The same cannot be said of Archibald MacLeish, however, who was born fourteen years after Sandburg, and lived through to 1982. But they were both very public figures for much of their lives, each playing the part of Grand Old Man, involving themselves in and writing about politics and public affairs. The nonsense lyric is, I suppose, the consummation of mistiness. But in MacLeish's similarly vasty Collected there is a remarkable variety of styles. A good Selected for the English market would make all this clear and is long overdue.
Reputations come and go, of course, often in response to the social climate.
For years we were persuaded that Robert Lowell was the next American genius after Eliot. A tortured religious New England male was just the ticket - even when Notebook appeared and reappeared as History , even when he started to recycle other people's letters into his own poems. Elizabeth Bishop is in his place. American women writers are at last beginning to get a fair hearing in Britain. Faber's 1968 Collected and 1969 Selected did indeed bring him a degree of popular acclaim here, and he had already had PBS successes.