
Photo@Heather McHugh
What is bigger, space or countlessness? Atomic droplet? Leap of miles? A single foot of fire? Sometimes the query makes a quarrel from an equability.
And poetry's the literary art of which I'd say (as once Disraeli did, of life): It's too short to be small.
As difficult as disentangling figure from its ground can be, it's harder sorting meaning from its means. How tell the two apart? Apart, I mean, from telling, in itself.
The meaning isn’t just the aim. The aim’s a point you meant to make. But much of what we say we didn’t mean. And much of what we meant we couldn’t say.
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.
A careless reader may incline to find in Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica only a sermon on economy in means, austere prescriptives— and proscriptives— for a genre, marked by shoves and shoulds and nots. But that's the rug he throws to pull it out from underfoot. Where worlds remain there is a means to wing away. He wove a magic carpet ride. Too many miss the jetées, magic mixes, and resounding polyguities.
The structures of the poem's paradoxes aren't so much overtly controverting as coordinate: they play the to and fro of our attentions. (Don't blame a craft for the disinclinations in some passengers, to learn its oars.) All overseeing's easier than understanding; I myself would rather be a captain than a recapitulator. No easier for scholarship than for enchantment is analysis of the poetic instruments, but let me try, from neck-deep in a life of tidal sounds and graphic images. I mean to call attention, over all the challenges of prose, to something in the love of letters, ways a poem's literality must matter.
***
In large degree our native language is beyond our ken precisely when beneath our notice. Fluency disposes us to a partial care, or complementary neglect. Plato's worry that a poem's musical seductions might make us miss a meaning's eminence, was something of a grown-up intuition about the art of governance. But we are born to be attracted to recurrences and children love a chime; and those are deeply woven into nature. If control is what you're after, it's possible you may too often take a lonely peak for a maturity.
But there are many senses in which writing could be said to make its mark, and anyone who loves the arts cannot be indifferent to sense's multiple identities: its shapes and sounds, frissons and glides, its side-effects, subliminalities, and tonal hints. Some fine ideas you find on-line (when looking for a guide to poetry) will tell you more about a fashion of interpretation than about materials and moment, lyric dynamism. But form at best is springboard to surprise.
Although MacLeish's Ars Poetica may boast the classical entitlement, it nonetheless unfolds without pretensions or propitiations. No claims of token erudition, no investments in tendentiousness: It is a sensualist’s delight, in artfulness and depth. And when you read for senses, you begin to apprehend the many kinds of those: not only senses that compose an argument, but many more, as well, that weave the arcs and textures, poignancies and resonances of an art.
The poem's couplets (twelve of them) appear, on second reading, to have fallen into three distinguishable stages of development. Each stage makes its distinctive claim about the genre nominally common to them all. The three are these:
First: that a poem’s felt beyond the tellable.
Second: that a poem’s moving when it's still.
And third, a poem doesn’t argue; it embodies.
Studying the ways a work of art’s instantiations can (themselves) refer to genre, the reader can't avoid a central paradox: This piece exemplifies what it's referring to. In doing so, it artfully resembles Pope’s own ars poetica, as Pope's developed out of others. No proof in art is QED of argument: reproof might just as well precede a proof's eventualities, if you must read a poem as a trail of philosophical dance moves.
Remember for example Arthur Schopenhauer saying all the stages of The World as Will and Representation were expressive of a single thought having "organic"—not a “chainlike"— structure. Early subdivisions of “perspectives on the one idea” he said we must conceive as subsequent to later ones (“as surely as the later ones [will] presuppose the earlier.”) Refusing us the customary linear progressions of an argument in time, he tells us that repeated readings will “complete one’s senses” of it.
Such dictates from a writer to a reader sound to us today too patronizing, but keep in mind that every lineated poem will involuntarily suggest the same, because the reader sees it as a shape in space before being immersed in it, in the associations that it prompts. The senses are not just semantic! We recognize the depth of the beginning only on our second time around.
The Schopenhauer preface tells us time and language shape our forms of thoughtfulness.
