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| Archibald MacLeish. |
Archibald MacLeish was born in
swanky Glencoe on the Lake Michigan shore north of Chicago on May 7, 1892. He became one of the most important American poets of the 20th Century and an extraordinary public intellectual and servant.
Yet he is not regarded as an Illinois
poet because he was aimed by his parents,
particularly his mother, like an arrow for the Ivy League and a place among the Eastern elite.
His
father Andrew was the son of a poor Glasgow shop keeper who had emigrated
to the U.S. and made a respectable
fortune as a Chicago dry goods merchant.
But his highly accomplished and ambitious
mother Martha, who by the time he
was born already been the President of Rockford
College, was a Hillard and a direct descendent of the Mayflower’s
William Brewster. She felt this
distinguished lineage destined her son to deserved greatness.
To
prepare him, Archibald was educated from 1907 to 1911 at The Hotchkiss School, a toney private
boarding school in Connecticut
that existed solely to prepare the right
sort of young men for Yale.
At
college MacLeish edited and wrote for
the Yale
Literary Magazine, contributed to the Yale Review, and composed
Songs for a Summer’s Day, a sonnet sequence that was chosen as
the Prize
Poem of 1915. He was duly elected—conspiracy theorist alert—to
the secret Skull and Bones Society and
Phi
Beta Kapa.
Upon
graduation in 1916 MacLeish married very suitably to Miss Ada Hitchcock and enrolled that fall at Harvard Law School. By the
time Yale University Press published
his first full book of poetry, Tower of Ivory which included Our
Lady of Troy, the first of his long
poems, in 1977 MacLeish was otherwise engaged.
But
his steady and dutiful march to just the life his mother envisioned for him was
interrupted, as it was for so many by World
War I. Like so many other y==oung
men who were or would become major writers, MacLeish signed up as an ambulance driver to get to the front in France in advance of the American
Expeditionary Force. When it
arrived, he transferred to the Army and
rose to the rank of captain in the artillery by war’s end.
The
war, of course was a shattering experience.
MacLeish recognized that the world was changed fundamentally in some
way. It took him a little longer to
realize that he was, too. He dutifully
returned home to resume his life, including his law studies at Harvard. He graduated in 1919, taught law for a semester at Harvard, and then worked
briefly as an editor for The
New Republic before spending three years practicing business law.
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| Ada Hitchcock, a noted singer, and Archibald MacLeish before their move to Paris. |
And
then, suddenly, he had had enough. He
threw up his job, his mother’s expectations, the shining and respectable career that would have made
him, inevitably, a very rich man. In
1923 he packed up his wife Ada and their two children to take up residence in a
fourth-floor flat on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris. Suddenly, he was an expatriate, albeit one who could live more comfortably than say the
perpetually broke Ernest Hemingway. But he knew them all—Gertrude Stein, F. Scott
and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Pablo
Picasso. Others he would meet and
hob nob with as a guest of Gerald and Sarah
Murphy on the Riviera including John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, John O’Hara,
Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, and Robert
Benchley.
In
addition to heady conversation and a
bit of suitably bohemian carousing, MacLeish
found time to work seriously on his poetry.
He embraced the modernists—the
new, post-war identity of the imagists—particularly
their high priests, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. His style, world view, themes shifted. By 1924 he was able to release a new book, The
Happy Marriage, and Other Poems featuring the long title poem and a
number of short ones, a combination which confused some readers and critics,
but which he continued to employ. Two
years later Harry Crosby, publisher
of the Black Sun Press issued a
first, limited edition of MacLeish’s break out long poem Einstein, a verse
exploration of biography, science, and an emerging world. He also came
out with Streets in the Moon which contained many of the short poems for
which he is now best known, including those coming to grips with his war
experience and Ars Poetica which some viewed as a clear manifesto of the
modernists art-for-arts-sensibility. But
almost as soon as it was published, the world pushed MacLeish in a different
direction. He was about to become, most definitely
about real things in the world and a
voice for change.
