Phoebe L. answered • 03/02/20
This is a great question, because it calls into discussion the many ways that poets recognize and refer to their unique positions within the literary canon, and also allows us as an audience to reflect on our personal experiences with poetry.
Maryann Moore, a widely celebrated modern American poet, is known for her sparse, clean and simple language that manages to hold beneath it complex and often almost tangible meaning. Notice that "Poetry" begins as if the poet - we must not assume it is Moore - were in conversation with the reader, commiserating over a shared distaste for poetry. By interpolating the reader into the poem from the first lines, Moore managers to create a conversational and conciliatory environment, and invites the reader to examine poetry alongside the narrator rather than undertaking a more didactic approach. Notice, too, that Moore uses concrete language throughout the poem - "hands that grasp, eyes / that can dilate" are clear, recognizable images. They are also images of a body aroused, which also plays into another element of Moore's work for which she is known - namely, the subversion of poetry to speak to women's sexuality and sexual autonomy.
Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" approaches poetry with more of a defensive approach, examining what poetry should be in the face, we are led to imagine, it currently is. MacLeish describes how poetry should be in a series of demands that seem impossible to obtain: "A poem should be wordless / As the flight of birds" offers a beautiful image - but how can one have poetry without words? Is MacLeish instead suggesting that the natural world - one steeped in the "moon," "winter leaves" and "globed fruit" - offers a poetry unto itself, one that is difficult - if not imppssible - to capture in words?
Wallace Stevens takes another approach entirely, personifying poetry as if it is a living entity: "It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place." Whereas Moore defends poetry as "useful" and MacLeish looks to the poetry of the natural world, Stevens places poetry within the realm of human creativity. Poetry "has / To construct a new stage," Stevens writes, suggesting that poetry relies on humanity to exist: "The poem of the act of the mind." Like Moore and MacLeish, Stevens also uses concrete imagery ("a woman dancing, a woman / Combing") but uniquely Stevens positions modern poetry within a man-made space.
One wonders what each poet would say, were they tasked with reviewing these poems alongside their own. What do you think they would say?