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The One Man Who Should Never Attempt An Explanation Of A Poem Is Its Author. If The Poem Can Be Improved By It's Author's Explanations It Never Should Have Been Published, And If The Poem Cannot Be Improved By Its Author's Explanations The Explanations Are Scarcely Worth Reading.

-Archibald MacLeish

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The One Man Who

Archibald MacLeish

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The One Man Who Should Never Attempt An Explanation Of A Poem Is Its Author. If The Poem Can Be Improved By It's Author's Explanations It Never Should Have Been Published, And If The Poem Cannot Be Improved By Its Author's Explanations The Explanations Are Scarcely Worth Reading.

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What Once Was Cuddled Must Learn To Kiss The Cold Wonn's Mouth. That's All The Mystery.

Democracy Is Never A Thing Done. Democracy Is Always Something That A Nation Must Be Doing.

Man Depends On God For All Things: God Depends On Man For One. Without Man's Love God Does Not Exist As God, Only As Creator, And Love Is The One Thing No One, Not Even God Himself, Can Command. It Is A Free Gift Or It Is Nothing. And It Is Most Itself, Most Free, When It Is Offered In Spite Of Suffering, Of Injustice, And Of Death . . . The Justification Of The Injustice Of The Universe Is Not Our Blind Acceptance Of God's Inexplicable Will, Nor Our Trust In God's Love, His Dark And Incomprehensible Love, For Us, But Our Human Love, Notwithstanding Anything, For Him.

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.

Freedom Is The Right To One's Dignity As A Man.

Personal Dignity

America Is Promises To Take! America Is Promises To Us To Take Them.

. . . What Humanity Most Desperately Needs Is Not The Creation Of New Worlds But The Recreation In Terms Of Human Comprehension Of The World We Have -- And It Is For This Reason That Arts Go On For Generation To Generation In Spite Of The Fact That Phidias Has Already Carved And Homer Has Already Sung. The Creation, We Are Informed, Was Accomplished In Seven Days With Sunday Off, But The Recreation Will Never Be Accomplished Because It Is Always Accomplished Anew For Each Generation Of Living Men.

There Is Only One Thing More Painful Than Learning From Experience And That Is Not Learning From Experience.

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.

A World Ends When Its Metaphor Has Died.

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 Of A Particular Occurrence As Though Only He Were Alone There.

The Dissenter Is Every Human Being At Those Moments Of His Life When He Resigns Momentarily From The Herd And Thinks For Himself.

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.

The Map Of America Is A Map Of Endlessness, Of Opening Out, Of Forever And Ever. No Man's Face Would Make You Think Of It But His Hope Might, His Courage Might.

Young Poets Are Advised By Their Elders To Avoid The Practice Of Journalism As They Would Wet Socks And Gin Before Breakfast.

The Business Of The Law Is To Make Sense Of The Confusion Of What We Call Human Life - To Reduce It To Order But At The Same Time To Give It Possibility, Scope, Even Dignity.

The Only Thing About A Man That Is A Man . . . Is His Mind. Everything Else You Can Find In A Pig Or A Horse.

Poets... Are Literal-minded Men Who Will Squeeze A Word Till It Hurts.

Races Didn't Bother The Americans. They Were Something A Lot Better Than Any Race. They Were A People. They Were The First Self-constituted, Self-declared, Self-created People In The History Of The World.

Never In All Their History Have Men Been Able Truly To Conceive Of The World As One: A Single Sphere, A Globe, Having The Qualities Of A Globe, A Round Earth In Which All The Directions Eventually Meet, In Which There Is No Center Because Every Point, Or None, Is Center - An Equal Earth Which All Men Occupy As Equals. The Airman's Earth, If Free Men Make It, Will Be Truly Round: A Globe In Practice, Not In Theory.

If The Art Of Poetry Is?the Art Of Making Sense Of The Chaos Of Human Experience, It's Not A Bad Thing To See A Lot Of Chaos.

Human Experience

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Poetry Is The Art Of Understanding What It Is To Be Alive.

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A Poem Should Be Palpable And Mute As A Globed Fruit.

That Peculiar Disease Of Intellectuals, That Infatuation With Ideas At The Expense Of Experience, That Compels Experience To Conform To Bookish Expectations.

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How Shall Freedom Be Defended? By Arms When It Is Attacked By Arms, By Truth When It Is Attacked By Lies, By Faith When It Is Attacked By Authoritarian Dogma. Always, In The Final Act, By Determination And Faith.

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We Have Learned The Answers, All The Answers: It Is The Question That We Do Not Know.

Questions And Answers

To See The Earth As We Now See It, Small And Beautiful In That Eternal Silence Where It Floats, Is To See Ourselves As Riders On The Earth Together, Brothers On That Bright Loveliness In The Unending Night ~ Brothers Who See Now They Are Truly Brothers.

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A Poem Should Not Mean But Be.

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Poetry Which Owes No Man Anything, Owes Nevertheless One Debt - An Image Of The World In Which Men Can Again Believe.

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Thought Provoking

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Positive Atheism

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You Burned The City Of London In Our Houses And We Felt The Flames.

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The Infantile Cowardice Of Our Time Which Demands An External Pattern, A Nonhuman Authority.

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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.

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A Self-advertising Writer Is Always A Self-extinguished Writer.

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If The Poem Can Be Improved By The Author's Explanations, It Never Should Have Been Published.

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We Have No Choice But To Be Guilty. God Is Unthinkable If We Are Innocent.

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

Man Can Live His Truth, His Deepest Truth, But Cannot Speak It.

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