Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing The Renaissance Shows Self, by Eli Siegel, an amazing and beautiful lecture of 1970. Using the book English Renaissance Poetry, edited by John Williams, Mr. Siegel discusses poems, and passages from poems, written around 400 to 530 years ago. They could seem distant from our lives now—yet oh, how not distant, how immediate to us, they are. Through them Mr. Siegel is illustrating what the self is: the self so personal and particular to each of us, which yet is the human self, something all people of every time and place have in common. Those poems have our own lives in them: they’re a means of our seeing who we are.

As I have described during this serialization, Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood and explained the self. The explanation is outlined in this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The central opposites in everyone are self and world. In everything we do—whether we’re walking, kissing, studying, eating, arguing, hoping, voting—our self is always affected by and dealing in some fashion with that which is not ourselves: in other words, the world. And the self’s great, continuous need is to make those opposites one: to care for and assert what we are and at the same time be just—deeply just, grandly just—to a world of things and people other than ourselves. The fact that billions of people day after day do not fulfill this self-need does not change the fact that it is the largest we have.

Mr. Siegel described too the central fight in the self. It is between the desire to respect the reality outside ourselves, and the desire to have contempt for it. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” And from it come all the injustice in history and all the coldness, unkindness, and cruelty in everyday life.

A Literary Device Represents Us

In the section of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks about something that can seem so literary, so technical: personification. Personification is among those things that have been called literary devices. And it is one. Personification is the giving of human qualities and ways to inanimate objects or abstractions. Yet Aesthetic Realism shows this: everything that is part of artistic technique arises from something elemental and insistent in the human self, and embodies what we’re looking for in our own daily lives, in our feelings, thoughts, and actions.

Here, Mr. Siegel says that personification has fundamentally to do with what the self is, including our own self. That is a tremendous idea, new in art criticism and human understanding. In this talk he does not state specifically what personification says about the self; but based on the rest of the lecture and on Aesthetic Realism as such, there are some things we can see about personification as standing for the self’s desire. And those things are of urgent importance—also hope-giving importance.

There has been in humanity over the millennia a drive to personify. Something of it was present in ancient Greece when (for instance) trees, groves, brooks, were seen as inhabited by, represented by, made inseparable from and equivalent to a being with human thought and feeling: a dryad or naiad. And the ocean just could not be seen as simply inanimate—it had to be given a self, a godly and human self, through Poseidon (whom the Romans later would call Neptune).

Personification is in making Justice be a lady balancing scales. It is in making Liberty a lady to be seen—and visited—in New York Harbor. In versions of the fairy story “Beauty and the Beast,” household objects have human feelings: they are personified. Mrs. Potts, in a recent film version, is a teapot who talks, and sings, and chides, and helps.

I think personification comes from the deepest drive of self, the aesthetic drive: to feel that things in the outside world are not apart from oneself but are, in all their difference, like ourselves. The ugliest thing in self, contempt, is the feeling, What is in me is different from, apart from, superior to other things and people. Our own feelings seem to us vivid, precious, profound—while we make the feelings of others either non-existent or dim, flat, theoretical. There is a tendency to see other things and people as, really, a backdrop to our own lives. Contempt (to put it mildly) makes what is not us less alive, less vital. The drive to personify is an opponent to that. It is a way of saying, There is meaning in things; there is pulsating meaning not just in us but in objects. And ideas, like Justice, are not mere abstractions: they have vitality; they’re as alive as we ourselves are!

Cruelty Comes from How We See Reality

Every unkind thought and activity comes because we have made our fellow humans less real, less human than we are. But robbing a person of his or her humanity begins with robbing reality itself of the life that is in it: making objects, for example, dull, unimportant; divesting them of their meaning, of the grandeur that art sees and shows to be in the most seemingly humble of things. The shamefulness of taking the life out of what’s not us, is told of in famous lines by Wordsworth: “A primrose by a river’s brim / A yellow primrose was to him, / And it was nothing more.” (There is, by the way, no personification in those lines.)

Personification, of course, is not in itself the answer to injustice. And just as all fine things (for instance, words or the ability to draw) can be misused, so personification in literature is often not well done, is often mechanical, not wholly sincere. But the impetus to it, the source of it in the depth of the human self, is against contempt: against the desire to make what we are apart from the rest of the world.

To find life as real as one’s own in other things and people is what all true art does, whether personification is there or not. The finding and showing of the aliveness of things is in the drama, the novel, paintings, sculpture. But some aspects of art can stand in a very outward way for that showing of life; this is what personification does.

Fruit & Personification

There is a poem by Eli Siegel himself that uses personification. I am going to quote it here because, not only is personification present in a fresh, wild, sensible, kind, important way, but the poetry itself is beautiful. It has—amid and including its personification—humor, depth, and music. Here the things personified are fruits. The poem is:

So this poem gives a self to fruit. What does the poem mean? I’ll say a little what I think it means, because that meaning has to do with how we should see the world, and objects, and ourselves.

“Oh, look, and see the laughing apple, / The grinning pear in a New York county. / For small fruit, and large, can have glee.” Apples and pears can look beautiful, and even look happy. But do they like the fact that they were grown, that they come from the earth and a tree, and can be used to please and strengthen people? Is there any delight in them that they are beautiful and can do good, much delightful good?

