Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was 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 the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[1] From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Archibald MacLeish
Position established
May 7, 1892
Glencoe, Illinois, US
April 20, 1982 (aged 89)
Boston, Massachusetts, US
Poetry, drama, essays
Early years[edit]
MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois. His father, Scottish-born Andrew MacLeish, worked as a dry-goods merchant and was a founder of the Chicago department store Carson Pirie Scott.[2] His mother, Martha (née Hillard), was a college professor and had served as president of Rockford College.[3] He grew up on an estate bordering Lake Michigan. He attended the Hotchkiss School from 1907 to 1911. For his college education, MacLeish went to 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 in Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.[4]
His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served first as an ambulance driver and later as an artillery officer. He fought at the Second Battle of the Marne.[5] His brother, Kenneth MacLeish, was killed in action during the war.[6] He graduated from law school in 1919, 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 with the Boston firm Choate, Hall & Stewart.[7] MacLeish expressed his disillusion with war in his poem Memorial Rain, published in 1926.[8]
Years in Paris[edit]
In 1923, MacLeish left his law firm and moved with his wife to Paris, where they joined the community of literary expatriates that included such members as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. They also became part of the famed coterie of Riviera hosts Gerald and Sarah Murphy, which included Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley. He returned to America in 1928. From 1930 to 1938, he worked as a writer and editor for Henry Luce's Fortune,[8] during which he also became increasingly politically active, especially with antifascist causes. By the 1930s, he considered capitalism to be "symbolically dead" and wrote the verse play Panic (1935) in response.
While in Paris, Harry Crosby, publisher of the Black Sun Press, offered to publish MacLeish's poetry. Both MacLeish and Crosby had overturned the normal expectations of society, rejecting conventional careers in the legal and banking fields. Crosby published MacLeish's long poem "Einstein" in a deluxe edition of 150 copies that sold quickly. MacLeish was paid $200 for his work.[9]: 183 In 1932, MacLeish published his long poem "Conquistador", which presents Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs as symbolic of the American experience. In 1933, "Conquistador" was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, the first of three awarded to MacLeish.[8]
In 1934, he wrote a libretto for Union Pacific, a ballet by Nicolas Nabokov and Léonide Massine (Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo); it premiered in Philadelphia with great success.
In 1938, MacLeish published as a book a long poem "Land of the Free", built around a series of 88 photographs of the rural depression by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and the Farm Security Administration and other agencies. The book influenced Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Return to writing[edit]
Despite a long history of debate over the merits of Marxism, MacLeish came under fire from anticommunists in the 1940s and 1950s, including J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Much of this was due to his involvement with left-wing organizations such as the League of American Writers, and to his friendships with prominent left-wing writers. Time magazine's Whittaker Chambers cited him as a fellow traveler in a 1941 article: "By 1938, U. S. Communists could count among their allies such names as Granville Hicks, Newton Arvin, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Matthew Josephson, Kyle Crichton (Robert Forsythe), Malcolm Cowley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, John Steinbeck, George Soule, many another."[18]
In 1949, MacLeish became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. 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. In 1969, MacLeish met Bob Dylan, and asked him to contribute songs to Scratch, a musical MacLeish was writing, based on the story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" by Stephen Vincent Benét.[19] The collaboration was a failure and Scratch opened without any music; Dylan describes their collaboration in the third chapter of his autobiography Chronicles, Vol. 1.[20][21]
MacLeish greatly admired T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and his work shows quite a bit of their influence. He was the literary figure who played the most important role in freeing Ezra Pound from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he was incarcerated for high treason between 1946 and 1958. MacLeish's early work was very traditionally modernist and accepted the contemporary modernist position holding that a poet was isolated from society. His most well-known poem, "Ars Poetica," contains a classic statement of the modernist aesthetic: "A poem should not mean / But be." He later broke with modernism's pure aesthetic. MacLeish himself was greatly involved in public life and came to believe that this was not only an appropriate, but also an inevitable role for a poet.
In 1969, MacLeish was commissioned by the New York Times to write a poem to celebrate the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which he entitled "Voyage to the Moon" and appeared on the front page of the July 21, 1969, edition of the Times. A. M. Rosenthal, then-editor of the Times, later recounted: "We decided what the front page of The Times would need when the men landed was a poem. What the poet wrote would count most, but we also wanted to say to our readers, look, this paper does not know how to express how it feels this day and perhaps you don't either, so here is a fellow, a poet, who will try for all of us. We called one poet who just did not think much of moons or us, and then decided to reach higher for somebody with more zest in his soul – for Archibald MacLeish, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes. He turned in his poem on time and entitled it 'Voyage to the Moon.'"[22]
