Archibald MacLeish Research Articles

MacLeish/Oppenheimer, Trump, and the Conquest of America

Archibald MacLeish (Pulitzer prize-winning poet/playwright) published his highly acclaimed essay “The Conquest of America” in the August 1949 Atlantic Monthly. His essay focused on an American crisis of national purpose, and central to his account is the importance of a national image for America. In particular, he called for a redeclaration of American purpose by appealing to a Jeffersonian “Revolution of the Individual.” MacLeish’s friend Robert Oppenheimer responded to his essay with high praise but also criticism. In this article, we use the MacLeish/ Oppenheimer exchange as a springboard for a discussion of the crisis of American democracy today exemplified by the election of Donald Trump. We take a synthetic approach, relying not simply on MacLeish/Oppenheimer but more importantly on contemporary scholars. We attempt to construct an American image with a realistic meaning for today. The image includes three interweaving political components—Liberal Democracy, Liberal Nationalism, Liberal Internationalism—complemented by America’s historical role as Democracy’s Vital Center. After sketching this national image, we discuss each component, touching on several contemporary issues as well as the general nature of the image in light of Trump and the current crisis of American democracy.

The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia

The Thornton Wilder Encyclopedia

Review Essay: A Tale of Two Women: Botteghe Oscure and U.S. Literature in Italy

Review Essay: A Tale of Two Women: <i>Botteghe Oscure</i> and U.S. Literature in Italy

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

William March’s Company K: history, memory, and metafiction

ABSTRACT Despite enjoying a sustained readership, William March’s Company K remains a surprisingly understudied examination of American soldiers in World War I. To date, just a mere handful of critical articles or book chapters have examined the novel in detail. March’s relentlessly anti-heroic themes, which now seem overly familiar (even clichéd) thanks to the popularity of works like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the bestselling war novel of all time) and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Paths of Glory, are perhaps part of the problem. But Company K is more than a war novel: on many levels, the book is about war writing. Indeed, March’s metafictional narrative plays with notions of representation and truth-telling in war literature in ways that anticipate Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This essay offers a new appraisal of Company K by focusing on its metafictonal features, which include the deployment of a novel-within-a-novel structure, and its iconoclastic form. To underscore the originality of March’s approach, as well as his implied scorn for the critical standards of his day, the essay first summarizes attempts by leading war-literature critics in the 1920s and 1930s to nail-down the relationship between war fiction and truth. This section of the essay spotlights the controversial French expert on literary testimony, Jean Norton Cru, as well as the English military historian Cyril Falls and two distinguished American men of letters, Archibald MacLeish and Malcolm Cowley, both of whom had strong opinions about what constituted a truthful depiction of the Great War. The essay then demonstrates how March’s novel rejects most of the assumptions put forward by these critics, both through its reflexive recognition of its own fictionality and through its subversive form, a transmedia blend of devices drawn from early cinema, modernist painting, and historical writing.

Poetry and Journalism Revisited: Toward an Affective Dimension of Journalism Culture

Abstract This article seeks to reconcile disparate conceptions of thinking and feeling in journalism by foregrounding an affective dimension of news epistemology through the example of journalistic poetry. Drawing from Archibald MacLeish’s classic 20th-century lecture linking knowledge and the imagination, and locating Postema and Deuze’s continuum of journalism and the arts within Hanitzsch’s broader framework of journalism culture, I explore the generative spectrum in which certain kinds of journalism are best performed as poetry, and certain kinds of poetry are simply affective journalism by another name. The argument draws on historical, cultural, and literary scholarship to define the relationship between poetry and journalism, review historical uses of poetry in newspapers, show how poetry developed as a boundary object that “objective” news has defined itself against, and present four mini-case studies of poetry doing journalistic work in the 21st century.

Poetry as an Event of Silence in Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”: A Heideggerian-Deleuzean Reading

