SOURCE: Van Ghent, Dorothy. “The Poetry of Archibald MacLeish.” Science & Society: A Marxian Quarterly 2, no. 4 (fall 1938): 500-11.

In the following essay, Van Ghent presents a thematic overview of MacLeish's writing up to 1938, considering its concentration on metaphysical issues and human fate.

MacLeish's first tentative poems were published by his university shortly after his entrance into the service during the World War. They were tentative, but they were stalwart in one theoretical position, and that was the poet's conviction that the ivory tower was the right place for him as an artist. The main poem in the book is written on the theme of Helen's apparition to Faustus, the antique symbol which, to the poet of the ivory tower, represents the only reality. MacLeish's latest book, printed in 1938, is a brief text written to accompany photographs taken largely from the collection of the Resettlement Administration, pictures of the ruined...