Word: macleish
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...Wrote MacLeish, "The last line was like the bursting of a sun...Of course, I said. What else is a great poet! A man who knows the world." In his long and tremendously varied life (he died last spring just short of his ninetieth birthday) MacLeish knew as much of the world as anyone. He was a lawyer, soldier, outspoken journalist, and Harvard professor, a public servant whose posts included Librarian of Congress and Assistant Secretary of State, an advisor to Adlai Stevenson and F.D.R., and above all a playwright and a poet...
...Stevens '01 joined the staff. A young poet named Thomas Stearns Eliot '10 published poems in its pages a few years later. He was followed, in turn, by such literary luminaries as Conrad Aiken 'H. E. E. Cummings '15 (still writing in capital letters), Malcolm Cowley '19, and Archibald MacLeish...
...coming of the cold war soured the old idealism. "Freedom that was a thing to use/ They've made a thing to save," MacLeish wrote bitterly in Brave New World (1948), "And staked it in and fenced it round/ Like a dead man's grave." An appointment to teach English at Harvard in 1949 removed the poet from the public arena. A kindly man, he found that he liked instructing the young and that they liked him. In later years, MacLeish turned toward a new questioning of fundamentals. From the ancient paradoxes of Job he created J.B., which...
...hardly accidental that J.B.'s salvation was manifested in the return of his wife to "blow on the coal of the heart." MacLeish had been married since 1916 to Ada Hitchcock, his childhood sweetheart in Glencoe, Ill. (She survives him, as do two children, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.) Ada also dominates MacLeish's last book of poems, The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968). "Ah, but a good wife!" he wrote. "To lie late in a warm bed/ (warm where she was), with your life/ suspended like a music in the head...
Such verses prompted some critics to conclude that MacLeish's talent had never been an epic one. "He is, and always has been, poet," an wrote engaging Hilton and often Kramer of the moving lyric New York Times. But MacLeish lived in a time of desperate battles, and it must be said to his credit that when the trumpets sounded, the poet answered...