MacLeish, Archibald

MacLeish, Archibald (1892–1982),born in Illinois, graduated from Yale (1915), served in World War I, and received his LL.B. from Harvard (1919), after which he practiced law. His poetic career falls into three principal divisions. The first, signalized by his expatriation in Europe (1923–28) and in part the result of his reactions to the war, extends from Tower of Ivory (1917) to The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). These works, along with The Happy Marriage (1924), The Pot of Earth (1925), Streets in the Moon (1926), and Nobodaddy (1926), a verse drama, show the influence of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and are subjective in content. MacLeish's work at this time was a voice of the hopeless individual in a chaotic postwar world.

Upon his return to the Depression‐ridden U.S., he showed, from the publication of New Found Land (1930) to Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933), a new attitude, in which his poetic influences were less obvious and his awareness of a national, social, and cultural heritage more sensitive and pronounced. New Found Land contains his poem You, Andrew Marvell, addressing the 17th‐century poet who heard “Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near,” and, three centuries before MacLeish, discovered, in the words of the latter, that “the shadow of the night comeson …” to bury the struggling heart in final darkness. His main book of this period was Conquistador (1932, Pulitzer Prize), an epic of the conquest of Mexico, in which Díaz tells of the battles to win territory named “for the kings that bear no scars” and “the bishops, rich‐men, generals, cocks‐at‐arms.” The end of the period was marked by the collection of Poems,1924–1933 (1933).

In Panic (1935), a verse drama, he turned his attention to immediate social issues of the American scene, while in Public Speech (1936) he definitely announced his intention to take his part in collectivist social thought. This dual interest in drama and social ideas was extended in the radio plays in verse, The Fall of the City (1937), exposing totalitarian dictatorship as a hollow mockery of leadership, and Air Raid (1938), depicting the impersonal cruelty of modern warfare. He chose the medium of these works in accordance with his belief that “the imagination works better through the ear than through the eye.” In America Was Promises (1939), he restated in poetry his theme of the need for action to save democracy, and Colloquy for the States (1943) is another poetic statement of patriotism.

Later poetry includes Act five (1948); Songs for Eve (1954), lyrics; and Collected Poems,1917–1952 (1952, Pulitzer Prize). He returned to verse drama with This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters (1953); J.B. (1958, Pulitzer Prize), treating Job's trials in a modern setting and idiom; Herakles (1967), relating aspects of the myth of Hercules to modern man; and The Great American Fourth of July Parade (1975), in which Adams and Jefferson comment on the U.S. of the 1970s. MacLeish brought together his poetry from 1917 onward in New and Collected Poems (1976). His prose includes The Irresponsibles (1940), an attack on American scholars and authors of the time for allegedly failing to take an active stand for democracy; The American Cause (1941), asserting the artist's usefulness in a democracy; A Time To Speak (1941) and A Time To Act (1943), addresses; The American Story (1944), radio sketches; and Poetry and Opinion (1950), Poetry and Experience (1960), A Continuing Journey (1968), and Riders on the Earth (1978), essays, addresses, memorials, and memoirs. Scratch (1971) is a prose dramatization of S.V. Benét's The Devil and Daniel Webster. His Letters 1907 to 1982 was published in 1983. His many important posts included Librarian of Congress (1939–44), Assistant Secretary of State (1944–45), and Boylston Professor at Harvard (1949–62).