AESTHETIC REALISM FOUNDATION
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Poetry, Self, and Love |
| Dear Unknown Friends:
The title is very modest—because what Aesthetic Realism adds to poetry is the biggest thing in the centuries-long history of poetic criticism. It is what such critics as Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Boileau, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold thirsted to see: the thing that makes one arrangement of words poetry and another not. What, also, Aesthetic Realism adds to poetry is this: it enables poetry at last to be really, fully useful. Poems, of course, have affected people, sometimes mightily, over the centuries; but a tremendous usefulness latent in poetry could never be for people until Mr. Siegel as critic explained it. Matthew Arnold wrote that poetry is "a criticism of life," but just how it is, he did not know. Eli Siegel explained that how, and Aesthetic Realism is the result. Aesthetic Realism itself is the aesthetic criticism of life and self. An instance is in this issue of TRO, as we print part of a paper by Aesthetic Realism consultant Ernest DeFilippis, from a recent public seminar titled "Vanity vs. Happiness: Can a Man Distinguish between Them?" Emergencies in Our LivesThere is nothing in this world I love more than the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry and Mr. Siegel’s magnificent, deep, charming, humorous, thrilling, vital presentation of it in thousands of instances in Aesthetic Realism classes. To say it was my good fortune to attend these classes, is an understatement. To say it means my life to me—cliché or not—is exact. There Is Emily DickinsonI got so I could take his name—The first line is very simple: "I got so I could take his name." It is beautiful because it makes the everyday and the wondrous, the casual and the tremendous, inextricable. And it does so both through the meaning of the words and the sound. "I got so" is offhand, everyday, idiomatic. But in "take his name" we have the wideness, the spread, the wonder of the long a sound. In "take," that a has pain with it, through the k; in "name," it has softness, through the m. But it is large. And as we feel this largeness, in a line composed entirely of humble monosyllables and beginning with that casual phrase, the effect is deep and fine. Those very opposites, the everyday and the wondrous, are opposites people make a huge mistake about in love. A woman, for example, feels the ordinary world is dull, and what’s big, what’s wonderful, is having a man make her more important than the rest of reality. Aesthetic Realism explains that the purpose of love, like the purpose of art, is to like the world; and the pain about love arises from using a person to have contempt for the world, including the world of every day. Emotion and LogicThe World Is ThereIn every good poem a person has expressed herself or himself by being just to the world. That is why, in order to combat contempt, the most hurtful thing in the human self, we must see what poetry is. Unless we feel we’re expressed, truly selfish, in being just, we’ll be unjust. Poetry, then, is an urgent and beautiful necessity. And so is that which explains poetry and us: Aesthetic Realism.
to Poetry; or, If One Wishes, Just Says about It By Eli Siegel
2. Aesthetic Realism says that every poem is a making one of individual consciousness and the entire world. Consciousness takes hold of world; world takes hold of consciousness. What the poet sees is the world as himself, himself as all that. This is shown in the words of a poem. 3. Aesthetic Realism says that consonants and vowels, syllables, words simply as sound are studies in rest and motion, depth and surface, color and auditory effect, directness and whimsy. A and r are studies, both of them, in rest and motion, depth and outwardness. A syllable like ar and one like ra are studies in opposites. The Grammar Poetry Uses5. The image and the deed are together in poetry. Poetry consists of deeds as images, images as deeds or happenings. About the Universe7. A poem is a deep oneness of here and there, the moment and all time. 8. Aesthetic Realism says that wherever a poem is successful, logic has taken a magnificently impeccable dress. 9. The universe as unutterably strange and tediously inescapable is in a poem. 10. Aeschylus, Villon, Pope, Burns, Rimbaud, Hugo, Shelley, Thomson—both the 18th — and 19th-century Thomson—Eluard, Yeats, Whitman, Carew, Chaucer, Isaiah were taken successfully by the same thing—the relation of the universe and themselves as making for beautiful sound and logical shape. Poetry Goes On
P.S. The relation of Quebec in neat roughness and rockiness, there in the east of Canada, to Vancouver in western Pacific mistiness, is like the sharpness and suggestion to be found in a poem—with each becoming the other.
By Ernest DeFilippis
I had that feeling as a boy when I built a house for my dog, Champ. I thought: What would he like? How much room did he need to be comfortable? How high should the floor be? I carefully designed the house; selected, measured, and cut the wood; framed it; then nailed the roof, sides, and floor. I felt proud of my creation and so happy to see Champ enjoy it. The materials of reality and I were in a team working to have a good effect. And I had this happiness at other times too—meeting a baseball solidly, or having my mind energetically engaged in understanding the logic of an algebraic equation. But I couldn’t distinguish between this feeling of happiness and what I felt, for example, when I’d be greeted with, "Ah, come bello!"—"Oh, how handsome!"—by my favorite aunts. At such times I’d feel a glow as everything outside me seemed to fade into dullness. "Vanity," said Mr. Siegel with humor, "makes us cross-eyed or dim-sighted." Is Our Picture of Ourselves Accurate?When I began to study Aesthetic Realism and learned about the fight in me between vanity and justice, I began making choices that gave me the rock-solid happiness I hadn’t thought existed! I love Mr. Siegel for enabling me to value accurately what my vanity and snobbishness made me scorn. In one of the first Aesthetic Realism classes I attended, I mentioned in an embarrassed way that I was interested in carpentry. He asked: "Are you interested in the aesthetics of carpentry?" "Yes," I answered. And I was moved as he gave form to something I’d felt but could never put into words: "Would you like to feel that some beautiful thing that is useful is made by you?" "Yes." He continued: It is the William Morris feeling. There is a good deal of that in history. Lorenzo Ghiberti, of the 15th century, spent 50 years constructing gates and statues in bronze. He showed hands and mind can be one.Studying the lives and work of these men had a profoundly good effect on me and encouraged expression I’m proud of. Vanity Interferes with LoveErnest DeFilippis would like someone to care for him, soothe him, make him feel mighty and important—and he would like to care for someone who would make him see all things better. That makes for trouble.And he asked me, "What do you appeal to, the strength of a woman or her weakness?" I had never thought in terms of strengthening a woman. What mattered was whether she liked me. And the main indication of her love was whether she gave me what I saw as the ultimate approval, sex. "What do you depend on for your charm," Mr. Siegel asked me, "truth or DeFilippis?" "My smile," I answered. Early in my study of Aesthetic Realism, I was seeing a woman I’ll call Carol Stevens. I liked the fact that instead of falling for my flattery, she criticized me. But I was also angry in a way I didn’t understand. In a class, Mr. Siegel asked me: "Do you like women to have mind?" EDeF. I like it more. ES. Do you feel a woman who cares for you will accept the limits you hand down? Right now quite a few men are tired of talking to a woman and want to grab her. Grabbing is the desire to stop intellect from working in a woman because it’s boring. You want her to become like a palpitating bird. Isn’t that what you want?I answered, "Yes." And I remember his deep kindness when he asked, "Is it wise?" Mr. Siegel always evoked the best thing in me. Seeing a woman’s mind as "boring" was pure vanity, idiocy of the highest degree. It made me miserable and ashamed, and botched up every relationship. I’m very glad that, because of my Aesthetic Realism education, I’m not the person I was. In my 15 years of marriage, I’m having a wonderful, romantic time learning about the world with Maureen Butler, my wife. I find the combination in her of feminine beauty and ethics, intellectual tenacity and sweetness, irresistible. I want to deserve Maureen’s love, and I see knowing her as an exciting quest. And that is so as I hold her body close to me! Resplendently JustConsultants. Do you think men have liked thinking about what a woman feels, what she’s yearning for? Men have felt, "If she’s got me, what else can she want?"Men have wanted to make a woman’s discontent narrower than it is, thinking all she needs is a little affection and everything will be all right. We asked, "What do you think Kate was angry at? Does she feel you want to know her—the Kate of Kates, what she feels to herself?" RS. No.Later we said: "The question is, what is Kate trying to get to for her whole life, and do you want to be a friend to her there?" "Yes," said Mr. Stanley, "I do." What he is learning, every man has the right to know.
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e begin this new year
the way Aesthetic Realism itself began: with the showing by Eli Siegel
of what poetry is. He explained that what makes for a true poem is the
very thing that will make a person’s life happy, intelligent, proud. What
takes place in the technique of a good poem is what we need, and
we suffer because we do not have it: "All beauty," he showed,
"is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what
we are going after in ourselves." We publish his 1960 essay "What Aesthetic
Realism Adds to Poetry; or, If One Wishes, Just Says about It."
esthetic Realism says
that every effect in poetry concerns the making one of opposites. An iambic
foot, for example, is a making one of short and long, swift and slow, surface
and depth. A poetic line, whether in free verse, in assonance, or rhyme,
is a study in assertion and muting, up and down, wide and narrow, softness
and intensity—and opposites like these. A group of lines is, furthermore,
a study in rise and fall, assertion and meditativeness, elementalness and
subtlety.
y notion of happiness
was to outshine everyone. But the feeling of exultation I got looking down
on people was, I learned, really the thrill of contempt. It was completely
against happiness, which Mr. Siegel described as "the feeling that what
one wants is going along with what the world is or does" (TRO 1569).
| Aesthetic Realism is based on these principles, stated by Eli Siegel:
1. The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis. 2. The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it .... Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it. 3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves. |
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First Thursday of each month, 6:30 PM: Seminars with speakers from Aesthetic Realism faculty Third Saturday of each month, 8 PM: Aesthetic Realism Dramatic Presentations
The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (TRO) is a biweekly periodical of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. Subscriptions: 26 issues, US $18; 12 issues, US $9, Canada and Mexico $14, elsewhere $20. Make check or money order payable to Aesthetic Realism Foundation.
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