Dear Unknown Friends:
With this TRO we conclude our serialization of Poetry i: Imagination Is All This, a 1971 lecture by Eli Siegel. It is definitive and also delightful. It is urgent, and composing. Mr. Siegel uses works of much variety to show—and he was the critic who truly showed this—what imagination is. Always, he explained, imagination is a joining of two great opposites: a particular self and the outside world. “Imagination,” he said, “can be described essentially as what we add to the world through our minds.” But how we imagine, how we deal with the world through our thought, can be either just or unjust.
In this final section Mr. Siegel continues showing imagination’s variety. There’s a passage by Tennyson telling of something he imagined, which troubled him and which he didn’t understand. (Meanwhile, in Mr. Siegel’s brief comments about it there is an understanding, which Tennyson would have been immensely thankful to meet.) In this same last section there is too something so different: passages from a 1948 book dealing toughly and wittily with aspects of New York. And also present in this section, along with New York streets and Tennyson’s depth, is something very different from both: an 1880 poem by Andrew Lang, which uses an exceedingly intricate French poetic form of the 14th and 15th centuries. That form is the ballade. (It should not be confused with the ballad, an ever so much simpler form.)
Since the Lang poem is here, I’m going to quote, as a means of celebrating Aesthetic Realism’s magnificent understanding of humanity, a poem by Eli Siegel that is also in this difficult, rarely used structure. It is his “Ballade Concerning Our Mistake and Knowledge of It.” And it is included in his book Hail, American Development.
Imagination Was There
The ballade form came to be through the imagination of a person (or persons) in France about 700 years ago. We can be pretty sure that, while affected by already existing ways of organizing lines and stanzas, someone was not wholly satisfied and felt: If I can arrange for lines and rhymes and stanzas to come in a certain new way, maybe I can say something that expresses me and pleases others.
To give a swift picture of a ballade, omitting various aspects, this can be said: A ballade consists of three 8-line stanzas plus an “envoy,” an address to a prince or someone else of eminence. The whole poem is in rhyme, but there can be only three rhyming sounds throughout. (In the “Ballade Concerning Our Mistake” those rhyming sounds are ain, ee, and ake.) And every stanza plus the envoy must end with the same line. (Here, that repeated line is “But first we must see our mistake.”)
Where ballades exist in English they are usually “light,” clever, jocular. This poem of Eli Siegel is extraordinary both in its complete ease with the intricate form, and in the fact that, while having lightness, it is joyfully and tearfully serious about a huge matter in everyone’s life. This is “Ballade Concerning Our Mistake and Knowledge of It”:
We’re always ready to complain:
Our lives are not what they should be.
We look for sun and we get rain;
And stalking us is misery.
There’s something else within our glee,
A touch of sand within our cake.
We hope; and sigh, Ah, to be free.
—But first we must see our mistake.
There are the heights we must attain,
There are the truths we have to see.
There’s so much loss, so little gain,
There’s surface for profundity.
Ourselves and world do not agree.
We’re stubborn, so we do not break;
And there’s so much plain misery.
—But first we must see our mistake.
No matter how we hide our pain,
And honor equanimity—
To see ourselves we do not deign,
That is, as an entirety.
We’d rather suffer fuzzily,
And soften sight—the while we quake,
And call for change so bitterly.
—But first we must see our mistake.
envoy
And so, dear Prince, when hope seems slain,
And bad things happen, and you ache;
Say this—dear This, against the grain:
But first we must see our mistake.
This poem is about the feeling in people that the outside world is the cause of our woe, and about the terrific disinclination to ask whether anything is amiss in how we see and are. Mr. Siegel writes in his note to the poem, “The outside world and other people may be mistaken…; still, can we, through a mistake or mistakes, give ourselves misery?”
Aesthetic Realism explains that the biggest, and continuous, mistake in the life of everyone is contempt: “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” Contempt happens to be the source of all bad imagination. As we go through our days, contempt is imagining for us what we think we are seeing: a world not good enough for us. Contempt tells us we cannot be happy unless we’re superior to everyone. It says our judgment of people should be based on how much they praise us. Aesthetic Realism shows that contempt is the Big Mistake, and we can have a thrilling, pride-giving time being against it in ourselves.
