Dear Unknown Friends:

We have come to the third part of the lecture we’re serializing: Poetry Is Alphabetical, by Eli Siegel. This talk is a masterpiece of the casual and the definitive; it is a wonderful good time arising from grand scholarship. Here Mr. Siegel, the critic who has shown what poetry is, illustrates some of the constituents of poetry through choosing a word for every letter of the alphabet. And each of those terms has to do with our own lives too, and the nature of reality. Some words, he speaks of briefly; others, with more fullness. But always, there are depth, aliveness, rightness, and surprise.

In the present TRO, we are with letters G through I. And the main discussion is of the word Incongruity. So, in a prefatory way, I’ll say something about incongruity in relation to the Aesthetic Realism principle, true of poetry and us, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Incongruity & a Person

Incongruity is the non-fittingness of things—their not going together. And people have much pain about it. A child, age seven—we can call him Finn—came to feel pretty early that the way his parents fought with each other, yelled and used mean words to each other, didn’t go with how at other times they could act (as he put it to himself) “lovey-dovey.” Finn didn’t use the word incongruity, but it’s what he felt, and it mixed him up terribly.

He also felt incongruous to himself: he felt he was a different Finn laughing with his friends from the Finn who could feel, in his bed at night, that he was far away from everyone—far away sometimes frighteningly and sometimes triumphantly. He felt too that the “bad thoughts” he had at night—about monsters coming after him, and about his wanting to hit his little cousin Arlo—would never be understood by himself or “anybody ever!” Those thoughts seemed so different from—incongruous with—what he felt when he looked through the microscope his grandfather gave him (for an interest in science was already alive in him).

Then too, Finn was keen enough to be aware that there were people in this country who had much more money than his family and could buy all kinds of things—and also there were some people who had much less than he did and were very poor. He felt the incongruity, and felt (rightly) that it was disgusting. But he was tempted to do what people of all ages do: use the incongruities one finds to see the world itself as a mess—to have contempt for the world.

Contempt is the feeling we take care of ourselves, make ourselves big, by lessening, looking down on, the world different from us. And Aesthetic Realism has identified contempt as the most hurtful thing in the human self. Eli Siegel’s showing that to be so, is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of human thought. To have a sense of incongruity is not in itself contempt. But: a person, feeling things are incongruous, can then go for the contemptuous victory of an all-encompassing sneer—The world is a mess, I’m superior, and I don’t have an obligation to be fair to anything.

When Incongruity Is Poetic

As you’ll soon see, in this part of his lecture Mr. Siegel speaks about two instances of what has been called “nonsense verse.” He doesn’t use the term, and it is, truly, a misnomer. That is because if a poem is good there is always a deep sense in it, no matter how strange it seems. A “nonsense” poem, though, unabashedly puts forth incongruity. And what makes such a poem art or not-art is the same as what makes any poem art or not.

When any poem is good, Eli Siegel explained, the writer has seen his or her subject with such fullness of honesty, such depth of accuracy, that this writer has felt the structure of reality itself there. And in the poem’s lines we hear this structure as verbal music. We hear simultaneously difference and sameness, point and expansion, jolt and continuity, awryness and order, motion—even commotion—and repose. If it is a poem presenting much incongruity, we feel that while the incongruity juts, asserts, brandishes itself, it is also part of a living structure that is musical.

We need to feel this. We need to feel that there is a relation, a musical fittingness, among things that don’t seem to fit, that seem at odds. Here, in his magnificent discussion of a Lewis Carroll poem, Mr. Siegel not only shows what makes for beauty in the lines—he also shows, amazingly, the logic in Carroll’s wild statements.

A Maxim

As a prelude, I’m going to quote a maxim by Eli Siegel. It is, in a single sentence, an instance of incongruity that we feel is congruity too. This sometimes happens through the literary form which is the maxim, and it occurs often in Mr. Siegel’s much loved book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. Some fine maxims are not about incongruity—but let us take this:

The eyelashes of a man are still delicate while he stamps his foot.

