Dear Unknown Friends:

Now, in January 2025, we begin to serialize a lecture Eli Siegel gave over fifty years ago: a lecture that’s brand new, for it’s about our present moment and has the knowledge, the exactitude and freshness and kindness, that humanity is thirsting for. The lecture is on imagination. It’s titled Poetry i: Imagination Is All This. And Aesthetic Realism is great about that tremendous subject—for Eli Siegel understood it, as no other critic or student of mind could.

He showed what imagination fundamentally is. And he showed there are two kinds of imagination, which can be called good and bad; kind and cruel; beautiful and ugly; true and false. Imagination is the source of the utmost loveliness and also the utmost cruelty. And Eli Siegel showed what the fundamental difference is between these. We need—how urgently we need—to know that difference.

And so, I’ll describe immediately the difference in impulsion between the two imaginations—between imagination that’s good (even magnificently good) and imagination that’s hurtful (even brutally hurtful). Aesthetic Realism shows that there is a fundamental fight going on in every human being. It is between respect and contempt for the world. Respect is the desire to see meaning, value, in reality; contempt is the feeling we’re more if we can look down on what’s-not-us. And the central distinction between the two imaginations is: does this imagining arise from a desire to respect the world—or from the desire to have contempt for it?

Two Examples

Let us take, for example, a person the anniversary of whose birth is being celebrated at this time: Martin Luther King, Jr. He imagined. He thought about what human beings deserved, whatever their skin tone. And he thought of—he imagined carefully, deeply—how a more just way of treating people in America could be brought about. This was good imagination. It was respect.

Then let us take a person who also imagined—but fundamentally differently: Adolf Hitler. He imagined a Germany that would suit him because through it people he associated with himself could look down on and manage and punish and humiliate and rule the rest of the world. He imagined non-German people in such a way as to make them seem ever so low, ugly, sleazy, inferior. And he imagined (successfully) how he could get others to agree with him. It was imagination utterly impelled by contempt. Not everyone, of course, goes as far in contempt as he did. But whenever imagination is bad, it’s because contempt for the world different from oneself has impelled it, however subtly.

All Imagination

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel shows what imagination, as such, is. And what he shows is in keeping with the landmark principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The two biggest opposites in human life are self and world. And in this lecture Mr. Siegel is showing that imagination is always a matter of some aspect of the world that has affected a person, and of how that person adds him- or herself to this thing and affects it, changes it.

Then there are other pairs of opposites. And in an artwork, for instance, the quality of the imagining depends on how reality’s opposites are present in it—on whether, and how richly, they are one. For instance, Shakespeare, imagining, wrote lines for Juliet that are at once intimate and wide; that tremble and are firm. They come to us with sound and meaning that are eternal even as they seem to issue from a particular young woman of Verona. —And there is Beethoven. Using his imagination on the world as sound, Beethoven showed in so many ways that a thrust could become sweetness too; that the brokenness of things and their grand continuity could be together; that uncertainty and triumph were deeply friends.

The Fight about Imagining Begins Early

The fight in everyone between contemptuous and respectful imagining begins early. Yet so often a child is praised for being “very imaginative!”—praised perhaps by a teacher or counselor, with no attempt to distinguish between imaginings that are just and strengthening and imaginings that hurt the child, and may hurt others. There is very much to say on this subject. But I mention it swiftly here as a means of saying that humanity needs—hugely—to learn from Aesthetic Realism about the fight between contempt and respect in every person.

I’m going to quote a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that illustrates musically the drama in a child about good and bad imagination. The speaker in the poem is a little English boy. The title is “Foreign Children”—and the speaker is driven to see himself as superior to them:

In the music of this poem there are two things that are very different. There is the smugness of contempt: I simply have to look down on these children who are different from me. At the same time, the boy has a certain excited interest in these children, a sense of wonder about them—and it’s this wonder that makes the poem musical. We hear it in these strange yearning lines, as good as any in the poem: “You have seen the scarlet trees / And the lions over seas.” There are bigness and mystery as this boy imagines the other children—and there’s respect in that. But then—he’s just got to show he’s better than they are!

I think Stevenson wanted to show those two ways of imagining, of thinking about people. I think he saw them in himself, and wanted to understand them better.

