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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

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
Flight
Bird
Wordless
Birds
Poem

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
Archibald MacLeish
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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.
Archibald MacLeish
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
Archibald MacLeish
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Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
Archibald MacLeish
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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
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A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
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Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
Archibald MacLeish
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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.
Archibald MacLeish
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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
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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Archibald MacLeish
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Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
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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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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish