In the following essay, Barber probes the strong social and public component of MacLeish's poetry, charting its development particularly over the period from 1930 to 1945.

In the following essay, Blum recounts MacLeish's literary and political career, stressing the poet's liberalism and belief in democracy.

In the following excerpt, Smith offers an in-depth survey of MacLeish's poetry from his earliest verse to 1968's The Wild Old Wicked Man, focusing principally on subject and theme.

In the following essay, Stout compares MacLeish's verse play J. B. and Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” as modern re-compositions of the biblical Book of Job.

In the following essay, Mizener emphasizes the continuity of MacLeish's poetic work over time, despite shifts in the poet's emotional and philosophical responses to experience.

In the following essay, Christensen considers critical reaction to MacLeish's verse play J. B. and defends the work from its detractors.

In the following essay, Cavanagh analyzes MacLeish's effort to compose a Modernist epic poem in Conquistador.

In the following essay, Waggoner explores the role of scientific thought in MacLeish's poetic representation of infinity and eternity.

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

In the following essay, Sickels tracks MacLeish's use of the Christian theme of the Fortunate Fall in his poetry, especially in Songs for Eve and the verse play J. B.

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

In the following essay, Jarrell critiques MacLeish's political/allegorical radio play The Fall of the City, finding it riddled with inconsistencies and calling it a “melodramatic oversimplification.”

In the following essay, Van Ghent presents a thematic overview of MacLeish's writing up to 1938, considering its concentration on metaphysical issues and human fate.

In the following essay, Kohler describes MacLeish as a “spokesman of the modern age” whose social poetry reaffirms the American ideal of human freedom.

In the following essay, Pritchard illuminates the qualities of MacLeish's character that inform his poetry.

In the following review of Poems, 1924-1933, Jones comments on the symbolic poem The Pot of Earth and MacLeish's more social works, such as Conquistador, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, and the verse play Panic.

In the following review of Collected Poems, 1917-1952, Whittemore highlights the pastoral element in MacLeish's poetry.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1982, Walters praises MacLeish's mastery of the impassioned and human lyric.

In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1982, Ellis discusses MacLeish's poetic rendering of the nature of women as closer to the “truly true” than the nature of man.

In the following review, Zabel traces MacLeish's development as a poet through the early 1930s and the publication of Poems, 1924-1933.

In the following excerpted review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Siegel forms a list of MacLeish's most enduring works of poetry.

In the following review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Carruth lauds MacLeish's overall work as a poet while devoting particular attention to his epic Conquistador.

In the following essay, Monroe evaluates MacLeish as a poet of the age with a sensitivity to human suffering, but wonders whether he has the necessary forcefulness to interpret the modern world.

In the following review of New Found Land, Zabel concentrates on MacLeish's poetic style—which he finds to be strongly influenced by other poets, especially T. S. Eliot—and foresees the possible “dissolution of a fine poetic talent.”

In the following essay, Sullivan explicates MacLeish's paradoxical poem “Ars Poetica,” viewing it as “a rarity among poems on the art of poetry.”

[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 infl...

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, opaq...

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 o...

Ten years ago Archibald MacLeish published a prose collection called A Continuing Journey; it was a public book, addresses and essays on topics ranging from literary theory to the fate of the nation. Now he has published a new prose collection, Riders on the Earth; this one is a private book, filled with MacLeish's reminiscences, meditations, and convictions. They reveal behind the fine mind a generous spirit. There are two kinds of essays here. In the more formal ones MacLeish examines the course of...

The danger in reading a poet's prose is that one can too easily be swayed by sounds and syntax, forgetting that words must make sense, too. Fortunately, Archibald MacLeish's passion extends to meaning as well and, for the most part, what he has to say in [Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections] is worth listening to. In the first part of the book, he discusses from an intensely humanistic point-of-view subjects as various as Thomas Jefferson, the place of science in our lives, and conte...

MacLeish's The Great American Fourth of July Parade is subtitled A Verse Play for Radio. It is a public speech to be broadcast—MacLeish's contribution to the bicentennial. It marks a return to a mode and to an obsessive theme. The mode was poetic drama for radio…. The obsessive theme, of course, is America…. [In his thirties poems such] as Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, Land of the Free and America Was Promises, and in Colloquy for the States (1943) MacLeish a...