“Ars Poetica”, written by Archibald MacLeish, is a Modernist poem that, through careful sensory images, provides guidelines and clear examples of the true form of poetry, and in effect, the poem reveals how life should be lived. “Ars Poetica” is a beacon poem of the Imagist era yet at the same time breaks many Modernist traditions in bringing across the above mentioned concepts. Similes are utilized throughout the poem to provide examples of how a poem should be brought into existence and evoke instantaneous feelings. “Ars Poetica” breaks the cardinal sin of Imagist poetry, “wordiness”, when it uses repetition to bring across, surprisingly, the core idea of The Imagist era. This ingenious contrast and contradiction within the poem presented through imagery, is yet another angle used by MacLeish in bringing across his poems theme. Poems should be living …show more content…
The second stanza both opens and closes with the rising of the moon. Nature is quite the firm underlying theme of imagery in the poem’s first two stanzas. Poems should be written in such a manner that they, like the “twigs” and like the “moss”, are another aspect of the natural world, in that poetry must not be forced onto a page, but rather it must appear on the page freely, naturally allowing it to then leave the page. McLeish is also explaining that poems should obtain nature’s intrinsic beauty that no words can describe, hence the phrase from the first stanza “…as wordless/As the flight of birds”. The theme of nature continues into the third and final stanza; however not as directly, yet nature’s elusiveness in the third stanza is how McLeish manages to teach the ultimate principle of life.
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