"The End of Poetry" exists in a lineage of meta poems: poems about poetry. A common term for this is ars poetica, meaning "the art of poetry," from the Roman poet Horace's work of the same name. And while "The End of Poetry" might seem like a pessimistic title for a poet to use—a future Poet Laureate of the United States, no less!—Ada Limón is far from alone in writing an ars poetica that takes issue with its own art form. Poets have struggled for millennia with exactly what Limón addresses here: the desire for a poem to perfectly evoke the world it describes, bridging all distance and abstraction—and the awareness that the poem will inevitably fail to do so.
Horace's Ars Poetica, written around the year 15 B.C.E., takes a decidedly practical approach, counseling would-be poets on keeping their audience's reactions in mind, being informative and creative but polite. His treatise emphasized the commercial and social ramifications of poetry. Many poets in the two millennia since have continued to probe the subject in a more inward-looking way, writing doggedly about what poetry is and why it exists.
One of the most famous (or infamous) poems in this tradition is Marianne Moore's "Poetry," written in 1924 but revised restlessly over the course of her career. Moore begins:
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Her original version is thirty lines long, laboring to explain what Moore views as "genuine" in poetry, despite her dismissive "dislike" and "contempt." Seemingly unsatisfied with the poem, Moore revised it throughout her life and eventually published a mere three-line version in her 1967 The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, with the original included as an endnote. Poet and editor Robert Pinsky analyzes the different versions, saying many consider the three-liner "one of the most egregious examples ever of terrible revision." But Pinsky appreciates their interplay: "In various ways, the two incarnations of the poem annotate, challenge, and criticize one another. I think they amusingly challenge and criticize us readers, too." This back-and-forth tension is emblematic of the ars poetica tradition, of poets scrutinizing their own craft, writing about writing to the point of paradox.
In her 1924 final stanza, Moore says genuineness can be found in "the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness." The same decade saw Archibald MacLeish and Wallace Stevens wrestling with this same question: how to make poetry as real and raw as possible. MacLeish borrowed from Horace to write his own "Ars Poetica," weighing in on the Modernist movement with this famous final couplet:
A poem should not mean
But be
In "Of Modern Poetry," Stevens laid out a similar command for poetry: "It has to be living," Stevens wrote. "It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction."
Stevens, MacLeish, and Moore all showed a restless yearning for poetry to be real, immediate, unfiltered by any artifice. It should be alive, according to Stevens. For MacLeish, it's not enough for poetry to be a representation of a thing; it must be that thing. For Moore, poetry is useless unless it cuts to the "raw," organic core of its subject.
Writing one hundred years later, Ada Limón is still wrestling with the same tension, adding her vibrant voice to the ars poetica tradition. Throughout "The End of Poetry," she dismisses all of the things that are not real, immediate, or unfiltered. Her striking last line, "I am asking you to touch me," echoes the brevity of "I too, dislike it" and "A poem should not mean / But be." In one line, Limón washes away all the exhaustion and disconnection of the previous twenty lines, wrenching the reader into a raw present moment where nothing matters but touch—real human contact.
However, Limón seems more doubtful than her Modernist predecessors that poetry can ever be "raw," "living," or offer pure "satisfaction." After all, a poem is not literally a living entity. A poem about a dog is never actually the dog itself. Despite undoubtedly loving her chosen art form, Limón acknowledges in "The End of Poetry" that a poem can never exactly replace the real world, which is why her closing line asks for a physical connection, beyond the page. Yet ironically, Limón says that acknowledging this limitation was precisely what unblocked her creative process for The Hurting Kind, allowing her to keep writing, getting as close as possible to her poems' subjects without ever reaching them.
