U. S. Poems

FRESCOES FOR MR. ROCKEFELLER'S CITY -- Archibald MacLeish -- John Day ($.25). U. S. Poet-of-the-year is Archibald Mac Leish. whose Conquistador (TIME. April 11, 1932) won him this year's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Like Proseman Ernest Hemingway, Poet MacLeish writes in a masculine style of quiet violence: his sparsely punctuated assonant verse often sounds as if it were spoken out of the cor ner of his mouth. That the greatest U. S. captains are not industrial, in Poet Mac-Leish's opinion, is indicated by his title. The six poems in Frescoes for Mr. Rochefeller's City are issued in a format and at a price that deserve popularity -- a pamphlet that sells for 25-c-.

One of these "frescoes" is a personification of the U. S. landscape as a naked girl: She lies on her left side her flank golden: Her hair is burned black with the strong sun: The scent of her hair is of dust and of smoke on her shoulders: She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country:

Poet MacLeish has a low opinion of the U. S. artist ("the plump Mr. Pl'f) who decries the U. S., who prefers Cypresses mentioned in Horace or Henry James: He prefers a country where everything carries the name of a Countess or real king or an actual palace or Something in Prose and the stock prices all in Italian:

After contrasting such empire-builders as "Mister Harriman." "Mister Vanderbilt," J. P. Morgan. "Mister Mellon" and Bruce Barton with Trailblazer Meriwether Lewis, Poet MacLeish concludes: You have just beheld the Makers making America: They screwed her scrawny and gaunt with their seven-year panics: They bought her back on their mortgages old-whore-cheap: They fattened their bonds at her breasts till the thin blood ran from them: Men have forgotten how full and clear and deep The Yellowstone moved on the gravel and grass grew When the land lay waiting for her westward people!

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