Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeishwas an American poet and writer who was associated with the Modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during World War One, and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the US, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five year MacLeish was Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 May 1892
CityGlencoe, IL
CountryUnited States of America
Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
A poem should not mean but be.
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night ~ brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
A world ends when its metaphor has died.
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.
Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.