The past is a living creature with a talent for seeming stable at particular moments. The use of an old myth today may provide a scaffold for contemporary feelings and ideas. It may offer a form, capable of any degree of solidity, for the most abstract subject. Mr. MacLeish in his play, Nobodaddy, deals with "the dramatic situation which the condition of self-consciousness in an indifferent universe" seems to present. For his scaffold he has arbitrarily employed certain incidents in the myth of Eden. He has made an intense and very "modern" poem out of his theme, even though he has chosen blank verse as his method. There is of course no argument, no discussion, in the play; these are attitudes presented with the force of poetry, not ideas demonstrated by logic.
Nobodaddy was the name Blake used for the god of jealousy and reason, for the god of this world, the devil. Presumably, Nobodaddy is here also the human self-consciousness. (p. 339)
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