NEW FOUND LAND—Archibald MacLeish—Houghton Mifflin ($5).
Poet MacLeish’s style is individual, marked but not marred by the omission of punctuation, by typographically broken lines, in the manner but not to the extent indulged in by Poet e. e. cummings. MacLeish’s verse often gives the same impression as Hemingway’s prose: quiet but threatening, simple but magniloquent. In most of these 14 poems he speaks “with grave and level voice”:
He walks with Ernest in the streets in Saragossa
They are drunk their mouths are hard they say qué cosa
They say the cruel words they hurt each other
Their elbows touch their shoulders touch their feet go on and on together
In monumental vein, Poet MacLeish carves lines that would look well on a monolith:
Our history is grave noble and tragic
Many of us have died and are not remembered
Many cities are gone and their channels broken
We have lived a long time in this land and with honor
No defeatist, MacLeish thinks “Life is a haft that has fitted the palms of many.” No expatriate, he thinks a poet’s place is in the home country:
Be proud New York of your prize domes
And your docks & the size of your doors & your dancing
Elegant clean big girls & your
Niggers with narrow heels & the blue on their
Bad mouths & your bars & your automobiles in the struck steel light & your
Jews & your bright boys & your sorrow-sweet singing
Tunes & your signs wincing out in the wet
Cool shine & the twinges of
Green against evening . . .
The Author. Archibald MacLeish, 38, short, quizzical, Scotch-looking, was born in Glencoe, Ill. He was voted Most Brilliant man in his Yale class (’15). He was both football player and chairman of the Literary Magazine, class poet and captain of water polo. He rose in the Massachusetts bar, but some years ago renounced the law for poetry, which he writes intermittently on his farm in Conway, Mass. FORTUNE employs him on its editorial staff. He has lived much in Europe, is a great friend of Poet Stephen Vincent Benét (John Brown’s Body), and Ernest Hemingway. But, vigorous, busy, disciplined, he does not fit the expatriate scene. Other books: The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, Streets in the Moon, The Pot of Earth.