SOURCE: Barber, David. “In Search of an ‘Image of Mankind’: The Public Poetry and Prose of Archibald MacLeish.” American Studies 29 (fall 1988): 31-56.

In the following essay, Barber probes the strong social and public component of MacLeish's poetry, charting its development particularly over the period from 1930 to 1945.

In the course of that long migration they had come of age as a people. They had conceived a good idea of themselves; they had dared to imagine and determine who they were.

—N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain¹

In 1931 Archibald MacLeish conceived a goal which he never afterward abandoned, though his idea of how to accomplish it changed: to identify or generate a vision for humanity, a motivating “image of mankind in which men can again believe.”² This image, both in its American and its worldwide versions, would express and thereby advance democracy, cultural coherence, “brotherhood,” and human potential...