There Is This and More
Meanwhile, this poem is beautiful. I do not have the space here to describe with any fullness why it is. But I can say, for instance, this: that in the elaborate form, as Eli Siegel uses it, we also feel a large sincerity; that in the music of a line like “And bad things happen, and you ache,” there is a joining of pain and rich wonder; that the repeated line, “But first we must see our mistake,” comes in like a drumbeat—a drumbeat that’s also tender; that in the address to the prince at the end there is a oneness, as sound, of strictness and love.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education
Here Too Is Imagination
By Eli Siegel
I’m going to read, from a poem of Tennyson, stanzas that are about imagination straight. This is section 69 of In Memoriam, and in it there is something of good and evil together. There’s great misery in a dream, and then there is partial solace, but the solace is unclear. This is overtly about imagination. After all, a dream is, if anything is, imagination. It’s the first member of the lodge, charter member of imagination. Tennyson says:
I dream’d there would be Spring no more,
That Nature’s ancient power was lost:
The streets were black with smoke and frost,
They chatter’d trifles at the door:
I wander’d from the noisy town,
I found a wood with thorny boughs:
I took the thorns to bind my brows,
I wore them like a civic crown:
I met with scoffs, I met with scorns
From youth and babe and hoary hairs:
They call’d me in the public squares
The fool that wears a crown of thorns:
They call’d me fool, they call’d me child:
I found an angel of the night;
The voice was low, the look was bright;
He look’d upon my crown and smiled:
He reach’d the glory of a hand,
That seem’d to touch it into leaf:
The voice was not the voice of grief,
The words were hard to understand.
So the solace is not complete.
“I dream’d there would be Spring no more, / That Nature’s ancient power was lost.” That’s some dream!
“I took the thorns to bind my brows, / I wore them like a civic crown.” Tennyson is saying that he has to see his grief as an object. He has to be honest about it. That’s why he finds these thorns and wears them as a “civic crown.”
But other people say about this making so much of grief, That’s silly—you’re a fool.
Then an angel “look’d upon my crown and smiled.” The angel seems to say, You’re not wasting your time: it’s well to see this grief. But there is no culmination in complete satisfaction. The angel is somewhat difficult: “The words were hard to understand.”
This passage has what can be called the somberly pattering quality of grief—the way it just patters on.
Our Hopes Belong to Imagination
I go to a later Victorian poet, with a touch of the frivolous. Andrew Lang collected some of the most useful imaginative things. A series of books that affected me very early is that wonderful series of fairy books in colors: The Red Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, and others. Lang was interested in mythology—also poltergeists. But he’s quite learned.
There’s a famous poem of Lang, a ballade about the books that one hasn’t found yet and hopes to see. I’m going to read it—because our hopes, our desires, our contemplations belong to imagination. In it Lang uses the Latin word for hope: spes.
I’m sorry to say that this could be better poetry, but it’s worth knowing. And the ballade form is fitting for imagination. This is from Ballades in Blue China (1880). The word bise, used in the poem, means a sharp wind. [The names in the refrain refer to noted type-designers and publishers of the past.] Here is Lang’s “Ballade of the Book-Hunter”:
In torrid heats of late July,
In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly,—
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,
And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees,—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.
No dismal stall escapes his eye,
He turns o’er tomes of low degrees,
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies;
Each tract that flutters in the breeze
For him is charged with hopes and fears,
In mouldy novels fancy sees
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.
With restless eyes that peer and spy,
Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees,
In dismal nooks he loves to pry,
Whose motto evermore is Spes!
But ah! the fabled treasure flees;
Grown rarer with the fleeting years,
In rich men’s shelves they take their ease,—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!
envoy
Prince, all the things that tease and please,—
Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers, and tears,
What are they but such toys as these—
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?
They Too Imagined
I go now to another phase of culture. It happens that columnists, “smart writers,” go after effects of imagination—and occasionally the person doesn’t know that he or she is doing it. I am going to read something of this city—and imagination gets in. Imagination is working now all over New York. A series of books that affected people in America very much is the Confidential series, by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. There were Chicago Confidential, Washington Confidential, U.S.A. Confidential, Around the World Confidential. I’m reading from New York: Confidential!, of 1948.