پژوهش حاضر به خوانشِ موردیِ شعر «هنر شاعری»، اثرآرچیبالد مک‌لیش، در پرتو نظریات دلوز-گتاری و هایدگر در باب معناآفرینی می‌پردازد. معنا‌آفرینی در حوزۀ معنای دلوز و گتاری برخلاف روند مألوف معنایابی عقل متعارف، اسکیزوفرن، انقلابی، و هنرمندانه است؛ انقلابی به معنای ادبیات اقلیتی و هنرمندانه به معنای شاعرانه. شاعرانگی معنا در شعر، به مثابۀ رویدادی همانند رویداد‌اندیشی شعر در فلسفۀ هنر هایدگر، به سکوت برگزار می‌شود. روزۀ سکوت شعر، آفریدگاه معناهای مکرر و متفاوتی است که در شدن‌ها و شدت‌های پی در پی بدنِ بدونِ اندام بروز می‌یابند. بدین شیوه شعر، معنا و حقیقت را چون رویدادی خلاف عادت و شأنی از شئونات هستی در کار می‌نشاند. از این رو رویدادگونگی شعر با معنا‌بخشی‌اش مصادف می‌شود. طرفه آنکه آرچیبالد مک‌لیش در شعر «هنر شاعری» (“Ars Poetica”) هستندگی و در-جهان-‌بودن شعر را با چیدمان پارادایم‌های سکوت، سکون و بی‌واژگی بر معنا‌آفرینی مألوف بنا می‌نهد. بدین طریق، شعر معنای متعارف را برنمی‌تابد زیرا دغدغۀ معناهای رویدادگون متفاوت و اشتدادی را به مثابۀ در-جهان-بودن دارد. این مقاله بر آن است تا فرایند معناآفرینی را در شعر نامبرده با تکیه بر یک چارچوب ترکیبی از فلسفه دلوز-گتاری و هایدگر بررسی کند و همزمان به شیوه‌ای توصیفی، یک خوانش نزدیک از شعر مک‌لیش به دست دهد.

Translation or Intertextuality: A Literature Comparative Analysis of “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak” by Archibald MacLeish and “Krawang Bekasi” by Chairil Anwar

This study aims to pinpoint the relevant relation between two literary works which have a relationship with one another in the perspective of comparative literature studies. Data were gathered through the text deconstruction theory method by means of an intertextuality approach. The method is applied to juxtapose two well-known poems, Krawang Bekasi (Indonesia) and The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak (America), which are suspected of having the same content and theme, but their relations were never revealed. This thematic-based study uses a multicultural perspective and is naturally suitable for comparative literature study. The objective of this study was to reveal the existence of Krawang Bekasi as one of the Indonesian poems written by Chairil Anwar and to demonstrate the cultural translation methods, known as cultural intertexts relation, for finding the intertextuality of two literary works. In fact, by tabling line through line, the intertextuality was found to be workable in comparative literature. As a result, the study shows that Krawang Bekasi by Chairil Anwar is an adaptation which borrows from and transforms The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak by Archibald MacLeish. Thus, the intertextual relationship of these two works is revealed.

Poet-Critics and the Administration of CultureAmerican Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture

Poet-Critics and the Administration of CultureAmerican Guides: The Federal Writers’ Project and the Casting of American Culture

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

Criticism and the Justification of Modernism

Evan Kindley’s Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture traces the process by which modernist poets between 1920 and 1950 transitioned from opposition against mainstream institutions to their integration into those institutions as poet-critics. Kindley asserts that it was the intentional choices of modernists seeking to preserve and justify their art that produced poetry’s position in American society today. To tell this tale, he examines how T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling Brown, and R.P. Blackmur operated in relation to academia, federal programs, and philanthropic foundations, ultimately rendering poets useful to a bureaucratic management of American culture. Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture provides a rich overview of a figure that has been ignored, the poet-administrator whose labors made the later dominance of poet-critics appear inevitable.

Contextual Meanings Used by Archibald McLeish’s Poetry ‘The Young Dead Soldiers do Not Speak’

This study was conducted by the aim to investigate the contextual meaning applied in the poetry written by McLeish by the title “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak”. This research applied descriptive qualitative design by applying the semantics theory supported by theory of contextual meaning proposed by Leech (1981). The instrument was the researcher as the primary instrument of the study. The data were indentified, classified, displayed, and were described into the poetry in regard the contextual meaning. The findings showed: (1) This poetry was one of Archibald MacLeish contribution towards World War II because the function of the poetry is not only commemorated the dead, but also made it clear that those who survived bore a special responsibility to make the deaths of these soldiers meaningful; (2) The poetry was a portrayed of horrific World War I in Europe which was pointed out Archibald MacLeish got the record because he was a volunteer of the United State of America young soldiers whom sent to Europe to serve his country; and (3) The dead soldiers saw the peace toward their death because they gave their life for the country so they did not die for nothing. Nevertheless, their dead seem nothing if the further generations do not remember them as the piece of peace which have to be honored.&#x0D; &#x0D;

The Sun Also Rises: An Experiential Travelogue of the Twenties

Ernest Hemingway is admittedly one of the most outstanding American writers of the twentieth century. The literary lion of the twenties, he has been a colourful personality all through his life. In the words of Archibald Macleish, he was “famous at twenty-five; thirty a master.” The Sun Also Rises, widely considered as Hemingway’s best novel, is a brilliant achievement in organizing post-war tensions, pressures, and situations. It offers a concentrated picture of the 1920s.

