Dear Unknown Friends:

Toward the end of 1951, Eli Siegel gave a lecture in two parts on the subject he called Technique and My Poems. And now, seventy-five years later, we have the honor of serializing that magnificent talk. The third installment of it is in this current issue of TRO.

The lecture is about three things, all richly inseparable from one another. 1) It’s about what Aesthetic Realism shows poetry to be, including the technique of poetry: what happens in a true poem as words—with their meaning and sound—meet, are together, are apart. 2) The lecture is also about the relation of poetry to the self of every person, including persons who don’t think they’re interested in poetry at all. And 3) in keeping with the lecture’s title, Mr. Siegel speaks about his own poems, likely in response to a request from his students. And if there was indeed such a request, I thank immensely those who made it!

Here, I’ll mention swiftly something I’ll likely speak of further as this serialization continues: I know of no other writer who wrote in as many different poetic forms as Eli Siegel did. In his work there are, for instance, sonnets; couplets of various kinds; stanzas; poems in assonance; blank verse; the intricate French ballade form; the also intricate French rondeau; and of course free verse—long free verse lines and short and mid-length and intermingled. But whatever the poetic form he was using, Eli Siegel was always sincere—including when he was jocular. All his work had his largeness along with his warmth. And it always had what he showed to be the sine qua non of poetry: music. Mr. Siegel’s poetry was always musical—variously and tremendously musical.

Mr. Bulwer and Ourselves

In the section of his talk that is included here, Mr. Siegel speaks about three of his poems; most lengthily about the great poem “Afternoon.” And here, I feel I must add something to what he says about it. Perhaps out of modesty Mr. Siegel does not mention that the principles embodied within this poem about “Mr. Bulwer” have changed people’s lives magnificently for the better, through the Aesthetic Realism lessons he, Mr. Siegel, gave. And they’re doing so now, through Aesthetic Realism consultations and classes.

The poem tells about Mr. Bulwer, who puts forth on the outside an insincere, smooth, smug self, very different from who he is within. He has that rift which, as Mr. Siegel says, is so common: between surface and depth, what we put forth and what we are. The rift is painful—but it is also triumphant. It comes from what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most hurtful thing in the human self: contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” A message to us from our contempt is: You have a self not to know and be accurate about the world—but to use that self to impress others and hide from them. In the history of thought, it was Eli Siegel who saw what contempt is, and saw its massive and everyday hurtfulness. And he saw that there is a constant battle in people between contempt and our deepest desire: to be just to what’s not ourselves, to like the world through knowing it.

As I said: the study of those forces in us, the drive for contempt and the inextinguishable need to see the world justly—which Mr. Siegel is dealing with so musically, so surprisingly and firmly and tenderly in “Afternoon”—has changed people’s lives through the philosophy he founded. And (I’m sorry if this sounds high-flown) the study of them can change the world.

Inseparable from the principles just described is this great one stated by Mr. Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The world’s opposites—including hidden and shown, lowness and height, tumult and stillness, individuality and relation—are in us: they are our very selves. So Eli Siegel has this loving rebuke for Mr. Bulwer, and us: “Happy, happy Mr. Bulwer, / That / You are more than you chose to see.”

In Closing, for Now

I am moved to say too: Eli Siegel himself did not have at all that contemptuous hiddenness which is so frequent. I never heard an insincere word pass his lips, nor ever saw one in his writing. As I’ve described elsewhere, his sincerity made some people viciously angry, because they felt it showed up their own lack of integrity. Nevertheless, Mr. Siegel was beautifully honest all the time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Technique and My Poems, III

By Eli Siegel

Now I am going to read something fairly recent, and comment on it for a while. It is about an Aesthetic Realism idea that I have mentioned to many people: the biggest thing people want is the feeling that what they show on the surface is in complete accord with where they begin, their very depths. As civilization has been, and as it is now, no such thing occurs. People see their depths as something apart from what they show, and it is very hard for them to see themselves as doing otherwise. In fact, they sometimes look on it as insulting if you suggest they do anything else.

Most people have no real junction between what they fully are and what they show—and some people have made a system out of that. There are two reasons why: one, it is hard to know what you feel; two, people think if they show what they feel they’re going to get it in the neck.

In this poem there is a Mr. Bulwer, who has a smile and can talk very smoothly, in a very modulated tone. I wanted to merge, in this poem, the smoothness of Mr. Bulwer with the terror that is the reality in him; merge the history of him as a human being with the labyrinthine grandeur of the feelings he doesn’t know and with what he’s come from. The fact that he has all this unknown relation, I see as happy. (I play around a bit with the phrase of Keats “happy, happy love.”) But I merge the superficial Mr. Bulwer with the Mr. Bulwer who represents changeless reality.

This occurs in the afternoon. Afternoon has a big meaning; it is light when most active.

Some lines, of course, are clearer than others; some are quite difficult. Technically, it is sometimes necessary to give a word its definite bucket meaning, its straight cube of butter meaning, its strict meaning. Then, sometimes it is necessary to see a word honestly but in relation—symbolically, metaphorically, God knows what all—because every word has something of every other word in it, and every object has something of every other object in it. That means you can do a great deal in having something stand for something else. Sometimes a thing has to stand for only itself; but also, it can stand for other things. Everybody is an indefinite succession of symbols.

How Lines End

Looking further. We find that there are two ways a line can end, and they are in these two lines: “That smile took him ages to get / And he uses it this minute.” If you listen to the lines, you will see that there is a rising in the first, and a skipping away in the second. There is a reason for that.

