SOURCE: Sullivan, Harry R. “MacLeish's ‘Ars Poetica’.” English Journal 56, no. 9 (December 1967): 1280-83.

In the following essay, Sullivan explicates MacLeish's paradoxical poem “Ars Poetica,” viewing it as “a rarity among poems on the art of poetry.”

Archibald MacLeish's “Ars Poetica” comes close to being the anthology piece of his poetry. It is also read aloud by the author in An Album of Modern Poetry as recorded for the Library of Congress. In 1946 Professor Donald A. Stauffer very excellently discussed this poem in The Nature of Poetry. Since it has become so familiar to students and since it does so remarkably image rather than define its author's conception of what a poem itself should be, a still closer examination into its specific symbolism and its tightly woven structure seems justifiable.

The poem is much more than an allusion-studded, cryptic collage or a painfully calculated, intellectual crossword puzzle. It is as...