I know, of course, that the literal answer is no. And yet, and yet: is it in any way correct to feel that the existence of a thing is liked by that thing? Is it in any way wise to feel that an instance of reality is not here on sufferance but has a good time being here? The purpose of art, and also science really, is to see and know and honor the meaning of things. Is meaning just passive—or is there force, vividness, aliveness in meaning? And is that vividness and aliveness close, at least, to pleasure, glee?

“For small fruit, and large, can have glee, / Not yet seen by appraising males / Given to philosophy sidewise.” Those incompletely philosophic males think they know what being is; they don’t see that with being comes joyful and even humorous meaning.

“Such joy of apples there in the cool / Commercial place of agricultural goings on.” The second of those lines is so matter-of-fact, so much about business. But listen: the sounds of its first four words are mouth-watering, with their ms, ls, the ersh in commercial, the ultural in agricultural. The line is a oneness of business and the luscious.

We have the last two lines: “Put that in your next inventory, pomologist, / Who may be called William, partly.” A pomologist is one who studies or grows fruit. But a pomologist’s technical knowledge may not include the meaning of those fruits—may not include something corresponding to an agogness that is in their existence itself. The pomologist “may be called William” only “partly”—not just because he has a second name too, but because there is more to him than people see. Likewise, there is more to the existence of things themselves than people see. Part of that more may be a vibrancy, a stir of meaning, a hoopla in existing.

Factuality and hoopla are one in the make-up of the poem’s lines themselves. They are tight, yet they leap and are free. Personification is used in them, I believe, to convey the fact that being as such has something like joy in it, something like love, something like kicking up one’s heels.

What Art Shows

As large a tragedy as any in the life of humanity is the unspoken feeling that to respect things is dull and is a lessening of our own glory. Art, however, shows that valuing reality is both thrilling and self-enhancing. Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that makes this message of art alive for us and enables us to learn it as logic and pleasure.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Self Is There

By Eli Siegel

We can see self in what has been personified. Many, many things have been personified in many languages. Anybody who does a sculpture called The Spirit of Sheridan Square is in the field, or The Spirit of Second Avenue.

An example of personification is in lines I’ll read, by Sir Thomas More (1478–1535). He is better known at this time than he ever was, what with the play A Man for All Seasons. He is seen as a hero. His book Utopia is still what he’s most noted for, but other works of his in prose have been esteemed. His poems have likewise been looked at. He wrote in Latin, but wrote a few poems in English.

This book includes a series called “The Pageants of Thomas More,” and it’s a series of personifications: “I am called Childhood”; “Manhood I am”; then a poem about Venus and Cupid; then verses on Death, and Fame, and Time. Time has been personified often. It’s been given feelings. Sometimes, I guess, it says, I’m tired of carrying this scythe.

Eternity is also personified by More—which is rather difficult, because as soon as you personify a thing, it has a self. If you personify a thing and it doesn’t have a self, that’s just useless labor. Let’s assume you personify the Mississippi—if it doesn’t sound different from the Hudson personified, why do it? In pageants there was that personification: I’m the Mississippi. I am what De Soto saw years ago. I wish I could have done more for De Soto. Also La Salle was on me. Then steamboats came. I’ve been called profanely Old Man River. I’m the Mississippi. —This is More on Eternity:

With all the disparagement of Barnabe Googe, of whom I spoke earlier, I think he knew something about the art of verse that Sir Thomas More didn’t know, because these lines do halt.

“Thou, mortal Time, every man can tell / Art nothing else but the mobility / Of sun and moon changing in every degree.” A few persons wouldn’t know that. But a good part of the abstract world has consisted of Eternity insulting Time. Offhand, it does seem as if Eternity came from a better family.

More says that when sun and moon stop moving around—Time, you won’t be anything. And that’s no way to talk. “When they shall leave their course, thou shalt be brought, / For all thy pride and boasting, into nought.” Even if it’s true, it was not for Eternity to say it.

Another Personification

Then, More has a fairly long poem called “To Them That Seek Fortune.” Fortune doesn’t talk in the first person, but it is personified. This is the fourth stanza:

So Fortune is quite crafty, gives people enough to give them hope, but not to have them lose their dependence on her—or him. Fortune is “she” here. Sometimes Fortune is seen as masculine. But these lines give Fortune a self.

What Ben Jonson Saw

Personification can be looked at more and more. How personification came to be and what relation it has to self, is not usually talked about. That it has to do deeply with what the self is, is being said for the first time, as far as I know.

One of the best things of Ben Jonson is that poem which is in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623. And it has metaphors that are also unabashed personification. Shakespeare is given a self that is both a swan and a constellation—but then the swan and constellation are given human activities. I have commented before on Jonson’s seeing Shakespeare as a swan going up and down the Avon. That’s what we have in this poem. And very shortly after, Shakespeare is a constellation. This is at the end of Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us”:

That’s the first swan that ever could reform the English stage. The personification is bold.

The couplets are very good—but this having Shakespeare a swan and having the swan please Queen Elizabeth and King James with its “flights upon the banks of Thames” has a little too much of something. It’s a quantitative state of too muchness. “That so did take Eliza and our James!”—James and Eliza watch these flights.

Then, a Constellation

Then the swan changes into a constellation:

Opposites are here: the constellation, which is also “thou star of poets,” will help the drooping stage by both chiding and cheering. (The stage is also personified: it droops and mourns.) These lines can be looked at. One can say this is musically inchoate. It gives one many ideas; however, one can cavil at the coherence of it.

So that is personification by Ben Jonson: personification of swans and constellations to have them be Shakespeare.