The danger in reading a poet's prose is that one can too easily be swayed by sounds and syntax, forgetting that words must make sense, too. Fortunately, Archibald MacLeish's passion extends to meaning as well and, for the most part, what he has to say in [Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections] is worth listening to. In the first part of the book, he discusses from an intensely humanistic point-of-view subjects as various as Thomas Jefferson, the place of science in our lives, and contemporary fiction's flirtation with the absurd. The rest of the book is composed primarily of short autobiographical pieces, where the poet is at his most revealing and, consequently, his most entertaining, and brief mediations on other poets like Pound, Frost, and Sandburg.

Yet, no matter what the particular theme of a given piece, the general theme is always the continuing possibility of making...