Life & Wisdom Quote by Archibald MacLeish

MacLeish draws a bright line between two ways of knowing, and it lands like a provocation aimed at the 20th century’s growing faith in “the facts.” Journalism, in his framing, is the world as it appears: legible, reportable, arranged into events with timestamps and attribution. Poetry is the world as it registers inside us: atmosphere, dread, longing, moral vertigo. The trick is that he doesn’t insult journalism; he shrinks its jurisdiction. It can tell you what happened. It can’t tell you what it did to you.

The subtext is a defense of art’s seriousness at a moment when mass media was rapidly standardizing attention. MacLeish lived through the rise of radio and the modern newspaper, through depression and world war, through an era when “objectivity” became both a professional ethic and a cultural fetish. His couplet exposes the cost of that ethic: when public language treats feeling as bias, we end up fluent in surfaces and illiterate in experience.

Context matters, too: MacLeish wasn’t a cloistered lyricist. He worked in government and public institutions, including the Library of Congress, and he wrote civic-minded poetry. So the line isn’t escapism; it’s a warning about what a society loses when it confuses information with understanding. “Look” versus “feel” is not a cute contrast but a hierarchy of needs: events explain the day; feelings explain the stakes.