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 alone there.
quote by Archibald MacLeish
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Liberty
When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Her showery torch to see it blaze.
When liberty is wedded wife
And keeps the barn and counts the byre
Liberty amends her life.
She drowns her torch for fear of fire.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
quote by Archibald MacLeish
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Voyage
for Ernest Hemingway
HEAP we these coppered hulls
With headed poppies
And garlic longed-for by the eager dead
Keep we with sun-caught sails
The westward ocean
Raise we that island on the sea at last
Steep to the gull-less shore
Across the sea rush
Trade we our cargoes with the dead for sleep.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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An Eternity
There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.
Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.
Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness.
quote by Archibald MacLeish
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The Snowflake Which Is Now and Hence Forever
Will it last? he says.
Is it a masterpiece?
Will generation after generation
Turn with reverence to the page?
Birdseye scholar of the frozen fish,
What would he make of the sole, clean, clear
Leap of the salmon that has disappeared?
To be, yes!--whether they like it or not!
But not to last when leap and water are forgotten,
A plank of standard pinkness in the dish.
They also live
Who swerve and vanish in the river.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Way-Station
The incoherent rushing of the train
Dulls like a drugged pain
Numbs
To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums
Unfolds
Hush within hush until the night withholds
Only its darkness.
From the deep
Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep
Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue.
Among
The sleeping listeners a sound
As leaves stir faintly on the ground
[...] Read more
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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Broken Promise
THAT was by the door
Leafy evening in the apple trees
And you would not forget this anymore
And even if you died there would be these
Touchings remembered
and you would return
From any bourne from any shore
To find the evening in these leaves
To find my arms beside this door...
I think O my not now Ophelia
There are not always (like a moon)
Rememberings afterward
(I think there are
Sometimes a few strange stars upon the sky.)
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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The Old Men In The Leaf Smoke
The old men rake the yards for winter
Burning the autumn-fallen leaves.
They have no lives, the one or the other.
The leaves are dead, the old men live
Only a little, light as a leaf,
Left to themselves of all their loves:
Light in the head most often too.
Raking the leaves, raking the lives,
Raking life and leaf together,
The old men smell of burning leaves
But which is which they wonder &mdash whether
Anyone tells the leaves and loves &mdash
Anyone left, that is, who lives.
poem by Archibald MacLeish
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