SOURCE: Monroe, Harriet. “Archibald MacLeish.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 38 (April-September 1931): 150-55.

In the following essay, Monroe evaluates MacLeish as a poet of the age with a sensitivity to human suffering, but wonders whether he has the necessary forcefulness to interpret the modern world.

One morning in late April a modest, melancholy, implacably sincere young man faced an audience of two or three hundred persons in the Arts Club of his native city of Chicago. The modernistic setting of the room—suave, never violent, a faultlessly tempered simplicity—was in harmony with the poet's mood; against it the beauty of his cadences was like the sound of a fountain in a garden, and through the windows the incessant motors slipping along Michigan Avenue struck the bass notes of a perfect chord.

It was manifest that a thinker confronted us, and that he was using his slow quantitative elegiac...