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,

 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.

Archibald MacLeish

1926

top photo: Cartier-Bresson

"A poem should not mean/But be" became the credo of the modernist poets of the early 20th century, and a foundation of most of the poetry published since then.  It is a statement often associated with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, but it came from this poem by Archibald MacLeish, a famous American poet in his time but largely forgotten and dismissed in academic literary circles.  Yet his accomplishments were remarkable: among them were three Pulitizer Prizes (one for drama, two for poetry) and a second (or third) career modernizing the immense Library of Congress as its Librarian, appointed by FDR.

Born in Illinois, he served as an ambulance driver in World War I (as did Hemingway) before becoming an artilleryman.  His brother was killed in that war.  He joined the expatriate Americans in Paris after the war, though his presence among the Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Picasso set is seldom mentioned. 

He  began as a modernist poet who admired Pound, but he also became politically active, first in the anti-fascist movement preceding World War II, and his literary work opened up to engagement with his times.  His book of poems accompanying photographs by Depression era photographer Dorothea Lang was a reference point for John Steinbeck as he wrote The Grapes of Wrath. 

 

MacLeish's verse play JB won both a Pulitzer and a Tony Award for best play in 1959.  Perhaps because he was prominent then and in the 60s (I recall witty essays in the American Scholar magazine) he was a poet whose name I knew and whose work I appreciated, at least until I took my first college literature courses and learned better.

There are many ways to consider those famous last two lines.  First of all, poetry and literature in general are made of words which have meaning--words refer to things, etc.--but literary works should be experienced as artworks--like paintings or concertos, composed of paint or notes but something in themselves.  (That was a creed and part of the cross-fertilization that went on in modernism and specifically in Paris between the world wars.)  Words have meaning, as do sentences or statements, which may be ironic or paradoxical or nonsense.  But the poem is a whole, an orchestration--that's another suggestion of the contrast between "mean" and "be."

To be also may mean to be alive--to the responses and interpretations of the reader.  MacLeish's poem  is very musical and somewhat whimsical, reminding me of Wallace Stevens (whose subject often was the nature of poetry.)  It is in part an entertainment, a show.  What messages may be gathered from a show may be part of the experience, but also, the show's the thing.  It is what it is, and how you respond to it.