Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was an American poet, playwright, teacher, and public official and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Ill. on May 7, 1892. He graduated from Yale University in 1915. After serving in World War I as a field artillery officer, he received a degree from the Harvard Law School in 1919 and practiced law in Boston for 3 years. In 1923 he departed for Europe to travel and write. He lived mainly in France for the next 5 years, publishing several books of poetry during this period, including The Pot of Earth (1925), which echoed T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, an expression of MacLeish's disillusionment with the postwar scene.

During the 1930s MacLeish was a reporter on the staff of Fortune magazine. A strong supporter of the New Deal, he served as adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt while working as librarian of Congress (1939-1944). A vigorous defender of democracy in many articles and speeches, he revealed a growing awareness of the dangers of both fascism and communism. From 1944 to 1945 MacLeish was assistant secretary of state. In 1949 Harvard offered him the Boylston professorship in rhetoric and oratory; he continued to teach at that university until his retirement in 1962.

MacLeish served as a sort of poetic weather vane; for more than 40 years his work reflected the thought and feeling, the poetic environment, of its time. Responding more to the outside world than to any abiding philosophic or esthetic commitment within himself, he expressed, from his earliest published verse to The Wild Old Wicked Man and Other Poems (1968), the cultivated man's changing sense of a rapidly changing world. The conclusion of his poem Ars Poetica (1926) has become the universal motto of New Critical poetic theory: "A poem should not mean/But be." "You, Andrew Marvell" (1930) expressed for the entire generation of modernist poets who came of age with Eliot their debt to 17th-century metaphysical verse.

MacLeish's lengthy poem Conquistador (1932) was, in effect, a summation of the poetic fashions of the 1920s, in style and plan derived from Ezra Pound, in attitudes indebted to Eliot. It won a Pulitzer Prize. Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933) might have served as campaign poetry for the New Deal. His Pulitzer Prize-winning verse drama, J. B., reflected the 1950s concern with existential absurdity in its retelling of the biblical story of Job.

MacLeish's most important critical work, Poetry and Experience (1961), treats esthetic theory and practice. The body of his poetry is included in The Collected Poetry of Archibald MacLeish (1963). His criticism and commentary are in Poetry and Journalism (1958) and The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren (1964). He died in Boston on Apr. 20, 1982.

Further Reading

Useful for information on MacLeish are Signi Lenea Falk, Archibald MacLeish (1966), and the section on MacLeish in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968).

For more information on Archibald MacLeish, visit Britannica.com.

MacLeish, Archibald (məklēsh') , 1892–1982, American poet and public official, b. Glencoe, Ill., grad. Yale, 1915, LL.B Harvard, 1919. He practiced law for only three years and during the 1920s lived mostly in France. There he produced several volumes of verse, including The Pot of Earth (1925) and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). Conquistador (1932; Pulitzer Prize) is a narrative poem about the conquest of Mexico. MacLeish returned to the United States in the 1930s; the volume of poetry Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933) and the verse play for radio The Fall of the City (1937) reveal his deepening concern with the rise of Fascism in the world. He was librarian of Congress (1939–44) and undersecretary of State (1944–45). From 1949 to 1962 he was Boylston professor of rhetoric at Harvard. Among his later works are the verse drama J. B. (1958; Pulitzer Prize), a retelling of the story of Job in a modern setting; volumes of poetry including Collected Poems 1917–1952 (1952; Pulitzer Prize), The Wild Wicked Old Man (1968), The Human Season (1972), and Collected Poems, 1917–1982 (1985); a volume of prose, Riders on the Earth (1978), and a play, Scratch (1971), based on Stephen Vincent Benét's short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster.”

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. R. H. Winnick (1983); B. A. Drabeck and H. E. Ellis, ed., Archibald MacLeish (1986).

