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

Archibald MacLeish

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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
Cities
Felt
House
Houses
Burned
Flames
London
City

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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
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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.
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
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If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Archibald MacLeish
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science—information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won’t.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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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
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A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
Archibald MacLeish
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Archibald MacLeish
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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