Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, playwright, and public servant who combined a distinguished literary career with an active life in government. Born in Glencoe, Illinois, he was educated at Yale and Harvard Law School and served in the First World War before abandoning the law for poetry.
In the 1920s he joined the expatriate writers in Paris and developed his craft, and his work matured into a poetry engaged with public and political life. He won the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes in 1933 for his epic poem Conquistador, and his much-quoted poem "Ars Poetica" — with its famous closing line, "A poem should not mean / But be" — became a touchstone of modern verse.
As fascism rose, MacLeish put his pen and energy at the service of democracy. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939, a post he reorganized and modernized, and during the war he ran government information offices and helped found UNESCO.
After the war he became a professor at Harvard, continuing to write. His verse drama J.B., a modern retelling of the Book of Job, won both the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in the late 1950s. Honored as one of the elder statesmen of American letters, MacLeish died in 1982.