“The first discipline is the realization that there is a discipline—-that all art begins and ends with discipline, that any art is first and foremost a craft. We have gone far enough on the road to self-indulgence now to know that. The man who announces to the world that he is going to “do his thing” is like the amateur on the high-diving platform who flings himself into the void shouting at the judges that he is going to do whatever comes naturally. He will land on his ass. Naturally. You’d think, to listen to the loudspeakers that surround us, that no man had ever tried to “do his thing” before. Every poet worth reading has, but those really worth reading have understood that to do your thing you have to learn first what your thing is and second how to go about doing it.” WritingArtDiscipline Author:Archibald MacLeish
“Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.” ArtUnderstandingAlivePoetry Is Author:Archibald MacLeish
“If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.” IfsHumansArtChaosMake SensePoetry IsBad ThingsHuman Experience Author:Archibald MacLeish
“. . . what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the recreation in terms of human comprehension of the world we have -- and it is for this reason that arts go on for generation to generation in spite of the fact that Phidias has already carved and Homer has already sung. The creation, we are informed, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the recreation will never be accomplished because it is always accomplished anew for each generation of living men.” MenWorldNeedsHumansArtReasonFactsHumanityTermGenerationsCreationGoes OnSevenAccomplishedSpiteSundayNew WorldComprehensionRecreationSeven DaysPhidias Author:Archibald MacLeish
“If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.” IfsMeanArtSoundElementsTasksSightCommitAgonyPrismsUsing Words Author:Archibald MacLeish
