"Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there"
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MacLeish draws a knife-edge distinction that still feels accusatory: journalism flattens lived experience into a distributable product, while poetry restores the heat and grain of being there. His phrasing is slyly prosecutorial. “Wishes to tell” and “wishes to say” make both forms sound less like neutral crafts and more like competing ambitions, each chasing a different kind of authority. Journalism “everywhere” is built to travel; it speaks in the voice of the public record, insisting the event can be rendered as a single shared object. The barb lands in the clause “as though the same things had happened for every man” - a critique of mass narration’s tendency to smooth over class, race, fear, luck, and private memory in favor of a clean, legible storyline.
Poetry, in contrast, is framed as radically local: “what it is like… to be himself.” The subtext isn’t that poetry is truer in a factual sense; it’s that it tells a truth journalism structurally can’t prioritize. The “particular occurrence” matters less than the consciousness meeting it. MacLeish’s provocative punch is the paradox “as though only he were alone there”: loneliness as a method. By exaggerating solitude, poetry reaches the inward conditions - shame, awe, dissociation - that public language edits out.
Context sharpens the claim. Writing in a century defined by propaganda, total war, and mass media, MacLeish treats “everywhere” as both modernity’s promise and its danger: information at scale, empathy at a discount. His intent is not to dismiss journalism, but to defend the irreducible singularity that survives any headline.
Poetry, in contrast, is framed as radically local: “what it is like… to be himself.” The subtext isn’t that poetry is truer in a factual sense; it’s that it tells a truth journalism structurally can’t prioritize. The “particular occurrence” matters less than the consciousness meeting it. MacLeish’s provocative punch is the paradox “as though only he were alone there”: loneliness as a method. By exaggerating solitude, poetry reaches the inward conditions - shame, awe, dissociation - that public language edits out.
Context sharpens the claim. Writing in a century defined by propaganda, total war, and mass media, MacLeish treats “everywhere” as both modernity’s promise and its danger: information at scale, empathy at a discount. His intent is not to dismiss journalism, but to defend the irreducible singularity that survives any headline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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