[My] rereading of MacLeish's poems in [New and Collected Poems, 1917–1976] has reaffirmed my admiration and has shown me excellences I had overlooked before. Above all I see a devotion to excellence in general, artistic excellence, which means not simply the excellence of craft but that of mind and heart, perhaps especially that of mind and heart. MacLeish began, like most other poets in the period of World War I, with more or less conventional, Georgian verses, but quickly fell under the influence of Eliot. Is that right? Was there a direct influence? (I am not a student of biographies.) Did Herrick write like Jonson because Jonson told him to or because that was the only way he could write—he and many others—with the example of Jonson before him? Certainly we know, with the example of "The Waste Land" (1923) before them, what American and British poets did...