SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Review of Poems, 1924-1933, by Archibald MacLeish. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 44, no. 3 (June 1934): 150-59.

In the following review, Zabel traces MacLeish's development as a poet through the early 1930s and the publication of Poems, 1924-1933.

“My development as a poet is of no interest to me,” says Archibald MacLeish in the preface to his Poems: 1924-1933, “and of even less interest, I should suppose, to anyone else.” What his statement lacks in candor it makes up in optimism. For this collection of his best work in ten years shows that like any serious and respectable poet, he has been interested to the point of painful obsession in his “development.” Self-knowledge (if not self-reverence and self-control) has been his involuntary goad in all the work he can now “read without embarrassment,” whether disguised by literary anthropology in The Hamlet, by American nostalgia in New...