Dear Unknown Friends:
We are publishing in three parts a lecture that is important for people of any time and enormously important now. Eli Siegel gave this talk, titled Poetry Is Concerned, in December 1965, and we’re honored to bring you the first part here. Mr. Siegel’s spoken prose is, as always, beautiful: leisurely and vivid; imbued with scholarship; simultaneously passionate, graceful, and exact. The lecture, while dealing with various instances of literature, is deeply about What is art, and what does it have to do with our lives and the world now? What is art for?
These days, as in other times, one hears various advocates for the arts saying such things as: Get some relief—put aside for a while the distressing things happening around you; go to a museum, where you’ll find a better world! Or: Get away from the things you’ve been thinking about—just listen to some music; get lost in a classic novel, or in the “magic” of dance. There’s been a feeling that the world of art is separate from the world we’re in, and that we need art as an offset to the mess that is current life.
Aesthetic Realism says No! It says art is neither an escape nor an offset. Art is necessary to see what the world truly is—and what we truly are. “In reality opposites are one,” Aesthetic Realism explains; “art shows this.” The grandeur of art exists because art is just to the world and embodies what reality truly is; to see art as an escape from life is an insult to art, life, and ourselves.
Uncertainty & Sureness
Take opposites that Mr. Siegel speaks of in various ways in this first part of his lecture, the opposites of uncertainty and sureness. Everyone has seen that uncertainty can torment people, including oneself: the feeling “I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s all unclear. Will I ever get an answer? Will things—will I—ever be clear?” But on the other hand, the idea of being only sure—having hours, days, a life with little surprise—is exceedingly unattractive. People, without knowing it, ache to have these opposites of sureness and uncertainty be one for them. That is why something Mr. Siegel speaks of here, suspense in art, is so desired. It’s why mystery stories and films are as popular as ever: they make us uncertain—and we want them to!—even as we’re confident we’ll get the answer at the end.
But sureness and uncertainty are one in all good art, not just mystery stories. We feel both, for instance, in the famous, beloved, breathtaking first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Those notes have been described as urgent; and urgency is always This MUST be! plus Will we make it? The four notes (along with the variations on them, which follow) have humanity’s unsureness and determination as one, simply and grandly.
The Difference
What is the difference between the way art sees the world, with its opposites, and the way people generally see? A central difference is the everyday yet terrible presence of contempt in the way people meet reality. Aesthetic Realism describes contempt as a “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.”
We are in a fight, Aesthetic Realism explains, between our deepest purpose, to like the world, respect it, see vibrant meaning in it, and our desire for contempt. As we look at things, think about them, there is that in us—contempt—which hopes to find the world a mess, so we, though pained, can look down on it, feel we’re too good for it. In terms of those opposites I’ve been commenting on, uncertainty and sureness: there is that in us which would like to take the surprise out of things and also take the security out of things, to feel that the world will always be either oppressive in its uncertainty or dull in its lack of freshness. That way we can feel, though miserable, that we’re superior creatures in a world not good enough for us.
Art, to the contrary, is impelled by a person’s wide and grand and living respect for reality. Art is impelled by a desire, so deep, to see what a thing is and reality is, that the structure of reality comes to be present and alive in the result of the person’s seeing. This structure of the world is the oneness of such opposites as rest and motion, intensity and ease, freedom and order, individuality and relation, and more—including another pair that Mr. Siegel comments on in this talk, the opposites of self-glorification and modesty, pride and humility.
Which brings me to another point (and I am speaking very swiftly about some of the largest matters in the world, matters to be studied deeply and lingeringly). To like the world on an aesthetic basis, because it is a oneness of opposites, is not the same as liking everything in it. Hardly! Take those opposites I mentioned last: pride and humility. A person can go after seeing him- or herself as surpassingly glorious, as mattering more than all other humans—and not have that modesty which would accompany any pride that’s true. For the person with swollen conceit, the humility can show up as a deep agitation or fearfulness about oneself—which then one may try to placate through going after an even steeper sense of superiority.
The World Itself
So there can certainly be things in this world, and in people, and happenings, and oneself, that are unlikable and worse. But the world itself, Aesthetic Realism shows, is not unlikable—any more than food should be seen as essentially unlikable because we have experienced some badly cooked meals.
As we approach this first third of Mr. Siegel’s magnificent lecture, I’ll quote a statement of his that is fundamental to Aesthetic Realism, and to everyone’s life. It’s a sentence that humanity needs to study, and can have a thrilling time doing so: “The chief reason the world is friendly is that it is the oneness of opposites which we like when we see a beautiful thing.”