The Sun Also Rises: An Experiential Travelogue of the Twenties

Ernest Hemingway is admittedly one of the most outstanding American writers of the twentieth century. The literary lion of the twenties, he has been a colourful personality all through his life. In the words of Archibald Macleish, he was “famous at twenty-five; thirty a master.” The Sun Also Rises, widely considered as Hemingway’s best novel, is a brilliant achievement in organizing post-war tensions, pressures, and situations. It offers a concentrated picture of the 1920s.

The Sun Also Rises: An Experiential Travelogue of the Twenties

Ernest Hemingway is admittedly one of the most outstanding American writers of the twentieth century. The literary lion of the twenties, he has been a colourful personality all through his life. In the words of Archibald Macleish, he was “famous at twenty-five; thirty a master.” The Sun Also Rises, widely considered as Hemingway’s best novel, is a brilliant achievement in organizing post-war tensions, pressures, and situations. It offers a concentrated picture of the 1920s.

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

Reviewed by: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley Greg Barnhisel Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture. Evan Kindley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 176. $35.00 (cloth). Even taking into consideration penicillin and the atomic bomb, bureaucracy may be the most consequential and pervasive of twentieth-century humanity’s gifts to ourselves. (Global warming we gave to all species.) Yes, administrative gears ground in ancient Rome and classical China, but in the 1900s bureaucratic organizations and institutions of every type spread like kudzu. Sociologists such as William Whyte and Max Weber documented how, over the first half of the century, bureaucracies proliferated beyond the church, the military, and the government, coming to colonize every aspect of modern life. Even the rambunctious American literary world got “rationalized” (to use Weber’s term) and, by the postwar period, surrendered to bureaucracy. In his pithy Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, scholar and Los Angeles Review of Books editor Evan Kindley shows how once-oppositional modernist “poet-critics” joined the bureaucratic machine and then, from inside, used it to enshrine and perpetuate modernist literature. The book is not just about paper-pushing, though. Instead, Kindley’s larger subject is “justification: the justification of literature, and of the difficult, experimental, elitist, unrepentantly unmarketable literature called ‘modernism’ in particular” (10). How did “modernist poet-critics” explain “what is the point of art” and “why should we pay for it”? To answer this, Kindley turns to writers both familiar (T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden) and surprising (Sterling A. Brown), tracing how these justifications evolved to reflect changing social and political conditions in the United States, as well as the institutional positions held by these poet-critics. (Although Auden and Eliot were as influential in Britain as in the States, Kindley’s lens is focused squarely on America.) Kindley is not the first to adumbrate these poet-critics’ arguments. Theorists from Raymond Williams to Andreas Huyssen to Peter Bürger have documented modernism’s apologiae, and in particular the central role of the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy in making a case for modernism. In the book’s early chapters, Kindley carefully traces the subtly divergent, and changing, positions of Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Archibald MacLeish on aesthetic autonomy—familiar ground, but briskly and clearly recounted. The Depression, though, made recondite squabbles about aesthetic autonomy seem irrelevant. The poet-critics got day jobs, and here Kindley’s book gets truly original. In the 1930s, he writes, “modernist poet-critics went from being slightly less obscurantist bohemians, charged with clarifying byzantine avant-garde practices to bewildered but sympathetic elites, to being civil servants, charged with reinforcing the ideals and institutions of American democracy and enlisting the energies of art in its defense” (73–74). MacLeish, the epitome of the high-minded modernist civil servant, is the key figure here, but Kindley’s discussion of African American poet Sterling A. Brown’s work for the Federal Writers’ Project, and his analysis of Brown’s poem “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home,” is for me the standout section of this concise book. Considering the position of the black writer joining the federal government in the 1930s, Kindley notes [End Page 430] archly that all poets have to compromise their ideals when going to work for the state, but some writers “had to compromise more than others” (108). Bureaucracies further proliferated and intertwined in the early Cold War period, and the modernists came to use them to their advantage. Although he could have chosen any number of representative examples, Kindley ends his book with perhaps the most important of these: R. P. Blackmur’s work to embed modernism in the university while protecting the independence and autonomy of both the critic and the modernism. Moving modernism to academe would “protect literature from . . . the market for literary commodities,” but modernism had to insist on its autonomy from other market imperatives—notably, the “market for skilled labor” that increasingly organized the postwar university (112). To accomplish this, Blackmur cannily brought in foundations such as Rockefeller, which funded the critical work (in journals and the Kenyon School of English) that...

