Archibald MacLeish Quotes

A poem should be palpable and muteAs a globed fruit,DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—A poem should be wordlessAs the flight...

You wanted justice ,didn't you?There isn't any...there is only love. - J.B's wife

Around around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

. . At Ghent the wind rose.There was a smell of rain and a heavy dragOf wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows

It is colder now,There are many stars,We are driftingNorth by the Great Bear,The leaves are falling,The water is stone in the scooped rocks,To southwardRed sun grey air:The crows areSlow on their croo...

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence o...