Biography

MacLeish was innate around Glencoe, Illinois. His father, Andrew MacLeish, was the dry-soft goods merchandiser. His mother, Marththe Hillard, was a college prof. He grew au courant an estate bordering Lake Michigan.

He attended a Hotchkiss School from 1907 to 1911, before moving in to Yale University where he majored in English and became a member of the Skull and Bones secret society. He so enrolled in the Harvard Law School. Around 1916, he married Ada Hitchcock.

His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served number 1 as an ambulance driver & later on as a captain of artillery. He graduated from either a school of law within 1919. He taught law for the semester for the government department at Harvard, then worked briefly as an editor for The New Republic. He next spent ternion years practicing law.

Around 1923 MacLeish left his law firm & moved by using his married woman to Paris, where they joined a community of literary expatriates that included such members when Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He returned to America within 1928.

From either 1930 to 1938 he worked as a writer and editor for Fortune Magazine, during which instance he besides became progressively politically active, especially using anti-fascist stimulates. He was a great admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. Based on data from MacLeish, Roosevelt invited him to lunch & "Mr. Roosevelt decided that I wanted to be librarian of Congress." MacLeish held this job for 5 years, & is remembered as an effectual leader world health organization helped modernize a Library.

In the period of World War II MacLeish also served when director of the War Department's Office of Facts and Figures, and as the assistant director of the Office of War Information. These jobs were heavy required by owning propaganda, which was well-suited to MacLeish's talents; he got written quite an bit of politically-motivated function in the former decade.

He spent a month when a Adjunct Secretary of State for ethnical affairs, & a farther year representing the U.S. at a creation of UNESCO. When this, he retired from either public service & returned to academe.

Despite an extended history of criticizing Marxism, MacLeish came under attack from either conservative politicians of the Forties & Fifties, including J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Lot of this was due to his involvement using anti-fascist organizations prefer a League of American Writers, and to his friendly relationship by using large left-wing writers.

Around 1949 MacLeish became the Boylston Prof of Rhetoric & Oratory at Harvard. He held this position until his retirement inside 1962. Inside 1959 his play J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

From either 1963 to 1967 he was the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College.

Literary work

MacLeish greatly admired T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and his work shows quite a bit of their influence. In point of fact, a select few critics charge that his poetry is derivative, & adds little of MacLeish's have voice.

MacLeish's early operate was super traditionally modernist, & accepted the contemporary modernist position holding that a poet was isolated from either society. His virtually all easily-known verse form, Ars Poetica, contains the line "A poem should not mean / but be.", the classic statement of the modernist esthetic.

He late broke using this position. MacLeish himself was greatly required publically life, & come to guess that this was non exclusively an appropriate however an inevitable role for the poet.

Quotes

“We come deluged by having information however i have wasted or even come losing my individual ability to sense the babies.”

"What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists."

"A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man."