SOURCE: Cavanagh, Michael. “The Problems of Modern Epic: MacLeish's Conquistador.” Papers on Language & Literature 17, no. 3 (summer 1981): 292-306.

In the following essay, Cavanagh analyzes MacLeish's effort to compose a Modernist epic poem in Conquistador.

Since its publication and Pulitzer award in 1932, MacLeish's Conquistador has been neglected by critics, a neglect that seems increasingly unreasonable as commentary on a few other long poems grows almost daily. The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Bridge, The Cantos, Paterson, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: apparently there exists something resembling a canon of modern long poems, which in a way is a sad and premature phenomenon. In attending to these poems, we have slighted other equally ambitious and interesting long poems from which we still have something to learn. Conquistador has been neglected for a number of reasons. From the beginning, the poem's critics have misconstrued it a Poundian or Eliotic poem—in other...