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education
Poetry Is Concerned
By Eli Siegel
Tonight’s talk is called Poetry Is Concerned, and I think it can make more immediate, more alive, the notion that poetry is about everything. Charles Eliot Norton, of Harvard, fairly late in his career got up a series of readers, books that young people could use, called The Heart of Oak Books.
One sees them around in, of course, the old book shops. But the fact that Norton gave his attention to these readers is not considered enough. His dates are 1827-1908, and he is one of the few people in America of the time who was interested in art in a very comprehensive but also exact way. He was interested in what went on in Florence and what went on in Greece. But he was interested in, at large, the question of what makes good taste, and these Heart of Oak books are readers done with as much taste as perhaps any in the history of America.
In the fourth Heart of Oak book, Sinbad the Sailor of The Arabian Nights is included. This is prose, but what is done well in any art has a likeness to what can be done well in poetry. The danger here is to make that last remark of mine too easy; when things in this world are compared, usually there is more care required than one chooses to give. But when we have something like a thrill, we can be pretty sure that we have something the like of which is in poetry.
Suspense & Security
The Sinbad story has the almost quality, which is the big thing in the suspense of action stories: the way somebody nearly gets hold of something but doesn’t get it, or somebody gets away from pursuers by jumping at just the right time. Suspense is a certain relation of sameness and difference. Yes and No kiss and glare at each other in suspense. And one could be the other. Will the lady be kissed by the Grand Vizier or fall into the jaws of the tiger? That is suspense. It’s got to do with sameness and difference because the tiger and the Grand Vizier are both waiting, and it’s the same lady, and it’s almost the same moment, and it’s the same story.
Sinbad loses his life, nearly, in every one of his voyages. Then, after being prosperous for a while, contented—he must go voyaging again. This is a paragraph that Charles Eliot Norton includes; it’s from the third voyage of Sinbad the Sailor:
We did not hesitate to take to our rafts, and put to sea with all the speed we could. The giants, who perceived this, took up great stones, and running to the shore, entered the water up to the middle, and threw so exactly, that they sunk all the rafts but that I was upon; and all my companions, except the two with me, were drowned. We rowed with all our might, and got out of the reach of the giants. But when we got out to sea, we were exposed to the mercy of the waves and winds, and tossed about,…and spent that night and the following day under the most painful uncertainty as to our fate; but next morning we had the good fortune to be thrown upon an island, where we landed with much joy. We found excellent fruit, which afforded us great relief.
The tensions, shall we say, that are present in poetry are present here. Tension is the more static side of suspense. Suspense makes for tension, but suspense has more action in it. The two are related. Tension is seen as a large thing in art, and it is. Tension is that point when the opposites haven’t made up their mind and they are keeping you guessing very much. But they always end happily ever after.
In the passage I read there are two kinds of tension. The giants almost get where Sinbad and his colleagues are; and then, when they get where Sinbad and his colleagues are, they almost are able, throwing the rocks, to kill everybody. But three people, including Sinbad, are not hit. As it’s told here, we go from evil to good very quickly: “We rowed with all our might, and got out of the reach of the giants.” But then there’s another evil: the sea is dangerously rough and “[we were] under the most painful uncertainty as to our fate;” yet right after the semicolon, good comes again—“but next morning we had the good fortune to be thrown upon an island, where we landed with much joy. We found excellent fruit, which afforded us great relief.”
In the Iliad and Odyssey Homer manages suspense. All the epic writers do. Virgil does in the Aeneid. With Paradise Lost, we know how the story’s going to end, but there’s some suspense there. Any epic whatsoever has something of it, because whenever there’s an action we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know when it’s going to stop, and where it’s going to be.
The technical poetic problem is whether, in what happens to things in a poem, there is something representing those two opposites: are words dangerous—is there an uncertainty about them—and are they also secure? In a good poem, do sounds have danger and security at once? What Nietzsche told people to do, “live dangerously,” words do in poetry. If there is not danger, life is like the traveling of a bit of spaghetti—or silk—on a smooth table.
Reciprocity; or, Sameness & Difference
There is a description of how Sinbad and some merchants whom he is with gather coconuts: you annoy apes, and they throw coconuts at you.
