SOURCE: Blum, John Morton. “Archibald MacLeish: Art for Action.” Yale Review 81, no. 2 (April 1993): 106-33.

In the following essay, Blum recounts MacLeish's literary and political career, stressing the poet's liberalism and belief in democracy.

Art encompassed experience: so believed Archibald MacLeish; and since politics was part of experience, art encompassed politics. On the contrary, politics encompassed art: so contended the Fascists and Communists of the 1930s and their spiritual successors who used the power of the state to brutalize art and artists. MacLeish condemned them for what they thought and what they did. He also exhorted his fellow American artists to abandon their posture of political neutrality and accept the responsibility of art for action. Only action would protect the freedom of the individual and of the states that nurtured that freedom from the attacks of the new barbarians ravaging Europe in 1940. Later MacLeish again exhorted Americans, artists not...