Archibald MacLeish, a venerated 20th century American poet, was also a graduate of Harvard Law School. MacLeish practiced law briefly before taking up poetry as his life's work. The following excerpts are from letters MacLeish wrote during the period he struggled with the decision whether to give up the practice of law. The letters are collected in R. H. Winnick (ed.), Letters of Archibald MacLeish 1907 to 1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983).

January 25, 1916 (During his first year of law school).

"At present I am completely swallowed by Law and I perceive little enough respite between now and June. It is a perfect jungle--the farther in you go the deeper the tangle gets and the more lies out behind you to be kept in mind. I won't say that it has not its fascination for it has. But it also fills me with a very real rebellion."

June, 1916.

"I sit here with the warm wind on my check and the soft blue of the Gulf Stream stretching out dazzlingly into the June sun and my body is as listless as the soft clouds that melt into mist at the horizons edge. I am empty of dreams for life is become a dream...."

August 13, 1916 (The summer following his first year of law school).

"My two remaining summers I intend to devote to the great mass of reading I have yet to do and for the doing of which my mind is so thirsty. Law and literature are, of course, incompatible, but I want to acquire a sufficient background so that if I am ever able to turn to the thing I most love I shall be able to undertake creative work at once. . . ."

November 11, 1916.

"I am laboring in a cursory fashion at the law and revolving certain things in my mind. Have you noticed how every now and again the platitudes on which you have walked rise up and engulf your very life?"

Winter, 1917.

"My silence is as the frogs--a continued din in your ears. Tres bien! We must err on occasion or there were no virtue. Hence there is much virtue in me. You see already the slimy mark of the legal mind like snail on leaf."

April 22, 1917.

"Continued failure to place my stuff [MacLeish refers here to poetry that he has been writing while in law school] in magazines & the continued success of persons of utter mediocrity to find place for theirs is slowly disgusting me and somewhat shaking my faith."

[In a postscript to the letter MacLeish adds] "April 22--and a fair fine day--devoted to the law of Sales. Man! What a fool thou art!"

May 7, 1919 (MacLeish has taken leave of Harvard to serve in WW I and has now completed his final year at the law school).

"I feel very keenly my own unworthiness just now. To be twenty-seven years old & to have accomplished no more than I have accomplished is not a matter for congratulation. And still less can I feel any complacence when I am not sure, even now, in what way to use my life. My various plans circle around me like moons, now in eclipse & now in a full & alluring light. Each one has its elements of attraction & each one its elements of repulsion. And the poor sea of my inclination has as many conflicting tides as there are rising & setting moons. I suppose I will find my decision made within a few days & shall then give over indecision for regret. Why is it so bitterly hard for me to choose?"

December 1, 1919 (After much agony MacLeish accepts a position teaching at the Harvard Law School and writes to his old Yale and Harvard classmate, Dean Acheson, now a law clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis).

"How can I avoid 'SUCCESS' intelligently? Working together with a common sense of the greatness of the law as a social instrument, the infinite capacity of the human brain to shape that instrument and with a very real opportunity to engage in an actual warfare with the stubborn Great Ones of our time to the end that the law may be justified--working so even practice might be delightful."

December 26, 1919.

"[O]ne must take his most perilous steps in life on the imperfect evidence of faith. Yet this is the merest platitude. For every man who grows takes first of all the supreme act of faith-- he agrees with himself to believe that the world and all that is in it is something more than the stuff of his own dreams; that life in it is worthwhile. And from that point on he continues to act on faith--he takes his friends on faith, he marries on faith, he chooses his profession and his religion on faith. Only after the preliminary act of belief has put him in motion does he, can he rationalize. Therein lies your greatest danger. You refuse to love with your eyes shut. Noblesse oblige--and you watch your friends with every organ of intellect awake, ready and eager to laugh at their mistakes because the integrity of your mind seems to demand of you that you never blind yourself to the weak or the comic. And the extraordinary part of that attitude is that the very fact of your being here at all is evidence that you have been playing blind-mans b[l]uff. . . ."

December 30, 1919 (MacLeish writing again to Dean Acheson and still worrying about his future).

"I haven't felt as much like the volitionless wind-buffeted creature of circumstances in all my life of opportunism before. I took out my three pitiful shadows of careers--teaching, [law] practice, journalism[--] & examined them individually & serially & in all patterns till I was dizzy. Then I became philosophical and examined myself. And finally I gave it up & came home with a sense of having occupied a morning in silly imitation of the Lake which, with each breaking wave, breaks down the ice-wall along the beach & builds, with the same motion, new barriers beyond. An endless battle of shadows--& I myself am the battlefield & the opposing armies. How can any thinking man imagine that there is any thing real outside his own mind? The reality is not the chair but the chair as he sees it. The reality is not the career but the career as we think of it. Well do we say that we 'make up our minds'. We do just that & therein do we erect, each one of us, the universe. The difference is that only one or two in a generation project themselves the plan upon which they shall build.

