Word: macleish
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...when Archibald MacLeish was 31 and practicing law in Boston (and moonlighting as TIME's first education writer at $10 a week), he abruptly abandoned income and respectability to take his family off to Paris. His passionate determination, he said, was "to write the poems I wanted to write and not the poems I was writing." Last week, when he died at 89 in Boston, MacLeish's 40-odd volumes of poetry, plays and commentary had won official rewards ranging from honorary doctorates (Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Illinois) to three Pulitzer Prizes...
...France, where he had served as an artilleryman during World War I, MacLeish spent five years among the expatriates of the Lost Generation, and from this came a number of rather conventional but polished lyrics. "A poem should be wordless/ As the flight of birds," ran the most celebrated one, "Ars Poetica." "A poem should not mean/ But be." But larger ideas were stirring. MacLeish went to Mexico to write the epic of Cortez, and Conquistador won him a Pulitzer for 1932. But by then there were other demands on his talent...
When President Hoover declared that nobody had actually starved to death in the worsening Depression, MacLeish wrote an impassioned refutation in FORTUNE, where he was a founding writer. It was his mission, as he saw it, to speak out on all contemporary causes: for Roosevelt's New Deal, for the Spanish Republic, against the spread of Nazism. "The victories of tyrants and the resistance of peoples halfway around the world," he wrote in 1939, "are as near as the ticking of the clock on the mantel...
...acted in effect as Roosevelt's minister of culture. Officially, he became Librarian of Congress in 1939, assistant director of the Office of War Information in 1942, Assistant Secretary of State in 1944. And when the war ended, MacLeish headed the U.S. delegation to the founding of UNESCO...
...poetry that MacLeish kept producing during these years acquired a solemnly official ring. Land of the Free, written to accompany a series of Dust Bowl photographs, purported to record the unspoken questionings of the People; America Was Promises urged the same People to demand their rights ("Listen! Brothers! . . ./ Companions of leaves: of the sun"). These symphonic musings inspired Edmund Wilson to malicious parody: "And the questions and/ Questions/ questioning What am I? O/ What shall I/ remember? . . ./ Till the hearer cried:/ 'If only MacLeish could remember if only could...