Archibald MacLeish
The best known poem by Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), published in 1926, took its title and subject from Horace's work. His poem "Ars Poetica" contains the line "A poem should not mean/but be", which was a classic statement of the modernist aesthetic. The original manuscript of the poem is in the collections of the Library of Congress.
Read more about this topic: Ars Poetica
Famous quotes by archibald macleish:
“It is the human season on this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.
I cry to you beyond upon his bitter air.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“And crossed the dark defile at last, and found
At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain
The dead against the dead and on the silent ground
The silent slain—”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“Nor now the long light on the sea—
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on . . .”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“What is more important in a library than anything else—than everything else—is the fact that it exists.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)