Calypsos island archibald macleish biography
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He was then ordered back to the United States to instruct draftees in artillery use and was there, a first lieutenant, when the war ended.
In the resolution of his own sense of self-consciousness, symbolized by his move to Paris in 1923, MacLeish showed a certain kinship with his character Cain. With the God gone, the King dethroned, and Man murdered—all in elegiac, characteristically despairing lines—the heroes of the age are then thrust forward in their emptiness through sardonically abrupt rhythms.
The result is a poetic affirmation, "humanist and existentialist," according to Luytens, for an even darker, more confused, post-Arnoldian time. He
Steding 3
expresses in the last lines of the poem his realization that his feminine side, his connection to personal development, as represented in the poem by his comparison to his mortal wife, will die: “she is a woman with that fault \ of change that will be death in her at last!” (33).
Odysseus professed and acknowledged his respect and devotion to Calypso.
Raymond Steding
Instructor: Professor Doten
English 50
December 16, 2013
An Essay About Calypso's Island
| Archibald MacLeish |
Calypso's Island, written by Archibald MacLeish, a modernist poet, answers the “Make It New” slogan of Ezra Pound's modernist calling with the art of a Statesman and sophistication of a Librarian of Congress.
By Part Four of The Happy Marriage, the protagonist's recognition of marital reality has found its poetic voice, what Grover Smith called in Archibald MacLeish "conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphysical strategies of argument; compressed and intense implications."
The Pot of Earth tells the very different story of a very different figure, a young woman deeply affected psychologically or culturally by archetypal myths of woman's fertility and its transformative powers as seen through "the figure of the dying god whose imaginative presence is at the core of cultural vitality," according to John B.
Vickery in The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. After years, of devoting life to Calypso, Odysseus recognizes what he has sacrificed. Alone of the final three plays, it explores questions that, because of their American roots, could move closer to resolution within the text. In World War I, MacLeish served as an ambulance driver, not unlike, the psycho-pompous conveyor of souls, Hermes.
To the end of his long life he continued, in prose and in poetry, to praise and to warn "the Republic."
Having left public life and moved to Harvard by the late 1940s, MacLeish refocused his attention from the social and political themes of the preceding two decades toward an earlier poetic interest: the place and value of man in the universe.
The agency lasted less than a year and lacked the authority to accomplish much. The shorter poems, some of them very successful, have by anthologizing and other emphases become better known than the longer ones.
Among the lyrics of the private world, which record recognizable and therefore meaningful experience spoken in a living, personal voice, are such fine love poems as "Ever Since," "Calypso's Island," "What Any Lover Learns," and such testaments of poetic and humanist faith as "A Man's Work," "The Two Priests," "The Infinite Reason," and "Reasons for Music," some of which also look outward to the public world.
Both a vivid retelling and sequel to Homer and Dante, this compressed little epic populates a modern Hell in the manner of Ezra Pound's poetry and points "the way on," in MacLeish's characteristic symbolic topographical imagery, where its readers can "begin it again: start over."
Among the other new poems in Poems, 1924-1933, "Frescoes for Mr.
Rockefeller's City" (also published separately in 1933) dealt with a public controversy and caused additional public excitement. Odysseus praises Calypso and asks her to make him immortal and strange. The editors of Ten Contemporary Thinkers included four MacLeish essays that represent well the range of his prose: "The Writer and Revolution," "Humanism and the Belief in Man," "The Conquest of America," and "The Isolation of the American Artist;" his essays and books specifically on poetry and poets eloquently and even more significantly witness to the broadly defined powers of poems to move their readers.
In Einstein, published separately in 1929, MacLeish presented a day's meditation that recapitulates the major stages in Einstein's physical and metaphysical struggle to contain and comprehend the physical universe, from classical empiricism through romantic empathy to modern, introspective, analytic physics. . MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois, in 1892, attended Hotchkiss School from 1907 to 1911, and from 1911 to 1915 studied at Yale University, where he edited and wrote for the Yale Literary Magazine, contributed to the Yale Review, and composed Songs for a Summer's Day, a sonnet sequence that was chosen as the University's Prize Poem in 1915.
Poets Hayden Carruth in Effluences from the Sacred Cave, Richard Eberhart in Virginia Quarterly Review, John Ciardi in Atlantic, and Kimon Friar in New Republic have all praised these poems.