If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published. Archibald MacLeish More Quotes by Archibald MacLeish More Quotes From Archibald MacLeish What once was cuddled must learn to kiss The cold wonn's mouth. That's all the mystery. Archibald MacLeish kissing mouths death Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. Archibald MacLeish personal-dignity dignity men Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England. Archibald MacLeish wyoming summer spring Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. Archibald MacLeish freedom exercise men We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent. Archibald MacLeish innocence guilty choices We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves. Archibald MacLeish atheism liberty belief They also live Archibald MacLeish swerve rivers Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo. Archibald MacLeish dying moon sun A world ends when its metaphor has died. Archibald MacLeish metaphor ends world Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen. Archibald MacLeish autumn country fall To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge. Archibald MacLeish acting realization opposites America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them. Archibald MacLeish america promise Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful. Archibald MacLeish grace morning children Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever. Archibald MacLeish medusa forever men A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit. Archibald MacLeish fruit poetry should A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. Archibald MacLeish flight should bird Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world. Archibald MacLeish events feelings looks If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see. Archibald MacLeish sight mean art The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority. Archibald MacLeish patterns demand atheism The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it. Archibald MacLeish frustration character america
