William Pratt

Archibald MacLeish, who like Cummings arrived on the poetic scene after the first imagists had
created the new movement, nevertheless can be credited with the poetic summing up of imagism
in his "Ars Poetica" in 1926, written well after the imagist decade had ended. It is inconceivable
that such a poem could have been written without imagism, because the technique as well as the
philosophy of MacLeish's most famous poem is imagist. It consists of a sequence of images that
are discrete but that at the same time express and exemplify the imagist principles and practice
of poetry.

The Latin title is borrowed from Horace, who wrote a prose treatise in the first century A.D., the
Silver Age of Rome, called "Art of Poetry," advising poets among other things to be brief and to
make their poems lasting. MacLeish wanted to link the classical with the modern in his poetic
"treatise" as a way of implying that the standards of good poetry are timeless, that they do not
change in essence though actual poems change from age to age and language to language. His
succession of opening images are all about the enduring of poetry through time, as concrete as
"globed fruit" or ancient coins or stone ledges, and as inspiring to see as a flight of birds or the
moon rising in the sky. The statements are not only concrete but paradoxical, for it is impossible
that poems should be "mute" or "Dumb" or "Silent" or "wordless," which would mean that there
was no communication in them at all; rather, what MacLeish is stating in his succession of
paradoxical images is that the substance of poetry may be physical but the meaning of poetry is
metaphysical: poems are not about the world of sensible objects as much as they are about
invisible realities, and so the universal emotions of grief and love can be expressed in words that
convey the experience in all its concreteness, yet the words reach into the visionary realm
beyond experience, toward which all true images point. The final paradox, that "A poem should
not mean but be," is pure impossibility, but the poet insists it is nevertheless valid, because
beyond the meaning of any poem is the being that it points to, which is ageless and permanent, a
divine essence or spiritual reality behind all appearances. MacLeish's modern "Art of Poetry" is
a fulfillment of the three rules of imagism (be direct, be brief, and use free verse), of Pound's
definition of the image, and at the same time of Horace's Latin statement on poetry, that good
poetry is one proof that there is a permanence in human experience that does not change but
endures through time.

from Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry. Copyright © 1996 by the
Curators of the University of Missouri

John Haislip
And so at the beginning of the twentieth century, English poetry was dominated by a highly
rhetorical, very popular poetry exemplified by such writers as Sir Henry Newbolt, William
Watson, and Alfred Noyes. The subsequent revolt against their poetry and especially the
implications of its popularity led directly to a search for an antidote to the horrors of the popular
poem. The antidote was the image and imagist poetry. In terms of Stead's metaphor, the imagist
poet sought to distance himself from the audience and shorten the line between himself and
reality with the goal of creating pure poetry.

MacLeish' s attempt at an "imagist" poem, "Ars Poetica," was written March 14, 1925, at the
beginning of his serious commitment to poetry.

[....]
"Ars Poetica" has been a part of our "literary lives" for so long that it has blurred in our memory,
vaguely associated with other "imagist" poems and modernist manifestos. Yet in spite of the fact
that we have encountered it innumerable times in innumerable anthologies, essays, textbooks,
that telling last couplet remains fresh and enigmatic: "A poem should not mean / But be." But
what can one say about its particulars? And what is its significance?

"Ars Poetica," John Cage suggests, is the best piece of propaganda the imagist movement ever
had. It is not an imagist poem, he says, because, first, it is almost impossible to write one, and
second, it is too didactic; there is too strong a message. To this insightful remark I would add
another: Scott Donaldson writes in his biography of MacLeish that "in severely compressed
form," "Ars Poetica" conveys "some of the modernist aesthetic" (150). This remark comes about
after Donaldson has pointed to a gloss on the poem that MacLeish wrote to Norman Holes
Pearson in 1937, in which MacLeish used his notebooks to refresh his memory on his thinking at
the time of the writing of the poem. Donaldson writes:

