Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Eli Siegel’s great 1972 lecture We Approach Poetry Variously. And here too is part of a paper presented by Leila Rosen at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar last month. The subject of the seminar was happiness—and what in ourselves stops us from having it. Ms. Rosen is a teacher of English and literature.

I have said there is nothing I love more, nothing I see as greater, kinder, more beautiful, more needed by the minds of people, than the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry. It is Eli Siegel’s explanation, and he came to it through the widest, richest, most careful scholarship, looking, testing. Poetry, he wrote, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

That principle is central in the lecture we’re serializing. When a person sees with a certain fullness of justice the matter he or she is writing of, the world’s opposites are present as one in what is seen and written. A result is what Eli Siegel showed to be the crucial thing in poetry: poetic music. We hear—and in each poem differently, each line differently—the oneness of such opposites as motion and rest, tumult and calm, expansion and contraction, clarity and nuance, what’s ordinary and what’s strange.

Poetry & Our Happiness

In this issue, as Ms. Rosen’s paper about happiness meets what Mr. Siegel is explaining, we have a vivid reason why it’s necessary to see what poetry is. We will not have the happiness we want unless we see that poetry stands for it.

For example, looking at the poetry collection Sound and Sense, Mr. Siegel explains that what we want from any experience of ours is to be simultaneously pleased and made stronger; to have pleasurethat’s inseparable from knowing. If these qualities are not one in us, we will not be happy. That is a fundamental reason happiness has been such an elusive thing for people.

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson when I was in my early 20s, Mr. Siegel explained a painful confusion I was in the midst of, and also a torment of all people. I was mixed up about a man I was seeing, and Mr. Siegel said:

You have a question as to Mr. V: “Do you make me stronger or not?” There are two things every person asks about another, “You please me, but do you make me stronger? You make me stronger, but do you please me?” These are terrible questions. Their terror cannot be over-estimated, because the fact that something can please one and make one weaker has brought a certain sick quality to the life of man.

Rarely have people felt their most pleasing times have also been times of logic, knowing, comprehension. And few have felt that reasoning is also a sweeping delight, a delectation that thrills. There’s been a feeling in people that a simultaneity of immense pleasure and thought, of being palpably gratified and mentally strengthened, is not possible. Yet the same people have also been ashamed of the separation: in fact, they’ve deeply despised themselves for it. But—these very opposites are one in poetry, if it’s real poetry.

Let’s take a famous line Mr. Siegel quotes in the part of his lecture included here: Tennyson’s line “I am a part of all that I have met.” It is a statement, and there is a certain thoughtfulness, a reasonableness, in it simply as idea. Yet the idea could be put in other ways, ways that would not be poetry. For instance, the idea could be put, maintaining the iambic pentameter rhythm, as follows: “All things I’ve had to do with hold me now.” But in the line as Tennyson wrote it, there is a thought, a knowing, that goes deeper than is customary: that gets to the bedrock and width of the thing said. And with this larger knowing, there is simultaneously a great pleasure, a love, a joyful treasuring in getting to the bedrock and width of a thing. The deeper desire to know and the great pleasure are shown in the way the words as sounds are present and affect each other.

There is very much to say about that. But I’ll point to one aspect. The beats come quite regularly in this line of five iambic feet. All the words are monosyllables, and there is a firmness at the beginning and end, as the accent falls on sounds that are rather short: am and met. But in the middle of the line we hear, accented, words with long vowels—“a part | of all | that I”—sounds that reach and spread. So in this line we are hearing an idea, yes, but also how the world itself is there. We are hearing the simultaneous firmness and reachingness of things, both reality’s definiteness and its wonder. As we hear this truly, we ourselves are knowing and having pleasure at once; we are both pleased and strengthened.

Through Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of poetry, and Aesthetic Realism itself, we can learn to have in our lives the oneness of knowing and pleasure that exists in art. That is the happiness people thirst for. And my gratitude is without end that this education, this experience, has been mine.

The Need to See Poetry Truly

All human cruelty arises from a rift between one’s notion of pleasure and the desire to know. “This pleases me—I don’t have to think deeply about what it is and means, how fair it is, how it affects people—I want it!” That state of mind can be in anyone, including in the high reaches of government. And it is a big reason why we need to see what poetry is.

