Please write an essay in which you compare Archibald MacLeishs Ars Poetica (1926) and Pablo Neruda Ars Poetica (1933).
The Poetry Foundation defines ars poetica as a poem that explains the art of poetry, or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem. In the American literary tradition, a well know example of the form is MacLeishs Ars Poetica. It is not an easy poem, but most readers would probably agree that it is less impenetrable than Nerudas own Ars Poetica, collected in the eminently difficult in Residencia en la tierra and one of the best known ars poeticas in the Latin American tradition.
What happens if you read MacLeishs Ars Poetica alongside Nerudas Ars Poetica? Is there anything in MacLeishs poem that might serve as a key to Nerudas poem? For example, MacLeishs poem concludes with the lines: A poem should not mean / But be. Is Nerudas poem an instance of a poem that just is rather than means? If so, how would you interpret Nerudas self-reflexive line, or maybe somehow a little less melancholic , in which the speaker appears to express a measure of dissatisfaction with his own diction and perhaps meanings. Equally important, is there anything in Nerudas text that might serve as a key to MacLeishs poem?
Feel free to craft your own essay by adapting these questions or raising different ones in response to your own reading of the poems. Please feel free as well to work with Nerudas original text in Spanish, Arte potica. If you wish, you may choose any other poem by Neruda to confront with MacLeishs text.