Lait and Mortimer tell about Damon Runyon, on whose stories Guys and Dolls is based. He has people who are, from one point of view, very “good.” He has, for example, dope peddlers who have tears in their eyes. He also has forgers and blackmailers who do it all for their dear grandmothers. This, about imagination, is said of Runyon:
Damon was our friend and we admired him profoundly, because he could write fascinatingly, almost entirely from imagination, not from photographic impression.
The writers tell of Runyon’s trying to get the lingo of New York, around Seventh Avenue and the Fifties, of then. They say he knew he wasn’t giving it straight. There too he wrote “from imagination.”
And there is this sentence:
New Yorkers compose plays about New York and any resemblance to the living or dead is carelessness.
That is, when they’re accurate they’re careless. Imagination is both careful and careless.
There Is a Wife
A thing that affected many people is about the wife of the racketeer Dutch Schultz. I’ll mention first that what Schultz said in his delirium, which was taken down as he was dying, is an example of imagination of a certain kind: imagination without sure purpose. It had complaint and fear and anger.
—However, Dutch Schultz is killed and his wife, Frances Flegenheimer, has to live on. The writers use a phrase here that is an old phrase but has imagination in it: caught up with. A person can say, My past will catch up with me. That has terror and imagination in it, and it’s something that can affect many people. Lait and Mortimer write of Schultz’s wife:
From rooming house to cheap hotel to boardinghouse in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island villages and the fastnesses of Manhattan tenements, where few give a damn about who lives next door, she fled and fled again as the ghost of Dutch Schultz caught up with her.
A Sentence Is Looked At
The writers describe how, as New York went uptown and uptown, the theatre also went uptown and uptown:
The tide imperceptibly but inevitably flowed northward. Even while Herald Square was in its ascendancy, Times Square bloomed and blossomed, with 42nd Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, flashing more legitimate theatres than any other block in the world.
They point out that legitimate theatres are hard to find on Broadway itself; you have to go to the side streets—which is quite true. But the metaphors in the passage I just quoted show imagination working too hard. First: “The tide imperceptibly but inevitably flowed northward.” All right—but then we go from flowing to blooming and blossoming: “Even while Herald Square was in its ascendancy, Times Square bloomed and blossomed.”
Then, after the flowing and blooming and blossoming, we have flashing: “…with 42nd Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, flashing more legitimate theatres—” To flash legitimate theatres, that’s something! Some flashing! “—than any other block in the world.”
I feel the writers are very proud of that sentence. But I think the flashing and the blooming and blossoming and the flowing and the tide make for too much of an excess.
Imaginative Terms and Titles
In this book we find various terms. Every profession has its imaginative terms, and there is one in this sentence:
George Raft hoofed at Roseland dance hall, later for Tex Guinan, at $50 a week.
The verb hoof, for dance, has become everlasting. For some reason, you hoof—and it seems to be the right word.
Then we have a metaphor with some imagination. Here it’s used in relation to a person, Granlund; he established the Hollywood Restaurant, which had a large dance floor and big bands—and it was imitated:
The Hollywood was the daddy of practically every cabaret in business today.
The metaphor here is, of course, daddy.
Imagination can be in songs. There are titles that are mysterious and are remembered. One is “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” That has to do with the oneness of negative and affirmative. Then, there’s the song, which still can be heard, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” That is a metaphor. It doesn’t mean smoke—it means your thoughts, which have the effect of smoke.
That Very Big Thing
This discussion has been all for the purpose of seeing that very big thing, the possibility a human being has of changing the world to suit oneself and maybe to suit the world. If you change the world to suit yourself and also suit the world—that is, if you’re true to the world, true to its cause—then imagination is showing it is needed by reality. Without imagination, reality couldn’t show how good it is. But it has to be reality that is shown.
The purpose of imagination is to show reality’s possibilities. An individual has to be present for that. And the most wonderful thing about people is that if they’re honest they can help reality through their imagination.