The Nightingale Keepers

POETRY AND EXPERIENCE (204 pp.)--. Archibald MacLeish--Houqhton Mifflin ($4).

Poetry, as Archibald MacLeish sees it, is a little like a man who shuffles across a familiar rug and touches a doorknob, only to be pricked by an unexpected spark of static electricity. In that instant, two things happen. For one, the man "understands" electricity not as a textbook diagram, but as a felt experience "charged with meaning." For another, three disparate things--the man, the rug, the doorknob--have been fused with one of the cosmic forces. They have become, in MacLeish's view, links in the underlying order at the heart of the universe, which men instinctively feel, and consciously or unconsciously mimic, in poetry and the other arts. This is a drastic oversimplification of the niceties of poetic craft, structure and sensibility with which Poetry and Experience is concerned, but it is a guideline to Poet MacLeish's central theme: that poetry is a passionate, perpetual re-introduction to the self and the universe.

Signs and Sounds. Amiable, ruminative, often obvious, sometimes pontifical, Poetry and Experience is based on MacLeish's Harvard lectures as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and it assumes a student's curiosity in taking apart a butterfly to see what makes it flutter. Ideas do not make poetry flutter, according to MacLeish. Reduced to prose, even great poetry is full of platitudes--life is short, love is sweet (or bitter), death is final. George Moore held that words have meaning only as signs of the things they stand for. Mallarme believed that all poetic meaning stemmed from words as sounds. MacLeish commonsensically concludes that any word is both sign and sound, and that a poet who ignores either tends to get as far out as James Joyce did, fictionally, in Finnegans Wake.

The word that breathes life in poetry is the image--not the image as ornament, but the image as analogy. As a superior example of what he means, MacLeish cites an anonymous Chinese poem of 600 B.C.:

Dead doe lies in forest, White rushes cover her. Lady thinking of the spring, Fine knight over her.

In the oak forest, In the waste land, doe is laid: White rushes over her. Lady beautiful as jade.

Don't please touch me, Sir. Don't snatch my handkerchief away . . . Don't! My dog will bark.

The meaning is not in the narrative but the counterpoint. The emotion of the poem is neither grief for the dead doe nor amusement at the coy, giggling girl: "The emotion is in the place between -- by speaking of two things which, like parentheses, can include between them what neither of them says -- death and passion, the human comedy and indifferent death."

Art as Religion. At 68, having ranged in his own poetry from a swashbuckling, 2,000-line epic of Cortes in Conquistador to the modern morality play in J.B., MacLeish himself is tempted to an omnibus generalization on poetry: "'What is the meaning of all song?' Yeats asks himself, and answers, 'Let all things pass away.' " The implicit proviso is "except this poem," and MacLeish goes on to say: "To face the truth of the passing away of the world and make song of it, make beauty of it, is not to solve the riddle of our mortal lives but perhaps to accomplish something more." What is that evasive "something more?" Poetry as religion, in the manner of Malraux's view of art? Poetry as an existential pacifier, good for stoics of all ages? Or has Playwright MacLeish now fastened on the poet that blasphemous tribulation he visited upon his Job in the closing scene of J.B. : the achieving of a self-made God?

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