(Above: Archibald MacLeish)
I am tying-in these last few posts to my several days in the South of France as I try to make up for not posting while there because of technical issues. So I’ll focus today’s A POEM FOR A SUNDAY on poet Archibald MacLeish. During my research into the coterie of literary and artistic types who loved heading to Antibes and the Hotel du Cap in the 1920s, the member of their tribe who surprised me was MacLeish. I’ve always thought of him as the Librarian of Congress who was appointed by FDR, after which he served as FDR’s Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. A poet with a law degree from Harvard who served as the Editor of the Harvard Law Review as well as, for a brief time, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic. A close friend of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. The winner of three Pulitzer Prizes - two for poetry and one for drama. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play, J.B., also won the Tony. A professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard and later a lecturer at Amherst. The New York Times even asked him to write a poem about the moon landing and put the poem on its front page when it happened. But I never really thought about him meandering about Antibes with Gerald and Sara Murphy or making a drunken fuss with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. I can, however, see him discussing painting with Picasso and maybe mumbling under his breath with Somerset Maugham about too many meandering afternoons and making too many drunken fusses at night.
MacLeish did, however, tie-in Antibes himself with his job as the Librarian of Congress when he referenced in an essay another writer who loved the place: Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote, among other works, Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. The route I chose on my walks into the old town in Antibes took me each day by the home in which Kazantzakis lived and the commemorative bench below it.
(Above: Twenty-one-year-old Nikos Kazantzakis in 1904. )
(Above, the bench I passed each day during my walks into old town in Antibes)
“When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life,” wrote MacLeish in that essay for The American Scholar.
”Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a ‘report’ upon the ‘mystery of things.’
”But if this is what a book is... then a library is an extraordinary thing. … It is not a sort of scholarly filling station where students of all ages can repair to get themselves supplied with a tankful of titles … On the contrary it is an achievement in and of itself—one of the greatest of human achievements because it combines and justifies so many others … But what is more important in a library than anything else … is the fact that it exists. For the existence of a library, the fact of its existence, is, in itself and of itself, an assertion—a proposition nailed like Luther’s to the door of time. By standing where it does … at the center of our intellectual lives—with its books in a certain order on its shelves and its cards in a certain structure in their cases, the true library asserts that there is indeed a ‘mystery of things.’ Or, more precisely, it asserts that the reason why the ‘things’ compose a mystery is that they seem to mean, that they fall, when gathered together, into a kind of relationship, of wholeness, as though all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies.
“The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city decays. The nation loses its grandeur. The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together...”
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I have always loved MacLeish’s Ars Poetica, which was first published in Poetry magazine in its June 1926 issue when he would have most likely been in Antibes. Its publication proves that his time there wasn’t all meanderings and fusses. It is, to me, a modernist masterpiece equal in its way to what his buddy Picasso was up to that June as well. There is no meandering to Picasso’s brush, no fussiness to his canvasses - just as there is none of either in this poem. There is the unsentimental precision of cubism to this portrait of poetry itself.
Ars Poetica
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
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And here is a bonus poem for today I discovered, one that MacLeish wrote about Picasso - and everything that wasn’t which , come to think of it, is the wasn’t that pulled him to Paris and then further south to Antibes seeking a friendship with Picasso and befriending his art. It was published in a grouping of poems by him in the November 1980 issue of Poetry magazine under the overall title FIVE POEMS FROM THE 1920s, a time which references those years of his in Antibes. I took a photo of it from its page in the Poetry issue.