When
he returned to the States in 1928 he
found himself something of a famous
poet. He contributed widely to
magazines from Poetry, to the New Yorker and The Nation, to popular
journals like Collier’s. Many of these
short poems, like those in Streets in the Moon, have become widely anthologized and are familiar to
those with a survey course understanding
of modern American poetry. They ended up
in later omnibus collections and, to
his regret became more remembered than his very ambitious long poems.
Back
in the states, somewhat to his own surprise, MacLeish found that his expatriate
status and reputation as a ground-breaking poet, had not entirely destroyed his
residual respectability. From 1930 to 1938
he supported his family a writer and
editor for that bastion of capitalism, Fortune Magazine.
Working, as a later poet would say, in the belly of the beast, the stock
market crisis of 1929 and ensuing Great
Depression convinced him that capitalism and the free market had collapsed due to the greed and short sightedness of
the wealth oligarchs who could not
stop themselves-- from continuing to extract
milk from the dead cow. The victims
of the collapse and the greed, the working
and middle classes would
understandably turn to panaceas like
Marxism and Soviet style Communism.
Unlike his friend and associates who had fully embraced Marxism,
however, he did not feel that it was historically
inevitable or even necessarily
beneficial in the long term.
For
one thing, the victims might just as
easily be conned into an even more dangerous alternative. He saw the specter of fascism rising
in Europe and was alarmed. He was among the earliest of American anti-fascists. MacLeish’s hope,
and sometimes it seemed a forlorn one, was for a virtually revolutionary makeover of capitalism to defang if of its most vicious aspects and provide both security and dignified full citizenship to the working and middle classes.
Now
that he had something to say, MacLeish invented what he called his public voice, more didactic and direct stripped
of some of the frills and images of artistic verse, yet powerful. He used this voice in both short pieces and
interwove it alternately with his image-filled verse in his longer poems,
expanding and elucidating the themes. This
work could be found in his books of the 1930’s—New Found Land, 1930; Conquistador,
a long narrative poem in ’32; Before Match, also in ’32; Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City
about capitalism, public art, and Diego Rivera in ’33; Public
Speech, ’36; Land of the Free, ’38; and America
Was Promises in 1939.
By
mid-decade he was seeking new avenues to project his poetry and actively engage
an audience. He turned to radio scripts, reader’s theater style presentation
of some of his long poems, and
finally full verse drama on the stage. The radio scripts included The
Fall of the City, aired in April, 1937 and Air Raid, based on the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish
Civil War by Nazi airmen flying
for Franco and Picasso’s famous painting, broadcast in
October, 1938. Panic: A Play in Verse, was a variation on the Cain story set against the background of the Great Depression. Young Orson
Welles was cast as McGafferty the
everyman who in a blind fury embraces
Marxist determinism while the Financier fails. The Blind
Man, acting as a Greek Chorus and
MacLeish’s Public Voice, commented on the mutual tragedy.
MacLeish
was hardly the only one who held these ideas.
Among those who shared them was his fellow patrician, Franklin D. Roosevelt
and his practical operative, Harry Hopkins. Roosevelt admired the poets work and decided
that he needed his services. Their views
were so similar that MacLeish earned the reputation as the Poet of the New Deal. Their
mutual friend, Felix Frankfurter,
was the messenger. As MacLeish put it, “The President
decided I wanted to be Librarian of
Congress.”
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| First day on the job as Librarian of Congress. |
The
1939 nomination was highly controversial. Republicans
in Congress were predictably outraged that the job was
being offered to a known associate of Communists
and a partisan of the President
arguing the post should be non-political. Isolationists
objected to his aggressive anti-fascism—just
the stance that made him so attractive to Roosevelt at this juncture. But noisy and organized opposition also
rolled in from the American Library
Association and academics. They had spent decades trying to raise
being a librarian to a profession at least on the par with teaching and had
long argued that only college trained administrators
were fit to lead major institutions. And
now the biggest, most important plum in
the field was being given to someone with no library training at all. Even the President of Harvard, where MacLeish
was a respected faculty member, came
out publicly against the appointment.
