Archibald MacLeish

(1892-1982)

Archibald MacLeish was born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois. He was a poet, playwright, journalist, lawyer, and statesman. He served in various government positions including Assistant Secretary of State and was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve as Librarian of Congress, a position he held from 1939 to 1944. He won three Pulitzer Prizes for his writing.

Archibald MacLeish
Modern American Poetry

Archibald MacLeish
Academy of American Poets

Archibald MacLeish
Wikipedia

Archibald MacLeish Interview
Paris Review

Library of Congress

Poems

[Ars Poetica] [Baccalaureate] [Two Poems From the War ]
[An Eternity] [The End of the World]

 

Poetry

Archibald MacLeish, Songs for a Summer's Day: (A Sonnet-Cycle) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915)

________________, Tower of Ivory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917)

________________, The Happy Marriage and other Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924)

________________, The Pot of Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925)

________________, Streets in the Moon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926)

________________, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928)

________________, Einstein (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929)

________________, Interrogate the Stones (Pasadena, California: Ward Ritchie, 1929)

________________, New Found Land, Fourteen Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930) (printed in Paris by Black Sun Press)

________________, Conquistador (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932)

________________, Before March (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1932)

________________, Poems, 1924-1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933)

_______________, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (New York: John Day Company, 1933)

________________, Poems (London: Boriswood, 1935)

_______________, Public Speech, Poems (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936) (London: Boriswood, 1936)

________________, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938)

________________, America Was Promises (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1939)

________________, Poems (London: John Lane, 1943)

________________, Actfive, and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948) (London: Bodley Head, 1950) (Random House, 1967)

________________, Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952)

________________, Songs for Eve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954)

________________, The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962)

________________, The Wild Old Wicked Man, & Other Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968)

________________, The Human Season: Selected Poems, 1926-1972 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972)

________________, New & Collected Poems, 1917-1976 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976)

________________, Collected Poems, 1917-1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

Correspondence

R.H. Winnick (ed.), Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983)

Conversations, Interviews, Reflections

Bernard A. Drabeck and Helen E. Ellis (eds.), Archibald MacLeish: Reflections (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986)

Warren V. Bush (ed.), The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren (1964)

Bernard A. Drabeck & Helen E. Ellis (eds.), Archibald MacLeish: Reflections: (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986)

Plays

Archibald MacLeish, Nobodaddy: A Play (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Dunster House, 1926)

_______________, Panic: A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935)

_______________, The Fall of the City: A Verse Play for Radio (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937)

_______________, Air Raid, a Verse Play for Radio (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938)

________________, The Trojan Horse: A Play (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952)

________________, This Music Crept by Me Upon the Waters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953) (Roma [Italy]: Botteghe Oscure, 1953)

________________, J.B.: A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)

________________, Herakles: A Play in Verse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967)

________________, An Evening's Journey to Conway, Massachusetts: An Outdoor Play (Northampton, Massachusetts: Printed at Gehenna Press, 1967)

________________, The Great American Fourth of July Parade: A Verse Play for Radio (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975)

________________, Six Plays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980)

Writings

Archibald MacLeish & E.F. Prichard, Jr. (eds.), Law and Politics: Occasional Papers of Felix Frankfurter, 1913-1938 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939)

Archibald MacLeish, The Irresponsibles: A Declaration (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940)

_______________, A Time to Speak: The Selected Prose of Archibald MacLeish (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941)

_______________, The American Cause (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941)

_______________, Prophets of Doom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1941)

_______________, The Free Company presents The States Talking (New York: The Free Company, 1941)

________________, American Opinion and the War (New York: Macmillan Company, 1942) (The Rede lecture delivered at Cambridge University on 30 July 1942)

________________, A Time to Act: Selected Addresses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943)

________________, Freedom is the Right to Choose: An Inquiry into the Battle for the American Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951)

________________, Art Education and the Creative Process (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1954)

________________, The American Story: Ten Broadcasts (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944) (2nd ed., 1960)

________________, Poetry and Opinion: The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pund, a Dialog on the Role of Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950)

________________, The Alternative (New York: Roger N. Baldwin Civil Liberties Foundation, 1955)

________________, Poetry and Experience (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1960) (Göttingen: Sachse & Pohl, 1960) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) (London: The Bodley Head, 1961) (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964)

________________, The Eleanor Roosevelt Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965)

________________, A Continuing Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968) (1967) (essays)

________________, The Great American Frustration (Stamford, Connecticut: Overbrook Press, 1968)

________________, Poetry and Journalism (Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft Press, 1969)

________________, Champion of a Cause: Essays and Addresses on Librarianship (Chicago: American Library Association, 1971) (compiled by Eva M. Goldschmidt)

________________, Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978)

Bibliography

Helen E. Ellis & Bernard A. Drabeck, Archibald MacLeish: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1995)

Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992

Signi Lenea Falk, Archibald MacLeish (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966) (1965)

William H. MacLeish, Uphill With Archie: A Son's Journey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001)

Arthur A. Mizener, Catalogue of the First Editions of Archibald MacLeish (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1938)

Leota H. Moller, "The Wide World of Archibald MacLeish: A Study of Poetics and Politics in Selected Writings," Master's Dissertation, Wayne state College, 1964

Edward J. Mullaly, Archibald MacLeish: A Checklist (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973)

Grover Smith, Archibald MacLeish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971)

Bibliography: Articles

Lauriat Lane, Jr., The Publication History of MacLeish's Longer Poems (in Notes), 61 (2) American Literature 273-278 (1989)

Eleanor M. Sickels, MacLeish and the Fortunate Fall, 35 (2) American Literature 205 (1963)

______________, Archibald MacLeish and American Democracy, 15 (3) American Literature 223 (1943)

Michael Stanford, The Cyclopean Eye, The Courtly Game, Admissions Against Interest: Five Modern American Lawyer Poets, 30 Legal Studies Forum 9 (2006) [on-line text]

Research Resources

Rachel Galvin, "Conversing With the World: The Poet in Society" [on-line text]