Archibald MacLeish: "Ars Poetica" (Imagist, Modernist)

Poems of 1926

"Ars Poetica" was first published in the journal above, and this poem is probably the best known and most critically acclaimed of all his short poems.

MacLeish's early, short poems seem to have been written to support the Imagist and Modernist view that a poem should be distinct and separate from meaning anything. This is perhaps especially characteristic of his poem "Ars Poetica," particularly of its last two lines:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit;

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb;

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown –

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs;

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees –

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf;

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea –

A poem should not mean
But be.

(MacLeish, 1926)

Reflect on this: "A poem should not mean / But be." These famous final two lines of the poem, ironically, serve to express a manifesto for Imagism or Modernism and also serve to reveal those movements' intention to remain separate from the world of discourse and their intention to set a poem apart as a type of sacred object, a thing to wonder at, not a thing with meaning awaiting explication.