Archibald MacLeish's poem "Ars Poetical'

Archibald MacLeish's poem "Ars Poetical' is an ironic work because it makes declarations about poetry and what poetry "should be," but it contradicts those declarations at the very moment it makes them. For example, we read that

But, of course, these lines are made of the very words of which the poet says a poem should be free. What MacLeish is saying in this and other declarations of irony and apparent contradiction is that a poem, if it is successful, appeals to a part of the reader that transcends rational, analytical thinking which seeks a linear "meaning" from life, experience and poetry. The true "meaning" of a poem, then, according to MacLeish, is more like a mystery unsolved than an object defined. The object in this case is the poem, and, as much as MacLeish writes about what a poem "should be," the reader is finally left with the most mysterious of indications and implications about the nature of a poem. By using metaphorical language, MacLeish simply suggests different ways of looking at and experiencing poetry, and in doing so with such deft mystery, he himself creates a lovely poem. The precision of the similes distracts the reader from the essential mystery of what MacLeish is saying.

Regarding the structure of the poem, it is composed of three stanzas, with each stanza containing four couplets. The rhyme scheme is simple, with variable elements in the latter part of each stanza. For exampl

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re. This is the tone of the poem. It is peaceful, slow, quiet, smooth, free of conflict. "A poem should be palpable and mute/ As a globed fruit." MacLeish is concerned here with having the reader remember as clearly and substantially as possible the sensation of holding an apple in the hand (or whatever fruit is brought to mind). We almost hear the word "apple" in "palpable." We feel the apple as a living entity in our hand --- "mute", which implies that it could speak if it wished, that it has the power to make us expect it to speak --- and speak it will when we bite into it. Its roundness is emphasized in "globed fruit," as if it were a globe, a world unto itself. "Dumb/ As old medallions to the thumb" gives us another impression related to the apparent stories which these "inanimate" objects might tell us if they could or would. The fruit is mute and the medallion is dumb. What they tell us is a tactile story --- we have all held a shiny, juicy-looking apple in our hand; we have all run our thumb over a cold, metallicsmelling medallion and wondered at the many hands it has passed through. We have all leaned out windows and rested our elbows on "sleeve-woryn stone" and looked along the ledge where moss grows in the cor

Category: Literature - A