Archibald MacLeish

11 of the Best Archibald MacLeish Poems Everyone Should Read

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The American poet-librarian, Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), was a modernist whose work does strange and invigorating things with language. But unlike his fellow American modernists William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and e. e. cummings, MacLeish remains less well-known to the general reader: many people know Williams’s red wheelbarrow and Wallace Stevens’s blackbird, but the work of Archibald MacLeish remains harder to summarise in a poem or image.

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A Short Analysis of Archibald MacLeish’s ‘You, Andrew Marvell’

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘You, Andrew Marvell’ is a poem by the American modernist poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), published in his seventh collection New Found Land in 1930. The poem’s title alludes to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell (1621-78), and in particular to Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

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A Summary and Analysis of Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Ars Poetica’ is one of the most famous poems by the American poet-librarian, Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982). A self-referential reflection on the nature of poetry, ‘Ars Poetica’ (1926) is provocative, suggestive, and – as is often the case with twentieth-century modernist poems – a piece of writing which raises as many questions as it settles.

You can read ‘Ars Poetica’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.

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