Word: macleish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though Archibald MacLeish, currently Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, considers himself primarily a poet, he has on several occasions turned to the dramatic medium. In the years just before MacLeish came to Cambridge for a year's stint (1938-39) as Curator of the Nieman Collection, he wrote three verse plays especially for radio: Panic (1935), Fall of the City (1936), and Air Raid...
During his decade as Boylston Professor, MacLeish has written four more plays. In The Trojan Horse (1952) he turned Homer's tale into a tragic and powerful parable about McCarthyism and the destructive force of fear and unreason. He specifically authorized its production without scenery, or over the radio. This Music Crept By Me Upon the Waters (1953), a comedy about five couples who have withdrawn from the banalities of the business world to a "paradise" in the Antilles, does not succeed; its obscurities prevent it from working on the stage...
...Pulitzer Prize-winning J.B. (1958), five years in the writing, nothing more need be said: these pages have already carried four articles about it by three different people, including myself, and enough's enough. Few persons know, though, that J.B. was not the first time MacLeish dramatized part of the Old Testament: he wrote a play, Nobodaddy (1925), about the Garden of Eden, which was published the following year by, of all things, Dunster House...
When war came. Léger's refusal to join the Vichy regime brought him disgrace and exile to the U.S.. where Poet Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, gave him a $45-a-week job collating bibliographies in the stacks. He has lived in Washington ever since; now, with a more lucrative contract from his publisher, he can afford an annual trip to the French Riviera. He never talks European politics in public, though he knew the secrets of 15 years of French diplomacy. His comments were saved for Chronicle, his latest work, which ends: "Summit...
Archibald MacLeish, chairman of the Faculty Committee on the Drama, commended director Stephen A. Aaron '57. "What Aaron did was completely remarkable," MacLeish stated; "he deserves very great praise." Shakespearean scholar Alfred Harbage, Cabot Professor of English, deemed the production "very well done, especially considering it was a terribly difficult play...