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A Critical Essay MacLeish's " Ars Poetica " : A Poem on the Art of Writing
Poetry as a Transcendent Aesthetic of Experience

Conference Paper · May 2017

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Murtada Al Manifi
King Abdulaziz University
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MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”: A Poem on the Art of Writing Poetry as a

Transcendent Aesthetic of Experience

Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica” is a lyrical aesthetic drama

of a concept of metamorphic ‘being’ inherent in the art of writing poetry.

The poem conceives the creative process as a silent transmutation of the

music of the mind into a mode of being, not into a pattern of the meaning of

a projective type. Poetry is not a philosophy or metaphysics, nor is it an

edifying or illuminating exercise in morality, with an ulterior view. Its

consummation as a process is its crystallized form with its molecular

vibration for a receptive ear. This is quite an old notion that the content and

the form of a work of art are one and the same thing. The form is only the

fullest realization of the possibilities of the content. This quite artistry of

unfoldment permeates ‘Ars Poetica’ as its animating spirit and is refracted in

the entire spectrum of its imagery of silence and stillness.

In the strong palpability of the poem, like that of around, full-grown,

soft, hard, delicious apple, there is a romantic analogy, reminiscent of Keats.

But the compactness and suggestiveness of the phrase ‘globed fruit’ as well

as its hard musical appeal impart it a modern quality. This feeling or

perception recurs throughout the poem by variations and secures the

maximum stress on the inherent reticence of the creative process. Aristotle’s

concept of the structure unity of the drama, Dante’s norm of poetic

composition as a painful toil, Eliot’s ‘impersonality’ and ‘auditory

imagination’, etc. highlight the underlying principle of discipline in art.

Keats’s ‘ripeness’, though contextually different, is an aesthetic of poetic

form of perennial value. Wordsworth’s superb art of reticence reveals the

classical strain in his mind and art, in his Lucy poems. MacLeish’s modern

lyrical genius finds an utterance in blending the classical qualities of

restraint, economy and concentration with the romantic art of evocativeness,

metaphorical and rhythmic. His philosophy of poetic composition is,

therefore, the theme of the poem and its artistic procedure or technique.

Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ has a greater evocative resonance as a poem

on the art of writing poetry. Here MacLeish uses rhythm and rhyme, line

order and stanza form not by a flamboyance of color and effect but by

modulating his means to his need to be ‘mute’ despite the reverberation of

phrases like ‘Dumb’ and ‘thumb’. A conscious vein of romantic imagery,

particularly the moon figure in its silent pace or ascent, infuses a sober

pensive grace in the poem. The entanglement of the trees with the darkness

of the night undergoes a liberating drive by the cool radiance of the moon.

This is obviously not a strikingly modern image. But the simple phrasing of

the increasing exposure of the ‘night-entangled trees’ to moonlight creates

the effect of a gradual ‘release’ in the same window ledge covered with

moss. A powerful telescopic image as it is, it interweaves image and allusion

to create a vivid atmosphere of the time, memory or the glamour of distance.

The image of a perfect poem as a ‘globed fruit’ intertwines the sense

impression of touch and taste, a little like Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’. But the

focal ‘muteness’ of the globe figure, cosmic and ‘round’ in suggestion,

implies among other things artistic restraint and reticence found essential for

the highest perfection of art and for its being charged with a great depth of

meaning. The iambic rhythm and the varying lengths of the lines in the

rhyming couplet add to its meaning and effect. Then ‘Dumb’ chiming with

‘thumb’ brings to mind the association of Philip Sidney’s norm of

spontaneous, emotional poetry – to look into one’s ‘heart’ and ‘write’.

Beneath the remoteness of the Renaissance or medieval relevance of the

poetic value of the fond feel of ‘old medallions’ there is a freshness of

appeal in the Hopkins-like sound and image produced. By the strikingly

rhyming couplet with one word ‘Dumb’ forming a line, followed by a long

line, the poet shows his command of rhythmic manipulations, in a singular

way.

The ‘casement’ image is more complex and subtle, by its conger of a

medieval-castle-like atmosphere suggesting in a way the ‘charm’d magic

casement, opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn’ in

Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. A lonely, lovely princess in the castle,

leaning on the window ledge for a view, again and again, could leave behind

a ‘sleeve-worn stone’ ledge.

The rhythmic refrain of silence in the poem varies effectively, assuming

a new tone, by a shift from image to image. The acute and complex

apprehensions of ‘muteness’, ‘dumbness’ and ‘silence’ in the first three

couplets are set off by the simpler figures of the birds’ flight and the

climbing moon. By an imaginative swell and surge, the poem attains its

exaltation of theme and artistic treatment, like the inarticulate flight of birds.

Ignoring the sounds or cries of the birds in flight, the poet concentrates on its

un-fretful sublimity. Then, through the figure of the climbing moon, he

extends the scope of the stillness of the poem in time as a timeless object,

corresponding to the moon’s bigger touch of illumination. The moon

obliterates the surrounding gloom of darkness by its light as it grows bigger

or goes up – higher and higher. The yield of memory or a mind illuminated

to a great height of knowledge or wisdom shows the essential quality of

poetry, through the moon image.

Poetry creates its own order or reality by transmutation, not by

mirroring the world. It renders the painful enigmas of life, suffering, death,
 A Critical Essay Al Manifi 5

destruction, etc., by focusing on the poignancy of the tragic void created by

it all and then on its natural regeneration: “For all the history of grief/ An

empty doorway and a maple leaf”. For its great vividness and evocativeness,

the metaphor, in its verbal form, is unexcelled in the poem and leaves little

to be desired for its greater perfection. This is intensely but mutedly

reinforced by the Emily-Bronte-like apprehension of the power of love or

feeling as ‘leaning grasses’, under the sweep of the wind, below the

luminous orbs of the sun and the moon. The conceptual climax of the

powerful portrayal of the exaltation of poetry into the silence of being

something beautiful and meaningful comes when it dies into its eternity as a

quiet, deep, lovely incarnation of a feeling or thought. MacLeish concludes,

‘A poem should not mean/ But be’. A poem is a living form of meaning, in a

lyric, dramatic, symbolic or metaphorical form. Any injected or projected

moral or didactic exercise obstructs its inner or organic growth perfection.

“Ars Poetica” is indeed a rare poem on the aesthetics of poetic creation,

compact, rhythmic romantic and yet modern.

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