READING THROUGH Harvard classical Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey, Archibald MecLeish was struck by this passage:

You speak with art but your intent is honest.

The Argive troubles, and your own troubles,

you told as a poet would, a man who know the world.

Wrote MacLeish, "The last line was like the bursting of a sun...Of course, I said. What else is a great poet! A man who knows the world." In his long and tremendously varied life (he died last spring just short of his ninetieth birthday) MacLeish knew as much of the world as anyone. He was a lawyer, soldier, outspoken journalist, and Harvard professor, a public servant whose posts included Librarian of Congress and Assistant Secretary of State, an advisor to Adlai Stevenson and F.D.R., and above all a playwright and a poet.

R.H. Winnick has collected an extensive selection of the letters of this extraordinary man. The impressive range of correspondents reflects MacLeish's wide-ranging interests and his knack for getting involved with the public of his time. He was particularly close to Amy Lowell, Dean Acheson, and Ernest Hemingway. He wrote often to Henry Luce, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot '10, and occasionally to Felix Frankfurter. J. Robert Oppenheimer and F.D.R. And the letters are full of MacLeish's articulate and often beautifully phrased observations on everything from political campaign strategies to the function of poetry. What emerges is a cohesive portrait of a powerful and flexible mind, of a man with human weaknesses and blind spots but also considerable generosity, wit, judgment and brilliance.

Winnick's introduction includes a brief but adequate summary biography of MacLeish, providing a necessary framework for the letters themselves. Arranged chronologically, they constitute a flowing narrative with only occasional gaps or seams. The story begins as young Archive leaves Glencoe, Illinois, to prep at Hotchkiss; a few letters from MacLeish's parents to the school's headmaster, the only ones in the collection not written by the poet himself, bear witness to their son's homesickness and general unhappiness there. In the letters he wrote at Yale and as a field artillery officer in France in 1918, a somewhat romantic earnestness begins to mingle with Ivy League wit. Though a little grating in tone, these letters provide some striking glimpses of nineteenth-century consciousness trying to make sense of the monstrous twentieth. "The thunderbolts of the King of Olympus were not more terrible." MacLeish writes, than his first view of modern warfare.

The major concern of MacLeish's young life was the incompatibility of his longing to write poetry with the necessity of eventually supporting himself and his future wife, Ada Hitchcock. He agonized over whether business, journalism, teaching, or law would be the best compromise, finally deciding to go to Harvard Law School, from which he graduated first in his class. But three years of promising law practice and lecturing in constitutional law at Harvard College left him unsatisfied; in a letter to his family he calls the law "a mockery of human ambition for reality." And as he wrote Yale and Harvard Law classmate Dean Acheson, law and poetry were for him "eternal irritant." So he set off for Europe to become a poet, reading and reeducating himself before starting to write, supported principally by his generous father.

It was a courageous and risky decision, for he had two children by this time, and the choice drew opposition and scorn from friends and family. Many years later he wrote Felix Frankfurter, "I think I was made to suffer as acutely over my decision to quit the law for poetry as it possible to make a man suffer over any decision it is that I gave up a career as a first-rate lawyer to become a third-rate poet."

MacLeish himself never regretted the decision, though there certainly were--and are--many who would call him a less than first-rate poet. His early work was justly criticized as overly derivative of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, a weakness MacLeish himself partially acknowledges. And though his voice became more distinctive in his poetry of the 1930s, even his best work was criticized as unoriginal. But the observations on poetry and criticism scattered through these letters indicate a coherent and convincing defense against such charges.

MacLeish took a more workmanlike view of the art of writing poetry than most of his contemporary poets and critics. He questioned what he saw as romantic and modernist assumptions that all art must be subjective and original, writing 1932 that the task of contemporary poets was to "fix momentarily or for many generations the aspect of the world we see. It is enough to do that and to do it with self-forgetfulness and humanity,"

MacLeish saw the work of the individual poet as part of a tradition of similar explorations into the same basic problems of human experience. Accordingly, his poetry reflects little of the stylistic experimentation prevalent in the work of contemporaries like Marianne Moore or e.e, cummings. He expresses this philosophy in a letter to Hemingway, arguing

that this business of trying to learn to write the somebody nobody had initiated yet in order not to write like anybody else is crap--that why in hell should we let ourselves get chased up into the reviews just because other people had farmed the good land before us--that the really great boys have been interested in writing poems not in writing poems differently--that why are we so scared of a cliche anyway.

SUCH REVEALING and useful statements of MacLeish's literary convictions are one great advantage of such a collection. Another is the consistent political stance that emerges. A staunch believer in representative democracy, MacLeish quickly identified threats to the ideals of the Republic he believed in, whether from the left or the right. In the early thirties he was one of the first to attack the Marxist positions fashionable among writers and critics. An early objector to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he drew McCarthy's public condemnation, though he never actually had to testify. He detested Communism as "rotten with the diseases from which all established police state suffer," but thought it should be combatted not through the reactionary defensiveness of the Eisenhower Administration, but by offering something better than communism to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, the nuggets are spread through an expanse of correspondence that sometimes becomes tedious. Winnick had access to all letters in MacLeish's possession (except those to and from his wife Ada) and he lists two pages of additional sources. No doubt he wanted to make a thorough and scholarly compilation, but the nearly 400 letters probably could have been cut by about a third without losing much. Nevertheless, it is well worth skimming through the housekeeping details, travel plans, and mundane dealings with editors to get to the plentiful meat.