So much of what’s presented as poetry is not the real thing. It may consist of a certain throwing of words around, or making them into a clever, tepid arrangement. It does not have that necessary musical justice of thought, feeling, and words. And if we take it for poetry, we will never get the hope, the evidence, we thirst for: we’ll never see what true poetry has—reality’s opposites, our own tumultuous opposites, made one. These include exact thought and great pleasure, a person’s individual expression and justice to the outside world.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

What Kind of Experience?

By Eli Siegel

As I said, the importance of the book I’m reading from—Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense—is that the main problems of poetry are at least presented. We have, on the first page of the Preface, the following:

The first assumptions of Sound and Sense are that poetry needs to be read carefully and thought about considerably, and that, when so read, poetry gives its readers continuing rewards in experience and understanding.

Well, that is a sober praise of poetry. One of the easiest things is to go praising poetry, as in “the poetry of the Chevrolet,” “the poetry of lacrosse.” Prof. Perrine is a little more sober; he seems to mean this. He hints in his writing that poetry may be organized and logical, and have an organization and logic that would give organization to a person. That, Aesthetic Realism sees as true.

“When so read, poetry gives its readers continuing rewards in experience.” Now, nobody has anything but experience in his or her life. Experience can be defined as that in one’s life which remains in one and has an effect on what one is doing at the present time. Poetry is supposed to be a rewarding experience, but we have this question: what is a rewarding experience? And here we come to a problem which is like that of poetry itself. A rewarding experience is that which pleases you; it also is that which organizes you and makes you stronger.

An experience is usually pleasing or displeasing; but always, if it is experience, it is something you retain. We can feel that we have the experience of the first two weeks of life; but how we retain it—that is something else, because no one can talk about it. No one can say, “I remember when the first milk was seized by me, or imbibed by me.”

The word experience, as has been felt for a long time, is central in poetry. The purpose of reading is to add to one’s experience, strengthen it, organize it, intensify it, make it keener, wider. And it is an experience in its own right.

Poetry & Experience Have These Opposites

The idea of experience as a oneness of known and unknown is in a poem included in this book, the “Ulysses” of Tennyson. There are these lines:

“I am a part of all that I have met”; this would mean also that what he met became part of him. And that is experience, because happening, as it becomes part of you, is experience, just as food, as it becomes part of you, is energy.

Experience, in those lines, is presented as “an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move.” All experience is immediate and continuous. As I’m talking now, everything I say could be seen as a tap of a drumstick: it’s immediate; one is hearing things. But there is a feeling as one listens to a word that it is continuous. It is like looking at a picture: you see a picture immediately, and then, as the phrase goes, it sinks in. And it is, again, like food: your tongue gets it first, but then the rest of your body gets it; and the fuel that food provides is supposed to be continuous with the fuel you may have tomorrow morning.

Poetry, also, is immediate and continuous. You hear something and, right away, you don’t understand it fully. It’s a little bit like what happens with death: Somebody close to you dies; you know that; it’s been told you; you have to believe it in a way. But the meaning of it, you think about for the rest of your life. Yet there is something immediate: My dearest husband died at 10:11 this morning. That is immediate. Or My dearest sister died at 12:04 this afternoon. A poem is like that: it’s immediate, and it has a possibility of lingering and organizing.

What Is Central?

Prof. Perrine says about poetry: “It has been regarded as something central to each man’s existence.” What is meant by that? What is central? That is a large question concerned with what we want most. It has to do with the Aesthetic Realism principle that a person’s deepest desire is to like the world. To like the world is to understand it and find it on one’s side simultaneously. In other words, understanding is a phase of true liking, because liking without understanding is spurious. If you like something without understanding it, you’re not liking what the object is. And if you “understand” something without liking reality more through this understanding, it means your knowledge of the object doesn’t have that propulsion, that energy, which is present in all substance, and that you’re not seeing the object entirely. Understanding without liking is academic.

Either way we have something bad. You can “understand” something without its meaning anything in terms of pleasure or pain. That is like much of the academic: you are aware of the matter in terms of footnotes. And the idea is present in relation to marriage: if the more you understand a person the less you like that person, well, hell is working. But to like the world is to understand it and to like it—and the more you understand, the more you like it.

The two ideas are constantly used together: Maybe I’d like him if I knew him. And mothers say, If you knew that man the way your brother knows him, you would give up seeing him!

Poetry is always a matter of the relation of like and understanding.

Happiness for Us—Are We Against It?