And Archibald MacLeish's sign-making in this, his Ars Poetica, is not just narrowly semantic; it expands by virtue of communication’s instrument as the radiances of a meaning always do arise from their artistic means. (Consider the inherent sexiness of saxes, or the gloss of glass harmonicas!)
In general an ars poetica will draw on instrumental skills, and will allude to its materials. It makes conspicuous the depths to which conceptual arrangements may be anchored in some worlds of percept; makes an active graph of musical and visual experience by dancing in, not only over, all the matter of ideas.
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A poem's not a strategy for argument. Encountering MacLeish's scrupulous design, a careful reader sees how exquisitely to the point the stratagems of apposition (not just opposition) are. Consider any thought's development as part of structure—through the lines inside their stanzas, stanzas in their sections. Here's what I'll be calling section 1:
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.
If “unheard melodies” have sprung to mind, well, rest assured you're not alone. Each of the couplets in this section hinges on an auditory adjective (the “mute,” the “dumb,” the “silent,” and the “wordless"); doing its études with them, the first four couplets offer up their four articulations of the one unspeakability.
The gist is this: however far beyond poetic instruments an explication aims, the poem will remain supremely sensitive to instrumental implications.
The couplet quartet opening the whole is seen (with just a glance at punctuation) to have formed a single sentence; but as we read it, we begin to understand how lines and stanzas overcome (or undermine) the logic of ensuings to which sentences are liable. Even the sentences (composed of word relationships themselves) can mount their own resistance to discursive logic, if their architecture isn't static. The subtle engineering of the context best refutes a narrow reading of the modal “should.” Suggestiveness results from sway in architecture, and it proves resistant to the kneejerk of an autonomic oppositional critique, conduces to some skepticism about sharpness and immutability as the exclusive means for representative exchange. A blur bespeaks a speed sometimes; a blink can lubricate the motion.
No mere conformings in the form (to dictates of prescriptive boundaries) alone compose the best poetic line. Its verve will not reside in bonds of words, but in the bounds between relationships among them. Jumps and rebounds. Archibald MacLeish's analogues for written music (from the sequence "mute" and "silent", "dumb" and "wordless") do not repeat but bloom in paradox.
To call up what's beyond the surfaces of words as our utilities, a poet must engage and then defy the understandings that our lives in language have engendered in us (not just logically but biologically; not just lexically but soon enough syntactically). Profound disinclinations to cliché arise where readers might have thought mere correspondences would come.
And content's uncontainability is registered in shaken settlements.
***
The first four couplets work by overlaying four analogous, materially-distinct embodiments of the section's whole poetic principle. There’s one surprise per couplet:
—First: The fruit, instead of being savored by the nose or mouth, is known by hand (where it is palpable), by ear (where it is mute), and eye (itself a globe and sizer-up of its semblables). MacLeish consigns neither to ear nor tongue (where song and speech may be presumed to live) the usual authorities. In “mute” and “palpable” instead he emphasizes how the qualities of a poetic quietude can qualify as touching.
—Second: Medallions (that might elsewhere be commemorating history) are valued here instead for their tactile immediacy.
—Third: The stone is chosen not for its conventional and monumental durability—but for being vulnerable, in time, to time. (The gift of time to living fingers is interpreted in silence: each of us detects, in just a touch, through all the moss's interventions, shapes the stone took lifetimes to achieve through ceremonies of a sleeve.)
—And fourth: Instead of being represented (as traditionally) by songs of birds, the poem takes their flights for figure; the imputed V sign makes the "figure" literal. The letter-loving flocks may flash their legibility, but won't form sentences as such; they’re not sententious.
As palpable as possible in time, as endless as can be in evanescence, every section here reiterates the claim that lyric time is marked not just in turn but in returns. Each section of four couplets illustrates the ways a poem's suppleness informs the poem's arguments more than the monumental could. The momentary turns to the momentous, and beyond.
***
Now consider section 2. Its first and final couplet seem identical:
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Context changes how we read what otherwise might seem a repetition. On the second time around, we start to notice how the tiniest of words like "in" and "as" are altered in effect. The intervening couplets actually changed the senses of the passage.
