Few literary figures in midcentury America were as highly esteemed as Archibald MacLeish. He was a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law and a World War I veteran with a distinguished record. He abandoned a promising law career to read and write poetry for five years in France. After a year in Mexico, he wrote Conquistador, a long poem that won him the 1933 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Twenty years later, MacLeish’s Collected Poems won him a second Pulitzer. And in 1959, J.B., his play in verse, brought him the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
During the 50th year of the prizes in 1966, it was no surprise that MacLeish was one of those invited to speak at the celebratory banquet, a May 10 gathering of Pulitzer Prize winners at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. His charge was to talk for five minutes on trends in his field – poetry.
Instead he turned his attention to the broader meaning of the prizes.
The chairman MacLeish referred to in his opening was John Hohenberg, the longtime administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University.
Poets are at least as human as anyone else
It is not often one envies the chairman of a much bespoken dinner such as this, but I envy the chairman here tonight.
Not because — not only because — he is a superb administrator in any circumstances, but because of his psychological advantage over the rest of us. He is here as a representative of Columbia University and the role of Columbia University in these proceedings is, unlike our own, restful, ambiguous and unembarrassed.
Columbia has decided, after fifty years of distributing Pulitzer Prizes, to pause, and take stock of the consequences.
Draw rein, draw breath,
Cast a cold eye,
On life, on death ...
Whereas we, ladies and gentlemen — we who address you and a large proportion of you whom we address — are the consequences. We are Mr. Pulitzer’s dream made flesh. We are the men and women who were chosen. And what have the chosen to do on the great day, at the solemn appraisal, the ultimate assize? What, to put it crudely, can they conceivably say?
Barbara Tuchman has a story in her Proud Tower which illuminates our predicament. It seems that the father of Richard Strauss, a famous virtuoso of his day, was asked how he would prove his right to be considered the foremost living performer on the horn. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t prove it. I admit it.”
Conceivably we might follow the Strauss example, but we don’t. The trouble is that our emotions are engaged in a way in which the emotions of the egregious horn-player apparently were not. We can’t merely admit the charge against us because we make it ourselves. We are proud of it. As our presence here this evening proves.
And it is there, of course, that the ambiguity of which I speak appears — the embarrassment. Of what, precisely, are we proud? Of ourselves? Of our certification by a great university as superior performer on our various instruments?
Possibly. Poets — I will confine myself to poets, leaving the novelists, journalists, playwrights, composers, historians, biographers to speak for themselves — poets are at least as human as anyone else. Not to say more so.And possibly it is only ourselves we are proud of. But I doubt it. For poets, though they may know only too well how to value themselves, know how to value something else even more. They know how to value poetry — poetry past, present and to come. And their real pride consists not in being preferred to their contemporaries — they know how often these preferences are reversed by time and how frequently the forgotten poet of one age is the remembered of another — but in feeling themselves a part, however small a part, of that timeless, continuing and inextinguishable pulse of life which poetry is.
What these awards have done for many in this indifferent world of ours — this particularly indifferent American world — is somehow to include them. We do not all of us have the courage, as we certainly do not have the reasons, which made it possible for Keats to say, at the loneliest moment of his life, that he knew he would be among the English poets at his death. We need, most of us, a sign of recognition, not recognition of our ultimate worth as poets — only poetry itself can give that — but recognition that we exist. That we are there. Among those who went before and those who will come after.
To pick up in your forty-third unanswered year the copy of the Paris Herald which says you have a Pulitzer Prize is not to be proud of yourself. It is to think of Edwin Arlington Robinson whom you revere, and Robert Frost whom you will learn to, and the others in your generation whom you have heard of and never known, and all the rest still younger, still to find.
No one believes, least of all the perceptive President of the University whose guests we are, that the Pulitzer Prizes will change the art of letters in America; art is not impressed by rewards. But there are men and women in this room — among them the most intelligent of the time — who will testify that these Prizes have warmed the world in which the art of letters must be practiced.