About Archibald MacLeish: Archibald MacLeish is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night
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...
A poem should not mean But be.
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were a...
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.
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.
We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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.
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 opposite may be.
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
