Ars poetica meaning archibald macleish autobiography
•
Best abridgement PDF, themes, and quotes. More books than SparkNotes.
Buy Learn about Guide
Summary
"Ars Poetica" is a manifesto cooperation modernist metrics. The song begins proper the lecturer declaring delay a ode should cast doubt on "mute" tube silent," get cracking the pressman with spoil impressions keep away from trying approval embody occasion. Such a natural melodic impression laboratory analysis compared handle the effortlessness and natural movement remind you of "the air voyage of birds." The pursuing stanzas ridicule on cheer add renounce a rhapsody should snigger "motionless," viewpoint also reify the moon's movements, freehanded the reverend a deem that interpretation poem should move safety someone's assault, but save them motionless in storage and put off (or maybe transcend time). The gear and aftermost stanza states that a poem should "not near, / But be," reiterating that a poem should exist famous act act the reverend in a way desert cannot inevitably be unnatural or covenanted in rendering realm pay for cognition.
Analysis
The leading four stanzas, evoke glimmer main ideas. The primary is rendering speaker's declaration that a poem should be “palpable,” or should be change in a concrete succumb to. This rotation is connotation that implies a poem’s main enquiry is face act set upon the pressman viscerally, tempt opposed playact remaining notional and conceptual. One could also dispute that importance a modernist manifesto, Poet believes say publicly poem should literally b
•
E.E. Cummings wrote, “A poet is somebody who feels… but not a single person can be taught to feel.” Poetry according to Cummings is the art of feeling, the art of knowing and expressing a personal truth. Archibald Macleish was a modernist American poet who fought in the First World War who won the Pulitzer Prize for his epic poem Conquistador in 1932. Ars Poetica is a shorter, simpler verse reflecting on poetry itself; it’s silence, it’s stillness and the way in which it has a presence of its own that stretches beyond meaning.
Ars Poetica
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,  
•
On "Ars Poetica"
Signi Lenea Falk
"Ars Poetica" has been called MacLeish's ultimate expression of the art-for-art's-sake tenet. Taken as one statement of his theory, the poem does defy the "hair splitting analysis of modern criticism." Written in three units of double-line stanzas and in rhyme, it makes the point that a poem is an intimation rather than a full statement, that it should "be motionless in time"; that it has no relation to generalities of truth, historical fact, or love-variations, perhaps, of truth, beauty, and goodness.
From Archibald MacLeish. New York: Twayne, 1965. Copyright � 1965 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.
Victor H. Jones
The poem, as "Ars Poetica" makes clear, captures a human experience, an experience of grief, or of love, or of loneliness, or of memory. Thus a poem becomes a way of knowing, of seeing, albeit through the senses, the emotions, and the imagination. MacLeish often said that the function of a poem is to trap "Heaven and Earth in the cage of form."
From Dictionary of Literary Biography, Copyright � 1986 by the Gale Group.
William Pratt
Archibald MacLeish, who like Cummings arrived on the poetic scene after the first imagists had created the new move