Archibald MacLeish
<p><img src="/0ecf52b4-5f79-5808-ad98-951cf5818add.jpg"/>
Archibald MacLeish in 1939, taken on the first day of his job as Librarian of Congress (Library of Congress)</p>
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"MacLeish greatly admired <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S.Eliot" title="T. S. Eliot">T. S. Eliot</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound" title="Ezra Pound">Ezra Pound</a>, and his work shows quite a bit of their influence. He was the literary figure that played the most important role in freeing Ezra Pound from St. Elisabeths Hospital in Washington DC where he was incarcerated for high treason between 1946 and 1958. MacLeish's early work was very traditionally <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism" title="Modernism">modernist</a> and accepted the contemporary modernist position holding that a poet was isolated from society. His most well-known poem, "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ars_Poetica_%28MacLeish%29&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Ars Poetica (MacLeish) (page does not exist)">Ars Poetica</a>," contains a classic statement of the modernist aesthetic: "A poem should not mean / But be." He later broke with modernism's pure aesthetic. MacLeish himself was greatly involved in public life and came to believe that this was not only an appropriate but an inevitable role for a poet."</p>
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MACLEISH</p>
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None. None so far as I was concerned. I met Hemingway a year or so after we got to Paris and Gerald Murphy about the same time . . . Dos, Estlin Cummings, Bishop, Scott . . . but there was no “community” in the sense in which you, I think, are using the word. No Americans-in-Paris community. That notion is a myth concocted after the event by critics with fish to fry.</p>