Another
obstacle was the incumbent Librarian, Herbert
Putnam who had served in the post since his appointment by William McKinley in 1899. Highly
respected and a sentimental favorite,
Republicans rallied to his cause.
Roosevelt enticed him into retirement by naming him Librarian Emeritus with a continuing elder advisor role. In
the end, MacLeish was confirmed and Putnam over played his hand, offering to
continue to virtually manage the library from his ceremonial office and let MacLeish
be a figurehead.
He
found a hostile staff of long term functionaries
resistant to change, but librarian or not MacLeish turned out to be a more than
able administrator. He commissioned committees of experts to examine the
vast collection and found that one
quarter of the entire collection had never been catalogued and was thus essentially useless. The problem was growing worse with almost indiscriminate acquisition. In time he was able to implement new policies
and procedures that ate away steadily at the backlog while refining the
collection, including filling out areas where it was shockingly lacking. Eventually MacLeish won over his critics in
the Library association for the professionalism of his administration, even if
he never won the hearts of Republicans in Congress.
More
important to Roosevelt, MacLeish expanded public education programs including
lectures and readings—and featured many voices—political, diplomatic, and
artistic who sounded the alarm on the threat of the Nazis and Fascists. He also explored things like sponsoring radio
programing.
One
of his greatest contributions was in establishing the position that became
known as the Poet Laureate of United
States—officially the Poet Laureate
Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress which was funded from hefty
donation from shipbuilding tycoon Archer
M. Huntington. Huntington tied his funding to the selection of came from a donation in 1937 from, a wealthy
ship builder. Huntington’s largess was
tied to the appointment of Joseph
Auslander to the post, which was intended to be a life-time sinecure. MacLeish
had little regard for Auslander as a poet, but did find his connections useful
in brining first class talent like Robert
Frost to the Library for readings. Gently,
he maneuvered to make the post an annual appointment with the possibility of a
second term. That brought a lot of new
talent to the library on a regular basis and the publicity surrounding the
selections helped increase interest in poetry.
With
America’s entry into World War II MacLeish picked up some very important extra assignments. He was called on to assist in the creation of
the Research and Analysis Branch of
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
Wild Bill Donovan’s predecessor to the
CIA. Top academic and their graduate students in many disciplines
staffed the branch, which was located in an annex of the Library. It
brought sophisticated analysis to the intelligence
service, and helped cement the tradition of drawing on Ivy League—especial Yale—alumni in what became a permanent establishment. MacLeish also served as Director of the War
Department’s Office of Facts and Figures and as the Assistant Director of the Office of War Information, essentially a propaganda post.
After
leaving the Library of Congress in 1944, MacLeish capped off his government
service as Assistant Secretary of State
for Public Affairs and spent a post-war
year representing the U.S. at the
creation of the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO.)
During
his years of public service, his literary output essentially stopped. After returning to academia he began writing
again. Actfive and Other Poems published in 1947 announced his return
to verse. It was followed by a career
retrospective, Collected Poems 1917-1952. In
1948 Harvard elevated him to Boylston
Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, its most distinguished endowed
chair.
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| Raymond Massey and Christopher Plummer in the 1959 Tony Award winning production of J.B. directed by Elia Kazan. |
Increasingly
MacLeish was drawn to verse drama. His
best known play, J.B.: A Play in Verse, based on the Biblical story of Job, was
first mounted by Yale School of
Drama and a revised version was
produced to wide acclaim on Broadway in
1958. Also noteworthy were the radio
play The
Trojan Horse first presented on BBC in Britain; the 1960 teleplay
The Secret of Freedom; Herakles
in 1965; Scratch, based on Stephen
Vincent Benet’s short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster produced
on Broadway in 1971; and a final radio play, The Great American Fourth of July
Parade in 1975.
By
the time MacLeish died on April 20,
1982 at the age of 89 in Boston he
had amassed a slew of honors—three Pulitzer
Prizes, two for poetry and one for drama; the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; a National
Book Award; a Tony Award for J.B; the French Legion of Honor for his contributions to the Allied cause during World War II, and Presidential Medal of Freedom from Jimmy Carter in 1977.