Both women and men have felt that the delicacy in themselves and their forcefulness do not go together. Every man, however tough he may present himself as being, feels there are sensitivities in him that no one has understood. He also wants to thrust himself, thumpingly insist, show angrily he won’t take any more nonsense. But the two ways have seemed to him (and people close to him) in separate worlds.

This maxim says the seeming incongruity is not only incongruous. And it says it beautifully. The underlying logic is that the opposites of delicacy and force, like all the opposites, are together deeply and faithfully in us, and never leave each other—though we ourselves may not use them rightly.

In the first part of the maxim we hear, through the sound of the words, the subtle motion of those eyelashes in their fineness, slightness, softness. The sh, m, short is, and ls help here: “The eyelashes of a man are still delicate.” Then we have a motion that is very different, that has firmness, weight, force: “while he stamps his foot.” But look—that phrase as sound is not only different from what preceded it. There is a subtlety, even a softness, in the amp of stamps. And that sound is related to the sound of man in the earlier phrase. There are wonder and gentleness in the sound of while. And there is a quietude, and some mystery, in the sound that ends the maxim: his foot.

What this maxim says, and how it says it, is evidence that if we can look at incongruity justly—with justice that’s wide and particular—beauty can come to be.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Poetry Has Wild Ways—& More

By Eli Siegel

For the letter G we have the word Gather. In our lives we are gathering things—and a more businesslike term is collect.

All poems are gatherings. All art gathers. All music is a gathering. On what principle was the gathering done? What was gathered?

For H there is the word Hackneyed. A principle is there. For instance, even with something very beautiful, some music of Beethoven you care for: if you heard it all the time—at breakfast, lunchtime, supper, even when you sup also late, at midnight—you would get annoyed with it. It’s a little like the principle of having to eat cherries all day: the poor cherries would take on something like smudged, viscous potato peels. This is part of the word hackneyed.

Then we have the letter I. A big thing in poetry, and of course in humor, is Incongruity. There are certain poems that live by their success with incongruity. Some are in Mother Goose. Take these lines:

This is a showing that incongruity can be a happy family. What happiness is in the poem!

Incongruity & Lewis Carroll

In art, a good incongruity is a desire to extricate the disorder principle in otherwise well-behaving reality. This is what Lewis Carroll did, and there’s nobody better than he is in making incongruity acceptable, dynamically acceptable. I could read “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and I still intend to look once more at “The Hunting of the Snark,” which is one of the great poems in English. But we can look now at “The Mad Gardener’s Song.” The version I’m reading has six stanzas, and this is the first:

Now, a humorous poem is to be seen as any other poem should. And in a good poem, as in the Tennyson poem I discussed, there are some lines that are greater than others. Take the first line of this stanza: “He thought he saw a Buffalo.” In poetry there can be a blending that has in it a similarity of sound, and that is present in this line. With its vowel sounds, “He thought he saw” is already effective—as is the famous phrase of the 1920s (one of the many changes on “for Christ’s sake”), “Oh, for crying out loud!” That line “He thought he saw a Buffalo” is already large.

When incongruous things are presented in true poetry, there is always a relation felt in some fashion among them. For example, there are pictures of buffalo heads, and a buffalo is buffalo-headed. To be buffalo-headed is even worse, in a way, than being pigheaded, because when you’re pigheaded you’re stubborn but you stay where you are, while if you’re buffalo-headed you barge in. So Carroll here may be saying something about the importunity of relatives in how they visit. When we look at a buffalo, we feel it already wants to be where we are. Then—“‘Unless you leave this house,’ he said, / ‘I’ll send for the Police!’”

There is the next stanza:

The relation here is quite subtle. Carroll, as is well known, was given to mathematics; and two big aspects of mathematics are geometry and algebra, with trigonometry having both. A rattlesnake could be seen as a circularity ready to affect you, ready to make a sound. And Carroll here may feel the meaning of the circle could ask questions that are philosophic and learned—could question him in Greek.

