Archibald MacLeish Quotes

Mr Morgan struck me as a healthy and childish Britisher probably inhabiting the early 19th century.

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.

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

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

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can’t be heard.

Anything can make us look, only art can make us see.

Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spirit—the records of men’s watch upon the world and on themselves.

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

We have learned the answers, all the answers: It is the question that we do not know.

A poem should not mean But be.

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

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

 

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.