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
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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.
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.
That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
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.
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.