The
would-be scruffy expatriate poet had fulfilled his mother’s dreams after all as
the poet of the 20th Century Liberal
Democratic Establishment.
Ars Poetica
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
--Archibald
MacLeish
The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak
The young dead
soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless,
they are heard in the still houses:
who has not
heard them?
They have a
silence that speaks for them at night
and when the
clock counts.
They say: We
were young. We have died.
Remember us.
They say: We
have done what we could
but until it is
finished it is not done.
They say: We
have given our lives but until it is finished
no one can know
what our lives gave.
They say: Our
deaths are not ours: they are yours,
they will mean
what you make them.
They say:
Whether our lives and our deaths were for
peace and a new
hope or for nothing we cannot say,
it is you who
must say this.
We leave you our
deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young,
they say. We have died; remember us.
—Archibald MacLeish
Invocation to
the Social Muse
Señora, it is
true the Greeks are dead.
It is true also
that we here are Americans:
That we use the
machines: that a sight of the god is unusual:
That more people
have more thoughts: that there are
Progress and
science and tractors and revolutions and
Marx and the
wars more antiseptic and murderous
And music in
every home: there is also Hoover.
Does the lady
suggest we should write it out in The Word?
Does Madame
recall our responsibilities? We are
Whores,
Fräulein: poets, Fräulein, are persons of
Known vocation
following troops: they must sleep with
Stragglers from
either prince and of both views.
The rules permit
them to further the business of neither.
It is also
strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers.
Those that
infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas—
Their bones are
resultantly afterwards found under newspapers.
Preferring life
with the sons to death with the fathers,
We also doubt on
the record whether the sons
Will still be
shouting around with the same huzzas—
For we hope Lady
to live to lie with the youngest.
There are only a
handful of things a man likes,
Generation to
generation, hungry or
Well fed: the
earth’s one: life’s
One: Mister
Morgan is not one.
There is nothing
worse for our trade than to be in style.
He that goes
naked goes further at last than another.
Wrap the bard in
a flag or a school and they’ll jimmy his
Door down and be
thick in his bed—for a month:
(Who recalls the
address now of the Imagists?)
But the naked
man has always his own nakedness.
People remember
forever his live limbs.
They may drive
him out of the camps but one will take him.
They may stop
his tongue on his teeth with a rope’s argument—
He will lie in a
house and be warm when they are shaking.
Besides,
Tovarishch, how to embrace an army?
How to take to
one’s chamber a million souls?
How to conceive
in the name of a column of marchers?
The things of
the poet are done to a man alone
As the things of
love are done—or of death when he hears the
Step withdraw on
the stair and the clock tick only.
Neither his
class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him
There where he
lies on his left arm and will die,
Nor his class
nor his kind nor his trade when the blood is jeering
And his knee’s
in the soft of the bed where his love lies.
I remind you,
Barinya, the life of the poet is hard—
A hardy life
with a boot as quick as a fiver:
Is it just to
demand of us also to bear arms?
—Archibald MacLeish
Dr. Sigmund
Freud Discovers The Sea Shell
Science, that
simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what
anything is for:
Enough for her
devotions that things are
And can be
contemplated soon as gathered.
She knows how
every living thing was fathered,
She calculates
the climate of each star,
She counts the
fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of
them exists, fish, fire or feathered.
Why should she?
Her religion is to tell
By rote her
rosary of perfect answers.
Metaphysics she
can leave to man:
She never wakes
at night in heaven or hell
Staring at
darkness. In her holy cell
There is no darkness
ever: the pure candle
Burns, the beads
drop briskly from her hand.
Who dares to
offer Her the curled sea shell!
She will not
touch it!--knows the world she sees
Is all the world
there is! Her faith is perfect!
And still he
offers the sea shell . . .
What surf
Of what far sea
upon what unknown ground
Troubles forever
with that asking sound?
What surge is
this whose question never ceases?
—Archibald MacLeish
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