Unlike many members of the American expatriate community in France between the World Wars, Archibald MacLeish is best known not as an alienated modernist, but as the continuator of the nineteenth-century American tradition of the man of letters as a public man, even government official, and as the advocate of a "public poetry" that he feels has not yet been achieved in the contemporary world.

Even during the twenties in Paris MacLeish never thought of himself as an expatriate. Born in Glencoe, Illinois, he was a distinguished graduate of Harvard Law School, a teacher at Harvard College, and a successful lawyer in a traditional Boston firm before he decided to take his family abroad in 1923. Later he was to become Librarian of Congress (1939-1944) and Assistant Secretary of State (1944-1945) during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even the period between the summers of 1923 and 1928 that he spent...