A Poet for the People

By Otto Friedrich

Archibald MacLeish: 1892-1982

In 1923, when Archibald MacLeish was 31 and practicing law in Boston (and moonlighting as TIME's first education writer at $10 a week), he abruptly abandoned income and respectability to take his family off to Paris. His passionate determination, he said, was "to write the poems I wanted to write and not the poems I was writing." Last week, when he died at 89 in Boston, MacLeish's 40-odd volumes of poetry, plays and commentary had won official rewards ranging from honorary doctorates (Columbia, Dartmouth, the University of Illinois) to three Pulitzer Prizes (1932, 1953, 1959) to the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977). Yet the conflicts between what he wrote and what he wanted to write remained forever unresolved.

In France, where he had served as an artilleryman during World War I, MacLeish spent five years among the expatriates of the Lost Generation, and from this came a number of rather conventional but polished lyrics. "A poem should be wordless/ As the flight of birds," ran the most celebrated one, "Ars Poetica." "A poem should not mean/ But be." But larger ideas were stirring. MacLeish went to Mexico to write the epic of Cortez, and Conquistador won him a Pulitzer for 1932. But by then there were other demands on his talent.

When President Hoover declared that nobody had actually starved to death in the worsening Depression, MacLeish wrote an impassioned refutation in FORTUNE, where he was a founding writer. It was his mission, as he saw it, to speak out on all contemporary causes: for Roosevelt's New Deal, for the Spanish Republic, against the spread of Nazism. "The victories of tyrants and the resistance of peoples halfway around the world," he wrote in 1939, "are as near as the ticking of the clock on the mantel."

He acted in effect as Roosevelt's minister of culture. Officially, he became Librarian of Congress in 1939, assistant director of the Office of War Information in 1942, Assistant Secretary of State in 1944. And when the war ended, MacLeish headed the U.S. delegation to the founding of UNESCO.

The poetry that MacLeish kept producing during these years acquired a solemnly official ring. Land of the Free, written to accompany a series of Dust Bowl photographs, purported to record the unspoken questionings of the People; America Was Promises urged the same People to demand their rights ("Listen! Brothers! . . ./ Companions of leaves: of the sun"). These symphonic musings inspired Edmund Wilson to malicious parody: "And the questions and/ Questions/ questioning What am I? O/ What shall I/ remember? . . ./ Till the hearer cried:/ 'If only MacLeish could remember if only could say it!' "

The coming of the cold war soured the old idealism. "Freedom that was a thing to use/ They've made a thing to save," MacLeish wrote bitterly in Brave New World (1948), "And staked it in and fenced it round/ Like a dead man's grave." An appointment to teach English at Harvard in 1949 removed the poet from the public arena. A kindly man, he found that he liked instructing the young and that they liked him. In later years, MacLeish turned toward a new questioning of fundamentals. From the ancient paradoxes of Job he created J.B., which ran for ten months on Broadway in 1958-59 and brought him the most resounding praises of his career.

It was hardly accidental that J.B.'s salvation was manifested in the return of his wife to "blow on the coal of the heart." MacLeish had been married since 1916 to Ada Hitchcock, his childhood sweetheart in Glencoe, Ill. (She survives him, as do two children, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.) Ada also dominates MacLeish's last book of poems, The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968). "Ah, but a good wife!" he wrote. "To lie late in a warm bed/ (warm where she was), with your life/ suspended like a music in the head."

Such verses prompted some critics to conclude that MacLeish's talent had never been an epic one. "He is, and always has been, poet," an wrote engaging Hilton and often Kramer of the moving lyric New York Times. But MacLeish lived in a time of desperate battles, and it must be said to his credit that when the trumpets sounded, the poet answered.

--By Otto Friedrich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.