MacLeish Contends Poetry, Reality One

"We are spiritually impotent because we have cut ourselves off from the poem," Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of English and Rhetoric, declared in the March Atlantic Monthly.

MacLeish, who is on leave in the Virgin Islands, went on to maintain that through poetry we reach a concrete understanding of experiences, as distinguished from the abstract knowledge which the sciences present. Thus we can understand the ends of our actions, as well as their means, he said.