Poetry should be tangible, but it can't be said.
Like a round fruit,
Silent,
It's like a thumb stroking an old medal,
Silence, like a stone fence on the windowsill,
Smoothed by sleeves, covered with moss—
Poetry should be silent.
Fly like a bird.
Poetry should be motionless at first glance.
As if the moon had climbed into the sky,
Fly away as if the moon had been untied.
Trees entwine the night.
Fly away, like the bright moon behind the leaves on a winter night.
Put aside one memory after another—
Poetry should be motionless at first glance.
As if the moon had climbed into the sky.
Poetry should really be equal to:
Not just real.
Not a sad history
It was an empty doorway with a red maple leaf.
Not love.
It's the grass, the sun, the moon and the sea-
Poetry should not have hidden meaning,
It should be direct.
(translated by Zhao Yiheng)
Mackley Xu (USA)
Xu's The Art of Poetry is not only a poem, but also a poetic theory that vividly expounds the principles of imagism. Especially the last two lines of this poem are well known and widely quoted. Mackley died in May 1982. When American radio and television stations reported this news, they all recited this work in their memory.
Pound, the leader of Imagist poetry, once published a three-point declaration of Imagist in a magazine. That is, dealing with things directly, whether subjective or objective; Never use words that are not helpful for expression; As for rhythm, you should use musical phrases instead of writing according to the rhythm of the metronome. Mackley Xu and Pound have the same idea.
The first paragraph of The Art of Poetry emphasizes the intuition of poetry, and even uses four metaphors: fruit, medal, stone fence and bird, which shows that poetry is both touching and silent. Although it is "silent" (a word that does not help to express), it is breathtaking and fleeting, and the impressions, lines and feelings of time and space are light and flexible. In the second paragraph, this poem is compared to the moon crawling in the sky. At first glance, at a point in time and space, it stands still and stares intently, and it is moving slowly, "putting aside one memory after another". As Pound said, the image of poetry is a kind of "instant presentation", not a frozen image, but has great time density and spatial tension. The third paragraph bluntly points out that a poem should be loyal to reality, but not necessarily completely true, that is, "directly dealing with subjective or objective things", integrating reason and emotion into the vision and hitting the reader's heart directly. Just as a red maple can detect a sad history, a green grass can peep at a lingering love. "Poetry should not imply anything, but what it should be directly" is praised by critics as "the shortest definition of truth in modern poetry".
According to the translator, Mackley Xu is good at using false rhyme (that is, semi-harmonic rhyme), and his poetic rhyme is full of musicality, which also reflects the idea that Imagism abandons the traditional iambic foot and replaces it with the phrase rhythm of free poetry.