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Archibald MacLeish
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Archibald MacLeish Poems
- Ars Poetica A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed ...
- The End Of The World Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot The ...
- An Eternity There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that ...
- Baccalaureate A year or two, and grey Euripides, And Horace...
- Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers Th...
- You, Andrew Marvell And here face down beneath the sun And ...
- Two Poems From The War Oh, not the loss of the accomplished ...
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Early Years
MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois. His father, Scottish-born Andrew MacLeish, worked as a dry goods merchant. His mother, Martha (née Hillard), was a college professor and had served as president of Rockford College. He grew up on an estate bordering Lake Michigan. He attended the Hotchkiss School from 1907 to 1911 before entering Yale University, where he majored in English, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was selected for the Skull and Bones society. He then enrolled ... more »
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Quotations
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''Poets ... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.''
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. As "Art and Law" in Riders on Earth (1978). "Apologia," Harvard Law Review (Cambridge, June 1972).
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''The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.''
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. As "Art and Law" in Riders on Earth (1978). "Apologia," Harvard Law Review (Cambridge, June 1972).
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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...
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. In "Return from the Excursion," Riders on Earth (1978). "Heaven and Earth and the Cage of Form," Rock...
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''The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.''
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. "In Praise of Dissent," New York Times (Dec. 16, 1956).
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''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.''
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. "Moonlighting on Yale Field," Riders on Earth (1978).
Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
A poem should be equal to:
Not true
For...
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Dear Caroline Mintzer
Stephen Colbert was quoting from Macleish's J.B: a Play in Verse:
I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
‘If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water.’
Stephen Colbert quoted Macleish recently - recall it was about Job and one of the last lines was having to do with the beauty of the wind on the water. Can you find that poem for me?
A lot of what A.M. said was not just Poems but Intellectual Quotations... HE WAS A.O.K. !
please i want Archibald MacLeish ars poetica analysis please