Ars Poetica (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Although “Ars Poetica” is regarded as one of MacLeish’s finest accomplishments, he himself is remembered as only a minor poet, with few truly impressive artistic accomplishments in his long and prominent career. Some critics consider the post-World War I period, when MacLeish lived as an expatriate in France along with hundreds of other aspiring artists, to be the only period of his life when he produced poems worth critical analysis, even though he continued to write for more than forty years after returning to America. “Ars Poetica” was produced during his French period, and, in its narrow focus and philosophical rumination on how man can (and cannot) turn ideals into reality, it is thought to contain what is best in MacLeish’s work. Grover Smith, in a short book on MacLeish, lists these features as “conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphorical strategies of argument; compressed and intense implications,” and these elements are all certainly present in “Ars Poetica.” While reviewing a play written late in the poet’s life, John Wain took time to give an overview of the works of MacLeish — the essays, books, dramas, and poems long and short — and observed that “the evidence of his shorter poems is there to remind us that he is, or has been, a poet of true sensibility and originality. One of these, ‘Ars Poetica,’ must be one of the most often quoted of all modern poems, partly no doubt because it has provided a slogan for the modern criticism of poetry, but also because it is genuinely impressive.”

Some critics have found fault with some of MacLeish’s poems, especially publicly responsible pieces that brought out the poet’s worst qualities. “The voice of civic rectitude in his verse is pious, stentorian, false, ... a poor surrogate for action or impotent rage,” noted critic Hilton Kramer. He goes on to note that MacLeish’s best-known poems, including “Ars Poetica,” “are eloquent warnings against precisely this sort of tendentious sermonizing.” Though he is much respected for a few sterling accomplishments such as “Ars Poetica,” Archibald MacLeish is not considered to be a poet of the first order.

What Do I Read Next?

• The accomplishments of MacLeish’s long career are beautifully presented in Archibald MacLeish: Collected Poems, 1917-1982, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1985.
• Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), is one of the best-known books about Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway does not have anything to say directly about MacLeish, but his discussions of his own life at the time, and the lives of other prominent writers he and MacLeish associated with, give a good sense how serious this crowd was about art.
• In 1962, after almost forty years as a public figure, MacLeish sat down for several long, uninterrupted conversations with Mark Van Doren, who was a friend and an equally famous poet.

  Their discussions were filmed, and a small portion was put together and broadcast on CBS in 1962. A longer transcript was compiled into a book titled The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren that was published in 1964. Although the conversations had no set topics, almost every subject mentioned reaches back to poetry in one way or another.

• The same spirit of reform that is present in “Ars Poetica” can be found throughout A Time To Act, a collection of Archibald MacLeish’s essays written in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The focus of the collection is politics, not poetry, but this book reveals the same attitude toward civic responsibility that the poem shows toward artistic responsibility.