SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Review of New Found Land, by Archibald MacLeish. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 36 (April-September 1930): 270-75.

In the following review of New Found Land, Zabel concentrates on MacLeish's poetic style—which he finds to be strongly influenced by other poets, especially T. S. Eliot—and foresees the possible “dissolution of a fine poetic talent.”

Mr. MacLeish's new book [New Found Land] is made up of fourteen poems, beginning with the familiar “You, Andrew Marvell” of five or six years ago, and ending with several poems in a somewhat later manner which have appeared in periodicals during the last year. The collection is distinguished, however, by a style which, for all its slack and discursive rhetoric, carries a definitive accent, unmistakably Mr. MacLeish's own. Even where certain external effects carry one back from these lines to the Swinburnian distension in the meters of The Happy Marriage...