Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part two of A Poem Is in the World—a powerful and also richly delightful lecture given by Eli Siegel in 1972. In it he spoke of those works called the Great Books—about which there has often been in people a sense of awe but also, often, discomfort and nervousness.

Many people have known, over the years, that such works as Aristotle’s Ethics and Milton’s Paradise Lost exist—works of might, like Homer’s Iliad, Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, Dante’s Inferno, and more. Yet the existence of such works has seemed, too, so disconnected from oneself, from one’s own thoughts, desires, worries. And so, ever so many persons have felt unattracted to such works. But then, they’ve also felt ashamed—felt they themselves were inadequate, were unable to have a certain largeness of emotion, and depth and scope of knowledge.

Eli Siegel, in the present lecture, has one feel what a so-called great book or classic really is, and has one feel, Oh, this has to do with ME: this, in all its largeness, is connected with me, and my own tumult and hopes. The basis of the lecture is this Aesthetic Realism principle, classic itself in its universality and immediacy: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

This Is What They Are

At the beginning of this lecture, Mr. Siegel describes what is meant by “a classic.” And he does so in a way that makes such a work, in all its bigness, seem warm and real and friendly:

Today I’m speaking about the world and poetry in terms of what works of mind many people, and for a long time, seemed to say were important. They correspond to what have been called classics—or to what have been called, in a more academic way, the great books….At various times in the history of the world, someone has written something and other people have felt this should remain. And if it is what is called a classic, it has remained. So we can, through these works, get a notion of something startling and intense and also lasting.

Aesthetic Realism shows that every instance of true art makes opposites one—whether it’s a classic, reverberating through the centuries; or a semi-classic; or simply an instance of that all-important and not-so-common thing which is art itself. A leap of Nijinsky, an instance of dialogue in Jane Eyre, a Cézanne still life with apples, a piano passage of Chopin, all are a oneness of such opposites as delicacy and strength, the breathingly personal and structure, exactitude and freedom, the logical and the wonderful. And so, each is a showing of how we hope to be—because we long to put together in our lives those very opposites.

A Single Person & the Wide World

Then, there are those opposites which, Mr. Siegel explains in the current section, have come to a certain tremendousness and point and grand flexibility in a work that is a classic: Self and World. At the start of the section published here, he explains why “there is an unease about reading books that are known to be great.” The reason he gives exists along with the one I mentioned earlier: I said there can be unease because a classic book in its vastness can seem so apart from one’s own life. The cause Mr. Siegel gives is even more fundamental, because if that cause didn’t exist, people would be more ready to see the largeness of a classic work as human too. The reason for the discomfort, he says here, is that there’s such largeness in a classic, such a sense of reality’s size and scope and might, yet this vastness is presented by one single person, the author.

You’ll meet, soon, how Mr. Siegel describes that. But I’m commenting on it here because this discomfort at greatness is something Mr. Siegel himself met again and again throughout his life. In fact, there was fury at him because he, as one person, saw and explained so much. Aesthetic Realism—his work—is the most inclusive of philosophies. It is beautifully just to the particularities of things, as it explains the relation among them all. And Eli Siegel, as he spoke in classes, and wrote, about ever, ever so many subjects and people, was always showing something new—showing it so gracefully and deeply, logically and with feeling.

He was punished for this with people’s discomfort, which often took the form of anger. Indeed, the biggest shame in my own life is that I too once had that discomfort about and resentment of Mr. Siegel because as one person he was so fair to the world in its multitudinousness.

There are persons today who, more than four decades after his death, are furious that Eli Siegel as one person saw so much. They are resentful that the philosophy he founded—Aesthetic Realism—as a single body of knowledge explains what the world in its fullness is. They’re uncomfortable that it is still, and will be forever, a living means to understand humanity, reality, and art.

The anger at another person’s largeness arises from contempt. Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the feeling that the way to make ourselves big is through looking down on people and things. This contempt is the cause of all injustice. It is also the thing in us that interferes with the largeness, power, accuracy of our own mind.

