The problem of editing is handled well through the section on MacLeish's years as a public servant in the forties. Just enough is given so that we get a sense of the scope of his massive re-organization of the Library of Congress, and of the variety of other duties he fulfilled in the Roosevelt administration, such as Assistant Secretary of State and director of the Office of Facts and Figures. There also comes some explanation of the convictions that motivated him to give up poetry for a time to serve his president and his country. He writes gratefully to Frankfurter. "You and you alone--and this is not the least of my reasons for loving you--have dared to believe that men do enter government...because they believe in the Republic and wish to serve it."

THE MOST DRAMATIC series of letters involves MacLeish's efforts to free Ezra Pound. In 1955 he visited Pound in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, where Pound had been held since the war as unfit to stand trial for treason. He writes to Hemingway, "What I saw made me sick and I made up my mind I wouldn't rest till he got out. Not only for his sake but for the good name of the country: after ten years it was beginning to look like persecution." For the next few years, MacLeish worked through his contacts in the Justice and State Departments and coordinated a successful joint request by Eliot, Hemingway, and Frost to drop the charges against Pound.

Pound had helped and advised MacLeish in his early years as a poet, and MacLeish remained loyal to him despite an apparently continuous stream of insults and attacks from Pound. Hemingway, too, tested his loyalty. A letter full of praise for Hemingway but with a few criticisms will be followed by another trying to assuage an apparently enraged and resentful Pappy. He writes to Pound after years of insults. "I send you my affectionate regards and to hell with you if you won't accept them." And to Hemingway. "So you go & compose a long letter full of various ways of saying that I'm a turd and all filled with expert blocks for undelivered blows. What the Hell! I never meant none of them things you say I couldn't have meant." The letters to Hemingway and Pound show the variety of MacLeish's voices. With Pound, he uses a crisp, precise telegraphese. Hemingway brings out a sporting and earthy bravado not fully expressed to anyone else.

From 1949 to 1962 MacLeish was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, where we see him inviting the likes of Acheson, James Reston, Frankfurter, and Oppenheimer to come chat with the students in Eliot House, where he served as master. During these years he wrote J. B., the work for which he is best remembered, a verse play based on the story of Job. And in one concurrent letter he states the problem J. B. addresses, an ancient human quandary made even more pressing by the painful events of the twentieth century--"the problem of making sense, making 'justice,' of a world in which men and women and children suffer and die by the millions in holocausts which seemingly take no account of humanity." MacLeish finds the resolution for the play and for himself neither in reason nor in religion. He writes that "the play's resolution is the only one humanity has ever found which I can accept for myself: the resolution in and through love...by loving life in spite of life."

The letters in this book deepen our understanding of that resolution. We see that MacLeish knew senseless suffering at first hand. He saw the agony of humanity in the World Wars, and the events of his personal life were often painful. His younger brother Kenneth, with whom he was very close, was killed in World War I, and MacLeish lost two sons, one as an infant and the other as a young man to cancer. But everything in these letters bears witness that he was nevertheless a great knower and lover of life, and that he believed this to be the root of his art. He writes his student Ilona Karmel that "heart alone has never made an artist as the sugary wrecks of millions upon millions of poems and paintings and works of music testify. But without heart, without the love of life, the hunger for life, was never anything that lived."

More vividly than a biography could, MacLeish's words show that unlike the tangled personal lives of so many artists, his own life was one of his works of art. To his friend Robert Frost he wrote this letter, one of the last Frost would have received:

Crossing the square this morning something made me remember that it is more than a year since I've seen you & therefore more than a year since I've had a chance to tell you with what delight & pride all of us who follow you so far behind watch your tremendous progress through time and place. Also to tell you with what gratitude I think of your unfailing generosity "and friendship to me. A good part of whatever confidence I have rests on that. This needs, of course, no answer. yours ever Archie