I took one step ahead. I discovered that my ambition to date has not been to do a certain work in the world but to be a certain person. When I think of [law] practice I think of the great practitioners & wonder whether I really desire to be as they are. If I think of the work at all it is to query whether work of that kind will give me an opportunity to be a little broader (more 'cultured' the phrase was once) than the ordinary lawyer. . . . A man decides that he would like to be a literary man, or a broker or a merchant--& embarks, as an incidental thing, upon the labor necessary to become such a one. Ask the ordinary business man what the significance of his work is sub specie aeternitaris & he will talk about you over the coffee as long as he lives. He's never thought. He isn't interested in his work as work; he's simply interested in the job that sets him off as a banker or a manufacturer. The reason why he wants to be banker or m'f'rer may simply be that he hopes thereby to achieve the greatest wealth. But that doesn't change the character of his choice. He has chosen to be, not to do.

Now I was at one time what we shall call, for lack of a better title, a Platonist. I nurtured what I thought to be the Greek ideal. Perhaps I was not altogether in error about it. At all events it came down to a matter of self-development. One was to choose that way of life & thought & faith which would give him most in body, & brain & soul. I am not prepared at this time to argue the rightness or wrongness of that theorem. But one thing about it is most assuredly true; that it leads a man to make his choice of a profession in life with an eye to the sort of man he'll be, & the sort of position he'll occupy when his profession gets through with him. He isn't to do things through his job. His job is to do things to him. And the ideal job is that job that gives you most & hurts you least.

. . . . [I]f this is anything it is the blind, sheep-life acceptance of the pattern of the world as it is; the thing we most want to avoid. God save us, if a man is anything more than a potential prize vegetable it must be his purpose to act upon the world, not to wait to see what the world will do to him. It should be his ideal to free the world not to fatten himself. And he should choose that way of living that gives him the greatest leverage on the world....

. . . . If you strip practice of law of its attributes of income & position & look at it as a means of effectuating a purpose, as changing the scope or direction of the growth of law, courts it at once becomes apparent that almost any purpose for which the law might be practiced except that of wealth & 'honor' may be better accomplished in some other way...."

January 12, 1920 (Writing to Dean Acheson about his future work).

"No sooner do I determine upon one course than the other beckons like the cults of Artemis. The result is that I have lost belief in myself & interest in my destiny. I hope I become a shyster practitioner with an eye to fees & a habit of reading Mr. Hearst. . . . After I've seen Croly tomorrow night & talked with a rich lawyer or so I shall flip a coin and decide my fate. (I shall see the rich lawyer merely in order to borrow the coin.) Then I shall write an ode to departed opportunity & blow my brains out. I'd rather be in love with two girls than to find myself in my present predicament. A man's other career will live to haunt him: the girl he decides not to marry will develop uninherited characteristics about 40 & bother him no more.

The whole trouble is that you & I have permitted ourselves to become interested in the game for the candle's sake. The great & happy majority never sees the candle & usually doesn't know there's anything more to the game than left tackle. I'd lay you our perambulator against the surrender value of your Life Insurance Policy that the average adult male of our acquaintance never once doubts but that the motions he goes through from breakfast to bed are Life. Get any banker to confess & he'll assure you that banking is living. . . . Get any lawyer to pray aloud & he'll divulge to Almighty God his conviction that lawyering is living & that the potential clients or possible malefactors he sees about him were put into the world by a forethoughtful god who would have been a lawyer himself if he had had better instruction. The point is that they've all swallowed the pattern--or let it swallow them. Since the breakdown of religion destroyed mankind's common sense of a common goal--eternal salvation--we none of us know where we're going or why. But having once started in persons of our great-great grandfathers we keep going like mad. When my great-great-grandfather Brewster became a divine on the ground that it was a respectable profession he made his choice because such a way of life was admittedly a direct road to salvation--& so reputed. The same thing was true of the law. It was a dignified profession because it enabled a man to be godly without too much humility. E contra acting was disreputable because actors, as everyone knew, committed adultery. And now god's gone & we choose because of the desirability of the profession per se caring not one whit where it leaves us as long as we're rich & notorious when its through with us. So I say that when you and I look for a profession because of its value as a means for operating upon the world--when we postulate a Life around & above & beneath the rut we intend to get wedged in we're all wrong. We might as well choose a profession on the basis of our maternal great-grandmother's maiden predilections. Damn the Irish!"

February 5, 1920 (In a letter to his mother).

"I've been struggling manfully as you know to come to a decent conclusion as to the thing I ought to do in this world and I've not found that it wasn't any easier as time passed. I threw over the chance to teach at the Law School first. It wasn't easy to do but it was easier than the other decisions and it had to be attended to first. . . .