I guess I have made it clear that I see Eli Siegel himself as a classic. His being one person grandly fair to the multifarious world includes his written work—for instance, his Self and World, his James and the Children, his poems. It also includes hundreds of lectures, published and to-be-published; and lessons given to individuals, in which one met a comprehension of oneself new in history. He reveled in the universe, and in the work of being exact about it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

One Person—& Something Large

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel is discussing passages from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book.

As I say in the essay “Great Books; and the Kick,” there is an unease about reading books that are known to be great. And the unease goes deep. If you look at the usual two volumes, in the complete form, of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and you see all the chapters, including chapters on industry and manufacturing and trade and the motion of money, and you feel one person wrote this, you have that sense which is in poetry: an individual and something very large. It’s a little like the feeling we get from the name Mount Horace Greeley or Pikes Peak: a mountain is a person.

And if you look at St. Augustine’s The City of God, you don’t know right away what you’ll find in the next chapter, because St. Augustine, being driven by God, rambled a great deal: The City of God is a tremendous assemblage of what you weren’t looking for. You see a pretty large work, De Civitate Dei, and you say, This is by one person?—and so long ago too? Yes, it is, with all its uncertain quality.

So there’s unease about seeing a great work, and thinking one person wrote it.

How Well Were They Reading?

Adler says something strange about what reading well would mean. He has been talking about the kind of reading that is limp and not exact, that doesn’t see what the subject is: the reading that is a bit like drifting on the Wabash, not thinking of anything in particular. Or it’s what can be called munching reading: you put in another bit of something, and then another bit; you’re very listless about it. Then there’s the strange passage, in which Adler says, This is reading well:

If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines…; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole;…they perceive the color of words…and the weight of sentences.

This little excursion of Dr. Adler makes one think of the quite useful question in two parts: Why did a ladybug on the bark of an oak tree not understand the oak tree? The answer is: she was too close to it. Why did an Indian chief, in a different part of the land from where the oak tree was, not understand the oak tree? He was too far from it. You likely can’t read accurately a love letter you just received because it’s too close to you. And therefore, many times, if you read a love letter eight years after you got it, it looks different and usually worse. This implies that at the time you first read it, when you felt it was a great document, worthy of archiving, you might not have been right—because the variability and the overhead on love letters is tremendous.

However, Adler says again that the way to read a book is the way one reads a love letter. In the last sentence of the chapter “To the Average Reader,” he writes:

This book is…about that kind of reading which its readers do not do well enough, or at all, except when they are in love.

Well, as has been said, there are two times you don’t have to trust a person: one is when they’re in love, and the other is when they’re not.

Divinity & Form, Intensity & Reason

We come to an important matter, which is a beginning of the feeling about great works. In the fifth and fourth centuries bc in Greece, there were two things that seemed to bring the world to form. 1) With Sophocles and with Aeschylus, it was the gods; it was the ordinance of the beginning of the world, or divinity present in the world. 2) And also, a Greek tragedy has some idea of form.

In Plato there’s an idea of form too—as God, divinity, is present. That joining of divinity and structure is present also in Aristotle. And it is present, as I said, in the tragedians: in Aeschylus and Sophocles; and somewhat in Euripides, whose gods became a little more sociological and not so tremendously remote and correct. The notion of form and reason as ominous and all-powerful, is there.

Reason can be all-powerful. That is in Plato and Aristotle too. It is a beginning of the great books, because one of the things that the great books have is a tremendous sense of order and inevitability, and a tremendous sense of uncertainty and mischief.

Some centuries before, a person whom we usually call Homer felt that a great happening—the coming to Troy of the invading Greeks—could be presented intensely, with uncertainty and also with the ever-constant music of the Greek hexameter. The hexameter, in its insistence, is a little bit like divinity that won’t leave. And one of the things about a great book is that it makes order one with intensity—and also with change, with uncertainty. And that has to do with reason.

When Adler wrote this book, in 1939, it was just about the time that the West felt it had better show it was really against Hitler and what was going on in Germany. Part of the West did, in September 1939—England and France did. There was a great deal of talking about reason: how Nazism relied on things opposed to reason—like das Blut (blood) and “the law of blood,” which was about a “master race,” Herrenrasse. Democracy, on the other hand, was associated with reason. And in a way it’s true: reason in its loveliest sense has found a refuge with democracy.

