Dear Unknown Friends:

I am very happy to say that with this issue of TRO we begin a serialization of Eli Siegel’s lecture Poetry Is Alphabetical. That 1971 work is a means of learning about two tremendous things: what poetry is, and who we are. The two, Aesthetic Realism magnificently shows, are the same subject, because to see what poetry really is, is to see what the largest matters in our own lives are: to see what poetry truly is, is to see how we most deeply and urgently are hoping to be. The reason is in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

In the surprising, casual, yet definitive lecture we’re serializing, Eli Siegel uses the alphabet, looking at a word for every letter, to present what all poetry has. In the section published here, we are with the letter A. And he speaks about Abandon. So by way of a preface, I’ll comment a little on that matter of abandon as it has been in people’s lives.

Beauty & Trouble

Abandon has an opposite, which Mr. Siegel also describes, an opposite which is with abandon, inseparable from it, when an artwork or anything is beautiful. The opposite of abandon has various forms; it can be carefulness, control, discipline, or exactitude—but it is always, as Mr. Siegel says, a checking of some kind. Abandon and its opposite trouble people terrifically, because these seem at war in one’s life.

Men and women everywhere feel ruefully, even tormentingly, that there’s something in them which holds them back, makes them unable to really let go, feel swept, get out of their enclosed selves and respond to things unimpededly. They may try occasionally to make up for their sense of confinement by “throwing caution to the wind” in various ways—sometimes with the assistance of alcohol or drugs, sometimes without. But then, they’re ashamed of how they let go—how they used their bodies, perhaps, their words, their minds, to become seemingly abandoned. They feel there was something crucially wrong in it.

The Decisive Thing

The decisive thing making abandon either beautiful or ugly, is told of in Aesthetic Realism’s description of the underlying fight in everyone. “The greatest fight…,” wrote Eli Siegel, “[in] every mind of once, every mind of now…is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality” (TRO 151). Abandon can arise either out of respect for reality or out of contempt. When it comes through respect, the opposite of abandon—the desire to be exact—is always with it.

Contempt is the feeling that we are more if we can make other things and people less, look down on them, see ourselves as superior to them. So our contempt stops us from wanting to be affected in a large way. Contempt is the enemy to the true abandon people long for. What’s not us, it says, is not good enough to stir us to our depths. Contempt tells us that if we’re swept we are belittled. At the same time, contempt is the source of a bad letting go, an ugly abandon.

For example, people have felt that when they unleashed their anger in some way, they were finally abandoned—free and unconfined. They were nothing of the sort: unless they were trying to be exact, and fair to other human beings and reality, they were merely slovenly and cruel. And that is why they felt awful after their “letting go.”

It happens that the appeal of various curse words is the false abandon they seem to provide: if you can sum up people with an ugly carnal expletive, you can get the fake release of feeling there’s nothing more for you to think about—your understanding of a person or situation is complete and this is what it comes to!

Driving too fast is a fake abandon, because it doesn’t come from respect—from a desire to be accurate about and just to other people and vehicles, and the law, and one’s own passengers.

There is the appeal of politicians who encourage an unmitigated contempt for other human beings: they attract because they provide a certain abandon. They give the message: You don’t have to fool around with trying to think, trying to know—just have contempt without limit for people and things that may confuse you or seem to question you. If a person is confused and very much does not want to think, having utter contempt provides relief, abandon—an abandon for which one loathes oneself, though one may never admit that.

Meanwhile, every act of heroism has abandon in it: true abandon, the abandon based on respect. When a firefighter hurries into a burning building to rescue people there, one sees in this public servant a beautiful letting go—a putting aside of other considerations—in behalf of respect for the value of human lives. This respectful abandon is at one with carefulness, a terrific desire to be accurate in dealing with burning beams and doors, so as to get a person to safety.

All good art has abandon, and the abandon arises from, and is, respect for the world. Some instances of this abandon are more obvious than others. When a great ballet dancer leaps with remarkable height and length and seems to sail through space—one can feel that never was the human body more abandoned. Yet how much terrific discipline is in that leap, how much precision—and how much respectful work made it possible.