. . . . Finally I decided that perhaps by rigorously holding to my purpose of writing and rigorously sacrificing the ambition to be the greatest lawyer in Boston to the ambition to write I might be able to write about as much after a year or two in [law] practice here as I would in the mills of New York journalism. The chances are against it. But I believe it is possible. And if it is I think I ought to practice. For my probability, if it is a probability, that I will realize my other ambitions is greater in the practice of law than it is in other things. What do you think?

I am still balking at the inevitable but I must soon reach a conclusion. . . ."

February 20, 1920 (In a letter to his friend Dean Acheson).

"I have decided to practice law in Boston. If you care to refer to mountains & mice you are welcome. God knows I do. I have persuaded myself to believe that I can practice (at least to an extent) and find some opportunity within five years say, to write. I admit it is a myth--the sort of thing one loves to believe in when one's windows open over clothes lines & ash barrels rather than the 'foam of perilous seas'. Perhaps it is because my alternatives do not convince me. Perhaps it is because I'm getting on. . . . But I'm sure its not a willingness to let the world have its way with me--to let my generation move through me. . . . I have not given up the dream of setting my seal on the brow of the world: I've simply given up the hope of it."

April 18, 1920 (Writing to his mother, the decision appears to be have been made).

"So much has happened I've decided on a life-work, bought a house and found some Hillards. And that is as much as I've done in all my life before. Ada [my wife] has written you that I have decided to go into Choate, Hall & Stuart in Boston & become a barrister. I am also going to teach my course in Constitutional Law at Harvard for one year more. After that I am going to apply myself altogether to the law & try to arrange to have time enough to write on occasion. Its an uninteresting outlook isn't it? Most high hopes boil down to that at last.

December 5, 1920 (?)(To Dean Acheson).

"You allege in effect, & by artful innuendo & colloquium, that, if the law is an excellent game it is therein & thereby justified, and that it is mere surplusage & impertinence to say of it that it has no meaning. . . .

I take it that we would both agree that the one common quality of all games is the incidental quality of the objective. Even in sports it is no object to win the particular match. . . . [T]he purpose of all intelligent men in opening their pores is exercise & physical well-being. And in the less violent games like chess and gambling the purpose is variously excitement, distraction, release, nepenthe--results equally well obtained by winning and losing. No man plays a game to acquire skill unless it be by way of insuring his power to distract himself in the future. Now if the law is a great & thrilling game & if it is professed by intelligent men for that reason it must be because it offers an imminently practical means of escape from self. And that is what I intended to suggest when I said the law had no relation to reality. And that I suppose is what you assumed when you said that even so it was a good a way to spend ones life as any other.

My disagreement is based upon my conviction that the high function of the human mind is not such activity & interests as will best blind it to its own existence in the universe, but rather its own expression. And its own expression much mean the expression of its ideal of life--usually in terms of its ideal conception of this world, for it has no other tools and symbols. That expression is not important as a reforming agency or indeed as an active & effective agency of any sort but is vitally important in & of itself. It is an act of creation, and creation we attribute to God--to our highest ideal of ourselves."

August, 1921 (To his parents).

"The law is crowded--interesting--& full of despair. It offers its own rewards but none other. Nothing that I would gladly be or have promises through its devolvement. As a game there is nothing to match it. Even living is a poor second. But as a philosophy, as a training for such eternity as the next hour offers it is nowhere--a mockery of human ambition for reality."

September 18, [1921] (To Dean Acheson).

"My renewed interest in teaching results from no new enchantment with that profession but from a profound suspicion of the practice of law. If I correctly analyze my emotions I am attracted to the law by considerations the most superficial imaginable. I am attracted by the general approval accorded to lawyers in an industrial society which is not sufficiently cognizant of its own interests to damn them; I am attracted by the game with its immediate success or failure--&, I suppose, by the fact that I have had some success; I am by my Chief [a senior partner in the firm] & his occasional approbation; I am attracted by the possibilities of money- making. None of these considerations seem to me of weight in a world which is at best an opportunity for life & at worst a mystery of living.

Teaching on the other hand has all my reasoning allegiance. Theoretically it is almost the only thing worth doing. The drawbacks are either superficial--the reverse of the arguments pro the practice of law--or such as a man with ambition cannot fail to overcome. The argument of limited income is not serious. Why then, in heaven's name not teach, is the question with which my vacation posed me. I confess there is no answer."

February 22, 1922.