Fundamental Education: UNESCO and American Post-War Modernism

This article examines how the impact of modernism’s reception dominated post-war poetic discourse, and in turn, how the intersection of literary and political interests in the late 1940s resulted in an education platform with a global reach and implications, mainly in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and most notably in the shaping of UNESCO. The rise of literary and cultural NGOs, then, is best viewed in light of an intersection of political and academic interests that institutionalized literary production in the form of humanitarian outreach. The claims for modernism’s liberatory aesthetics were folded into a discourse of cultural freedom that was packaged as an educational imperative for global literacy. I.A. Richards and Archibald MacLeish’s different involvements in UNESCO will be used as case studies to illustrate how one aspect of modernism’s transmutation into a populist progressive political discourse occurred and how they reflected a global structural shift for literary production.

Archibald Macleish’s Air Raid: Interventionist Drama and the Gendering of American Radio

Scholarship on Archibald MacLeish’s Air Raid (1938) has focused on the play’s warnings about destructive military technology and fascist aggression. This article takes a new approach, focusing on the play’s self-conscious scrutiny of American radio. In the play, MacLeish advocates for an actively interventionist radio. But the play also registers a set of anxieties about the medium’s fitness for this task, due to concerns about media ownership and, especially, about the gendered nature of the American mass audience. Air Raid reflects contemporary stereotypes that associated American radio’s more frivolous content with its supposedly feminine, passive listenership. The play also, however, envisions a more actively engaged listenership in tune with MacLeish’s conception of (implicitly masculine) public service. Through close reading of the play and exploration of historical debates about radio, this essay reveals the complex intersections of war, gender, class, and technology brought about at a time of intense technological, social, and political change.

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography by Scott Donaldson

Reviewed by: The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography by Scott Donaldson Dale Salwak (bio) Scott Donaldson, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. Pennsylvania State UP, 2015. 284 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-06528-1; $39.95. In this handsomely presented book, Scott Donaldson draws upon his own expertise as well as the methods and the testimony of other writers whose work he admires to offer a sympathetic scrutiny of what Lytton Strachey called in Eminent Victorians (1918) “the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing” (vi), the biography. In this instance, Donaldson focuses on the literary biography. Full of anecdotes, hard-won advice, details of craft, and compelling case studies, this text is also an engaging and disarmingly honest account of the problems he encountered, and the pleasures he experienced, while trying to reconstruct “without prejudice” but with definitive completeness the life and work of a gallery of uniquely American authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Winfield Townley Scott, Charlie Fenton, Archibald MacLeish, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He has divided his book into five sections: Beginnings, Topics in Literary Biography, The Impossible Craft, Case Studies, and, where he is at his most exhilarating, The Cheever Misadventure. Following a sketch of the complex history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson chronicles his own biography and explains how it influenced his path toward writing about other people’s lives. From Yale, Donaldson went on to become a Morse code intercept operator during the Korean War, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, a publicist at Pillsbury, an editor and publisher of a fledgling weekly, The Bloomington Suburbanite, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and, finally, a professor at the College of William and Mary. [End Page 829] During a summertime reading of the poet Winfield Townley Scott’s letters and journals at Brown University’s John Hay Library, Donaldson explains, his future was sealed: “There was no clap of thunder, but I’d found something I could do, something I really wanted to do. … I would be a literary biographer” (11). The more he learned about Scott and then other literary figures, he says, the more eager he was to display that learning on the page while pursuing at the same time his principle occupation as a university professor. He had become, as Richard D. Altick famously called such a person, a “scholar adventurer” (4). Although with each project Donaldson gave full and earnest study to his subjects, at every step of the way he was faced like all biographers with tremendous barriers. No matter how many letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, earlier biographies, memoirs, photographs, and other sources were available to him, he says, there remained what Victoria Glendinning called “lies and silences” (49) in the public record. “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man,” wrote Mark Twain, “but the real biography of a man is lived in his head twenty-four hours a day, and that you can never know” (qtd. in Kaplan 9). There’s so much about every individual that remains beyond reach no matter how thorough the search, and finding those limits was, Donaldson writes, both daunting and intriguing; that’s what makes biography an “impossible craft.” Other workaday problems confronting Donaldson stemmed from the inability to verify facts or documents, from encountering conflicting accounts of the same events, from the complexities of copyright and securing permissions, and perhaps the most difficult of all, deciding on how to construct the work. What shape shall the book take? Straight narrative? Topical treatment? Essay? Where should the narrative begin? How should it end? What is the biographer’s proper relationship with the subject? Donaldson examines these matters and many others. Opening the door to private lives clearly raised ethical and legal questions as well. How far should he go in respecting the privacy of the family—or of other people implicated in the life he is describing? Is it ethical to disregard instructions in documents left by the dead, even more to use those documents as a basis for further diagnosis? Surely, Donaldson writes, the biographer has a responsibility in the selection of evidence...