"In time" refers not only to a moment or some moments still to come, but also to abiding or essential temporality (across all stretches of a medium considered as a whole). Moreover, "as" acts one way when it marks resemblance, and another when it marks the simultaneous.
A poet keeps in mind the flex of frames that can accommodate the switches (since a train of thought is constantly conditioned by its stations and its speed). This section of the poem winds up not only comparing but importantly distinguishing its recapitulations. The four words "leaving, as the moon" will be reiterated, and entangle us in a syntactical engagement quite distinct from what we took for granted in the first go-round. How you read the "leaving" (and, thereafter, the related forms of "leaves") informs the changes in your understandings too, since leaving's gerund and its participle both participate, whether at once or (as you notice them) sequentially—to mark not only something disappearing but the something that remains, in shreds of matter or detrituses of memory. Notice how "leaves" at the end of this section's 5th line must at first appear a noun (the tatters on the twigs of trees); but then line 6 does not support that reading, forcing only nouns upon us, so we have to understand the "leaves" as verb and find its object in the mind. (A mind is what is left behind, in shreds of memory). MacLeish has made so exquisitely moving thing of the extended sentence that the objects and the subjects fleetingly can change positions, as our relationships to minds and times can do. Each time you read this section, it is more detailed, more twigged.
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—
And whether leaves are taken to be nouns or predicates, relinquished or reframed in time, we can't and mustn't extricate ourselves entirely from the nature of articulation's own proliferations—that's the depth of the suggestiveness—nor should we want to, since we'd lose such richnesses of understanding and of overlook. Once words like "as" and "leaving" have then succeeded in cross-fertilizing sentence structures from within, then figures that at first appeared distinct can merge in our imaginations as perspectives on the annual and the perennial, as well as on the stretches we'd call spatial.
The couplets operated paratactically in section 1, repeating structures against which the independences of paradox emerged. But section 2 has built a single sentence from a structure of subordinations. There the over-arching reading runs into interior entanglements from its branching inroads.
I cannot resist rereading moon's releases (dreams and images of man upon it) as the human mind's own lunar borrowings, in light of fields of figuration. The moon slips through our own imprimaturs via its motion whether as an object or a metaphor (each night, each month, each year) to leave behind a season, which stands for (and behind) the ones to come.
Try tracking consequences of “A poem should be motionless in time” in every way you can, allowing for the “time” in which you can escape, as surely as the one in which the sorting mechanisms of the mind become entangled. In equal justice under grammar you will leave “the moon behind, memory by memory” or "the mind behind, leaf by leaf”—(and by a similar progression, take your leaves of an investment in but one exclusive meaning, or another.)
We read the waves and particles of such a medium at last, in person, in a perfect insecurity: in grammar-shivers, in syntax-slippages.
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
***
To looney-tune syntactophiles like me, the virtuosities of section 2 are downright heavenly, a sentence carefully constructed for suspension, notwithstanding all those “shoulds” and “nots.” With just one word the fewer, would the poet risk undue attenuation; one extra, and he tips the scales too early towards a false decisiveness. It's better not “get closure" as proliferations of experience (and its representings) never let us settle up—or settle down.
In section 2 he's turned a wheel of time and space, the wheel returning to its first position, as the spoke that poked up first is spoken up again, but now with grounds and seasons, skies and minds, all changed about it.
How many moons compose a mind, a mind to turn things over in, a mind to turn a sky on? Here MacLeish has given us entrées through structures that otherwise might well have smacked of mere finality. The middle couplets of the second section center us (not only for its portion but the whole and moving poem, too). That middle is the engine and the genie of it all, a gestural poetics giving rise (via the rounds in time and reading's seasons) to a motion's notion: that the moons (extraneous as surely as intrinsic) are turning over everything.
