SOURCE: Lane, Lauriat, Jr. “MacLeish at Work: Versions of ‘Bleheris’.” English Studies in Canada 13, no. 1 (March 1987): 79-90.

In the following essay, Lane investigates MacLeish's revisions of the tale of the Grail knight Bleheris in his The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

By 1926 Archibald MacLeish had left well behind both his career as one of Boston's promising young lawyers and the later Victorian/E. A. Robinsonian poetry of his The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (1924). In 1923 he had moved with his family to Paris; in 1925 he had published his first wholly successful major poem, The Pot of Earth, and earlier in 1926 his first major collection, Streets in the Moon, which included Einstein. A year later, December 1927, Houghton Mifflin was to accept The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

Formally and thematically The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is more ambiguous and complex than either The Pot of Earth or Einstein. Including MacLeish's Hamlet...