He later said that, like practicing law, the poet’s job was to Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos, as well as artists from other countries and disciplines. In 1923 MacLeish gave up his law career to write poetry, moving with his wife and two children to Paris, where he associated with some of the most innovative writers America has ever produced, including Ernest Hemingway, F.
Upon returning to the United States, he earned his law degree and successfully practiced law for four years. Like many who were to become that generation’s greatest literary figures, MacLeish had his belief in the world’s basic goodness and logic smashed by the inhuman scale of destruction that modern warfare reached. After his graduation, he married, and then served in France during World War I. He went to private school, prep school, and then Yale University, where he was active in writing and had work published in The Yale Review. MacLeish was born into a well-to-do, but not extremely wealthy, family in 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois. The title is Latin and can be translated as “The Art of Poetry.” In addition, the life of the poem’s author, Archibald MacLeish, showed the sort of commitment and received the sort of recognition that supporters of the art like to think of when examining the artist. “Ars Poetica” is one of the most famous and most quoted poems of twentieth-century American literature, possibly because it addresses a subject that all poets and poetry teachers hold dear-poetry itself.