Archibald MacLeish was born in 1892 to a Scottish father and American mother in Glencoe, Illinois. He attended Yale University in 1911, where he nurtured his literary proclivities, winning the University's Prize Poem award in 1915 among many other accomplishments. After college, MacLeish married Ada Hitchcock and two years later served in WWI. After the war, which, for MacLeish, seemed like the dawn of a new era, he attended Harvard Law School and began a career as a lawyer. During this time, and for the rest of his life, MacLeish would be captivated by questions of idealism versus reality, the past versus the future, and consciousness versus the unfathomable.
In 1923, MacLeish turned...