"I am now in the throes of deciding whether to stay on in the practice of law or chuck it & take an assistant professorship at the H. Law School. My ancient and misplaced ambition to write lies dreadfully at the bottom of it for the whole purpose of the change would be more time for the concoction of words into verses. I wonder why I cling to that ambition so tenaciously.... I teem with purposes. I am beset with the passion to bring forth. But the process of begetting is tasteless to me. . . . It is partly the product of my timeless days. But it is also in part the product of advancing years. God rest us...we are no longer lusty beggars to lie endlessly under the lip of a haymow & work miracles in the patterns of the flesh. To teach or not to teach! I mistrust my worldliness. But if a man must ride two horses does it much matter whether the beast that bears his weight goes at a gallop or a canter? I might as well break my neck riding Old Dobbin, the law, at a full clatter as suffer sea-sickness on the back of Old Pansy, the pedagogy. I don't know. I shrewdly suspect my worldliness. And as for the service of God & my fellow men I'm not sure that I think twice about it. That's what they taught us at Yale. . . . Service! Service be damned! You do or you don't and little enough you have to say about it. I might go as a missionary to Papua & serve no man. And again I might grind the faces of the poor and serve them well enough. Let me hear from you on this service."

June 4, 1922 (To Dean Acheson).

"I have the spur of my difficulties. Just at present I am on the horns again. I have been offered membership in the firm of C.H.&S, I have planned an office of our own dedicated to the practice of litigation, & I have been asked to reconsider. And of course as soon as I reconsider--I reconsider. Now I don't know what to say or do. The personal element plays so large a part & my determinative powers are so frail that I despair of ever being satisfied on heaven or earth.
. . . .

I say we need poets & scientists. We need another Lucretius or a wiser Dante. We need to dream what we think we know in order that all we know may mean something."

September 12, 1922 (To Dean Acheson).

"My discontent rises from your increasing conviction that I am working in thin air, or in blown dust--at all events to one side of the object. The only subject of importance is my relation to mortal earth & human-kind & spiritual divinity. Nothing else is worth working at. Any other labor is a mere manufacture of new dirt to cloud the issue. The purpose of our profession is even poorer for we merely stir up the dust that others have made. The question is how to work at reality. We can't be scientists & so we miss the pulse of modern thought. We can be amateur philosophers in the intervals & lacunas of our busyness. But that won't do. What you & I are fitted for is the serious & healthy-minded study of political & social science considered not as an academic 'subject' but as the means of salvation. Political science & such poetry as I really wish to write will fuse. Law & such poetry are eternal irritants.

This is an ancient whine of which you have long been weary. The practical solution or half solution is clear--a job at the Law School. And I have refused that. I have also refused a partnership with C.H.&S. My present plan is to go out with Day next Spring. It is bad plan. What must I do to be saved?"

October 10, 1922 (To Dean Acheson).

"State Department or practice? You & I seem to be forever choosing between utterly indistinguishable ways of achieving distinction. Our real trouble is that we don't want anything in particular: we just want the world. If we wished for wealth or political prestige or social priority . . . I have no doubt but we could achieve. There are ways into banks and cabinets and teas which may be ascertained by a little thinking. And if worst came to worst courageous and ambitious young men like ourselves might attempt the front doors. But we want none of these things--as such. . . .

It's stupid for moralists to remark that one can achieve anything he chooses to achieve. Its the labor of a lifetime to make a choice of an achievement. . . . [I]t is very hard to decide on anything to achieve. It is rather ridiculous to decide on anything. If you do nothing at all you will last just as long in the Record Of the Rocks. And after all the point is to know, to learn, to touch, to feel. We can't 'be' anything. Or rather we are everything in the world to start out with. The problem is to know what that is.

One thing is clear and that is that you can't trust reason to decide anything of any importance about yourself. Reason is an excellent pander. It ferrets around among the hormones to find what complexion you desire for the moment & at once it has the very damsel of delight in hand."

March 25, 1923 (?) (To Dean Acheson).

"At the precise moment of decision I was thrown into the Warner Fuller libel case, the political case of which I have told you, and in the excitement & anguish of that trial everything else faded into insignificance. I decided to stay. Even the elements of decision have faded out of my mind now & I can only remember that it was a sense of my pitiful incompleteness as a practitioner which kept me here. Perhaps I am missing the boat. I don't know. But I have a tremendous sense of relief in having made a decision & perhaps that is the only reward I can expect."

May 2, 1923 (MacLeish writes to his mother about his most recent plans and the decision to leave the practice of law, move his family to France, and write poetry).

"Well, it's done. I've sold my house for $1000 more than I paid for it & we are going to vacate early in June. . . . I plan to leave the office October first."

December 8, 1923 (From Paris).

"Now I am getting my feet a bit nearer together & a few things have succeeded in writing themselves & I am satisfied that the adventure was at least worth undertaking."

December 26, 1923 (To his parents).

"I think we are both [MacLeish here refers to his wife, Ada] going to do a great deal more this way [writing poetry, living in France] than we ever should have done as a lawyer and his wife in Boston or anywhere else."

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