文献检索Ars Poetica.doc

2012级《美国文学》课程作业

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Ars Poetica
《诗艺》

课程名称： 美国文学
任课教师： 许晓琴博士、教授
专 业： 英 语
班　　级： 2012级英语本科 1 班
学　　号： 1428320005
姓　　名： 肖甜
检索日期： 2015.3.12—2015.4.23

Ø Introduction to Author
Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois in 1892. He attended Yale University and served in World War I. Later, he went to Harvard Law School and practiced law in Boston for a few years until he gave it up and moved to Paris with his wife and children to devote all his time to writing poetry. During the next four years he published four books of poetry, including The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1924) and The Pot of Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 1925). In 1928, MacLeish returned to America, where he began research for his epic poem Conquistador by travelling the steps and mule-ride of Cortez’s army through Mexico. MacLeish won the Pulitzer Prize for his efforts in 1932. MacLeish worked as an editor at Fortune magazine from 1930 to 1938 and he served as Librarian of Congress from 1929 to 1944. In 1944, he was appointed assistant Secretary of State for cultural affairs. After World War II, MacLeish became the first American member of the governing body of UNESCO, and chaired the first UNESCO conference in Paris. In 1949, Archibald MacLeish retired from his political activism to become Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, a position he held until 1962. From 1963 to 1967, he was Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College. MacLeish continued to write poetry, criticism, and stage- and screenplays, to great acclaim. His Collected Poems, 1917-1952(Houghton Mifflin,1952), won him a second Pulitzer Prize, as well as the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. J.B.(Houghton Mifflin, 1958), a verse play based on the book of Job, earned him a third Pulitzer, this time for drama. And in 1965 he received an Academy Award for his work on the screenplay of The Eleanor Roosevelt Story. Archibald MacLeish died in April 1982 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ø Summary of Ars Poetica
Archibald MacLeish divides Ars Poetica into three eight-line sections, each explaining what a poem“should be.”
The first section compares a poem to familiar sights : a fruit, old medallions, the stone ledge of a casement window, and a flight of birds.
The second section compares a poem to the moon. If a poem has universality, it can move from one moment to the next, or from one age to another, while its relevance remains fixed(“motionless,” Line 9). Thus, like the moon traveling across the sky, a good poem seems to stand still at any given moment---as if it were meant for that moment. Its content remains fresh and alive to each reader down through the years, down through the centuries.
The third section states that a poem should just “be”, like a painting on a wall or a sculpture or a pedestal. It is not a disquisition or a puzzle, but a mood, a feeling, a sentiment—a work of art.

Ø Translation of 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

参考译文：
诗艺
诗歌应该是看得见，摸得着的
如同一个圆球状的水果
它暗哑无声
就像用拇指抚摸旧奖章
它静悄悄的像那被衣襟磨损
窗台边长出了布满青苔的斑驳的石头

诗歌应该是无声的
如飞鸟滑过天际

诗歌应该在时光中静止
像明月悄悄爬上枝头
像明月一个枝桠一个枝桠地
释放那被夜幕笼罩的树林
像明月遗忘残冬
一片记忆一片记忆地从心头离去
诗歌应该在时光中静止
像明月悄悄爬上枝头

