Jim Finnegan over at Ursprach posted this ironic bit of faint praise for Archibald MacLeish. I don’t know if it reflects his own sense of MacLeish’s importance, but it’s certainly true that “they” who quote his famous “Ars Poetica” very often find the rest of his work forgettable. But Hayden Carruth, who never seems to have forgotten anything important, provided an answer to “them” in his essay “Homage to A. MacLeish,” available in Effluences from the Sacred Caves: More Selected Essays and Reviews: What is it that makes poetic genius—a Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Browning, Ezra Pound? Poetic talent, of course; that comes first.Read More