Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Poem
Poetry
Mean
More quotes by Archibald MacLeish
That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
Archibald MacLeish
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.
Archibald MacLeish
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.
Archibald MacLeish
The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
Archibald MacLeish
Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
Archibald MacLeish
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
Archibald MacLeish
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
Archibald MacLeish
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.
Archibald MacLeish
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
Archibald MacLeish
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
Archibald MacLeish
There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.
Archibald MacLeish
If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeish
Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
Archibald MacLeish
The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
Archibald MacLeish
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Archibald MacLeish
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
