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
That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.
If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.
Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt - an image of the world in which men can again believe.
Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful.
Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.