Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second part of Poetry Is Alphabetical, a 1971 lecture by Eli Siegel. It is at once playful, lighthearted, and of the utmost seriousness—including as to our own lives. In it, Mr. Siegel discusses a word for every letter of the alphabet to show what a poem must have in order to be the authentic item—to be art.

And he is the critic who has explained that we need to see what real poetry is in order to know who we are and to have our lives go truly well. We want to make sense of opposing desires in us, he wrote:

We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose….And it is poetry that makes jarring, separating propensities to act as one; it is poetry that coalesces forces in a oneness that is not languid. [“The Immediate Need for Poetry,” TRO 758]

The first section of Poetry Is Alphabetical dealt with a term beginning with A: Abandon. In the present section Mr. Siegel looks at words arising from letters B through F—and I’ll comment a little on one of these discussions.

There’s Forward—in Poetry & Life

To illustrate the word Forward, he speaks, magnificently, about Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” That is one of the most popular poems in English. And while a poem’s being popular is not the same as its being great, or even being real art—“Ulysses” (despite various academic critics) is great. Mr. Siegel, while showing what the poem is about, also describes vividly its beauty, poetic authenticity, musical might.

All along, he is illustrating that word Forward. To go forward, to proceed firmly toward a goal or toward what’s next, is both a huge human desire and a terrific fear of people. It is something that mixes people up very much. And the largest reason is, they don’t know that which Aesthetic Realism explains: how to distinguish between a true notion of forward and a false. And people don’t know what in oneself interferes with a going forward truly.

How We See It

How we see the idea of forward, arises from what goes on in us as to that big battle which Aesthetic Realism shows to be everyone’s. It is the battle between the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it, and the desire to have contempt—to make ourselves more through lessening what’s not ourselves. Our deepest desire—what we were born for—is to go forward as Ulysses does, wanting to be affected keenly and profoundly by things, people, facts, happenings. But we have another notion of forward: to conquer, beat, grab, manipulate things and people. That is the contempt way.

“Forward—to a vaster impressing of people while looking down on them! Forward—to managing facts, things, people, however I please!” These are battle cries of contempt. The going forward that they embody is present and causes pain in social life. It’s the thing that makes for ugliness in politics. In economic life, contempt as going forth is central to the profit motive—which is the seeing of people as means to one’s financial aggrandizement, and the using of them accordingly.

Contempt can also take a form that’s the reverse of going forward. One’s contempt can have one feel, This world is not good enough for me to go forth in. One’s contempt tells one: Keep yourself pretty much locked in yourself, even as you seem to be busy in this world.

Without End

Eli Siegel himself was like the Ulysses of Tennyson—but he was a Ulysses of thought: his desire to know was without end. His thought was about reality in all its diversity. His whole self, his human self, was in this going forth to see what things and reality are—from a crack in city pavement to Immanuel Kant, to the feelings of people. And his Aesthetic Realism enables a person who studies it to go forward deeply and oh so happily—to feel that this world is always new.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

From Blend to Forward

By Eli Siegel

The second word, the word I’ve chosen for the letter B, is Blend—I could use many others. Blend is one of the words standing for composition. It goes along with combine, amalgamate, mingle, join, coalesce, unite, and many others. Blend, though, has a particular meaning. It very often is about two substances blending; however, blending has a quality of flowing, and that means sounds can blend.

There are some great places where sounds blend through the way words are used. I have said that the sounds blend in the first line of “St. Louis Blues”: “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down.” The long i and a and e, and uh and ow, are present as God wanted them to be. The vowel sounds are great and fine.

Something of that is in the line of Hamlet “Absent thee from felicity awhile.” Here too we have the long e and i and uh blending. Vowels are looking for a relation. Also, the i, e, ow, and uh that are in the first line of “St. Louis Blues” are in a great line of Blake: “Ah, Sun-flower, weary of time.” I’ll read the Blake poem, “Ah! Sun-flower,” in its entirety.

The sunflower is looking for something. The line “Seeking after that sweet golden clime” has those shrill sounds (I’m using the word shrill with respect) in “sweet” and “seeking,” along with those full vowels in “golden” and “clime.” This is an instance of blending, and lines in poetry have to have it—perhaps not with the fullness of the three lines I mentioned, but some blending. That is, a junction is felt by the writer among the sounds, among the vowels and consonants.

There’s blending also of sentiment, and of what one sees. It happens that anything can blend. You can blend the seeing of a cathedral and the seeing of a sparrow. Then you can blend a cathedral with a peasant’s hut. The blending is looked for, and, as Coleridge said, it should be organic. As mind is with one thing, it organically wants to relate that to something else. And whenever anything is blended organically, there is that which poetry deserves and looks for.

Three Words: Clash, Discover, Ease

For the letter C we have that which, also, all poetry should have—and reality has it: Clash. Off the Pacific coast right now, and against its rocks, the waters are coming and clashing with that territory which Robinson Jeffers wanted to be laureate of—Point Sur. The clash is there.