There Is Sean O’Casey

As the lecture we’re serializing begins, Mr. Siegel continues to discuss a play of Sean O’Casey that he’d been commenting on in previous classes. Here, he is using it to illustrate the fundamental makeup of imagination: the fact that imagination is always “what we add to the world through our minds.”

This is a great thing to show. Yet I want readers to know too that Eli Siegel spoke on other occasions about the meaning, for literature and human feeling, of this O’Casey play, Juno and the Paycock. He showed that O’Casey brought together, in a new way, humor and tragedy, humor and the unbearable: that with O’Casey these were not just interwoven but were organically of each other, inseparable. Eli Siegel was the critic who understood O’Casey most fully.

In my judgment, Mr. Siegel was the person of thought who had the widest, deepest knowledge—the most kindly imaginative and exact way of seeing.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Imagination Is All This

By Eli Siegel

I have found, somewhat as Coleridge found many years ago, that in order to deal with poetry there has to be a looking at imagination—at what it is. And there has to be a continued trying to see and say where it is good and where it is bad.

In my book Self and World there’s a chapter on imagination in which I differentiate between the imagination that is in art and the kind of imagination that makes one scream as one wakes out of sleep, the kind of imagination that makes one unfair to people, that has in it a good deal of building up a world that is really oneself and that hurts oneself. Imagination can be one of the most hurtful things in the world, one of the ugliest. It can be the kind that’s in the phrase doctors often have used: It’s all in your imagination.

Imagination frightens everyone, and should—imagination as it is with most people. And then, it can be a cause of great beauty. The difference is something necessary to see.

The Principle of Imagination

In this talk I shall continue to use Sean O’Casey. I find he’s very good—a mingling of prose and poetry—for these inquiries. In the play I’ve been discussing, Juno and the Paycock, we have something of the principle of imagination. That is, the play is historical: it takes place in the early 1920s, at a time when Ireland was undecided as to whether to go along with England or be definitely independent, and there were various factions. Also, British soldiers were in Ireland, in Dublin. So O’Casey in Juno and the Paycock had something to go by: recent Irish history, which is exceedingly complex.

The discussion and fighting about this—how should Ireland be?—is in O’Casey’s play. So he goes with something, begins with something already existing. After all, he didn’t make up the difficulties that made one of the characters, the son in the Boyle family, be an invalid in bed. And some actual happenings are discussed.

So there’s Irish history. And this is an instance of the fact that we go with something. But imagination can be described essentially as what we add to the world through our minds. Sean O’Casey added something, which is the play itself, through things that occurred in Ireland. It’s hard to say where the history ends and O’Casey begins. The two interpenetrate.

A person and what already exists would interpenetrate if somebody walking across an American cornfield were to see a white garment in motion, and change the white garment into a ghost. That’s his contribution to the American cornfield. And in that there’s a possibility also of something beautiful. Imagination works in many ways, but it can be described as what you add to the world and the way it is made. You sometimes add something to please yourself in a false way, and you sometimes add something to terrorize yourself: I’m sure it’s someone coming to hurt me who’s stomping upstairs! That’s imagination, because it’s only a big high school boy restless, not somebody one should fear.

Imagination, then, is a very large thing. It does belong to psychology. It belongs also to mental pathology or, to use an outworn word, psychiatry. The word psychiatry is becoming rather archaic by now, obsolete nearly, but I’ll use it to show that I love ancient times.

In Art

In art, there’s music that goes with imagination. There’s style that goes with imagination. And it is quite clear that if a person gets to a three-act play, the play wasn’t there before. The history was there, but the play Juno and the Paycock was not there. The play consists of many words, punctuation marks, intonations—and imagination. Since it is all Sean O’Casey, imagination is always there. Even if Sean O’Casey quoted a clipping from a newspaper it would be imagination, because what made him select it would be what he added. —So as we look at imagination we continue to use Juno and the Paycock.

We’re in the third act. Boyle’s wife has just said the doctor told her their daughter, Mary, should get married at once. And Boyle asks:

Boyle. Married at wanst! An’ why did he say the like o’ that?

Mrs. Boyle. Because Mary’s goin’ to have a baby in a short time.

