Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the lecture Poetry i: Imagination Is All This, by Eli Siegel. And as I’ve been saying in my commentaries for this series: Mr. Siegel is the critic who explained what imagination is. He explained the fundamental difference between the two kinds of imagination—good and bad—that have existed, uncomprehended, throughout history.

And so, for readers who may not have seen our last two numbers, I’ll state that distinction freshly. There is the imagination—bad imagination—that arises from the most hurtful thing in every human being, contempt: the desire to be big by lessening, looking down on, what’s not oneself. Contempt is the desire in a person that makes the person cold, mean—even cruel on a large scale. Contempt has one feel one can imaginatively change any fact one pleases, to suit one’s ego. Contempt has one make the feelings of other people into nothing—or at least see others’ feelings as much less real than one’s own.

Good imagination, on the other hand, arises from what Aesthetic Realism shows is the deepest desire, the largest desire, really the most practical desire, in a person: to be our individual self, take care of that self, through being just to the outside world. From that source comes the imagination in all true art. This imagination is beautiful, and has what Aesthetic Realism shows all beauty has: “the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality.” Good imagination is a oneness of freedom and exactitude; of a person’s individuality yet relation to everything; good imagination is assertion and yielding, sharpness and tenderness.

A Poem Is Looked At

In numerous classes, Mr. Siegel spoke, thrillingly and scientifically, about imagination, discussing the work of many authors. (In the previous section of the talk we’re serializing, the text used was a passage from Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock.) I want, though, to look a little at a work of Eli Siegel himself. The reason is, while being so important in the understanding of imagination, he had, himself, one of the great imaginations in world thought. It was present throughout his abundant work; it was in his prose and poetry, in the classes he taught, in the way he spoke to people in Aesthetic Realism lessons. And his imagination was always at one with exactitude, with that desire to know which is science.

I’ll comment some on a quite short poem of Mr. Siegel, written in 1928 and included in his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. This is “The Missouri”:

Mr. Siegel has this note to the poem: “About two kinds of motion: a sudden running, a permanent flowing.”

As we begin to look at the lines, there are these big facts we should know: Whenever imagination in any art is deep enough, there is a feeling of largeness. As we meet such a work we feel we’re meeting something that—while having particular components—is also unbounded. In poetry, Aesthetic Realism explains, one hears this largeness: a largeness that is the world itself, the oneness of such opposites as rest and motion, certainty and uncertainty, force and gentleness. In poetry, this structure of the world is poetic music, heard in the way words meet.

The poem of Eli Siegel I’ve quoted has that music—that deep imaginative sincerity, true to the world. We hear the two motions Mr. Siegel writes of in his note.

The first line, “How a river goes its way,” is continuous and slow. And the line has curves in it, two curves, which we hear. One curve begins with the wide, slow “HOW” and falls gently through “a river”; the other starts with the wide, slow “GOES” and falls unperturbedly through “its way.” Then, in the second line, we have another motion—much more staccato, lively, broken-yet-delicate, swift, light: “While little girls in April dresses.” Meanwhile, there’s a gentle blowing sound in “April dresses”: we feel them move—as we felt the slower, heavier curvings move in the first line. —And we have “the sudden running” motion that Mr. Siegel refers to in his note: “Run from a pavement / Across a street / To a pavement there.”

In the next lines, “that dying” refers, I believe, to the sun’s setting. And then, as the short poem ends, we have another character or characters, so different from that slow river and also from the running girls: the twigs. They’re here with sound that makes us feel their tactuality, their particular physical being: the sound of “Warm twigs on it…”

What It Honors

So we have an instance of imagination become poetic music. And, for all the poem’s brevity, the music of it is tremendous. The poem is an honoring of the difference among things, and also the relatedness of those very things. Through the author’s grand, respectful imagination, it is a poem in which an American river, American little girls, American pavements and twigs stand for reality itself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Honoring of Possibility

By Eli Siegel

We go now to one of the great imaginative works of the world: that eminent, keen, everlasting, almost divine work here and there, The Pickwick Papers. I’ll try to show, looking at the meaning of imagination, why I call it that.

Imagination has been in everyone. To be a person, to be an individual, is to be imaginative. It is well to know where imagination has been at its greatest, and it has been at its greatest in Charles Dickens. There are other persons I could mention, and have mentioned.

