SOURCE: Sickels, Eleanor M. “MacLeish and the Fortunate Fall.” American Literature 35, no. 2 (May 1963): 205-17.

In the following essay, Sickels tracks MacLeish's use of the Christian theme of the Fortunate Fall in his poetry, especially in Songs for Eve and the verse play J. B.

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Archibald MacLeish first treated the myth of the lost Paradise in the verse play Nobodaddy, which appeared in 1926. Though the fact that it was never reprinted argues that he came to consider this play unsatisfactory either in idea or in technique, it is a revealing expression of his mood in the mid-twenties, serving in particular as a companion piece to The Pot of Earth, written in the same period, in which he uses the pagan myth of the dying and resurrected fertility god to question the meaning of a girl's life absorbed and snuffed out in service to survival of the race. In...