The place of reason in the great books is to be thought about, because there is no great book that doesn’t have it, and also the other thing—something moving, something that stirred a person. These things are present in a poem. A poem is a tremendously authentic and honest example of reason and the being moved. The being moved is equivalent to emotion.

It’s good to think of reason and emotion in terms of somewhat recent history. But you’ll find that Aristotle talks of reason; Plato talks of reason as divinity. The matter of reason and emotion is part of the history of the world. And the history of the world is the world itself.

Books Are Related—& So Different

Adler writes of what is called “correlative reading,” or “suggested reading.” That is a big part of education. Usually, if you’re interested in Homer, you begin getting books about him. Every one of the great books has a little cluster of friends and brothers and sisters. Adler criticizes people who don’t want to read “related books”:

They may try to read The Federalist Papers without having read the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Or they may try all these without having read Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and John Locke’s essay Of Civil Government.

It happens that the Articles of Confederation is not the liveliest reading. And then it was superseded by the Constitution. However, Montesquieu—Montesquieu has gobbet after gobbet of lively stuff. He also has the shortest chapters of all the great books. There are chapters sometimes that consist of one sentence. There could be a chapter titled “Of Marriage in Zanzibar.” Then this is the whole chapter: “Marriage in Zanzibar is still confused.” I made that particular one up. But if you refer to the book you will see chapters like it: one sentence.

What Adler doesn’t say is that these great books disagree among themselves. Montesquieu is a pretty settled person, along with the other French writer beginning with Mont. There are two fortunate Monts in French literature: Montesquieu and Montaigne. They both were settled and prosperous. Montesquieu is exceedingly learned and knew all the books on law before his, and all the books on government, and all the books on sociology, while Rousseau’s The Social Contract (which Adler mentions right after) was written more or less by a bohemian who was out to startle France and did. The Social Contract is very radical. And its manner is to excite, while Montesquieu says, This is the way it is; so, Frenchmen, don’t be so sure of yourselves and don’t think Louis XV represents all wisdom.

How one great book can be so different from another is what Adler doesn’t discuss. The Social Contract is very different from The Spirit of the Laws, and both are different from Locke’s Of Civil Government, which is essentially a saying that power in government need not be hereditary, and that the government should rest on the people’s judgment or consent. And the manner of it is different. The prose of Montesquieu is different from Rousseau’s, and Rousseau’s is different from Locke’s.

Again, this is about the world. How Montesquieu writes with a certain stillness, sobriety, has to do with poetry, and so does how Rousseau writes. There’s hardly a greater passion than that of Rousseau. Rousseau and Byron are put together in Romanticism: two writers who dared to be excited in their phrases, clauses, sentences, and pages.

We have the following of Adler, critical of how reading assignments are given:

One day you are to read six pages from the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin; on the next, eleven pages of Milton’s early lyrics, and on the next, ten pages of Cicero on friendship. Another sequence of days finds you reading eight pages by Hamilton from The Federalist Papers,…then twelve pages from Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality.

Commenting a little on that passage: If the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a great work, then reading a great work is very easy. The Autobiography of Franklin thought of you when it was written: Franklin wouldn’t torment you as some other writers do.

There is Cicero’s On Friendship, a Latin work of esteem. It does show emotion. And Cicero, perhaps, is the writer in Latin who showed more kinds of emotion than any other. (I’m being very careful.) What remains of him is larger than that of any other Latin writer. There are letters, ever so many of them. There are treatises, like the one on friendship, and also on old age, and The Tusculan Disputations, and then on how to have the gods with you, a kind of divination book with a touch of the supernatural. Then, of course, there are the speeches, which are on many subjects.

What Is in Common?

But—arising from the passage I just read—we can think about a person like Benjamin Franklin and how he wrote. He worked on the Autobiography in Europe, but he may have written some of it in Philadelphia. Then we get to Milton in England; then Cicero, writing on friendship, in Rome, in Italy. And we come to Hamilton, who very often roamed around this very neighborhood. All these people represent differences of the world. And all of them have affected the world.

So a question we have is: What is there in common between the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Milton’s “L’Allegro”; or between Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and Cicero on friendship? When we think of what is in common among different things, we are in the field of poetry, because every poem shows something in common among the things that the writer has come to or felt.