MacLeish Pleads For Increased Imagination

The greatest flaw of modern civilization is its inability to "feel" and "imagine," Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, told a University of Minnesota audience Sunday.

"Far more than we need an intercontinental missile or a moral rearmament or a religious revival, we need to come alive again, to recover the virility of the imagination on which all earlier civilizations have been based," the Pulitzer-prize winning poet said.

MacLeish spoke on "Poetry and Journalism" at the eighth of the University's Gideon Seymour lectures, a series named for a late Minneapolis newspaper editor.

Knowledge without feeling is not knowledge and leads only to "public irresponsibility and indifference, and conceivably to ruin," MacLeish asserted.