SOURCE: Lane, Lauriat, Jr. “‘Intimate Immensity’: On the Poetics of Space in MacLeish's Einstein.” Canadian Review of American Studies 14, no. 1 (spring 1983): 19-29.

In the following essay, Lane analyzes the spatial imagery and dialectic pattern of MacLeish's long poem Einstein.

In 1926 Archibald MacLeish included in part two, “Several Shadows of a Skull,” of Streets in the Moon, one longer poem, Einstein.¹ Published separately three years later,² Einstein has been included in every collection of MacLeish's poetry since.³ Twice it was gathered with other longer poems in a separate section; in the latest edition it is placed chronologically with the other poems of the 1920s. It has been anthologized in a few collections of American poetry.⁴ But it has not, to my knowledge, received extended critical attention. Nor has it been fully appreciated for what it is: both one of MacLeish's most distinguished longer poems and one of the most...