So the rattlesnake is abstraction as portentous and learned; then the thing “found” is abstraction in another way: “He looked again, and found it was / The Middle of Next Week.” But then, we also want silence and abstraction to talk to us, and there is poignancy in these lines: “‘The one thing I regret,’ he said, / ‘Is that it cannot speak!’”

What are these wild ways saying? And what are the abstractions trying to tell us?

A New Arrangement

Two lines as good as any are “He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk / Descending from the bus.” Somehow, having a banker’s clerk descend from the bus puts civilization in a new arrangement. And the vowels are deftly related. At the time Carroll wrote, a banker’s clerk was aware of himself and would be seen at no moment whatsoever in any kind of careless attitude. So if you have a banker’s clerk descending from a bus, you’ll likely have dignity. Still, there’s a human being there.

“He looked again, and found it was / A Hippopotamus.” We have a relation of lightness and heaviness. One thinks of a banker’s clerk of then as slim and, while trying to show authority, also trying to vanish into the wall somehow. So when you see a banker’s clerk change into a hippopotamus, it means that the world as linear and light has changed into the world as weight.

“‘If this should stay to dine,’ he said, / ‘There won’t be much for us!’” Carroll was careful of his time and quite careful of his energy. In the printing of Alice in Wonderland, he was one of the fussiest authors who ever lived; there’s a whole epic about all his directions. These lines are a way of saying that too much of me will be taken from me if I have to meet something that makes demands, and also something I haven’t tried to understand.

The most obviously related lines are “He thought he saw a Kangaroo / That worked a coffee-mill.” If you asked a child what is the sound that a coffee mill or coffee grinder makes, the child might utter something like the vowel sounds in the first two syllables of the word kangaroo. Coffee mills aren’t around so much these days, but the old-fashioned coffee mill had that sound. It was welcome. It was the grind that was pretty. And we have something of that sound in kangaroo—including the rrr.

“He looked again, and found it was / A Vegetable-Pill.” I think the first two lines of that stanza were joyous—and then Carroll could feel, as many people have: something good can go on for a while but soon you have to be reminded that you’re still weak. So “He looked again and found it was / A Vegetable-Pill.”

“‘Were I to swallow this,’ he said, / ‘I should be very ill!’” This may be a hint that Carroll was given to coddling himself too much and seeing himself too much as an invalid.

Esteem, Fear, Contempt, Compassion

Carroll, as is pretty well known, was, in a way, afraid of people. A coach-and-four would have people, in pomp. And suppose you had to have a coach-and-four coming to your home, and the people near your bed. You’d have to be hospitable. Then this coach-and-four becomes an animal that is not complete: “He looked again, and found it was / A Bear without a Head.”

What Carroll is saying is that he esteemed people too much and he was afraid of them too much, and then he felt that they were silly. He may have been affected here by Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman. “‘Poor thing,’ he said, ‘poor silly thing! / It’s waiting to be fed!’” Very often, too, fear changes into compassion, and that is one of the things here: “‘It’s waiting to be fed!’”

The Domestic & the Remote

“He thought he saw an Albatross.” Carroll obviously was affected by Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” There are a few overtones of it, evanescent and sly overtones, in “The Hunting of the Snark.” And here we have the albatross, not in mid-ocean, but in the city.

“He looked again, and found it was / A Penny-Postage-Stamp.” This is logical. The albatross is a moving thing, but here it flutters around a fixed thing like the lamp; and because the lamp is used by it, the albatross becomes fixed in a way that was familiar to English letter writers: that of a penny postage stamp. “He looked again, and found it was / A Penny-Postage-Stamp.” What happens in these lines is a little bit like a person finding a fossil of a winged insect.

“‘You’d best be getting home,’ he said, / ‘The nights are very damp!’” As that is said to the albatross, again the domestic and the remote are put together, which is a frequent thing in this poem.

So I invaded the incongruity of the poem and found, I believe, some things that are moderately sensible. It’s not necessary to call a poem wholly sensible. It has to be audacious. Still, there is congruity too.