There he [MacLeish] found Fenellosa's observation that "metaphor was the very essence of
poetry," but not as exegesis or demonstration. Metaphor itself was "experience." In his
notebooks, too, was his reworking of Eliot's doctrine of the "objective correlative," a concrete
representation that would convey emotion without involving the abstract slither of the merely
personal. It would not do to gush on the page. The object of a poem was "not to recreate" the
poet's emotion in someone else. . . . The poem itself is finality, an end, a creation." (150)

Outlined here are four important aspects of the modernist aesthetic. Donaldson' s astute
statement of the importance of metaphor identifies this trope not as exegesis or demonstration,
but experience itself. Second, he isolates the concrete as a representation of the emotion, that is,
the objective correlative. Third, he insists upon the avoidance of the merely personal, the escape
into the impersonal. And fourth, he understands the poem as a creation that is an end to itself.
Perhaps what was buried in "Ars Poetica" in 1925, but uncovered by MacLeish himself in the
letter of 1937 is what has drawn us to the poem all these years: metaphor, concretion, non-
intervention, the concept of impersonality, and autotelism.

In a discussion of Williams's theory of "no ideas but in things" and MacLeish's "Ars Poetica,"
Howard Nemerov observed that

One of the hardest things about studying Modern Poetry is that you can write a far more
coherent and plausible account from what the poets said they were doing than from their poems.
This difficulty is compounded when the poems keep talking about themselves and their
intentions for poetry as a whole. (154-55)

"Ars Poetica" does not do what it says should be done in the composition of a poem—largely
because it is impossible to write a poem that is and only is an object to behold as a static object
without meaning, without message. This is the central paradox of "Ars Poetica."

from "Archibald MacLeish: 'Ars Poetica' and other Observations." In Poetries in the Poem. Ed.
Dorothy Z. Baker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1997.
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Reflections on Ars Poetica

Posted on February 2, 2006 by eclark2

One thing that puzzled me at first about Archibald MacLeish’s poem Ars Poetica is all the
qualities that MacLeish thinks that poetry should have, or in some cases, should not have. He
says that poems should be “mute,” “dumb,” “silent,” and “wordless.” These attributes seem to
be the opposite of what many people would want a poem to be—we want poems to say
something, to mean something, to be filled with nuances that require multiple readings to fully
figure out (if one is ever able to fully figure it out at all).

Ars Poetica, however, also seems to follow its own expressed ideas of what poetry should be.
The first line, “A poem should be palpable and mute,” seems to suggest that instead of explicitly
expressing an opinion or meaning, a poem should try to paint a picture with words that is open
to interpretation by the reader—thus causing the poem itself to be seen as “dumb,” “silent,” and
“wordless.” The poem itself does this with vivid imagery filled with tangible visual details such
as the lines “An empty doorway and a maple leaf,” and “Leaving, the moon releases/Twig by
twig the night entangled trees,” which both bring to mind a picture of what each scene looks
like.

Another detail that caught my eye was the repetition of the stanza “A poem should be
motionless in time/As the moon climbs.” Sandwiched in between the repetition of these lines are
two stanzas detailing the movement of the moon in the sky. This creates the sensation that,
within the world of the poem, the moon is climbing yet the poem remains motionless, just as the
line states.

At first, this poem had me very confused—I thought to myself, “But what does it mean?!” And
then, upon further reflection, I realized that I was looking at it in the wrong way. The whole
point of the poem seems to be that the question of meaning is irrelevant—the poem is there,
open to interpretation by the reader. As Ars Poetica concludes in the final stanza,

“A poem should not mean

But be.”

What is MacLeish saying? He presents us with a series of statements about poetry that seem at
first simply to be nonsense. A poem that was mute, dumb, or silent would be no poem at all, for
poetry is an oral art form. In every century before the Twentieth it demanded to be intoned,
chanted, or sung--or at least recited. And a poem that was wordless would also be no poem at
all, for poetry is a verbal art form. An object that made use of neither surface, line, color, nor
texture might be interesting, but one could hardly call it a painting. Nor can a poem be
motionless in time. To be heard (or even read) it must progress from one phoneme, one word, to
another, from the opening line to the last syllable of recorded sound. And as for meaning versus
being . . . well; the prosaic might be excused if they simply shrug their shoulders and walk away.

