Archibald Macleish

From the point of view of a free society, its writers, its creative writers, its poets, are not unlike those diplomatic agents whom countries send abroad to the remotest parts of the most distant continents to report on dangers and on possibilities. If a country's diplomatic agents are punished by those in power, for reporting what those in power do not wish to hear, that country's information, and eventually its policy, will be worthless.

It is the same with a country's novelists and poets. Their function, their obligation as artists, is to live at the frontiers of the experiences of their time -- at the passage of the present toward the future. Unless they are free to report that experience as they live it -- unless they are free to present the forms and shapes of meaning as those shapes and forms appear -- not they alone but the whole society will suffer. A country in which agencies of government, party functionaries or inquisitorial committees can dictate or influence the writers' work, or determine the conditions of its publication, is a country which has rejected freedom, and turned its face toward conformity and ignorance and death.