SOURCE: Pritchard, William H. “MacLeish Revisited.” Poetry 141, no. 5 (February 1983): 291-301.

In the following essay, Pritchard illuminates the qualities of MacLeish's character that inform his poetry.

Archibald MacLeish died last April just as he was about to be honored on his ninetieth birthday by a large gathering at Greenfield Community College (near the MacLeish home in Conway, Massachusetts) to which he had given his papers. His death prompted few attempts on anyone's part at revaluating his achievement as a poet, or even at thinking twice about his career as, preeminently, America's elder statesman of poetry. Increasingly since the death of Frost in 1963 he had played the role of America's poet laureate without portfolio. If Richard M. Nixon requested a poem from him on the occasion of the moon landing of 1969, MacLeish, a lifelong Democrat, courteously obliged; after all, the President in his inaugural address a few months previously had...