By Leila Rosen

I once thought happiness was just not in the cards for me. How could it be when (as I saw it) everyone around me was a fake, my family was annoying and ordinary, and no one treated me with the deference I considered my due. Anyway, I reasoned, the chances of anyone’s feeling happy in this world for more than a brief moment were about a zillion to one.

How I saw happiness changed when I began to study Aesthetic Realism. In Eli Siegel’s “Questions for Everyone”—27 questions for people to ask themselves—I was amazed to read this: “Does something in me want to be unhappy?” Why would anyone want to feel unhappy?—but somehow I felt described. With the next question, I began to learn why: “Do I feel more important when I’m unhappy?” The answer was yes. And so began the most important, liberating, joy-giving education of my life.

Happiness, Unhappiness, & Individuality

“Happiness,” said Mr. Siegel, “can be defined as the state of being able to say truly you like the world.” We like the world, I learned, when we feel reality’s opposites are together well. I felt this, for instance, as I stood on the shore at Coney Island, looking out at the vast expanse of ocean as the waves rose and fell, were powerful yet sent forth a delicate spray. And in school I was excited to see, through the lens of a microscope, wonderful tiny beings in a drop of ordinary pond water. In these instances and others, I experienced the central thing in happiness, because I felt, though I couldn’t put it clearly, at one with the world outside of me.

Meanwhile, that other feeling I described, that I’d never be happy, was with me a lot, and I had no idea why. “Most people are unhappy,” Mr. Siegel explained, “because they see their individuality as separate from and antagonistic to the world about them” (TRO 1781).

From pretty early, I did base my individuality on feeling that the world hurt me. I felt wounded when my friend Robin got the new Chatty Cathy doll for her birthday, but I didn’t get one for mine. I was smart, but not as smart as my classmates who skipped a grade, and I felt cheated. Yet, as Ellen Reiss writes, we can arrange to feel “beset and let down,” in order to feel we’re “too good for a mean, insensitive world” (TRO 1748).

This feeling is the triumph of contempt, and I had it. In Aesthetic Realism consultations I learned where it began. I said yes when my consultants asked, “Do you think you built a self based on the weakness you saw in your parents?” Today, looking back, I see there was much to respect in my parents; but growing up, I got a victory from seeing them as inept and foolish. I was a little snob. I looked down on my father for not having a job that paid more money, and wished my mother didn’t talk so boldly and to so many people. I felt my parents were foolish in making much of me in various ways, including boasting to their friends of my early facility with words. But when they showed they were interested in things besides me—that was too much! How could I be happy with such parents?

My consultants asked, “Do you see it as a come-down to be happy?” I did. I thought if I were pleased and showed it, my keenness and superiority would go out the window. Instead, I flaunted my unhappiness, as when I’d curl up in an armchair in the high school library and write miserable verse, looking miserable myself—making sure I’d be seen as people passed.

Yet sometimes I’d have a sense that at least part of my unhappiness might have come from me. So I occasionally threw myself into situations where I’d have to be closer to people. But because I was unable to criticize my desire to have contempt, these situations couldn’t make me happy. For instance, I went to sleep-away camp and arranged to bunk with the popular girls, hoping that somehow I’d be transformed into a fun-loving, boyfriend-having camper. But soon I found reasons to be scornful of them, and felt like an idiot to have thought being friends with them would bring me happiness!

I learned that the way I’d be happy was to want to be fair to the outside world. And to do that I had to change how I saw the first representatives of it I’d met: my parents. My consultants asked: “Do you think your mother ever had yearnings? Could she feel she was looking for something but didn’t know what? Do you see her as having mystery?” That had never entered my mind. And I learned more about my father’s life as I worked on an assignment: a character sketch of him at age 20. I thought about how he was affected by his family’s being very poor during the Depression; his working with his father selling fruit from a pushcart; how much he loved the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, where he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps; his feeling bad that he couldn’t go to college.

I saw I’d been wrong about my parents, plain and simple. As my case against them began to break up, so did my case against the world they stood for. Seeing new, likable meaning in reality made me happy in a way I’d never thought I could be. And my happiness grows with every year.

My Education about Happiness Continues

“Is our desire to be happy all that it should be?” asked Mr. Siegel. “It isn’t;…because to desire to be happy is an art.” I am very glad I can study this art—including in my marriage to jazz pianist, teacher, and Aesthetic Realism associate Alan Shapiro.

The great news is: because of Aesthetic Realism, people can now learn to have the happiness that comes from seeing the world truly and liking it.