Dickens’ first work of size, after his Sketches by Boz, has that great imagination about the world in the form of comedy. But every time there is real comedy, the other Muses are present too. The fact that Charles Dickens came to a character like Pickwick—with all else that’s been, Pickwick is still there and Jingle is still there—well, that says imagination can do things. To create a person and have that person walk around—O’Casey is very good at it, but Dickens is even better.

The work was published in twenty parts in 1836 and 1837, and when it came out in book form it had a preface by Dickens, which I’ll read from.

Surmise Is with Imagination

When people are interested in something, their imagination becomes busy, and there was surmise by various people about how the character of Pickwick came to be. There can still be surmise about that. Persons have found a relation of Mr. Pickwick to the title character of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield; to Parson Adams in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews; to Uncle Toby in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. There is such a relation—to a person who is kind and also seems not to be mawkish, someone who seems to be strong as he seems so gentle and, in a way, so sweet. The substantiality of sweetness: that’s one of the hardest things to imagine—to make somebody kind and not make him simply silly. It’s true that at first Dickens did tend to make Pickwick silly, but as he says in his preface, he found himself stopping that.

So, a novelist’s seeing of a person is imagination. And this kind of imagination is related to the imagination that can make for a well-placed iambic. That is why my title is Poetry i: Imagination Is All This. We cannot understand imagination in a line of poetry until we are ready to see as friendly and to honor imagination in any form whatsoever.

Dickens says in his preface:

I have seen various accounts of the origin of these Pickwick Papers, which have, at all events, possessed—for me—the charm of perfect novelty. As I may infer, from the occasional appearance of such histories, that my readers have an interest in the matter, I will relate how they came into existence.

Dickens is saying that these accounts of the origin of Pickwick Papers are imaginative. They have “the charm of perfect novelty.” Then he tells how the book came to be.

The effect of The Pickwick Papers on the public of then is one of the mighty things in human history. A work appeared, and then gradually people felt this was different. There was a kind of laughter through this work, different from previous laughter. For example, Wilbur Cross in his Development of the English Novel shows that there’s a character in a work of Theodore Hook who was like Jingle; but I know both characters, and Jingle is not that other character. There was a kind of laughter that took place in 1836 and 1837 in London and elsewhere in England that everyone should know about. It speaks well for man.

In the preface Dickens tells of how, after the Sketches by Boz had appeared, he was approached by Chapman and Hall. They were publishers, interested in a work by him:

[They] waited on me to propose a something that should be published in shilling numbers—then only known to me, or, I believe, to anybody else, by a dim recollection of certain interminable novels in that form, which used to be carried about the country by pedlars, and over some of which I remember to have shed innumerable tears before I had served my apprenticeship to Life.

So it seems there was fiction—long fiction—published in parts, and people would cry over it. That is a kind of imagination. As soon as you see a play and cry, or read a novel and cry, you add something. There were persons who cried in the eighteenth century over Clarissa Harlowe in Richardson’s Clarissa. We know that Francis Jeffrey cried over Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Other critics later said this showed Jeffrey’s weakness—that he should not have cried. But to have tears is related to imagination.

Discussion and the Everlasting

Dickens tells of how he and Chapman and Hall talked over this book he’d write, and about what kind of book it should be. They say they want a comic book, about the “Nimrod Club”—four sportsmen who would have misadventures in England. And Dickens says he’s not so good writing about sports—although he does get sports into The Pickwick Papers. Mr. Winkle—who is a sportsman, but more by announcement than by deed—is there.

Then there is a famous phrase, one of the great phrases having to do with imagination: Chapman and Hall seem to think that Dickens knows what he’s talking about, and they defer to him; and Dickens says:

My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr. Pickwick, and wrote the first number.

That phrase, “I thought of Mr. Pickwick,” is everlasting. And it shows you can think about people who exist but also people who don’t exist. When you think of people who don’t exist, you’re in the field of imagination. You can also begin with people who exist and imagine them doing something they haven’t done yet. When you add something from your mind to what is (or, in a sense, to what is not), and the adding shows respect and depth and love—and also your sense of form, which would come out of these—there is important imagination. And that occurs in poetry.

