Making It New: 1900–1945 451publication of this truth. They were indispensable, in fact, to the rediscovery of
community. Sometimes, the community Rexroth celebrates and dramatizes is with
one particular person, as in “A Letter to William Carlos Williams” or “Delia Rexroth”;
sometimes it is with many people, past and present, as in “Autumn in California” or
“Wednesdays of Holy Week, 1940”; sometimes, as in “The Signature of All Things,”
it is with all created life, “streaming / In the electrolysis of love.” Always, though, it
involves a devoted attention to the particulars of the object, and a faithful recreation
of the voice of the subject: Rexroth’s phrasing is organically determined by his own
speaking and breathing, so a powerful sense of Rexroth the individual emerges from
his work – humorous, honest, irascible, passionate, proud. William Carlos Williams
called him “a moralist with his hand at the trigger ready to fire at the turn of a hair.”
To which could be added that he was also a poetic prophet whose prophecies were
shaped by an indestructible optimism.
A similar, if less persuasive, optimism characterizes another poet for whom the
social role, the idea of the writer as agent of cultural change, was crucially important:
Archibald MacLeish. MacLeish’s early work, written mostly while he was in Europe,
is preoccupied with the plight of the artist and is full of unassimilated influences –
notably Eliot, Pound, and the French Symbolistes. On his return to the United States,
however, at about the time of the Depression, he became increasingly interested in
social issues and began to work toward a poetic diction closer to common speech.
A series of poems followed examining the problems and possibilities of his native
country (New Found Land (1930)). These were followed, in turn, by an epic poem
describing the attempted conquest of the Mexican Aztecs by the Spanish Cortéz
(Conquistador (1932)) and by other poems satirizing the excesses of American
capitalism (Frescoes for Mr. Rockerfeller’s City (1933)) or chastising American writers
for their withdrawal from what MacLeish saw as their social responsibilities (The
Irresponsibles (1940)). “Instead of studying American life,” MacLeish declared of
the writers of the 1920s, “literature denounced it. Instead of working to understand
American life, literature repudiated it.” His clearly stated aim was to reverse this
trend: “This is my own land,” he announced in “American Letter” (Collected Poems,
1917–52 (1952)). “It is a strange thing – to be an American.” For MacLeish, as for so
many of his predecessors, this strangeness, the special quality of his native land
resided in the idea of America rather than the historical fact: the New World as a
place of freedom and solitude, a site of possibility. “America is neither a land nor a
people, / ” he insisted in “American Letter,” “America is West and the wind blowing /
America is a great word and the snow.” These lines repeating a common theme illus-
trate a significant weakness in MacLeish’s poetry. His most famous poetic statement
comes from “Ars Poetica,” “A poem should not mean / But be”; and its fame perhaps
prevents us from registering that it is a statement. Paradoxically, it invites us to
interpret its meaning even while it insists that a poem should not “mean.” What is
missing from much of his work, in fact, is indicated by his occasional successes. His
fine poem, “You, Andrew Marvell,” for instance, begins with an evocative description
of the sunset, the “always rising of the night,” that carries with it intimations of
mortality (“To feel ... / The earthy chill of dusk ...”). At first, this looks like aGGray_c04.indd 451ray_c 04 .indd 451 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM