Word: macleish
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...Winnick has collected an extensive selection of the letters of this extraordinary man. The impressive range of correspondents reflects MacLeish's wide-ranging interests and his knack for getting involved with the public of his time. He was particularly close to Amy Lowell, Dean Acheson, and Ernest Hemingway. He wrote often to Henry Luce, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot '10, and occasionally to Felix Frankfurter. J. Robert Oppenheimer and F.D.R. And the letters are full of MacLeish's articulate and often beautifully phrased observations on everything from political campaign strategies to the function of poetry. What emerges...
Winnick's introduction includes a brief but adequate summary biography of MacLeish, providing a necessary framework for the letters themselves. Arranged chronologically, they constitute a flowing narrative with only occasional gaps or seams. The story begins as young Archive leaves Glencoe, Illinois, to prep at Hotchkiss; a few letters from MacLeish's parents to the school's headmaster, the only ones in the collection not written by the poet himself, bear witness to their son's homesickness and general unhappiness there. In the letters he wrote at Yale and as a field artillery officer in France in 1918, a somewhat...
...major concern of MacLeish's young life was the incompatibility of his longing to write poetry with the necessity of eventually supporting himself and his future wife, Ada Hitchcock. He agonized over whether business, journalism, teaching, or law would be the best compromise, finally deciding to go to Harvard Law School, from which he graduated first in his class. But three years of promising law practice and lecturing in constitutional law at Harvard College left him unsatisfied; in a letter to his family he calls the law "a mockery of human ambition for reality." And as he wrote Yale...
...MacLeish himself never regretted the decision, though there certainly were--and are--many who would call him a less than first-rate poet. His early work was justly criticized as overly derivative of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, a weakness MacLeish himself partially acknowledges. And though his voice became more distinctive in his poetry of the 1930s, even his best work was criticized as unoriginal. But the observations on poetry and criticism scattered through these letters indicate a coherent and convincing defense against such charges...
...MacLeish took a more workmanlike view of the art of writing poetry than most of his contemporary poets and critics. He questioned what he saw as romantic and modernist assumptions that all art must be subjective and original, writing 1932 that the task of contemporary poets was to "fix momentarily or for many generations the aspect of the world we see. It is enough to do that and to do it with self-forgetfulness and humanity...