A History of American Literature

452 Making It New: 1900–1945

meditation on personal death, inspired perhaps by Andrew Marvell’s famous lines:

“But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” Imperceptibly,

though, the poem moves into a meditation on cultural crisis and death. This poem

has a public dimension, certainly, but for once it is a dimension that draws its power

from an acutely experienced moment of personal tension. The sense of cultural

crisis is felt precisely because it is inextricable from a sense of individual, immediate

crisis. The darkening of the evening sky, the shades of death, the shadow of social

conflict: all are brought together in the one, long sentence that constitutes the

poem – a sentence that is incomplete because, on the cultural, communal, and

natural levels at least, this is a process that never ends. MacLeish did not always

remember Frost’s warning that a poem is “drama or nothing” but, when he did, the

results, as here, could be remarkable.

The need MacLeish felt to serve his society drew him into institutional life;

eventually, he became something of an establishment figure, working as assistant

secretary of state under Roosevelt and acting as a member of the delegation that

founded UNESCO. The same could hardly be said of two other poets, Kenneth

Fearing and Kenneth Patchen. Fearing, in particular, has almost been marginalized

by his commitment to techniques and attitudes formed during the Depression.

Discarding what he called “the entire bag of conventions and codes usually associated

with poetry,” he adopted a documentary style, the eye of the camera, and abrupt,

syncopated rhythms. The opening lines of “King Juke” (1938) illustrate the result:

The juke-box has a big square face,

A majestic face, softly glowing with red

and green and purple lights.

Have you got a face as bright as that?

BUT IT’S A PROVEN FACT; THAT A JUKE-BOX

HAS NO EARS.

Fearing’s favorite subject, as here, and in novels like The Big Clock (1946), is street

life, the world of dime stores, cheap cafés, gangsters and hustlers; his approach, apart

from the occasional attack on bourgeois stupidity, that of the reporter; city slang,

disjunctive imagery, and an elastic free verse line are all used to capture what he calls,

in another poem, “Reception Good” (1938), “the new and complex harmonies ...

of a strange and still more complex age.” The range of his work may be limited,

perhaps, but taken on its own terms it represents one very specific and successful

response to Emerson’s call for an American bard – someone, that is, who could

mirror “the barbarism and materialism of the times.”

Patchen, while being even more of an anti-establishment figure than Fearing, is

also a more varied and subtler writer, as even a glance at his Collected Poems (1968)

or prose works such as Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945) would indicate.

Influenced by the European surrealist tradition and committed to experimental

forms, he gravitated between haunting lyrics of personal emotion (“The Character

of Love”) and vitriolic social comment (“Nice Day for a Lynching”), sharp vignettes

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