A Change

Then Dickens says in his preface:

It has been observed of Mr. Pickwick, that there is a decided change in his character, as these pages proceed, and that he becomes more good and more sensible. I do not think this change will appear forced or unnatural to my readers, if they will reflect that in real life the peculiarities and oddities of a man who has anything whimsical about him, generally impress us first, and that it is not until we are better acquainted with him that we usually begin to look below these superficial traits, and to know the better part of him.

Well, Dickens is not completely candid here. He didn’t know what he was doing as he had Mr. Pickwick change. He’d had farcical characters in Sketches by Boz—but the character of Pickwick deepened in him. The character took on, more, a mingling of the opposites of great gentleness and sweetness and some kind of strength. And the character of Jingle took on a quality of evil but great usefulness, like a kind of roaming-about English Iago.

As Dickens felt, a character gets out of one’s hands. Something works in us, the way our heartbeat does, and has this character as this character will be.

Balzac is related to Dickens. He is another of the imaginations that imagine mightily. There is a character in Balzac—present in many of his novels—Vautrin, who is that mingling of evil and good which is the hardest thing to make sense of in fiction.

Imagination is related to emotion and instinct. It is instinct as giving useful new form to the world; and it is emotion, which can be seen as that from which instinct gets its procedure. Emotion is to feeling what instinct is to emotion. Emotion is feeling on the move, and instinct is emotion on the move. Then, imagination is also on the move. It’s related to feeling, emotion, instinct, because it says, If I see the world in this way, I’ll be good to myself and good to the world. And Dickens was good to the world. Without Pickwick there would be a little less food in the larder.

Social Justice

Dickens talks about some of his purposes, very social. There are awful magistrates, awful judges, in Dickens’ works, quite a few of them. And he was impelled to present some of the ways of England—the social ways of England—as horrifying and as funny. At the end of the preface he describes his hope:

Who knows, but by the time the series reaches its conclusion, it may be discovered that there are even magistrates in town and country, who should be taught to shake hands every day with Common-sense and Justice;…that a few petty boards and bodies—less than drops in the great ocean of humanity, which roars around them—are not for ever to let loose Fever and Consumption on God’s creatures at their will, or always to keep their jobbing little fiddles going, for a Dance of Death.

It happens here, as it does with many writers, that imagination gets huddled. Your metaphors start getting around each other’s necks and getting each other down. In this long sentence, the imagination gets too multiple: “that a few petty boards and bodies—less than drops in the great ocean of humanity”—that isn’t so coherent—“which roars around them—are not for ever to let loose Fever and Consumption on God’s creatures at their will…”

We have imagination working too hard here. It’s difficult to follow—like three movies at once. And there’s the saying that those “boards…keep their jobbing little fiddles going, for a Dance of Death.” Well, the ending of this preface is, I think, rather huddled.

The Pickwick Club Meets

There is a meeting of the Pickwick Club that is one of the funniest things in the book. Mr. Pickwick makes a speech:

He (Mr. Pickwick) would not deny that he was influenced by human passions, and human feelings (cheers)—possibly by human weaknesses—(loud cries of “No”); but this he would say, that if ever the fire of self-importance broke out in his bosom, the desire to benefit the human race in preference effectually quenched it.

Which is a Pickwickian way—and it’s quite eloquent with all its funniness—of saying that he admits he would like to assert himself, be very important, but that there’s a force that is stronger. And unlike the way the preface ends, this is somewhat elaborate but it’s not huddled.

“He (Mr. Pickwick) would not deny that he was influenced by human passions, and human feelings (cheers)….” That is Dickens imagining this. He’s imagining the whole meeting. Every novel—as it’s been said—is a one-person show.

“…(cheers)—possibly by human weaknesses—(loud cries of ‘No’); but this he would say, that if ever the fire of self-importance broke out in his bosom…” That is a metaphor. Most often self-importance is not called a fire. “…the desire to benefit the human race in preference effectually quenched it.” But it is interesting to think that self-importance is a fire and the desire to benefit the human race is water that can quench it. It’s very taking, and it’s a very well-managed imaginative metaphor. Also, there is a construction to this sentence.

What I hope to show is that every example of style has something to do with imagination and presents another possibility of imagination. I hope to make clear that imagination itself is the honoring of possibility and the seeing of it as pleasing fact.