Arts and Letters

Some of our number knew Archibald MacLeish better than I did, and if I am allowed to call him Archie, well, that is because almost anyone acquainted was allowed to do so; he stayed overnight at our house in Lexington, Massachusetts, on the occasion of the centenary of the Cary Memorial Library there, where I was his introducer, and we met a fair few times, chiefly at meetings of this Academy, thereafter.

The facts are well known enough: he was born in 1892 in Glencoe, Illinois, and died just short of his ninetieth birthday and the celebration to be given him then at Greenfield, Massachusetts, of which I wrote:

Congratulations, dear Archie, on your birthday and on having the good luck to celebrate it in Greenfield, surely as beautiful a town as there is in Massachusetts—as often as I've driven through it I've wanted to stay—and at the very flowering of the year (I hope it isn't snowing).

Especially now our names grace the cover of the same book (Denis Donoghue's Seven American Poets from MacLeish to Nemerov), it's appropriate that greetings flow back against the stream of time, from Nemerov to MacLeish, from the bottom of poesy's funny totem pole to the top. Greetings, Archie, and many happy returns.

But when the celebration became a memorial, I couldn't see how to revise those remarks, though invited to.

He was by turns and all at once a soldier, lawyer, statesman, poet, playwright, whatever else. Compared with other poets of his day, he was a public man, decided for poetry as above all else addressed to a living and acting people. But also a most private man, in the sense that his thoughts were secret; and no matter if you could call him Archie, you didn't know what he was thinking. F.D.R. made him Librarian of Congress, and when Archie wanted to refuse said, "you can run it before breakfast." That wasn't so, but MacLeish ran it anyhow. Then he was appointed Director of the Office of Facts and Figures, in 1941, where I had my first and only, if indirect, notion of him till about 1968. My father, with some notion of saving his firstborn from the dire things of war, wrote to MacLeish asking if he could find me a job in the O.F.F., and MacLeish replied to the effect that "your son had better take his chances with the others." And so I did, which was what I had meant to do anyhow.

But all this distinguished career at all sorts of service would not have made his fellows in the Academy remember him now, had he not also been a poet. As a poet, he was kind of overshadowed, as many others were—Conrad Aiken, for instance, and John Peale Bishop, and Allen Tate and John Ransom, all also colleagues of ours—by the world-winning reputation of T. S. Eliot, that marvelous poet who dominated taste in my youth—and if you ask, Was Eliot that good, I should have to say, Yes, he was that good; though it does make you wonder how the canon is established, and why, and by whom. Is the great poet the world-historical poet? Eliot, Pound, Yeats, they all understood the history of the world entire better than I understood my own back garden. And Archie had his ambitions in that area too. But I'd prefer the case to rest on one alone poem, "You, Andrew Marvell," writ when I was ten years old and introduced to me at college maybe eight years later, and of which I wrote when I was a thirty-three year-old doing his novitiate in criticism:

Archibald MacLeish, for a very few poems, is one of the few finest lyric poets now writing. That after these few poems, a long way after, there follow many which strike one as forced, incomplete, not thoroughly considered, and some which seem to betray an impatience, an exasperation with the mere idea of poetry as an art, does not affect the position. We do not much like to speak of immortality in this connection any more, nor even of future times (for who knows what altogether dreadful nonsense people will admire day after tomorrow? [—a prophetic remark; if ever you made one—]), but if I may pretend the old usage still to apply, as though we looked forward to an Oxford Book compiled by archangels, it is to say that the author of the simple and noble "You, Andrew Marvell," will have a place there, where room will be denied to many whose flabby complexities now pass for muscle. This poem reads, surely, as though it were imperishable; it has no false note, and neither hesitation nor haste in its grave, steady rhythms, the exact timing of its rimes.

And I added there, back in 1953, that the poem reminded me of Dante's last long look down through the heavens at the earth in Paradiso XXII, looking back at the seven spheres he has left behind; looking past them at the earth, the aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci, the little threshing-floor that makes us so fierce, and that Archie's poem is of that quality, and as memorable.

You, Andrew Marvell*

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night;

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift, how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on....

1930

And so, at last, whatever any of us may do, one of us did that. Dante wanted to reach the love that moved the sun and other stars, and so far as one can see with reservations as many as the stars themselves, he did. Archie got the sense of the earth we live on, turning turning, in mysterious relation with the sun and shadow and the other stars.

*“You, Andrew Marvell” by Archibald MacLeish appears in New and Collected Poems 1917–1976, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. © 1976 by Archibald MacLeish. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.