SOURCE: Mizener, Arthur. “The Poetry of Archibald MacLeish.” Sewanee Review, no. 46 (October 1938): 501-19.

In the following essay, Mizener emphasizes the continuity of MacLeish's poetic work over time, despite shifts in the poet's emotional and philosophical responses to experience.

The career of Archibald MacLeish has the appearance of having been a tortured series of unconnected allegiances. It is, after all, a long way from what Horace Gregory once called “the four-year illusion of supremacy at Yale” to the interest which lies behind “Pole Star for This Year”. It seems even longer when one stops to consider that it leads through the terrible and wonderful days of the exiles when the pages of transition were being filled with manifestoes on “The Revolution of the Word”; when Harry Crosby and Hemingway were drunk in the streets of Sargossa and “their mouths are hard they say que cosa”. MacLeish (“a few years...