Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on America and ‘The Heart's Change’)

“This, this is our land, this is our people,

This that is neither a land nor a race. We must reap

The wind here in the grass for our soul's harvest:

Here we must eat our salt or our bones starve.

Here we must live or live only as shadows.

This is our race, we that have none, that have had

Neither the old walls nor the voices around us,

This is our land, this is our ancient ground —

The raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers,

The different eyes, the wind, and the heart's change.

These we will not leave though the old call us.

This is our country-earth, our blood, our kind.”—American poet, playwright, and teacher Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “American Letter,” in New and Selected Poems: 1917-1976 (1976)

These days, our not-so-social media are filled with talk designed to create divisions. Archibald MacLeish, a true man of the book (not just a poet, but a Librarian of Congress!) wrote this at the start of the 1930s, what W.H. Auden called a “low, dishonest decade” that turned destructive, with global consequences. Maybe it takes a poet to remind Americans of their best selves, of  what unites instead of divides us.

(The image accompanying this post is Norman Rockwell’s Spirit of America, from 1974.)