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Archibald MacLeish |
In 1923, on the day he was made partner at a prestigious Boston law firm, Archibald MacLeish quit and went to Paris to be a poet. For five years he absorbed Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and Joyce and came home with a voice of his own. Four poetry books in four years established him as one of America’s finest new poets and won him the first of four Pulitzer Prizes. From 1930 to 1938 he was an editor at Fortune magazine, still producing poetry, but alarmed by what he called the rising darkness of fascism in Europe. He thought poets should speak out on politics, and he did.
In 1939, having been brought to the attention of FDR by Felix Frankfurter, his old law school professor, MacLeish moved to Washington to become the new Librarian of Congress, FDR speech writer, war propagandist, and founder of UNESCO. In 1949 he returned to Boston and poetry again (another Pulitzer). Plays (another Pulitzer). Screenplays (Academy Award). And political philosophy (Presidential Medal of Freedom). He was the anti-Eliot. Starting from the same grim assessment of our situation, MacLeish had a higher vision of our potential. He was optimistic, particularly about America, and as a public poet he gave voice to those dreams.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |