Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part two in our three-part serialization of a magnificent and definitive lecture that Eli Siegel gave in 1965. He titled it Poetry Is Concerned. And I’ll say a little about the title.

It’s generally agreed by now that anything in the world can be the subject of a poem. And that much it’s felt, however theoretically or dully, that poetry has to do with, is concerned with, anything and everything. But how is it concerned? And why does this matter?

Eli Siegel is the critic who explained that when poetry is the real thing, whatever may be its particular subject, it is always concerned too with something that can be called The World Itself, reality in its wholeness. Further, poetry is concerned with every human being, because in a true poem—and in all real art—there is a way of seeing that we need to have. We need to have the art way of seeing in order to respect ourselves, in order to have emotions and thoughts we’re proud of. Poetry concerns all our lives, and our lives concern poetry, because the seeing and feeling that are in a good poem are what we’re looking for in order to have our minds work with the scope, accuracy, logic, excitement, and depth we desire. The reason is given in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Always, the World

The opposites that art puts together, and that we long to put together, are the world’s. In fact, they constitute the world. Some of these opposites are tumult and order, the likeness and difference of things, their discontinuity and continuity, motion and rest, individuality and relation, height and lowness, the strange and the ordinary, difficulty and ease, certainty and uncertainty, severity and tenderness. And you, there—they are your opposites; and they are mine.

Why do these opposites become one in art, whether in musical notes, or words on a page, or shapes that are on a canvas, or shapes made by a dancer’s motion in space? The world’s opposites become one in authentic art because the artist is using him- or herself to see and feel a particular matter so justly that the structure of reality itself is present in the resulting work—on that canvas, or in those notes, words, shapes in space.

We Have to Choose

I see these facts, which I’m briefly outlining, as wonderful and great. But they’re also urgent, because they have to do with a choice that everyone needs to make. It’s a choice that was unarticulated until Aesthetic Realism described it. There is a fight going on in every person all the time, Aesthetic Realism explains: between 1) the desire to like the world honestly and be just to it, and 2) the desire to look down on things and people, have contempt for them. With contempt, we often resent what’s admirable in persons, because we want to feel superior to them. And we see the outside world as to be managed by us, conquered by us, not as something we should want to understand.

Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” The having of contempt can make one for a while feel like a big shot, but it leaves one empty, unsure, agitated, and ashamed. Then, one may try to stifle those feelings through having more contempt.

Eli Siegel described the fight in everyone between respect and contempt as the big fight in the human mind throughout history. Without being clear about this fight, persons have shuttled between the two unseen contenders within them.

Today, as in other times, people are worried and frightened by much that they see as happening in the world. Aesthetic Realism is not political, and I am not commenting on anything in that field. I am commenting on Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of every individual self, including my own. What I want, passionately, to express is this: we all need to use the present days to understand the fight between contempt and respect in ourselves, and to decide truly which, as a human being, we want to go by. For respect authentically to win in us, for the desire to be just to the world, value it, have real good will for it, to win, we have to see good will, justice, respect, not simply as “right,” or honorable or admirable. We have to see respecting what’s not ourselves as giving us real importance, as being thrilling, as taking care of us, as delicious, as warm, as mighty, as sweepingly lovely, grandly tender. I could go on. But the point is: unless, in a steady way, we see valuing what’s not ourselves as warming our bones and a grand time, contempt will have victories within us, even while we may act nice. Seeing the desire to know and value what’s not ourselves as “moral” or “ethical” is not enough. We need to see the unmistakable pleasure, the good time (sometimes rollicking good time) of trying to be just in all the hours of the day.

Because Eli Siegel has explained contempt, and shown that art embodies respect for the world, humanity has a chance now to have that biggest fight in self be won truly—by respect. That respect win is necessary—and will make us happy, make us truly at ease and big.

A Prefatory Note

In the lecture we’re presenting, Mr. Siegel uses as text a collection of literary instances for young people. It’s the fourth volume of the Heart of Oak series of books, edited by Charles Eliot Norton and published in the 1890s. At one point, as you’ll see, Mr. Siegel speaks about a matter that has to do technically, yet vitally, with what poetry is: he speaks about various poetic feet. But since some readers of this TRO may not be clear about that subject, as a means of placing what Mr. Siegel does so mightily, I’ll say something about it here.

Poetic feet are units indicating the rhythm of a poem, or of part of a poem. Mr. Siegel speaks about the trochee, which consists of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented (as in the word láter). He speaks about an iambic foot, which is an unaccented syllable followed by an accented (as in enóugh); and about a spondee, two accented syllables (as in súnríse). There are feet of three syllables; for instance, the amphibrach: an unaccented syllable followed by an accented, which is followed by an unaccented (as in discóver, or he’ll sée you). And there are more.

As Mr. Siegel discusses passages from this Heart of Oak volume, we are seeing poetry as musical respect for reality. I thank him with all my heart for showing again and again and always with complete freshness that poetry is justice to the world, justice become music.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Drama in Events, Words, Music

By Eli Siegel

In this book Norton includes “The Passing of Arthur,” from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. The section I’ll read begins after there has been a great battle between the army of Mordred, a relative of King Arthur, and Arthur’s army. Nearly everyone has been killed, and Arthur has a very bad wound in his head. He is with Sir Bedivere. Camelot is going to vanish and the Round Table is to be no more, and Arthur is to be remembered. He is going to go, in a barge, with the ladies who will take care of him, taking him to some land the nature of which we do not know. The unknown is here.

Bedivere says:

This poetry of Tennyson is great. There is the feeling of the swell and tightness, the precision and boundlessness, the quality of a tremendous orchestra with somebody being ever so naïve. That can be in poetry. And here we have lines that make Tennyson different from persons who are not true poets: different from Hardy, and different from Masefield, different from Robert Bridges, and ever so many other people.

“And I, the last, go forth companionless, / And the days darken round me, and the years, / Among new men, strange faces, other minds.” Things fall and rise and have a fight which is also amity, in these lines.

A Line Is Looked At

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” That line is one of the most noted in English. It has been used about many matters, and with all its being used, poetry unquestionably is there. The line, in this blank verse poem, has something like a free verse structure, and it would be well to look at it.

One of the big fights in poetry is the fight of vowel and consonant, and various kinds of consonants. This line’s first foot is “The óld.” If anybody thinks they’ll ever get the full meaning of those two words, I would say that is imprudence, it’s rashness, it’s conceit. You never will—there is too much suggestion there. But one thing that can be said is: the kind of consonant that is like carpentry and makes for a sense of structure is there. It is the d in “The old.” That foot is an iambic.

Next we have “order.” It has been said there are no true spondees in English. There’s something to that, because the word órdér when by itself can be felt as a spondee, but when words of two accented syllables (spondees) are joined with words of other feet, the spondee can get to feel trochaic. So we can see this word order as a trochee here: “órder.”

And something happens in that word order with the change in it from the d into the r at the end; there’s a sense of the mystery of the world. It’s a little like the change in a passage I read earlier—the change from the land that the Sinbad sailors were on, to the water into which they went. One of the things said about some sounds is that they are liquid, and the r is such a sound.

Then we have something that can be seen as a trochee again, which moves stolidly: “chángeth.” There is a feeling of a little difficulty in the sound of “changeth.” But the tension in that word is made easier with the next word, “yielding.”

The large thing is: are the words in this line something with more power than other combinations of words? Can they do something to one? Can they do it again and again? Yes.

After a release of tension through “yielding,” there’s something happy and clear in that word “place.” And then the last foot ends in a vowel sound, oo, “to new.” One of the biggest mysteries in verse is the difference between an iamb ending in a vowel sound, as “to new” does, and an iamb ending with a consonant, as in “the old.” It’s as if space and matter were announcing their difference and announcing their likeness.

With Wonder

As “The Passing of Arthur” continues, Bedivere sees Arthur and the barge he’s on vanish. This is narrative with wonder:

This is an effect that Tennyson was fond of—he has it in “Crossing the Bar.” And it’s present in literature a good deal.

In the literature of ancient times, the wonder of the sea in twilight or early morning isn’t so much around. “The wine-dark sea”—that’s about the utmost that Homer gives us on the subject. It’s pretty strong. But he doesn’t have all kinds of mystery present in water vanishing in the distance. One can feel it at any seacoast: the land vanishes into water, the water vanishes into space, and distance is the means of it all.

The feeling about a lost sail in the sunset and the vanishing of a boat in the distance—what does it come from? Is it a human’s imposition of him- or herself? Or is there something in distance and one object, which means something to you?

Words do give a sense of distance. Take the German word Sehnsucht, the power of which the English have tried to get through the word yearning. But one can’t quite do it, because Sehnsucht has a touch of the tearful Brahms that English doesn’t have.

There are possibilities of distance and strangeness in words. And the question is whether the relation of distance and presence is a poetic matter. Aesthetic Realism says it is. The arrangement of reality, both historically and otherwise, is poetic. To see a violet, one lone violet, on the side of a mountain, and think all that you’re seeing is a little interruption of the mountain and not something wonderful, would be wrong. Or to see this poor, bold violet alone on the side of the mountain, and have an emotion but feel the emotion is only given to you because people, through what they’ve written, have told you to get such an emotion—that would be incorrect. You may think the feeling all comes from books. No, it comes from what reality is.

Sir Galahad Is Present

Here, in this fourth volume, there is also Tennyson’s poem “Sir Galahad.” Sir Galahad is a little more popular than he used to be. He was once seen as insufferable. These two lines in the first quatrain of Tennyson’s poem can still get one gnashing; Galahad says: “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure.” Well, the irritation is less than it used to be.

The stanza in this poem nearest to poetry that matters is the following—this stanza is simply good:

Vagueness and clearness very often meet in Tennyson. If there’s enough clearness and enough vagueness, poetry is at its most felicitous. The vagueness here is somewhat more than it should be, but there is enough of the other thing.

It’s interesting to see the difference between what happened to Fra Angelico as to how he’s seen and what happened to Tennyson. Some of the properties—if it is correct to use that word—of Fra Angelico, the angels proclaiming the beauty of the world, are in Tennyson. But Fra Angelico is seen as being of our time. And though Tennyson has been seen recently as being more of this time, he is still given the objectionable quality of a person who contrived a feeling at a later time that had been sincere in an earlier time but wasn’t sincere in the later time. Meanwhile, as I said, there is also a tendency to feel that Tennyson perhaps did see some of the things he deals with in The Idylls of the King and other Arthurian poems. He did see something about the Holy Grail.

That stands up. It’s worthy of much praise.

Fathers & Sons Are Told Of

Charles Eliot Norton includes a ballad—it’s not a great ballad—called here “Bewick and Grahame.” It’s about how one nobleman of a kind, Grahame, and another nobleman, Bewick, were comparing their sons. One son was studious and the other was more active. And each father claimed his was the better son. The sons hear about it, and they get the idea that their fathers want them to fight—although the sons are, very much, friends.

The ballad consists of the telling how it seems these sons, Bewick and Grahame, don’t want to fight, yet in order to be loyal to their parents they do. The studious son fights the more warlike son. And they both die.

This is the way the ballad ends; the balladist gives the moral:

We know that; it is so. And both fathers get very sad too. The stanza I read is in ordinary language, but it is a poetic stanza.

(To be continued)