As moons detach from earthling view, so poems leave the mind behind, and yet to mind recur. (Where mind is left, or takes its leave, it leaves behind its own detritus: memory by memory. And all the while you kept in mind: the mind is in a man no more precisely than a man is in the moon.) The thought of lunatics engages mechanisms of a self-destruction in the processing of thoughts of Self itself. As Gertrude Stein in her own way reminds, all is in language, nowhere else. To study the materials of music may render meaning more transparent, not just iron out an understanding. The sum of moves resists the stiffening of meaning, and enlightens it by making meaning not more ponderous but more transparent.
If time and space are of a piece, eventuality is overall. And ranging there, the components can turn (as if by nature) into arts of composition, moving first the writer then the reader, even in a section about motionlessness.
***
And here's a final set of turns, to underline the modus operandi (of recurrence-as-distinction):
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.
A meaning has to do with claims to truth, but an equality with claims of being. This final section gives us the argument outright (of all the enterprise's campaign against argument). Its middle couplets start with two more tiny words that matter: "For."
And that's another word you notice now in context can do two different things: It can replace or can displace. It links some subjects (grief and love) with objects, but can emphasize either the differences or likenesses. An “empty doorway and a maple leaf" as emblem of the "history of grief" may minimize or deepen grief's extent. The leaning and the lighting may be emblems of love's slightness, or of its ubiquity in forms. One reading takes instantiation—leaf of maple, blade of grass—as its anchor in an uncontainability. The other reading takes the instance as release from category.
In language we may use synopses to reduce—even replace—particulars, just as we use mass mechanisms in our times; but in experience details will not be dampened or absorbed. This poem's final section emphasizes not the arithmetic ways particulars add up to generalities, but rather how details may well outrace abstractions. Those two lights above the sea can represent an edge of earth against the vastnesses of flow. A fragment can evoke the missing whole a torch cannot illuminate. So each displacement (from a large abstraction into the immediate perception) stands to serve not only as an omen of extinction, but as hint of amplitude.
The metrics for immeasurables, our snaps of emblem and metonymy, particulars in place of universals, carry irreducible yet figurative weight in a MacLeish's ars poetica. The multivalences—the latitudes—arise precisely from the poet's care with means: The lights are two, a man may lie where grass arises, trees create an avenue, a doorway opens up the wood. Perspect. Percept. Perhap. And bodies turn, as incarnations will, to show their bright sides and their darks: In several ways may any father turn a child again, after the child has turned into a dad. So say the laws of insight, which succeed commandment.
No single-mindedness gainsays the way we stand without the grounds for our security becoming grounds for change. We have a world in mind, but have a mind to see the world more ways than one. With minds, it's never just enough to be of two.
A reader's impulse to reduce the senses of the final section of MacLeish's Ars Poetica to simple paraphrase is happily frustrated by the special nature of its ways of naming, ways of meaning, making an economy both unified and manifold, because the language is suggestive in its radiations, shimmering with semblances, recharged by change. Its structures signal and reveal.
We signal and reveal ourselves. We cannot even nail our plans, much less our planets, down— into what Dickinson would call our "minor meanings." We live, as ever, on such shaky grounds as language manages to open up.
Admire in all precision what you love beyond arithmetic. You do not have to prove your case. Just open it.
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.
The paradoxes of the poem are exposed most barely here, in couplets 1 and 4 of this, its final, section. Being paradoxes, they rely on neither reason nor thesauruses (not merely true, when being equal to; not meaning less, for being more).
In context, all of incarnation overflows its indications, and goes on by defying expectations. Then by and by, in time, if we can't form a meaning, we can come to mean in form. And by its nature ars poetica won't remonstrate so much as demonstrate; it demonstrates the ways to effloresce; and must refuse the merely ornamental modes, which only can perseverate into a floweriness.
To be precise, a meaning flourishes inside its means (not, like my own presumptions here in prose, just frothing on about them). 
***
Heather McHugh, recipient of a 2009 MacArthur fellowship, is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays. Her prize-winning translations include a Griffin International Poetry Prize selection, and her books of original poetry have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville. From 1999 to 2005 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2011 to 2018 she hosted respite getaways for full-time family caregivers.
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This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.
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MORE FROM HEATHER MCHUGH

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The Montréal Review, February 2025
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