Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize the lecture These Speak of Poetry, which Eli Siegel gave in 1973. In it he describes something no other critic saw: the crucial, defining thing in poetry, that which distinguishes a true poem from something not that. And here it’s necessary, and a great pleasure, to say again: Aesthetic Realism does not see poetry as a matter that is apart from life; it’s not apart, for instance, from your turmoil—or from your need to be “practical.” Nor does Aesthetic Realism see poetry as some clever arrangement, or some sloppy expression. Poetry is the furthest thing from these! An authentic poem is sincerity at its deepest and most exact; it is justice as strict and loving.

“Poetry,” Eli Siegel wrote, “…is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” And he explained: the evidence showing that a poem is the real thing is a certain sound, which is poetic music. The music is different in each instance, but it is always the oneness of such “opposites in reality” as freedom and order, delicacy and strength, tumult and calm, continuity and change. The music of a poem is present in and inseparable from what the words, as meaning, are saying.

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel speaks about this all-important thing, poetic music. He is looking at work in the Louis Untermeyer anthology Modern American Poetry, and, in the part of the lecture published here, continues to discuss poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Robinson lived from 1869 to 1935. He impressed many readers and what can be called the literary establishment. His work, though, Mr. Siegel is showing, however adept it may be, is not true poetry.

Why It Matters

In my commentary on the first portion of this lecture, I wrote some about why the distinction between true poetry and what’s not that matters vitally. I wrote that all authentic art shows, through its structure, what kind of world we’re in. Central to Aesthetic Realism is this principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” The world can bewilder us, frighten us, toss us between hope and fear. But every good work of art brings to us what the world really is: a oneness of opposites—such opposites as those I mentioned earlier. And I can add others; for instance: ease and difficulty, high and low, likeness and difference. Every good work of art gives evidence that reality in its structure is beautiful, has grandeur, is our friend.

In this TRO I’ll comment on why the distinction between a true poem and what’s not that, is vital for our seeing of ourselves—for our knowing what we, under our skin, in our days, are really after. I quote now from one of the most critically valuable and also truly lovable essays ever written, “The Immediate Need for Poetry,” by Eli Siegel. He says, in this work of 1964:

When we are born we hope to make some sense of the forces in us. We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail, and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose. All through life, really, we are trying to make jarring, separating propensities to act as one; we are trying to have forces coalesce in an other than languid oneness. —And it is poetry that makes jarring, separating propensities to act as one; it is poetry that coalesces forces in a oneness that is not languid.

From this one may properly gather that the immediate need for poetry (also the permanent one) is to see it as a means of our own organization, strengthening, instigating. Poetry represents the good sense we desire. Poetry is the exacting shepherd of our emotions….

We need poetry, and so we need to see it; not something else. [TRO 758]

If we take things to be poetry which are not, among other hurtful effects there is this: we won’t know how we want to be. We’ll be saying that how we want to be, thirst to be—which is present in every good poem—is indistinguishable from ways of being that don’t stand for our true hopes.

Through the millennia, of course, people have not known that real poetry and art show what the world is and who we are. But because of Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel, we can know it at last.

The Real Thing

In the portion of the lecture published here, as Mr. Siegel describes what’s amiss in the Robinson poems, he quotes as contrast a stanza—great in its music—from the Edward FitzGerald translation of Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat.” He doesn’t comment lengthily on it—that’s not his purpose. But as a prelude, I’ll say a little about the music of that stanza, and how it meets “the immediate need” and life-need of us all.

A caravanserai, mentioned in the first line, is a kind of inn, where travelers, often in caravans, could stay overnight. Omar Khayyam had been saying in this poem, ever so charmingly and musically: Don’t look for much meaning in the world—because we’re only here a short while and then we’ll die. Now he compares our life to this inn, where we’ll be present so very briefly—even if we seem to be a big shot, like a sultan. Here’s the stanza Mr. Siegel quotes:

In the first of these lines there is something battered, non-grand. For a while we hear something uncomfortable, with those flat a sounds in batter’d and Cara, and those short i sounds in think, in, this. There’s a poking, something of a battering, even a creaking. But then—the word Caravanserai stretches out, goes forth grandly into space. The uncertainty of things, the discomfort of things, becomes might, and wonder.

In this lecture Mr. Siegel speaks about poetic music as representing the unknown. One can feel that unknown, that mystery and wonder, in this stanza, even as the stanza has a neatness to it.

Take the third of these lines: “How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp.” There’s the sound of a slow march here. There is grandeur in Sultan and Pomp and in that march. But there’s also a sense of lack. “Sultan after Sultan”—so many Sultans, and what happened to them? They could stay only a short time. In all that slow pomp, we can feel an emptiness between the words. Might and weakness, fullness and emptiness throb in this line. Again: we hear them as music.

Then, the fourth line. We have a firm dignity in “Abode his destined Hour”: a person is there, solidly. Yet there’s such mystery and largeness in that full o of abode; such quiet sizzle in the sound of destined; such largeness and quietude with a touch of pain in how the sound of Hour comes in. Then: “and went his way”: here is a music of absence, and disappearing, even a delicate shrug. Yet the going into something like nothingness is at one with a heard fullness of things.

Why did a stanza about the fact that life is temporary come to be so beautiful? It’s because the lines are musical: because the structure of the world itself, the oneness of opposites, was felt by a person, Omar Khayyam; also, centuries later, by the translator, Edward FitzGerald. And it is Eli Siegel who explained 1) what poetry is; 2) what the nature of reality is; 3) what the self of every person is looking for.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

How Is It Said?

By Eli Siegel

A further poem of Robinson in this anthology is about persons caught in the bondage of the office—white-collar thralls, they may be called. It’s titled “The Clerks.” There’s an unusual word in the final line: alnage, which is a measurement of cloth. It’s a medieval term, and I haven’t seen anyone but Robinson use it. This is a sonnet—about clerks who give up too much of their lives in an office:

As is well known, Edwin Arlington Robinson, being very “intellectual,” had to be a pessimist—which he was. He felt there was more motion than meaning in the world. That is one definition of a pessimist: a person who feels there’s more motion than meaning, and more mechanism than purpose.

This sonnet has two parts. First: the speaker goes back to an office and sees persons going through the same business routine or municipal routine they went through years ago. Then he indicates that this is what people, even kings and poets, have to do with life. —However that may be, the important thing is how this is said.

Once more, there is the need to ask: Into what kind of unknown possibility called music have these statements been put? Music is the unknown part of poetry, even though it can be scanned. When you see it entirely, you feel there is something unknown. To give an example, there are these lines from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” in the Edward FitzGerald translation—they have that music:

The rhymes of day and way are very ordinary. But the passage is tremendous. There’s a music in it. There’s a difference between those lines and the lines of Robinson and many others.

Continuing with the Robinson sonnet: “I did not think that I should find them there / When I came back again; but there they stood.” This can be called patter.

The language is impressive. But it roams around the object. There are too many gloves around the syllables.

“And you that ache so much to be sublime”: somehow the words ache and sublime don’t go together. “Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time”: that seems to be a bold metaphor—where Time would be the boss, and poets and kings would act on its orders. Well, that isn’t exactly true. And the poets and kings would be “Tiering the same dull webs of discontent”: that’s one of those lines that look impressive. Tiering is putting into layers. “Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.”

As Francis Jeffrey said, “This will never do.” And people need to know well enough what might do.

Does It Happen This Way?

A poem of Robinson included by Untermeyer has some of the feeling that’s in Tennyson’s “Blow, Bugle, Blow.” It’s about evening. And evening has been described from the very beginning. Homer has lines about evening. Virgil has. The fact that brightness can be less in the world, light can be less, has taken people very much. This is Robinson’s “The Dark Hills”:

The idea of sunset and things changing—if it doesn’t get you there’s something wrong with you. But once more, the chief matter is how this is said.

“Dark hills at evening in the west”: that’s as good a line as any in the poem. It’s not up to any verbal flimflam. But what comes next is: “Where sunset hovers like a sound / Of golden horns….” There’s too much suggestion there, and also too much of simply untrue statement. Sunset does not hover like a sound. It may be around a short time or longer, but it doesn’t “hover”: it takes up the whole show. Sunset is not creepy, no matter how faint it is.

“Where sunset hovers like a sound / Of golden horns.” There is some gold in sunset but the sunset as such should not be described in terms of golden horns. Sunset is such a mingling of effulgence and restraint, such a mingling of darkness and showiness. To say it hovers, and is like a sound of golden horns, takes the majesty and the infinite divine cunning out of the construction of a sunset. (I have to beg pardon for saying “construction”—but somehow a sunset was made.)

“Far now from all the bannered ways / Where flash the legions of the sun.” This use of bannered as an adjective is questionable. And bannered ways and flashing don’t go together.

“You fade—as if the last of days / Were fading and all wars were done.” That is reminiscent of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. But the adroit word is used by Robinson in such a fashion that it captivated people and made them think things could be said in so many ways. The purpose of poetry is not to say things in so many ways, but to show that a thing you’re thinking of has more possibilities of being truly seen. We haven’t yet exhausted all the possibilities of seeing an orange, or a billiard table, or a rose, or a politician.

There’s How Shakespeare Is Seen

Then, there’s a poem of Robinson that caused a good deal of stir: “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.” The idea is: Ben Jonson is lonely in London. His friend William Shakespeare has gone to Stratford as the owner of a house and is going to give his life to Stratford. Now a visitor from that town is with Jonson. —There’s a lot of what can be called somber and profound stuff here but, again, not poetry.

The poem has Jonson say that Shakespeare has the desire to be a landowner, too much so; and also that he can still look at women. These two lines are kind of lively (the word Cyprian refers to a woman who doesn’t go by the prayer book):

So Robinson has Jonson saying pretty vividly that Shakespeare ought to stay in London and not give his life to real estate and be the owner of a house.

There’s a description of Shakespeare’s troubles—and sociologically, or in terms of psychological pedagogy, it’s interesting:

That’s a description of confusion and uncertainty—which it is likely Robinson had because everyone has it. How do all these things get together? Do all these pieces say something friendly to each other? Again, the language: it’s impressive, but it’s not the real thing. And here Robinson has the same fault as T.S. Eliot. Eliot is impressive but he doesn’t get to that expansive and roving heart of reality.

Robinson has Jonson say of Shakespeare:

I don’t think it’s wholly true about Shakespeare. To say Shakespeare is “mad, careful, proud, indifferent” is to have four rather lively adjectives; but it doesn’t present Shakespeare. Furthermore, the syllables were not chosen by God.

People Are Here, but Not Poetry

There’s a poem of Robinson that tells of a mother. She cares very much for her son and thinks he’s awfully valuable—but others think he’s not so much. Robinson’s way of saying it is very impressive. The rhyme scheme is very adept, and should make the stanza quite successful and buoyant and happy. The lines are iambic tetrameter. This is one stanza of “The Gift of God”:

It means that she insists he’s wonderful, but other people and the centuries are not with her.

The poem should be known, because it says something about people. But it doesn’t add to the richness of poetry.