Word: macleish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vedantists, Taoists, Zen Buddhists and Bohemians. Getting personal, he is agin' Jean Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer. Walt Whitman, Alfred Kinsey. Adlai Stevenson, Aldous Huxley, Jack Paar, Caryl Chessman, Erich Fromm, Boris Pasternak, Charles Van Doren, Tennessee Williams, Françoise Sagan, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Archibald MacLeish, Albert Camus. Samuel Beckett, D. T. Suzuki and James F. Powers. He is also agin...
...word that breathes life in poetry is the image-not the image as ornament, but the image as analogy. As a superior example of what he means, MacLeish cites an anonymous Chinese poem...
...Religion. At 68, having ranged in his own poetry from a swashbuckling, 2,000-line epic of Cortes in Conquistador to the modern morality play in J.B., MacLeish himself is tempted to an omnibus generalization on poetry: "'What is the meaning of all song?' Yeats asks himself, and answers, 'Let all things pass away.' " The implicit proviso is "except this poem," and MacLeish goes on to say: "To face the truth of the passing away of the world and make song of it, make beauty of it, is not to solve the riddle of our mortal...
Poetry, as Archibald MacLeish sees it, is a little like a man who shuffles across a familiar rug and touches a doorknob, only to be pricked by an unexpected spark of static electricity. In that instant, two things happen. For one, the man "understands" electricity not as a textbook diagram, but as a felt experience "charged with meaning." For another, three disparate things-the man, the rug, the doorknob-have been fused with one of the cosmic forces. They have become, in MacLeish's view, links in the underlying order at the heart of the universe, which men instinctively...
Signs and Sounds. Amiable, ruminative, often obvious, sometimes pontifical, Poetry and Experience is based on MacLeish's Harvard lectures as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and it assumes a student's curiosity in taking apart a butterfly to see what makes it flutter. Ideas do not make poetry flutter, according to MacLeish. Reduced to prose, even great poetry is full of platitudes-life is short, love is sweet (or bitter), death is final. George Moore held that words have meaning only as signs of the things they stand for. Mallarme believed that all poetic meaning stemmed from...