influenced by Eliot's "Prufrock" with the context of "I am
nor prince Hamlet, nor meant to be, I am an attendant lord". The meeting point
between the two works is the futility and nothingness of the modern citizen
comparable to that of the golden past.
In fact, the influence of Pound is not as great as that of Eliot. MacLeish
asked Pound his opinion on his writings. The result was disappointing to the
hopes of MacLeish as Pound devastated his work and described his poetry as
being derivative of the poetry of Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce.
The charge of derivativeness stuck to MacLeish to the end of his life. Yet,
Pound agreed to correct a poem for MacLeish called "Broken Promise" which
revealed to the reader how great an editor Pound was. These editing corrections
gave the poem its final shape and elegance. When he commented on "You,
Andrew Marvell", he told MacLeish that he sensed "E.P [Ezra Pound] hovering
over the work"(173). The influence of Pound appears in "Conquistador", when
199

5. Conclusion
MacLeish employs a similar technique Pound had used in his "Cantos". Both
works depend on piling up harshly juxtaposed concrete images. Both works
made great use of sense experience to convey their meaning. Among the four
guidelines MacLeish had for writing "Conquistador", Pound was the second.
MacLeish wrote in his notebook "Use the material in the manner of Pound:
assume the wars of the conquest and follow them at a distance …the presentness
of the past—make the thing live"( Donaldson, 218). Some passages of the poem
echo some passages in the "Cantos".
It is worth mentioning that MacLeish was obsessed with the idea of the
West as an ideal for which man should fight and sacrifice. In his boyhood school
days he wrote an essay called "The Call of Brazil" in which he sums up the
dilemma of a young man who, during his study abroad, fell in love with one of
his colleagues, though she did not love him at the time. After a period, she sent
him a letter confessing her love and inviting him to join her abroad in order to
marry. When the young man was preparing himself for travel, the cold wind of
the West was waiting for him at the back of the city. The man found himself the
willing slave of the mighty West. He sacrificed his love for the sake of the
indispensable West. It means for MacLeish the future and the establishment of a
great nation. The essay won a prize. What is more important is that it pinpoints
the origin of this dominant idea for the first time which appeared in his mature
works. In his poem "Conquistador" he took the West as the central point around
which the whole work revolves. When some followers of Cortes wanted to come
back to Spain, he rebuked them for their unhealthy adhesiveness to the east:
Spain is east of the seas and the peaceful countries
The old tongues: the ancient towns: return to them
Why should you waste your souls in the west: you are
young:
Tell them that in the tight towns when you talk of us
200

6. Conclusion
The west is dangerous for thoughtful men. (277- 78)
He prefixed three lines from the Odyssey to the poem in order to express
how those explorers reached the West "through a thousand perils". It is the ideal
world for MacLeish, the virgin land full of unexplored realms of experience.
The West is the new world, the American dream that librated people of the old
world from their kingdoms and oppressive governmental systems, (but what a
difference between the vision of MacLeish and the real one of America now!).
Therefore when the Spanish took the city and destroyed its civilization,
MacLeish laments the beautiful land. He admitted that the West as a pure idea
has gone and finished with the coming of the colonizers. In the end he says:
They came like lice staining it.
And the west is gone now: the west is the ocean sky... (325)
The role of the public spokesman which some critics accused MacLeish
of is justifiable if the reader knows first the background of MacLeish's
upbringing and second his education and third the atmosphere he found himself
in. Some critics alleged that MacLeish's assumed position as a public spokesman
stifled his poetic talent and left him as a mere malformed poet who is neither a
poet nor a spokesman. They also assumed that he muddled his poetry with his
public speech. It was also alleged that politics consumed both his time and his
poetic sensitivity. Yet, an objective reader should know that like any other poet,
MacLeish has his flaws. Among those flaws is his deep belief in America and
his readiness to pay for the sake of this creed whatever the price may be. It is
known that some circumstances are more responsible for that than MacLeish.
For example it was his friend Dean Acheson who facilitated MacLeish's
entrance to the official circles as he was the person who recommended
MacLeish to the trip to Persia. After that incident MacLeish knew his own way
inside the corridors of those in power. Surprisingly, when MacLeish was still
201

7. Conclusion
young in Yale school, he was chosen as the fence orator. He gave a very good
address to the students of Yale. His school won the fence and MacLeish's essay
was chosen as the best, furthermore, the headmaster gave the whole school a
holiday on his honor, but this time the role of spokesman was not a handicap for
him as it was in his mature years. It is also noticeable that had he not been
socially and financially affluent, no one would have said a word of him. But the
more he became known in the circles of interest and power, the fierce was the
attack. MacLeish's above mentioned essay is paralleled to his open letter to the
young men of the Wall Street and his social critique the "Irresponsible". Critics
should have studied his background in order to know how his mother had
instilled in him the love of duty and to be of great benefit and help to others as
much as possible and to leave the world a better place.
What does one expect of a person working for one of the most powerful
financial magazines all over the United States? Or of a person whose contacts
are the President of the United States, the Secretary of States, Ernest
Hemingway and Felix Frankfurter and other well-known figures of the States?
He was obliged to behave in the same way he did.
Another feature of MacLeish's poetry is his interest in the sense
impressions. He values experiences drawn from the senses than anything else.
He also preferred concrete knowledge derived from personal experience to the
abstract knowledge taken from books. In one of his earliest poems
"Baccalaureate" as in his long poem "Conquistador" he contrasts knowledge
experienced and that taken from books. It is this point which MacLeish made
good use of when he let Diaz tell what he had experienced during the conquest
of Mexico rather than what the official chaplain, who did not attend the war, say
about it. Diaz comments:
These things were real: these suns had heat in them:
202

8. Conclusion
Not the sound of a word like the writing of Gomara (240)
MacLeish's poetry was also influenced by the Old English rhetoric in
more than one sense. He was indebted to the Old English in syntax and in
vocabulary as the most various types of indebtedness. He preferred to use the
colon to indicate a rhythmical pause rather than a traditional mark of
punctuation, a feature most characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon. That is why
readers should take great care when dealing with MacLeish's punctuation. Some
critics who did not pay attention called it the all-purpose colon which MacLeish
uses at any occasion. He would use words commencing with "w" like "wealed"
and "wold" which carry an Anglo- Saxon tinge. His use of alliterative phrases
such as “quail out of corn", "stars over stubble", "rest by roadside" is one of
the features of his poetry. Another feature is his use of participial and
oppositional phrases; this can be seen in the following lines from
"Conquistador":
This priest is a learned man: is not ignorant
And I am poor: without gold: gainless
I: poor: blind: I have seen... (239)
203