诗歌应该等同于
不真实的
空荡的门廊，一枚枫叶足矣
渲染充满哀伤的历史
随风摇曳的青草，海上的两盏明灯足矣
表示爱
诗歌不应该只是表意
而是本质

Ø On the theme of Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica is one of the most famous and most quoted poems of twentieth-century American literature, possibly because it addresses a subject that all poets and poetry teachers hold dear — poetry itself. The title is Latin and can be translated as “The Art of Poetry.” In addition, the life of the poem’s author, Archibald MacLeish, showed the sort of commitment and received the sort of recognition that supporters of the art like to think of when examining the artist. I will analyze the theme of Ars Poetica from the following.
1. Language and Meaning
In Ars Poetica MacLeish suggests that readers should not analyze a poem to determine its meaning, because, ideally, a poem should not have hidden meanings beneath its surface. However, this suggestion introduces a dilemma that concerns the interaction between poets, their text, and readers. On one hand, it is easy for the poet to write with the faith that “A poem should not mean / But be,” because the poet is free then to write in a rush of instinct or inspiration, ignoring the obligation to careful language and form, which serve to convey meaning. The reader, however, has come to expect meaning in a poem, for it is often thought of as the poem’s purpose of existence. Any written work can be considered as just a collection of words on a page until a reader is able to determine its meaning. In Ars Poetica MacLeish may be asserting that a poet should not construct his poem to be a vehicle for conveying an already-decided meaning. Outdated standards, such as ones that demand that a poem should be “about beauty” or that it should be for the benefit of humanity, can be debated by artists, and Ars Poetica is MacLeish’s countering of those who would impose such generalized rules. It is possible, however, that he states his case a little too strongly: poets who concern themselves only with writing that is “not true” are more likely to produce gibberish than art.
Any language must have figures with meanings assigned to them. For instance, the letter “c” attached to the letters “a” and “t” indicate to English-speakers a small, carnivorous mammal. In this poem, MacLeish seems to propose a type of language that uses birds, trees, the moon, doorways, and so on, in place of letters and punctuation. These objects have meaning in a poem, he tells us, while abstract ideas such as “meaning” and “truth” do not. On the one hand, he rejects language as we know it, saying that a poem should be “wordless,” but at the same time, he suggests a new set of natural objects that would communicate to readers as a language would. The irony here is that MacLeish must necessarily use words to represent his natural objects.
2. Search for Self
In this poem’s rejection of intellectual concepts and its embrace of actual, physical things, readers can see a hint of what MacLeish thinks the search for self should be. After covering the methods that a poem should use, the work’s final four couplets get down to replacing the ideas that we use to express our feelings with images that MacLeish believes will be more effective than words. For example, the poet proposes that mankind does not need the word “love,” as long as we have leaning grasses and lights above the sea. Likewise, it is not only the current dictionary definition of “grief,” but all grief felt throughout all of history, that can be replaced by “an empty doorway and a maple leaf.” In spite of the popular notion that poetry is a very intellectual matter, in Ars Poetica MacLeish wants to show that poetry is actually very physical. He tells readers that self-recognition takes place in the world at large — in doorways, in fields, in tree branches, and in the sky, not in the mind. The three concepts that he looks at — truth, grief, and love — can be seen as covering just about all questions humans have about their identities: a person who understands these three mysteries would have a thorough understanding of herself or himself. MacLeish, however, suggests that there can be no understanding of them, just experience of them. If poetry speaks about life, then anything that is said about how a poem should work also applies to how life should work, and understanding the true nature of a poem can lead to understanding oneself.
3. Art and Experience
The world that we experience is what art represents with paint on a canvas or music or words. “Ars Poetica” calls a poem “wordless,” which makes as little sense as calling a song “soundless.” Traditionally, the thing that distinguishes one’s experience of a poem from one’s experience of reality is that a poem represents a shared reality plus a poet’s own ideas. Taking the ideas expressed in Ars Poetica too literally would completely eliminate the job of the poet: when the poem’s intention is only to reflect reality without expressing a poet’s perception of it, then who needs the poet to come between reality and the reader? This question about the purpose of art is increasingly relevant today, as technological advances in the fields of sound and graphics can create virtual realities that are becoming increasingly successful in replicating actual experience.
Readers would better benefit by looking for MacLeish’s intentions for writing Ars Poetica. He proposes that poets should refrain from preaching, or adapting a superior moral pose, and that they are more likely to touch readers‟ emotions with specific, tangible images than with vague concepts. MacLeish implies that poets should rein in their ambitions to keep poetry in touch with reality. Writers who learn these lessons from Ars Poetica are more likely to create meaning than those who deliberately try to create something “meaningful”.
The central theme of Ars Poetica is that a poem should captivate the reader with the same allure of a masterly painting or sculpture—that is，it should be stunning in the subtlety and grace of its imagery that it should not have to explain itself or convey an obvious meaning. Ars Poetica is a wonderful poem that speaks with the quiet eloquence of Rodin’s Thinker and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
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