SOURCE: Jarrell, Randall. Review of The Fall of the City, by Archibald MacLeish. Sewanee Review 51, no. 2 (April-June 1943): 267-80.

In the following essay, Jarrell critiques MacLeish's political/allegorical radio play The Fall of the City, finding it riddled with inconsistencies and calling it a “melodramatic oversimplification.”

Any successful play in verse—in a time when the phrase sounds like an Irish bull—is worth an analysis; and The Fall of the City has been extraordinarily successful. Almost anyone with a radio has heard it, almost anyone with an anthology has read it; even the college textbooks print it, with prefaces calling it a really topical play, one that has both comprehended and predicted the actual history of our times. “Pioneering in a new medium, the verse play for radio, MacLeish foretold the fate of Vienna by eleven months,” one editor writes; “Prague, Warsaw, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris—the play was...