Biography Partly Told

Biography Partly Told Robert Lacy (bio) The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography by Scott Donaldson (Penn State University Press, 2015. 271pages, $39.95) For those of us who thought writing literary biography must be a stroll in the park, Scott Donaldson is here with disabusing news. The Impossible Craft makes it clear that, while the rewards for success as a biographer may be real enough, the path to earning them is not without its pitfalls. These include lawsuits, the enmity of the subject’s family and friends, and the fluctuation of literary reputations. Donaldson, himself a seven-time perpetrator of literary biography, knows whereof he speaks. He had the misfortune in 1987 to be completing a biography of John Cheever at the same time lawyers for J. D. Salinger were taking the biographer Ian Hamilton to court to prevent the publication of excerpts from certain of Salinger’s letters. The eventual court ruling in Salinger’s favor forced Donaldson and his editors to spend weeks scrubbing his Cheever manuscript to fit the new definition of what was permissible as “fair use” of unpublished material. At roughly the same time, Donaldson got crossways with the Cheever family for writing an introduction to a book of hitherto uncollected stories by the late Cheever. Mary Cheever, John’s widow, objected to the “dirty laundry” contained in the introduction and thought the publication of the early inferior stories would damage her husband’s reputation. The Cheevers prevailed in their lawsuit, and the book, along with Donaldson’s introduction, was never published. All of this played out over a considerable period of time and took an appreciable toll on the biographer, in Donaldson’s telling. It also didn’t help matters that Susan Cheever, John’s daughter, was finishing up a memoir of her father, the well-received Home Before Dark, and Susan saw Donaldson’s book as unwelcome competition. “I wasn’t out to get [Donaldson],” he quotes her as saying, “but we were competing. I wished he hadn’t been writing [his biography].” Donaldson’s most recent book of literary biography was published in 2007. Its subject was Edwin Arlington Robinson, a poet Donaldson had loved and admired since his schoolboy days in Minneapolis. He spent seven years on the Robinson book, he tells us, the longest amount of time he has given any of his biographies. Unfortunately Robinson’s reputation, which was once as high as an American poet’s gets, has fallen into steep decline. Donaldson devotes more than forty pages of The Impossible Craft to Robinson and the contentious wrangling over the poet’s letters and other effects following his death in 1935. It seems there was a Maine faction, Maine being Robinson’s home state, and a New York faction, New York being where he made his career; the two sides never saw eye to eye, with the result that over time Robinson didn’t get the biography he deserved, only a flawed one nobody trusts—at least not until Donaldson came along some forty years later. “The real loser in the sorry tale of [End Page xxxi] Herman Hagedorn’s unsatisfactory biography and the two camps competing for control of Edwin Arlington Robinson beyond the grave may well have been the poet himself,” Donaldson concludes wistfully. “Had a solid and sound book about him appeared a few years after his death, it could have helped to secure his standing as a great American poet and halted the unwarranted drift of his work into relative obscurity.” The other subjects of Donaldson’s biographies are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and Charles Fenton. Fenton had been a teacher of Donaldson’s at Yale and had himself written an early book on Hemingway’s apprentice years. He later killed himself in his early forties by jumping from a building. Rounding out Donaldson’s oeuvre, Fenton also wrote a book on the Fitzgerald-Hemingway friendship, poor, storm-tossed relationship that it was. The Impossible Craft is divided into chapters. The first offers a brief autobiography of the author and the march of his career in the field of literary biography. Then we are treated to a survey of works concerning literary...