Ars Poetica

Titles of fictional works, poems, films, and non-fictional works can't be copyrighted, so one frequently finds several works with the same title, and this can cause confusion.   It can also be very interesting to compare several works with the same title to see if the title is being used by the authors in the same way.

Titles are supposed to provide some information about the work, as well as being a way to set out that work from the millions of other works of the same type. Following are three poems with the same title, the latter two probably borrowed their title from a much earlier and longer work by Horace.

from the Wikipedia entry:
The earliest use of this title is "a poem written by Horace, c. 19 BC in which he advises poets on the art of writing poetry and drama."

.  .  .


"Written...in a loose conversational frame, the Ars poetica consists of 476 lines containing nearly 30 maxims for...poets." However, unlike philosopher Aristotle's formal treatise the  Poetics, the Ars Poetica is not a systematic handbook of literary theory; nor, in spite of the respect accorded to it in later centuries, was it ever meant to be."

The following excerpt is from the beginning of Horace's "Ars Poetica."

"Dear Pisos, if it’s idle fancies were so conceived
That neither its head nor foot could be related
To a unified form. ‘But painters and poets
Have always shared the right to dare anything.’
I know it: I claim that licence, and grant it in turn:
But not so the wild and tame should ever mate,
Or snakes couple with birds, or lambs with tigers."



Another shorter version of what poetry should be is that by Archibald MacLeish who has borrowed Horace's title.  But rather than giving us a widely ranging discussion of various aspects of poetry, MacLeish focuses on what he thinks a poem should be.


 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 --


A poem, for MacLeish, should contain concrete images and little if any intellectual content.  The intellectual part resides in the reader who responds to the images.  The irony here is that his poem does have intellectual content: for example--

"For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf"

He has to reach us intellectually to inform us that instead of writing about grief, an image of "An empty doorway and a maple leaf"  should suffice.  This, of course, is the fundamental problem of those who wish their readers to avoid writing or speaking and instead grasp the physical world in some way.  Taoists, thousands of years ago, faced a similar problem when telling their readers about "those who know" and "those who don't,"  for they have to speak to tell us.

"Those who speak, don't know
Those who know, don't speak."




One last example is a poem by Jorge Luis Borges.  I've included it because of the title, but right now, I see little connection with the other poems mentioned above.  Perhaps after I meditate on it, I will cut through the mental fog.

 

Ars Poetica: Jorge Luis Borges 

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind’s days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours.

They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,
Wept with love to descry his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of wonders.

It is also like an endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
From Dreamtigers,  translated by Harold Morland

A tentative thought:  poetry is that which helps us confront the world?  and perhaps confront ourselves?

"Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours."

 I think I shall have to read this one again, and again, and .  .  .

Any thoughts?