(1892-1982)

1917	Tower of Ivory. MacLeish's first collection, assembled while the poet was serving in the army, registers the disillusioning impact of World War I. The New York Times reviewer calls the poems better "than the average run of minor verse." Technically accomplished but conventional, the best is "Our Lady of Troy," a blank-verse play in which Faustus evokes Helen of Troy.
1924	The Happy Marriage and Other Poems. After two earlier collections--the sonnet cycle Songs for a Summer's Day (1915) and Tower of Ivory (1917) reflecting his war experiences--MacLeish issues his first mature work in the title poem, a complex meditation that shows the poet working through influences to articulate a personal vision and authority.
1925	The Pot of Earth. The first of the poet's major modernist works during the decade shows the influence of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in the story of a woman's sexual awakening, marriage, pregnancy, and death in the context of a mythical fertility cycle.
1926	Streets of the Earth. The volume includes the important long poem "Einstein," a meditation on the physicist's struggle to comprehend the universe, as well as some of MacLeish's enduring short poems, such as "Memorial Rain," "The Silently Slain," and "The Farm."
1928	The Hamlet of A. MacLeish. The poet's most elaborate and complex work is a challenging reinterpretation of Hamlet as a reflection of the modern world and the poet's own uncertainties.
1930	New Found Land. Reflecting the poet's return to the United States to live, this collection shifts from international to American themes. The volume includes two of his most admired works, "You, Andrew Marvell" and "Immortal Autumn."
1932	Conquistador. MacLeish's epic poem about the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés is hailed as the poet's masterpiece; it wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1933.
1933	Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City. Intended as a "replacement" for the removed murals by Diego Rivera commissioned for New York's Rockefeller Center, MacLeish's sequence celebrates the American land and labor despite the excesses of both capitalists and radicals. MacLeish's "public speech" style and declamatory stance are also evident in his other 1933 collection, Poems, 1924-1933, particularly in "Elpenor," MacLeish's partisan version of the modern underworld.
1935	Panic. In two special Broadway performances, Orson Welles stars in MacLeish's verse drama as a banker who is certain that he knows how to solve the problems of the Depression and is done in by selfishness. The play announces the author's shift of attention to pressing social issues.
1936	Public Speech. As its title indicates, the volume announces the poet's intention to use his verse to address important social and political issues, a stance that would dominate MacLeish's work thereafter.
1937	The Fall of the City. MacLeish's attack on totalitarianism takes the form of the first American play in verse written for the radio. It is performed on April 11 by Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith.
1938	Air Raid. Described as a "verse play for the radio," the poem dramatizes the bombing of a city in a series of vignettes.
1939	America Was Promises. A poetic call to action to save democracy. Fellow poet Louise Bogan complains that the work shows an essentially private poet being misled by assuming a public, prophetic role.
1940	The Irresponsibles. MacLeish's attack on American academics and authors for not taking a firmer stand on the side of democracy causes critics such as Edmund Wilson and Morton D. Zabel to accuse the writer of succumbing to the role of propagandist.
1941	The American Cause and A Time to Speak. These collections of speeches include many on the meaning of democracy and the artist's responsibility in its defense. Another collection, A Time to Act, would appear in 1943.
1948	Active and Other Poems. The title work is a dramatic poem in which MacLeish imagines a totally destructive war and laments the collapse of humanity and heroism.
1950	Poetry and Opinions. MacLeish comes to the defense of Ezra Pound over the controversy surrounding the latter being awarded the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos in 1949. MacLeish argues that a poem's "bad opinions" do not necessarily make a poem bad.
1952	Collected Poems, 1917-1952. MacLeish wins his second Pulitzer Prize for this compilation spanning more than thirty-five years. It prompts a reevaluation and renewed critical acclaim. According to poet Richard Eberhart, "There is something basically lithe, wiry, direct and clear-seeing about his talent. We feel him as distinctly American."
1958	J.B. MacLeish's verse drama recounts the trials of the biblical Job in a modern setting and becomes a surprise Broadway hit, playing for 364 performances and earning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award.
1971	Scratch. Disappointed by the social unrest of the period, MacLeish responds with his only prose play, inspired by Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," arguing for personal liberty and social order. Closing after only four performances, it is called by one reviewer "too arbitrary for a drama, too ambiguous for a history, and too shallow for a biography." MacLeish would follow it with his final dramatic effort, The Great American Fourth of July Parade (1975), dramatizing the philosophical battle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
1983	Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907-1982. Much of the politics and literature of the modern period is reflected in these wide-ranging letters. MacLeish's correspondents include Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Dean Acheson, and John Peale Bishop.

Quotes:

"Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold."

"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."

"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."

"There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream."

"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words."

"What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice."

See more famous quotes by Archibald Macleish

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