Biography Essay"Ars Poetica" and Archibald MacLeish are inextricably bound for most readers of modern American poetry, but neither this poem nor "The End of the World" (both first collected in Streets...
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Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was an American poet, playwright, teacher, and public official and a Pulitzer Prize winner.Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Ill. on May 7, 1892. He graduated from...
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Unlike many members of the American expatriate community in France between the World Wars, Archibald MacLeish is best known not as an alienated modernist, but as the continuator of the nineteenth-cent...
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In a distinguished and kaleidoscopic career spanning more than six decades Archibald MacLeish, chiefly renowned as a major American poet, has also served as soldier, educator, lawyer, journalist, libr...
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"Ars Poetica" and Archibald MacLeish are inextricably bound for most readers of modern American poetry, but neither this poem nor "The End of the World" (both first collected in Streets in the Moon, ...
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In the following review of New Found Land, Zabel concentrates on MacLeish's poetic style—which he finds to be strongly influenced by other poets, especially T. S. Eliot—and forese...
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In the following essay, Monroe evaluates MacLeish as a poet of the age with a sensitivity to human suffering, but wonders whether he has the necessary forcefulness to interpret the modern world.
One m...
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In the following review, Zabel traces MacLeish's development as a poet through the early 1930s and the publication of Poems, 1924-1933.
“My development as a poet is of no interest to me,...
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In the following review of Poems, 1924-1933, Jones comments on the symbolic poem The Pot of Earth and MacLeish's more social works, such as Conquistador, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's C...
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In the following essay, Van Ghent presents a thematic overview of MacLeish's writing up to 1938, considering its concentration on metaphysical issues and human fate.
MacLeish's first ten...
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In the following essay, Mizener emphasizes the continuity of MacLeish's poetic work over time, despite shifts in the poet's emotional and philosophical responses to experience.
The caree...
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In the following essay, Kohler describes MacLeish as a “spokesman of the modern age” whose social poetry reaffirms the American ideal of human freedom.
Archibald MacLeish has brought poe...
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In the following essay, Waggoner explores the role of scientific thought in MacLeish's poetic representation of infinity and eternity.
Since the time of Edward Taylor the chief philosophical pr...
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In the following essay, Jarrell critiques MacLeish's political/allegorical radio play The Fall of the City, finding it riddled with inconsistencies and calling it a “melodramatic oversim...
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In the following review of Collected Poems, 1917-1952, Whittemore highlights the pastoral element in MacLeish's poetry.
Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems, 1917-1952 contains perhaps e...
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In the following essay, Christensen considers critical reaction to MacLeish's verse play J. B. and defends the work from its detractors.
The publication a few years ago of J. B., a play in vers...
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In the following essay, Sickels tracks MacLeish's use of the Christian theme of the Fortunate Fall in his poetry, especially in Songs for Eve and the verse play J. B.
I
Archibald MacLeish first...
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In the following essay, Sullivan explicates MacLeish's paradoxical poem “Ars Poetica,” viewing it as “a rarity among poems on the art of poetry.”
Archibald MacLeish&...
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In the following excerpt, Smith offers an in-depth survey of MacLeish's poetry from his earliest verse to 1968's The Wild Old Wicked Man, focusing principally on subject and theme.
...
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In the following review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Carruth lauds MacLeish's overall work as a poet while devoting particular attention to his epic Conquistador.
Almost 60 years of p...
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In the following excerpted review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Siegel forms a list of MacLeish's most enduring works of poetry.
The New and Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish conta...
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In the following essay, Cavanagh analyzes MacLeish's effort to compose a Modernist epic poem in Conquistador.
Since its publication and Pulitzer award in 1932, MacLeish's Conquistador ha...
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In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1982, Walters praises MacLeish's mastery of the impassioned and human lyric.
What I mean by love is … the kind of relationship...
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In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1982, Ellis discusses MacLeish's poetic rendering of the nature of women as closer to the “truly true” than the nature...
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In the following essay, Pritchard illuminates the qualities of MacLeish's character that inform his poetry.
Archibald MacLeish died last April just as he was about to be honored on his ninetiet...
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In the following essay, Lane analyzes the spatial imagery and dialectic pattern of MacLeish's long poem Einstein.
In 1926 Archibald MacLeish included in part two, “Several Shadows of a S...
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In the following essay, Lane investigates MacLeish's revisions of the tale of the Grail knight Bleheris in his The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.
By 1926 Archibald MacLeish had left well behind both hi...
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In the following essay, Stout compares MacLeish's verse play J. B. and Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” as modern re-compositions of the biblical Book of J...
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In the following essay, Barber probes the strong social and public component of MacLeish's poetry, charting its development particularly over the period from 1930 to 1945.
In the course of that...
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In the following essay, Blum recounts MacLeish's literary and political career, stressing the poet's liberalism and belief in democracy.
Art encompassed experience: so believed Archibald...
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Critical Essay by R. P. Blackmur
The past is a living creature with a talent for seeming stable at particular moments. The use of an old myth today may provide a scaffold for contemporary feelings and...
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Critical Essay by John Wain
Mr. MacLeish has a weakness for the large subject; he finds convenient fairways in the major myths; previous works of his have rehandled the material of Hamlet and of the B...
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Critical Essay by Hayden Carruth
[My] rereading of MacLeish's poems in [New and Collected Poems, 1917–1976] has reaffirmed my admiration and has shown me excellences I had overlooked bef...
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Critical Essay by James K. Robinson
MacLeish's The Great American Fourth of July Parade is subtitled A Verse Play for Radio. It is a public speech to be broadcast—MacLeish's contr...
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Critical Essay by Peter Brunette
The danger in reading a poet's prose is that one can too easily be swayed by sounds and syntax, forgetting that words must make sense, too. Fortunately, Archiba...
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Critical Essay by Tom Johnson
Ten years ago Archibald MacLeish published a prose collection called A Continuing Journey; it was a public book, addresses and essays on topics ranging from literary theo...
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Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
