SOURCE: Kohler, Dayton. “MacLeish and the Modern Temper.” South Atlantic Quarterly 38 (1939): 416-26.

In the following essay, Kohler describes MacLeish as a “spokesman of the modern age” whose social poetry reaffirms the American ideal of human freedom.

Archibald MacLeish has brought poetry back to the language of public speech, poetry that is once more a record of man's common fate. Written in an age of crisis, his work is an act of participation in the living world. For the problem of the modern writer is a search for the moral subject, one that will support a literature of belief and meaning, and relate that literature to the disordered life of our time. Nowhere is this search better illustrated than in the career of Archibald MacLeish. Step by step he has emerged from private association and the scholarly influences of his apprenticeship. Today his poems exhibit a craftsmanship of passion...