One way imagination and science get together is in a possibility that medical persons have written of: the false pregnancy—in which a person really looks as if she were going to have a baby, though she isn’t. Yet there is a feeling in her that this will be. Fears can go with it, and also great hopes. A woman may say, At last I have a chance to have a child who will be President! But she also may feel something else. Anytime something happens to you, your imagination has a chance to do imaginative things. (Meanwhile, Mary’s pregnancy is not a false one.)

Boyle. Goin’ to have a baby!—my God, what’ll Bentham say when he hears that?

Occasionally imagination is just part of ignorance. Boyle is not aware that Bentham had to do with the getting to be of this possible child—that Bentham is the father. “Goin’ to have a baby!—my God, what’ll Bentham say when he hears that?” But there is imagination there. When you think of what a person will say, you’re using your mind to see the world as possibility. Another description of imagination is all that in our mind which sees the world as possibility.

Mrs. Boyle. Are you blind, man, that you can’t see that it was Bentham that has done this wrong to her?

Boyle (passionately). Then he’ll marry her, he’ll have to marry her!

Mrs. Boyle. You know he’s gone to England, an’ God knows where he is now.

If this were a play by Chekhov, the two would have talked in a different way. Somebody—we’ll call him Lubakov—has left Moscow, and there can be an asking where he has gone. The wife says he’s by the Black Sea. And the husband says Nizhny Novgorod. But both would be using imagination. This doesn’t happen here. They don’t worry about it—they just know he isn’t here and he went to England. They don’t talk of anything more specific.

Boyle. I’ll folly him, I’ll folly him, an’ bring him back, an’ make him do her justice.

Imagination makes us say we’re going to do things and two minutes later has us say, Well, I don’t know if I can.

Two Ways of Seeing

Mrs. Boyle. We’ll have to keep it quiet till we see what we can do.

This brings up two ways of seeing. When Mrs. Boyle says, “We’ll have to keep it quiet till we see what we can do,” there is possibility looked on factually. That is, something will occur and what one can do will be clear through what occurs. The other way is to say, Let us do something now. It’s like persons saying Time will tell, and then somebody says, Oh no! Let time tell—I want to tell first though. To feel time will tell is to look out for possibility. But when you think possibility is something that can be managed by you, there’s another kind of imagination. And imagination very often does lead to action. One of the things we can do is like what a chess player does; that is, the way a chess player thinks of his next move has something of imagination: If he does that, I’ll do this. I’ll checkmate him.

How We Seem to Others

Boyle says to his wife:

Boyle. Oh, isn’t this a nice thing to come on top o’ me, an’ the state I’m in! A pretty show I’ll be to Joxer an’ to that oul’ wan, Madigan! Amn’t I afther goin’ through enough without havin’ to go through this!

We think about how we appear, and when Boyle says, “A pretty show I’ll be…,” he’s imagining how he’ll appear to the people he mentions.

Imagination has a good deal to do with how we seem to others. Take a person hazed at Harvard around 1872—he was told to walk through Beacon Hill on a Sunday morning in his undershirt. He had to think, What will I feel as I walk this way through most elegant Boston? And he felt he could take it because people would know he was doing it in a good cause: that is, to get into a fraternity.

When we think of possibility in this field we can get very flustered. For instance, many persons will say, I’d rather die than wear this. And sometimes they mean it.

There are phrases that have imagination in them. And as Boyle is imagining what may happen to him when people know about Mary, he uses the phrase “come on top o’ me”: “Oh, isn’t this a nice thing to come on top o’ me…!” If this were happening in the Midwest, a person might say, It’s not nice of the Lord once more to throw me for a loop—whatever that means—instead of on top o’ me. And in ancient Greece a person might have said, Once more I’m tripped up by unruly Fate. That would be imagination too. But Boyle says on top o’ me.

“Amn’t I afther goin’ through enough without havin’ to go through this!”: this is a saying we already feel what hasn’t yet fully occurred. Imagination is there: we feel we’re going to go through something, and we already are repelled.

Other People

Then Mrs. Boyle says:

What you an’ I’ll have to go through’ll be nothin’ to what poor Mary’ll have to go through.

Imagination has a great deal to do with thinking of other people. And the way we use imagination about other people is usually not good. So Mrs. Boyle says, Why don’t you think of Mary?