The Poet On Capitol Hill

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 7

The Poet On Capitol Hill

I NV spite of the outcry raised by the left-wing writers, American opinion is solidly behind Archibald MacLeish, the noted American poet who was appointed Congress Librarian, says Professor Sizer. In a speech he made in June last year entitled " PostWar Writers and Pre-War Readers" MacLeish, it may be remembered, charged such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Millais, Remarque and Dos Passos with undermining the foundations of democracy. "The post-war writers whose work educated a generation to believe that all declarations, all beliefs are fraudulent, that all statements of conviction are sales-talk, that nothing men can put into words is worth fighting for, and that there is a lowdown to everything-those writers must face the fact that the books they wrote in the years just after the war have done more to disarm democracy in the face of Fascism than any other single influence," MacLeish said; and intellectual left-wingers rose like Spitfires to the attack. MacLeish, who has been everything and written everything, materialised at precisely the _ right moment, observed one mildly sar-

castic writer, to give him his chance to impress on his fellow citizens the fact that a Milton not only should be living at this hour but by miraculous good fortune was. However, there can be no question that the Poet on Capitol Hill, as he has been called, has already done some outstanding work as Congress Librarian, says Professor Sizer. For one thing, he has welded the library's annual report, usually a dry-as-dust document, into a masterly piece of " reportage."