Giving Meaning To The Private World

Archibald Macleish’s Modern Poetry Style of the 1920’s

BY BIANCA LLERENA

I don’t know much about poetry (at least, not enough), but I do know this: what makes for a great poem isn’t just the meaning itself, but the pursuit of the meaning. Writing is a kaleidoscope of aesthetic and noise, mathematics and spirals, emotions and cycles.

“Oh, not the loss of the accomplished thing!” Laments Archibald Macleish, starting his poem “Two Poems From The War”. The poet “viewed World War I as the ending of an old world and the beginning of a new one that was sensed rather than understood.” While he first published four books of poetry, including “The Happy Marriage, and Other Poems” in 1924, there were many more to come.

He was a scholar and poet (one can be both, of course), and “whilst in Paris, MacLeish had some small success with the publication of his poem “Einstein”, widely regarded as MacLeish’s attempt to portray an understanding of Einstein’s ‘quest for knowledge.’”

I found Macleish and his work one day by accident, as I was roaming the disordered shelves of a thrift store and stumbled upon a blue cover with a pegasus sketched atop. I slipped the cashier a dollar, ripped the cover off, and taped it to my wall.

That was months ago.

Finding him again, I learned his early poetry was his attempt to understand this new world we live in, how it warps and morphs us, changing the calculations of our “mental time.”

“Oh, you are too much mine and flesh of me/To seal upon the brain,” MacLeish ends his poem “Two Poems From The War.” I feel that he meant more than I can understand right now, but maybe I will get it later.

MacLeish rooted his lyrics in the early 1910’s, bloomed in the 20’s, and continued putting out shoots for years and years after. The world was changing, and he wrote accordingly. He sketched the horror and love that followed the war, and with his poems, he took pictures.