Nor now the long light on the sea?
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on . . .

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. You, Andrew Marvell (l. 33-36). . . Modern American & British Poetry. Louis Untermeyer, ed., in consultation with Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur. (Rev., shorter ed., 1955) Harcourt, Brace and Company.)

And crossed the dark defile at last, and found
At Roncevaux upon the darkening plain
The dead against the dead and on the silent ground
The silent slain?

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. The Too-late Born (l. 9-12). . . Modern American & British Poetry. Louis Untermeyer, ed., in consultation with Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur. (Rev., shorter ed., 1955) Harcourt, Brace and Company.)

What is more important in a library than anything else?than everything else?is the fact that it exists.

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. In Riders on Earth, as "The Premise at the Center" (1978). "The Premise Of Meaning," American Scholar (Washington, DC, June 5, 1972).)

What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. As "Return from the Excursion," in Riders on Earth (1978). "The Great American Frustration," Saturday Review (July 9, 1968).)

Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year?and therefore did.

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. In Riders on Earth as "Return from the Excursion" (1978). "The Great American Frustration," Saturday Review (New York, July 9, 1968). Of the advance of technology in the U.S.)

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night?brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. As "Bubble of Blue Air" in Riders on Earth (1978). "Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold," New York Times (Dec. 25, 1968). Of the first pictures of the earth from the moon.)

Ambassador Puser the ambassador
Reminds himself in French, felicitous tongue,
What these (young men no longer) lie here for
In rows that once, and somewhere else, were young . . .

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. Memorial Rain (l. 1-4). . . Modern American & British Poetry. Louis Untermeyer, ed., in consultation with Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur. (Rev., shorter ed., 1955) Harcourt, Brace and Company.)

There with vast wings across the canceled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing?nothing at all.

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. The End of the World (l. 12-14). . . New Oxford Book of American Verse, The. Richard Ellmann, ed. (1976) Oxford University Press.)

We are as great as our belief in human liberty?no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. repr. As "The Ghost of Thomas Jefferson" in Riders on Earth (1978). "Now Let Us Address the Main Question: Bicentennial of What?" New York Times (July 3, 1976).)

I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken,
Look! It is there!

(Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), U.S. poet. "Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments," (l. 34-38). . . Modern American & British Poetry. Louis Untermeyer, ed., in consultation with Karl Shapiro and Richard Wilbur. (Rev., shorter ed., 1955) Harcourt, Brace and Company.)