Word: macleish
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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...
POETRY AND EXPERIENCE (204 pp.)-. Archibald MacLeish-Houqhton Mifflin...
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...
...speak in Harvard Hall last year will remember); it has the built-in advantage of immediately alienating a certain number of ineffectuals and of subtly flattering the educated majority; thus it is considered controversial. It also permits Mr. MacDonald to indulge in one of his greatest pleasures: insulting Archibald MacLeish...
...every one of his plays, MacLeish is not wasting his time. He is always the statesman-teacher, dramatizing with serious intent the things he feels strongly about, which are the things he feels we should feel strongly about. He reminds us that the highest role of playwriting is to show and explain Man to himself...