Archibald MacLeish is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, not for his stint as Librarian of Congress, or for any of his other stints of public service, but for his drama and his poetry.
Of the 17 or so plays that MacLeish wrote (the exact number depends on who is doing the counting), his dramatic reworking of the Biblical story of Job, which became the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play J.B., is the best known. Begun in 1953 as a one-act production, it achieved its greatest fame in its final form as a three-act play set in a modern-day circus:
In poetry, MacLeish explored a wide variety of poetic forms and genres: sonnets (as an undergraduate at Yale, MacLeish won the Yale University Prize for Poetry with his Songs for a Summer's Day (A Sonnet Cycle); lyric verse (MacLeish's two best-known poems--You, Andrew Marvel and Ars Poetica--exemplify his mastery of such verse); terza rima (as seen in his Pulitzer Prize-winning epic poem Conquistador, about Spanish explorer Hernan Cortez's 16th-century destruction of the Aztecs).
Perhaps because MacLeish was so fond of explicating his own work, no major independent critical assessment of his drama and poetry has ever been published. His most recent biographer, Scott Donaldson, was not up to the task in Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (1992), preferring instead to focus on MacLeish's private peccadilloes (as seems to be the case with so many modern biographers).
Nor has MacLeish yet received the exhaustive descriptive bibliography that his corpus deserves, although Bernard Drabeck & Margaret Howland made a valiant first attempt in 1995 with their Archibald MacLeish: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography.
At a minimum, folks building a private library of works by MacLeish will want to include at least the following titles:
Poetry
"The Wild Old Wicked Man" and Other Poems (1968)
Actfive (1948)
Actfive and Other Poems (1948)
Class Poem (1915)
Collected Poems (1952)
Conquistador (1932)
Einstein (1929)
Elpenor (1933)
Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933)
Later Poems, 1951-1962 ()
New Found Land New Found Land (1930)
New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976 (1976)
Nobodaddy (1926)
Poems, 1924-1933 (1935)
Songs for Eve (1954)
Songs for a Summer's Day (1915)
Streets in the Moon (1928)
The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish (1962)
The Hamlet of A. Macleish (1928)
The Happy Marriage (1924)
The Human Season, Selected Poems 1926-1972 (1972)
The Pot of Earth (1925)
Tower of Ivory (1917)
Prose
A Continuing Journey (1968)
A Time to Act: Selected Addresses (1943)
A Time to Speak (1941)
America Was Promises (1939)
American Opinion and the War: the Rede Lecture (1942)
Art Education and the Creative Process (1954)
Champion of a Cause: Essays and Addresses on Librarianship (1971)
Freedom Is the Right to Choose (1951)
Jews in America (1936)
Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907-1982 (1983)
Poetry and Experience (1961)
Poetry and Opinion: the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound (1974)
Public Speech (1936)
Riders on the Earth: Essays & Recollections (1978)
The American Cause The American Cause (1941)
The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren (1964)
The Eleanor Roosevelt Story (1965)
The Irresponsibles: A Declaration (1940)
Drama
Air Raid (1938)
An Evening's Journey to Conway (1967)
Colloquy for the States (1943)
Herakles (1967)
J.B. (1958)
Panic (1935)
Scratch (1971)
Six Plays (1980)
The American Story: Ten Broadcasts (1944)
The Fall of the City (1937)
The Great American Fourth of July Parade (1975)
The Land of the Free (1938)
The Trojan Horse (1952)
The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968)
This Music Crept By Me on the Waters (1953)
Three Short Plays (1961)
Union Pacific (ballet) (1934)
Tomorrow, we set forth to explore the mysterious works of Dame Agatha....
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