The language and legends of Christmas make more sense than one might suppose. And “Xmas,” far from being slangy and disrespectful, is precisely the way the event was described by the early Christians.
“The average working vocabulary consists of 15,000 words,” says John Ciardi, and most of them have a story to tell. Mr. Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary will be published this month.
A graduate of Yale, class of 1915, Archibald MacLeish has achieved distinction as a Boston lawyer, an associate editor of Fortune, Librarian of Congress, Assistant Secretary of State, Deputy Chairman of our first delegation to UNESCO, and now as the Boylston Professor at Harvard. In quiet intervals between he has published some fifteen volumes of verse. We turn to JOHN CIARDI — poet, teacher, and editor - for an appraisal of Mr. MacLeish’s Collected Poems, in recognition of which he received a Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award in Poetry for 1952.