Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet, writer, Librarian of Congress, and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is closely associated with the Modernist school of poetry, and he was greatly influenced in particular by the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Like Pound and Eliot, MacLeish eschewed some of the stricter rules of traditional verse; but throughout his life MacLeish's poetry retained a certain simple lyricism that set him apart from his more experimental colleagues. Renowned as a teacher, critic, and poet, MacLeish has been sadly underappreciated by subsequent generations of writers, though there remain a handful of poets who discover his poetry and, in it, discover one of the most thoughtful poets in American canon. In contrast to Eliot, who gave up his American citizenship to become an Englishman, and Pound, who supported Mussolini during the Second World War and would be tried for treason, MacLeish was one of the few poets of his generations to openly and ardently defend the cause of American democracy and political freedom. In fact, MacLeish's politics have contributed somewhat to his obscurity, as many of his fellow poets and critics shunned him for taking a pro-American stance. In addition to his poetry—which, as the years go by, is slowly attracting the critical acclaim it so deserves—MacLeish was also an accomplished playwright, and he would win his third Pulitzer Prize for J.B., a play based on the Old Testament's Book of Job. MacLeish has long been an underdog in the history of 20th-century American poetry, but he has not been totally ignored; his poem Ars Poetica is one of the most widely-anthologized in the English language, and is considered to be one of the clearest statements of the Modernist aesthetics ever written, and his brief lyric You, Andrew Marvell is viewed as one of the greatest poems ever written in traditional-and-meter by an American. MacLeish, like Randall Jarrell and John Crowe Ransom, is often categorized as a "major minor poet", and though he has been overshadowed by some of his more prominent contemporaries, he is nevertheless an artist of major quality.

Biography

MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois. His father, Andrew MacLeish, worked a dry-goods merchant. His mother, Martha Hillard, was a college professor. He grew up on an estate bordering Lake Michigan.

He attended the Hotchkiss School from 1907]] to 1911, before moving on to Yale University, where he majored in English and became a member of the Skull and Bones secret society. He then enrolled in the Harvard Law School. In 1916, he married Ada Hitchcock; the couple would remain together, happily, to the end of MacLeish's life.

His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served first as an ambulance driver and later as a captain of artillery. He graduated from the law school in 1919. He taught law for a semester for the government department at Harvard, then worked briefly as an editor for The New Republic. He next spent three years practicing law.

In 1923 MacLeish famously resigned from his law firm on the day he was to receive a promotion. He moved with his wife to Paris, where they joined the community of literary expatriates that included such figures as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He returned to America in 1928.

From 1930 to 1938 he worked as a writer and editor for Fortune Magazine, during which he also became increasingly politically active, especially with anti-fascist causes. He was a great admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. According to MacLeish, Roosevelt invited him to lunch and "Mr. Roosevelt decided that I wanted to be librarian of Congress". MacLeish held this job for five years. Though his appointment was officially opposed by the American Library Association because of his lack of professional training as a librarian, he is remembered by many as an effective leader who helped modernize the Library.

During World War II MacLeish also served as director of the United States War Department's Office of Facts and Figures and as the assistant director of the Office of War Information. These jobs were heavily involved with generating pro-American propaganda, which was well-suited to MacLeish's talents; he had written quite a bit of politically-motivated work in the previous decade, and during this time he wrote, among other things, a pair of pro-American, anti-fascist radio-plays that were popular among general audiences but cost MacLeish the friendship of some his more bohemian friends.

He spent a year as the Assistant Secretary of State for cultural affairs and a further year representing the U.S. at the creation of UNESCO. After this, he retired from public service and returned to academia.

Despite a long history of criticizing Marxism, MacLeish came under fire from conservative politicians of the 1940s and 1950s, including J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Much of this was due to his involvement with anti-fascist organizations like the League of American Writers, and to his friendship with prominent left-wing writers.

In 1949 MacLeish became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He held this position until his retirement in 1962. In 1959 his play J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. From 1963 to 1967 he was the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College.

Literary work

MacLeish greatly admired T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and his work shows quite a bit of their influence. In fact, some critics charge that his poetry is derivative and adds little of MacLeish's own voice. Others, however, argue that while MacLeish was certainly inspired by Pound and Eliot and imitated their style, he also gave their Modernist aesthetic his own unique stamp. MacLeish's work is characterized by dealing with profoundly complex and ambiguous topics typical of Modernism in ways that are surprisingly simple and clear. The finest example of MacLeish's technique is easily his most popular poem, Ars Poetica, which is brief enough to be excerpted in full:

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 all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be.

MacLeish's early work was very traditionally modernist and accepted the contemporary modernist position holding that a poet was isolated from society. He later broke with this position, believing that a poet must take an active role in the social causes of his or her times. MacLeish himself was greatly involved in public life and came to believe that this was not only an appropriate but an inevitable role for a poet.

Awards

• 1933 Pulitzer Prize for poetry

• 1953 Pulitzer Prize for poetry

• 1953 National Book Award

• 1953 Bollingen Prize in Poetry

• 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

• 1959 Tony Award for Best Play

• 1965 Academy Award for Documentary Feature

• 1977 Presidential Medal of Freedom

External links

• Archibald MacLeish's Grave
• The Paris Review interview series

Quotes

"We are deluged with facts, but we have lost or are losing our human ability to feel them".

"What is more important in a library than anything else — is the fact that it exists".

"A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man".

Cateogry:Art, music, literature, sports and leisure

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