SOURCE: Jones, Llewellyn. “Archibald MacLeish: A Modern Metaphysical.” English Journal 24, no. 6 (June 1935): 441-51.

In the following review of Poems, 1924-1933, Jones comments on the symbolic poem The Pot of Earth and MacLeish's more social works, such as Conquistador, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, and the verse play Panic.

It would perhaps be unfair to label Archibald MacLeish with even so inclusive a tag as metaphysical, were it not that the best metaphysical poets have also been poets of sense, and their work often simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Certainly the term is not meant to indicate any bounds limiting Mr. MacLeish's work but to suggest that pervading quality which, together with another, an Americanism that is the very antithesis of the popular one-hundred-per-cent variety, gives character to a body of work that is extraordinarily diversified.

Of Mr. MacLeish's peers in American poetry—and there are only...