“A poem should not mean
Tweet
But be.”
– Archibald Macleish
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,
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 (1892-1982)
From: Collected Poems 1917 to 1982