'Art Is Slow and Long'

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with an oddly contemporary-sounding observation: “Last year Archibald MacLeish resorted to scaring people over the radio, with air-raid noises and human screams in order to waken the population to ‘Fascist’ dangers.” Sound familiar? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been called a “fascist” . . . The word is rivalled only by “racist” when it comes to tediously meaningless slurs. Bogan describes MacLeish’s collection as “the history of the American people sold out by ‘the Aristocracy of politic selfishness,” whatever that means. Talk about unpromising poetic material. Bogan gets to the point: “This poem is Mr. MacLeish’s saddest and most conglomerate attempt at ‘public speech’ to date.” Still, Bogan works to be fair: “Bury his gifts though he may, Mr. MacLeish is a private, a lyric, poet through and through; it is somewhat of a loss that he did not…