Nevertheless, there is a method to MacLeish's rhetorical madness. How, the persistent reader is
led to ask, should a poem be mute, silent, dumb, wordless, or motionless? And then we notice
the parallel structure in which each assertion is stated in the form of a paradoxical simile. Each
simile, moreover, has as its vehicle a concrete sensory image. The poem is mute the way a
globed fruit is palpable; the way, that is, in which its shape, weight, and texture nestle into one's
hand. The combination of visual with tactile imagery continues as the poem is dumb the way an
old medallion feels to the thumb. Complex emotional associations are added next through
romantically-tinged connotations, accruing as silently as moss on casement ledges. And then
auditory imagery jumps in, making our hearts leap as wordlessly as the whir of wings from a
suddenly spooked flock of quail.

MacLeish is saying by doing what Robert Frost had stated more prosaically: Poetry is "saying
one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another" (24). Thus, MacLeish
presents the two emotions that appear in his poem, grief and love, in terms of concretely realized
pictures. Grief is conveyed by an empty doorway and a maple leaf, love by leaning grass and
lights above the sea. And he explains how grief and love are related to these pictures with his
cryptic statement that a poem should be "equal to, not true." Equal to what? Presumably to grief
or love or globed fruit or flying birds. Well, this is another paradox: a poem about grief is not the
same thing as sorrow, nor one about love the same thing as devotion. A poem cannot be literally
"equal to" any more than it can be wordless.

But there was a truth in the lie that a poem could be wordless, and that same kind of truth
appears again here. A poem cannot literally "be" grief or love, nor equivalent to them; it perforce
must be a statement that "means" something "true." In what sense then is a poem true? One
hopes it is a true statement about something. We need to supply that preposition about to match
its sister preposition to: true about versus equal to. A poem can't be literally wordless, but it
should, if it is to be true about the flight of birds, use words that convey the rush of those wings
so vividly that we are not conscious of reading words but only of the object: the unavoidable
words are virtually lost in the whir of wings. In the same way, a poem cannot be literally equal
to grief or love, but it should be true about them in such a way that we are not conscious so
much of reading words as only of the object: the unavoidable words are lost in the tears of loss
or the heart throb of affection. The poem cannot really avoid being true about (except by being
false, and hence not a true poem)--but it should seem equal to if it is to be effective at being
affective poetically.

The way the poem achieves this seeming is through metaphor and concrete imagery. MacLeish
suggests a plausible scenario. Perhaps the empty doorway is the one out of which the lover went,
never to return. And perhaps she did so in autumn. And then one pauses years later before that
doorway with the leaf blowing across it and the full poignancy of the original grief comes back
in force. So we do not tell the reader that "the man was sad because he thought of his lost love."
We park the reader in front of that doorway and let him get the impact of that blowing leaf,
carried by its associations, even as the character in the poem would if it were really happening.
Perhaps the waving grasses are in the dunes by the beach on which the two lovers walked with
the beams of the lighthouses stabbing through the darkness.

Perhaps you can provide another scenario. It does not matter. What matters is that we use
concrete words in such a way that they convey the same emotional associations that the concrete
things they image do in life: globed fruit, casement ledges, old medallions. And it matters not
whether the imagery is visual, tactile, auditory, or even olfactory. Have you never been
transported back to your mother's kitchen in your childhood by the smell of bacon frying?
Poetry conveys emotion by tapping into the mind's propensity to form associations between
emotions, memories, and concrete experiences. And so we come to understand the last dyad of
"Ars Poetica": "A poem should not mean / But be." "Mean" is parallel to "true about," "be" to
"equal to." The poem cannot avoid meaning, but by the use of concrete imagery it means in such
a way as to seem to do more: to be. Rather than simply making a statement about emotion, it
recreates it by means of the magic of concrete imagery and metaphor.