And people have had some of their truest and proudest feelings of abandon through being affected by authentic art. A person—whether he or she knows it or not—has been swept by an instance of art because of the wide, deep, fresh, keen respect for reality that is in this painting or concerto or novel and shows itself as sound, shape, words.

Here Too

As large a way as any that people have sought abandon is through sex. For now, I will say simply that in this field, the same great aesthetic, ethical, and scientific criterion holds: the criterion of Is it respect or contempt? As bodies are ever so close, is the purpose to value the world itself, to see all things as more meaningful, to have this meeting of bodies stand for a desire to know accurately the other person and the world he or she represents? Or is one’s purpose essentially contempt: to feel one has had a victory over the world—has even, for a time, wiped out the world—through having a person seem to yield to oneself and adulate oneself utterly?

There have been so much pain and unkindness throughout history and now because people haven’t known this criterion, which is true for every aspect of life: Is my purpose respect for the world, or contempt? This criterion has always existed within every person and has been, though we haven’t known it, the basis for our pride or shame. I love Aesthetic Realism for teaching it to humanity.

And I love Aesthetic Realism for teaching how to see as poetry sees. This education includes learning how to meet things with such a desire to know them, such a desire to be exact, that we can have the abandon that is great emotion; and we can feel we are more ourselves through having it.

Here, then, is the first part of Eli Siegel’s warm, charming, and magnificent lecture Poetry Is Alphabetical. The lecture itself is a oneness of the very opposites he is speaking about. It has excitement and wonder (qualities that have abandon in them). And simultaneously, the lecture has exactitude, scholarship, beautiful justice.

So it was, with Eli Siegel, always.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Poetry Is Alphabetical

By Eli Siegel

I call today’s talk Poetry Is Alphabetical, because using the alphabet to look at poetry is the best way I know of having poetry seen as beginning with anything whatsoever. So we look first at a word starting with A.

The word is Abandon. Abandon is one of the big things in poetry—and also a very big thing in the world itself. It corresponds to a waterspout; a shower; an earthquake; lightning, in a way: reality as not caring what it does. Yet the idea of abandon also corresponds to a lonely dandelion, a dandelion that doesn’t have company. And the uncertain is often the abandoned.

Abandon is also checked. The earth spinning around can be seen (if you’re malicious) as abandoned, but the check is there. Those two things, abandon and check, are everywhere. No waterspout has lasted forever. And no fissure in a mountain has lasted forever. Every avalanche has gotten tired—that’s one of the most comforting things. But also, every avalanche hasn’t given up, because there are and will be other avalanches.

One May Be Wrong about Abandon

The idea of abandon is in the world and it’s very necessary. It’s something that can be seen as the chief thing lacking in a person. That’s because it’s much easier to be abandoned socially—people will abandon themselves in many ways socially or when they’re with just themselves—but to be abandoned beautifully, that is something else.

So with abandon as the hero of this alphabetical roster, though there will be other words, I’ll read a poem that should be known. It’s by Percy MacKaye (1875-1956). He wrote a play, once much esteemed, called The Scarecrow, and was given to the Elizabethans and also American history. But at the moment, he’s as little known as some of our contemporaries. There’s a poem of his that I see as having the wrong kind of abandon in it. It’s “The Automobile,” an early poem about the motorcar. It’s a sonnet, and that would seem to bode well: getting the automobile at that time, when it was an uncertain vehicle, into the sonnet form.

Though it was not faster than the train, the automobile in its very early days seemed to go faster than anything a person had had for oneself. And in 1904 there was a lot of gawking at automobiles: What is it doing? —Well, I cannot say this poem is fair to the automobile. A while ago, I read the poem by Marinetti about a racing car, and that poem of 1908, though making the automobile too personal, is a good poem. The auto also gets into Vachel Lindsay’s “Santa-Fé Trail” (of 1914), which is true poetry. So, what is abandon in art that does well, and what is abandon that doesn’t do well? When is finger painting unjust to the finger and also unjust to the painting?

This is in common between careful people and impulsive people: both may be wrong. The sonnet of MacKaye tries to be careful, and it does try to be impulsive or abandoned. I cannot say it succeeds. This is the first part:

Car, Person, & Earth Are Given Abandon

The poem’s best line is perhaps the first. Meanwhile, though I don’t know much about early cars, I don’t think it was easy to feel in one of them that “the world flowed under us.”