In all music there is clash. There is no music so melodious that, with the ear listening to what the universe is whispering, it cannot find clash. And clash is of poetry.

Another word clearly standing for poetry begins with D: Discover. In the poetic moment, you’re discovering another way of seeing something. Poetry without discovery would lack one side of its heart. The other thing in poetry is the seeing of the universe as an old friend, chatting away by means of the sciences and arts.

Then, a word beginning with E is there waiting: Ease. There are clash and ease. All poetry has ease, including staccato poetry—as some drums are thumped more easily than other drums. There’s just as much ease in jazz as in a string quartet—jazz has simply shown that ease can have other elements in it. Ease is ever so necessary. It can be looked for.

You Can—You Should—Ask This

Using the words I’ve talked of so far: in the criticism of a poem you have a right to say, Where does the writer see and feel something new—what did the writer discover? Also: What is clashing here—where is that discord which makes concord more entertaining? Also: Where is the writer letting go?—that is, Where is the writer showing abandon? Then, a favorite question of the Muses (it’s a secret, but I’ll tell it) is: What’s cooking, and how?—because just as when soup is cooked the ingredients clash yet they all blend, so in a poem. It should be asked too: Does the writer have ease? So often, we have tiredness but not ease. Also, boredom is a very bad imitation of ease.

Tennyson & the Grandeur of Forward

Also in poetry, there’s a going Forward. (We are with the letter F.) In a poem there’s often a let’s go quality. And the lines and words themselves must go forward.

The idea of forward has been in ever so many poems. One, which I have discussed before, I’ll discuss again, to have the forwardness of the words in blank verse felt, and also the feeling that is in the unconscious: we’re going toward something. The poem is Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”

It has some of the high things, great things, in English poetry and in poetry itself. Sometimes the poem is unclear and the lines seem to twist, but it is a mighty poem.

When a line of poetry goes forward it has motion. The first line of this poem is meditative and somewhat humdrum—

—still, the motion, the iambic parade goes on. Then:

It is well to know that “the rainy Hyades” are nymphs who somehow are responsible for rain. And it is good to see that nymphs, being liberated by Greek mythology, are on high, ready to send rain.

So Ulysses is not complaining about his renown. He says he is noted. But there’s still something he’s looking for:

This is in keeping with thought. All thought has a limit, and all thought also has a beyondness we do not see. Tennyson compares experience to an arch, which is limited, but through which the world we haven’t seen can be perceived, glimpsed, glanced at—be something that affects one.

“For ever and for ever when I move.” That is a strange iambic line. Some iambic lines accent motion and rippling; others, the stopping of things. In “For ever and for ever when I move,” the accents make the motion more in motion.

The next line, “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,” is quite different. The possibilities of the iambic can be seen in a comparison of these two lines: “For ever and for ever when I move. / How dull it is to pause, to make an end.” In one line, the boxes are in motion on an escalator. In the other, they’re safe on a department store floor.

What Does It Mean to Live Abundantly?

So Tennyson presents Greece, or an island related to Greece, Ithaca, as having persons who wanted to take life in a stolid, comfortable, and island-bourgeois way. Ulysses is saying the people of Ithaca aren’t venturesome enough.

What it means to live abundantly, live fully, live every moment, make every three seconds a gem for yourself, as Pater intimated, what it means to live life with blazing adequacy, luminous adequacy—that hasn’t yet been discovered. Do we live by forgetting ourselves, or do we live by being conscious? Do we live by steeping ourselves with conquest of other beings, or do we live by seeing clearly?

Ulysses represents the two kinds of knowing. One is the knowing which is in locomotion—he was a great traveler. But he also was thoughtful. Thought has been related to traveling, as in a line of Wordsworth about Newton: “Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Tennyson has Ulysses use the word knowledge: “To follow knowledge like a sinking star.”

A Father & Son

Telemachus has sometimes been described as the first son of a well-known father who, unlike that father, carried a briefcase. Well, Telemachus seemed to be conservative. And Ulysses says Telemachus is

“Meet adoration to my household gods” is a rich line. It has blending. “Adoration” and “household” and “gods” do very well. —But then, after saying of Telemachus “He works his work, I mine,” Ulysses says this:

No person has ever thought he or she did enough with one’s life. There are some statements of Napoleon on St. Helena saying he thinks he didn’t.

The second of those lines is one of the great long lines of long sounds in English. Every word is a monosyllable. Then, the next group of lines begins with a brisker phrase:

As one gets to those lines, one has to look for the angels in the hackneyed; one has to look for brass bands in empty packages; one has to look for excited people in worn out streets. This part of the poem is one of the most useful, one of the clearest, one of the nearest-to-magic-and-replete-with-good-judgment-and-management sections of poetry anywhere.

And that continues, as Ulysses says:

Like some other famous lines, that last has in it four infinitives. And there’s an effect.

About the Largest Thing

There was the earlier line, which is somewhat didactic, and is true and is deep; it has in it the largest thing in psychology, that a person, looking at something, becomes part of it: “I am a part of all that I have met.”

So this poem is read in honor of the word Forward.