SOURCE: Whittemore, Reed. “MacLeish and Democratic Pastoral.” Sewanee Review 61, no. 4 (October-December 1953): 700-09.

In the following review of Collected Poems, 1917-1952, Whittemore highlights the pastoral element in MacLeish's poetry.

Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems, 1917-1952 contains perhaps eighty poems written since the publication of his earlier volume of collected poems (1924-1933). It also contains twelve poems written in the period covered by the earlier volume though not to be found in that volume, and several pre-1924 poems that, in 1933, MacLeish presumably thought of as juvenilia. Conversely only one poem, “Insomnia” (a poor poem), is to be found in the 1933 volume and not in the new one, so clearly the new volume gives a much more complete account of MacLeish's activities than the old. That it does not include his wartime radio verse plays (Air Raid, etc.) is a fact I can't bring myself to worry about, since his long-poem ventures...