We are serializing the magnificent 1949 lecture Poetry and Keenness, by Eli Siegel. And in the present section, Mr. Siegel is in the midst of discussing a poem by H.D., or Hilda Doolittle, to show what keenness is—in reality, art, and the human mind. Hilda Doolittle lived from 1886 to 1961, and between the years 1912 and 1918 she wrote some of the true poetry of America. Her life is a means of seeing Aesthetic Realism’s greatness in explaining something not understood elsewhere, something still looked at in a barbaric fashion: the relation between art and mental difficulty or depression. Eli Siegel was born 16 years after her; and it is my careful opinion that the resentment and boycott of his work, including by the literary people who praised H.D., ruined her life. 

     I cannot give all the documentation for that statement here, or say with detail why the later verse of H.D. is, as I see it, unsuccessful poetically. But Hilda Doolittle, from 1920 on, was intensely troubled and suffered nervous breakdowns. In the 1930s her analyst was Sigmund Freud, and the 1982 biography H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet, by Janice Robinson (Houghton Mifflin), is written from the Freudian point of view. It is only because of the press boycott of Aesthetic Realism that a statement like the following from that biography can be made seriously at the end of the 20th century: "Freud, as well as H.D., knew that what we call madness and what we call inspiration come from the same source" (p. 275). This idea — still current — happens to be one of the most ridiculous and hurtful notions in the world. It equates the best thing in humanity with the worst. And only Aesthetic Realism counters it clearly. 

     Eli Siegel is the critic who showed that all art—and everything good in the human mind — comes from the desire to like the world honestly, to be just to the outside world. And he showed that all mental difficulty arises from contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." In every person who has ever lived, he showed too, a fight between like and respect of the world and contempt for it is going on all the time. Because Mr. Siegel explained this fact, provided riches of cultural evidence, and fought for justice with fidelity and courage — contempt at last can lose and respect for the world win in every person. 

Instead of running or even walking toward a tree Hilda sat down in the grass at the edge of the hill and let it come. "Come, beautiful rain," she said, holding out her arms. "Beautiful rain, welcome." [New Directions, 1967, p. 69] 

     He also tells of a time in 1906 when their crowd went to the beach at Point Pleasant, New Jersey: 

There had been a storm and the breakers were heavy, pounding in with overpowering force. But Hilda was entranced ....Without thought or caution she went to meet the waves, walked right into them .... They dragged her out unconscious. [Pp. 69-70]

     Eli Siegel is the critic who has explained that nothing is saner than art. The reason is in the following principle, stated by him: "In reality opposites are one; art shows this." Take, for example, these lines from H.D.’s "The Garden," which Mr. Siegel quotes in Poetry and Keenness: 

     But her biography and her own later writings make evident the fact that there was a different purpose in the life of Hilda Doolittle too: a purpose completely against art, which no one ever clearly criticized — certainly not Freud. 

Minnie was like some fraction....Minnie’s very presence depreciated the house front, steps, the symmetrical recumbent jade pillars of low carefully clipped terrace .... Ringed, washed-out blue eyes, Minnie and her eternal headaches[,]... her inferior little being. [New Directions, 1981, pp. 15, 21]

     This is how she describes the person who introduced her to much of English poetry, who recited Swinburne’s Chorus from Atalanta as he kissed her in the Pennsylvania woods. She sees Ezra Pound — called George Lowndes in the novel — as 

making circus tent noises, little faraway miniature Punchinello....George being funny is piglike .... George ... was a hideous harlequin being funny on a woodpath .... "You’re nothing, George. I mean precisely nothing." [Pp. 42, 65, 66, 69] 

     William Carlos Williams, in his famous 1951 letter, wrote of Eli Siegel’s 1925 Nation prize-winning poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana": "That single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world." He calls Eli Siegel’s poems "the truly new," and writes about the anger Mr. Siegel and his work have been subjected to these many decades: "The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new" (Something to Say, ed. J.E.B. Breslin, New Directions, 1985, pp. 250-1). Press persons and others have tried to suppress Mr. Siegel’s work, because they have resented his beautiful honesty; his fresh, kind, vast intellect; and their own need to learn from Aesthetic Realism about everything. Their boycott of Mr. Siegel’s work has brutalized the lives of millions of people, including Hilda Doolittle’s. 

     The following paragraphs contain some of his powerful, merciful, graceful understanding of poetry and humanity — and her. Had she been able to meet it, she would have felt as her friend William Carlos Williams did when Mr. Siegel spoke on poems of his: Williams said, "It’s just as important — it’s as if everything I’ve ever done has been for you" (The Williams-Siegel Documentary, eds. Baird & Reiss, Definition Press, 1970, p. 94). 

     In my own passionate gratitude to Mr. Siegel, I stand for Williams, H.D., and all the people of the future. 
 

— Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

Then, the awful desire: "If I could break you / I could break a tree." This is the desire to change the flexible into the brittle. Why go around breaking roses? In the same way that later painting took the metallic and made it flexible, so here the growing thing is made hard and sharp and metallic. It happens that with a certain sort of fulness of perception, the petal of a rose on a hot day can take on the sharpness of something that is mineral, hard. 

     H.D. sees this heat as like the enveloping sameness, dullness, inanition, and inactivity that we can welcome. So something should be cut — and the dullness should be cut. 

     "And blunts / The points of pears, / And rounds the grapes." Bluntness — that is, an absence of sharpness — is associated with dullness. If a thing is very sharp, it doesn’t hurt as much as a thing that is less sharp. To be hacked about by a thing that is not sharp is cruel, while being dealt with by something very sharp is comparatively merciful. So bluntness is against keenness. Roundness is also against keenness. Roundness is important, but where roundness is against the idea of point, it is a bad roundness, because we want to have the softness that roundness represents and the hardness that the point represents. — Then: "Cut the heat: / Plough through it, / Turning it on either side / Of your path." 

     This is a quite good poem. Looking at it, we find that various elements making for keenness are present. Since the universe is both wide and keen, sharp and soft, it is to be expected that language expressing the universe be also that. 

     It is quite clear that a letter like the hard c is sharp in a way that z is not. You can also get a kind of sharpness with p; but whereas pool is not sharp, pi as in pit is — because the vowel is little, neat. There are all sorts of relations of sharpnesses and widenesses, and keennesses and softnesses or envelopingnesses in a poem. In having c a good deal — for instance, if one says "Crack, crack, crack"— one has a different effect entirely from "Ooo, ooo, ooo." And take perhaps — along with the hard sound of c — the keenest letter in the language, n. N does happen to be the letter used when you want to deny something. You say, "No, no, no, no!" as if you were cutting. 

     All the letters are presentations of keenness or softness in one way or another. So when we have "O rose, cut in rock," along with having the rose dealt with as if it were of rock, we have a certain sound. The sound would be different if we had "Cut in rock, a rose," because the final effect would be the softness of rose. 

     We have in this poem a good many of the hard c or k sounds; and then, we have swiftness. Swiftness is associated with keenness. We have also the visual effect — breaking. And through it all we have one of the important things in mind and in the world: division with neatness. 

     That is the big idea in keenness, because one of the things that mind does, even in feeling, is to analyze; and to analyze is to divide; and if you are going to analyze efficiently, you might as well analyze neatly.