The merchants gathered stones, and threw them at the apes in the trees. I did the same, and the apes out of revenge threw cocoa-nuts at us so fast, and with such gestures, as sufficiently testified their anger and resentment. We gathered up the cocoa-nuts, and from time to time threw stones to provoke the apes; so that by this stratagem we filled our bags with cocoa-nuts, which it had been impossible otherwise to have done.
So anger comes to be the same as kindness here. The apes don’t know any better, and they put opposites together having no intention to do so. The large thing, though, is the reciprocity. Anything can be exchanged. You can exchange a diamond for an incunabulum—a rare book, very rare, perhaps 15th-century. Or you can exchange a diamond for a little hut in the Catskills, fairly well furnished. Or you can exchange a diamond for so much food. Part of relation is reciprocity.
Grandiosity & Modesty
In Sinbad’s telling about another voyage, the famous ruler Caliph Haroon al Rusheed is present. Tennyson has a poem about him. He’s supposed to have been eminently wise. And he’s a monarch who went out in the streets of Baghdad, in disguise, trying to hear what people were talking about, what they said of him, trying to get their real feelings.
Sinbad gets to the kingdom of Serendib. No one knows where that is. But the quality of this excerpt is that quality of a letter that is at once formal, pompous, large, and also friendly. The King of Serendib sends the letter to the Caliph Haroon al Rusheed; it begins with the king’s describing himself:
The King of the Indies, before whom march one hundred elephants, who lives in a palace that shines with one hundred thousand rubies, and who has in his treasury twenty thousand crowns enriched with diamonds, to Caliph Haroon al Rusheed.
Though the present we send you be inconsiderable, receive it, however, as a brother and a friend, in consideration of the hearty friendship which we bear for you….We desire the same part in your friendship, considering that we believe it to be our merit, being of the same dignity with yourself.
The relation of modesty to pomp is present here. And it’s present in the answer of Caliph Haroon al Rusheed. When persons are aware that they can be gorgeous but also want to be modest, we have, in another way, some of the tension that is present in poetry.
You would think that the king was boasting, with all those rubies and diamonds. But about the present he’s sending, he seems to be modest: “Though the present we send you be inconsiderable…” I can assure you, that present is not “inconsiderable”; it’s a most gorgeous present. This letter has reserve and gorgeousness in it.
Later, we have the answer of the Caliph Haroon al Rusheed to the King of Serendib. This is most of it:
Greeting, in the name of the sovereign guide of the right way, from the dependant on God, Haroon al Rusheed,…to the potent and esteemed Raja of Serendib.
We received your letter with joy, and send you this from our imperial residence, the Garden of Superior Wits. We hope when you look upon it, you will perceive our good intention and be pleased with it.
With the phrase “Garden of Superior Wits” the relation of garden and mind is present, as we find it also in Persian poetry. When persons had thoughts to gather, there would be an idea of a garden, as in the Gulistan of Saadi, the Baharestan of Jami.
So this letter too has gorgeousness and restraint.
Murky Uncertainty Can Become Firmness
In this fourth Heart of Oak reader, there is a passage from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. It’s a passage Shakespeare used in his dealing with the death of Caesar.
In tension, as I said, there can be suspense, but also there can be uncertainty. And occasionally, there’s a dull uncertainty, where people are “certain” and then they hear something else and they take another view. The people in Rome at the time of Caesar are presented as giddy and double-minded. They’re presented that way by Shakespeare. And they’re presented that way by Plutarch and North. They think Brutus is right and then they change. Uncertainty is the slow process of tension or suspense. If you say “uncertainty,” you think a person is taking his time. If you say he feels “suspense,” you think things are more in a hurry, tighter. Tension can be both. So this is a passage from North’s Plutarch; Caesar has been murdered:
The next morning Brutus and his confederates came into the market-place to speak unto the people, who gave them such audience that it seemed they neither greatly reproved nor allowed the fact: for by their great silence they showed that they were sorry for Caesar’s death and also that they did reverence Brutus. Now the senate granted general pardon for all that was past and to pacify every man ordained besides that Caesar’s funeral should be honored as a god, and established all things that he had done, and gave certain provinces also and convenient honors unto Brutus and his confederates, whereby every man thought all things were brought to good peace and quietness again.
Yet later, the people get very angry.
This is a part of the uncertainty of humanity. And to see people wavering, wobbling, hesitating, is very bad for the nerves. It isn’t a beautiful sight. But there is a phase of it that is related to the utmost effect art can have, to the utmost thing that makes beauty that.
(To be continued)