Archibald MacLeish Quotes - Page 3

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.

Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.

America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.

Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.

If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!

Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.

If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

They also live Who swerve and vanish in the river.

What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

What once was cuddled must learn to kiss The cold wonn's mouth. That's all the mystery.

The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.