“The hills / Billow on billow of umbrageous green / Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons.” I don’t see that as so true. First of all, a car of that time would avoid hills if it could. MacKaye says that the “world flow[ing] under us” took the form of “Billow on billow of umbrageous green”—but you’d never put a car where there was so much green billowing under it; it couldn’t very well move.

The worst form of abandon is the untrue, and that can happen. We can abandon ourselves to our favorite self-enhancing prevarication.

MacKaye says next that “fresh horizons” are “seen / One rapturous instant,” and we, it seems, are “blind with flash of rills / And silver-rising storms and dewy stills.” That is exaggerated. And the “dewy stills / Of dripping boulders” don’t seem to get in too well either.

Then “the dim ravine / Drowned us again in leafage”—leafage that had “coverts”; and the coverts “grew loud with our tumultuous wills.” When you drove a car then, you didn’t see yourself as having a will—you felt more that the auto had one, and what you had to have was patience.

The sonnet concludes:

MacKaye says that when someone got into the first motorcar and drove around, that person was a different kind of Man. That is so—MacKaye was quite correct there. How well he shows his correctness is another matter.

This poem, in a way, has abandon, but it’s in the wrong way. It doesn’t keep its eye on what the eye should be kept on. It also doesn’t hear in the best way. This is abandonment in a manner that is not wholly praiseworthy.

A True Looking For—& Finding—Abandon

As might be expected, the greatest poets are the best in that wonderful field of abandonment. But before I give instances of such poetry, I’m going to read a prose passage by an author who, in his Histoire Naturelle, wrote about the skies, and growing things, and animals, and lightning, and more: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788).

In his writing about the sea, there is a feeling that Buffon was looking for abandonment and control—and he found it. I’ll translate what is perhaps the best passage (it’s part of a sentence) in that description. He says about the sea:

From these constant and general motions result movements that are variable and particular, carryings of earth elsewhere, deposits that form, at the bottom of the waters, eminences like those that we see on the surface of earth….

At this moment it goes on. Water is everywhere—there are all kinds of flowing in the Indian Ocean, in the Pacific, in the Atlantic. Then, the Great Lakes are busy and act as if they were doing something, and the Hudson River is going somewhere. It went there yesterday, but it’s going there again today. And the Mississippi, having started somewhere in Minnesota, is going once more towards New Orleans, crazy as all get-out.

Then, there is the big discovery that Buffon hinted at: that things were going on deep in the sea. Buffon felt that the sea also had its mountains; and this has been ascertained.

After the passage that I read, the sentence continues. And Buffon says there are also, within that water,

currents which, following the direction of those chains of mountains,…and, flowing in the midst of the waves as waters flow on land, are indeed the rivers of the sea.

Abandon can be felt in the phrases of Buffon that I have read. There’s a feeling that all this is magnificent and without meaning, and when something is magnificent and without meaning, it is in the field of the abandoned. For example, the Pacific in a sweet way doesn’t give a damn, and the Atlantic in a somewhat more bitter way doesn’t give a damn. Water is abandoned. It’s one of the abandoned phases of the world. We know that if water falls on the floor its behavior is not symmetrical. Air is more abandoned.

When Abandon Is Great Art

There is the abandon that is Marlowe’s famous phrase from Dr. Faustus, “the face that launch’d a thousand ships”:

That is a great example of abandon, and of the other thing that’s in the world: control. If there were no control, Helen would have been forgot in relation to these lines long ago. But here, she is in the midst of what the Pacific is: control and abandon.

There is Shakespeare also. In the last act of Romeo and Juliet we have this, said by Romeo:

That has abandon.

As great abandon as any—and this gets in sudden liquid—is Antony’s, in a line in Julius Caesar. He says about Brutus’s stabbing Caesar:

There’s no more abandoned line in any language than “Mark how the blood of Caesar follow’d it.” And that’s in the construction of the line—having the sudden flowing of blood, with all it means. There’s poetry because syllables are asked to do what is their universal possibility.

All poetry has some abandon in it. There must be a letting go in poetry, and also measure. Frenzy and a thermostat—these are there.