Biography Essay

"Ars Poetica" and Archibald MacLeish are inextricably bound for most readers of modern American poetry, but neither this poem nor "The End of the World" (both first collected in Streets in the Moon, 1928) nor MacLeish's other heavily anthologized poems, such as "You, Andrew Marvell" (New Found Land, 1930), begin to capture the range and variety of his work. In addition to these and other excellent lyric poems, he wrote an epic (Conquistador, 1932), several effective satires, and no fewer than ten verse plays for radio and stage. He was also a lawyer, an editor, a Librarian of Congress, an assistant secretary of state, one of the founders of UNESCO, a teacher, and a literary critic. Through nearly all of the phases of his career, MacLeish urged understanding (awareness) and love as necessary to the human revolution (the beginning of which he associated with the American Revolution) for which...