Mr. MacLeish has a weakness for the large subject; he finds convenient fairways in the major myths; previous works of his have rehandled the material of Hamlet and of the Book of Job. In [Herakles] he is at one with many or most 20th-century poets…. Mr. MacLeish has certainly made it a central part of his business to "manipulate a continuous parallel" between the immemorial and the modern…. But I must admit that the grounds of his considerable success are, for the most part, opaque to me. I cannot understand why The Hamlet of A. MacLeish was ever taken with much seriousness…. His epic, Conquistador, is hardly any more readable than the general run of long narrative poems in our time, which means virtually that it is not readable at all. His most successful verse play, J.B., had a good run in the theatre, and I can...