Collected Poems 1917 to 1982

I say, Bring him back! because MacLeish has pretty well dropped from sight, except for 'Ars Poetica' and 'You, Andrew Marvell.' And it's true that one has to mine this hefty volume pretty carefully for the real treasure. Except for Conquistador (MacLeish's 1932 Pulitzer Prize-winning epic--really, it's a sort of epic lyric--of the Spanish conquest of Mexico), MacLeish's long poems hold very little aesthetic interest, and even Conquistador is marred by its indebtedness to the Ezra Pound of the early Cantos. But at his lyric best, MacLeish is incomparable: 'Eleven,' 'Memorial Rain,' ''Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments,'' 'Immortal Autumn,' 'Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,' 'Cook County,' 'Winter Is Another Country,' 'Calypso's Island,' 'What Riddle Asked the Sphinx,' 'The Reef Fisher,' 'The Infinite Reason,' 'Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell,' 'Captivity of the Fly,' 'Companions,' 'Mark's Sheep,' 'Rainbow at Evening,' and a generous handful of others drawn from every stage of a very long career. What is more, I cannot understand, in this age of the socially conscious anthology, why the editors of the Heath Anthology of American Literature haven't rediscovered the MacLeish of Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (especially 'Empire Builders'), 'Lines for Interment,' the often misunderstood 'Invocation to the Social Muse' (a satire whose irony turns back on its speaker), 'Speech to Those Who Say Comrade,' and 'Brave New World' (which is especially relevant today, thanks to the so-called Patriot Act). MacLeish was THE poet of the Lost Generation and later the very first 'Fellow Traveler'--literally! His public and private voices merit hearing.