Past Perfect: Beneath the Flooding Darkness

Few modern American poets have written more eloquently about the impermanence of the human condition than Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982). A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and playwright who devoted much of his free time to politics, MacLeish was one of America’s leading public intellectuals from the 1930s to the 1960s. Over the course of his 70-year career, he wrote about everything from the rise of fascism to the legacy of western imperialism, but his favorite subject was much more universal—mankind’s mysterious passage through time and space. “To face the truth of the passing of the world and make a song of […]