Also, there are various letters that can sometimes stand for complacency and for hiding, and one is the letter m. The reason is: if you say the letter m, your lips close and you have yourself for the moment. No person ever used the letter m without his or her lips closing. So the letter m is something that can bring up the sense of placidity, self-containment, and, I could say, successful, acceptable hypocrisy. Ms are in the next lines: “That tone of voice, so managed, / Smooths the milieu of the afternoon.” The word smooth, of course, sounds like itself. And there is the word milieu. The sounds go with the idea that Mr. Bulwer’s voice, particularly if it’s heard in the afternoon, can seem so peace-giving: peace-giving of a wrong kind.

Then, adverbs can be used. If you use a five- or six-syllable adverb, it’s like going up the stairs in a hurry in the dark. These adverbs, if they are placed, can sound swift and terrible: I am indefatigably yours—what can you do with that? This is constitutionally unbearable. The effect depends, of course, on the meaning of the word too. So when I say, “Yet there’s a mystery of a heart, / Connected irremediably with Mr. Bulwer,” the word irremediably goes up with swiftness. And it happens it is connected irremediably with him—I’m not just using adverbs. The technique, as I said, has to come from a desire to be fair to the object you’re dealing with, not a desire to get away from the object.

Then, we can see that heavy syllables give a certain effect. If we take a phrase like “lofty twilight glooms”—even if you tried, you couldn’t say that very fast. In saying the phrase, you have to have some sense of going high. I know persons can rush through anything, but this is hard to rush through. It gives a feeling of slowness and height and dark.

The lines are some long, some short. And one of the things I am very fond of is to take a line that goes out widely, seems to have long steps, and then get it back into short steps. That is done here:

This is part of the music: lines should have a life of their own.

Then: “Happy, happy Mr. Bulwer.” Here I am using a purposely superficial sound in order to point to what he is deeply happy about: that even though he is a hypocrite, he can’t lose relation with the world; somewhere in you some honesty has to remain. The fact that there is still something in him that he hasn’t made a smooth, oily show of, he should be happy about.

Another line I could point out is “In the all-permitting, delicately forbidding.” Some words go out like a fan, and some go back as a fan does; some are wide, some narrow. Permitting is different from forbidding, and one reason is that along with the actual meaning of the word there is a sense of fall from one syllable to another in forbidding that isn’t in permitting. Permitting is more smooth. These things are part of what words are. When you have “In the all-permitting” and then “delicately forbidding,” there is a certain opposition that I see as worth affirming.

Amphibrachs and Amphimacers

There are such things as bravura effects. The bravura effect is sometimes a very unusual metre. And in the Mr. Bulwer poem, one line has that quality: the line “Howéver notewórthily fríght’ning.” It would not, I suppose, be seen that way, but it happens to be metrically very unusual. It has that rare foot the amphibrach: short-long-short. In my poem “Ralph Isham, 1753 and Later,” there is an effect like that: I say he had bought “a cópy of Drýden that mórning”—three amphibrachs.

In contrast, the amphimacer is long-short-long. And the best example of the amphimacer that I know is in “The St. Louis Blues”—which I have said is technically a very fine poem. “Gót the Sáint Lóuis blúes, júst as blúe” is three amphimacers, long-short-long, long-short-long, long-short-long. That happens very seldom. The opposite, the amphibrach, is “a copy of Dryden that morning.” Amphibrachs are important. I have always felt the amphibrachs are necessary for civilization.

Difference and Kinship

I go now to another poem, called “The Missouri.” When I say that all things are friends and that the purpose of art is—while being exact and not in any way gushy—to show how in their difference these things have a kinship, I mean just that. I remember some of the things that went to make this poem. I know that I was taken once by a description of the Missouri as the “Big Muddy”; the great ooze; the slowest river, almost, in America. It does a lot of harm sometimes, but it sure takes its time. Then, of course, one sees other things. Occasionally you see a girl running across the street, in a dart—she just has to get there. And somehow the notion that there is this big river taking its time, getting to the Mississippi, in the same world with a girl running across the street, took me. And it seems I wanted to have them friends. So in 1928 this poem resulted:

Quite a few things are done here. The first line is slow. I couldn’t stand it if it were put this way: “How a river is going on its way following a direction.” And the next line is much faster: “While little girls in April dresses.” But even while it’s fast there’s a sense of curve. “Run from a pavement / Across a street / To a pavement there.” That’s just the opposite of the Missouri: the Missouri lumbers along, but this little girl, when she wants to go, goes right across.

“How the Missouri / Before that dying”: there is a certain relation between slowness and death.

One of the differences between this girl and the Missouri has to do with shape. The Missouri is very long, while a little girl of then usually had a pinafore, a blowy dress (this one is meant to have that). So when I say about the Missouri, “That possessing of wide cloud,” I’m saying the Missouri has also taken on the blowiness of the wide cloud, a shape related to a girl’s in a blowy dress.

The Missouri gets very friendly toward the end: “Was warm and had / Warm twigs on it.” That word twigs is very fast. The Missouri is slow, but a twig is a very pesky little thing, even in its sound, and it has a cuteness about it. There is a mingling of the largeness of the Missouri and the daintiness of twigs, and this is friendly to the little girl who has just run across the street.

Intermediary Relation

There is a poem that definitely is not geographically so correct. I have come to see, and I think I knew it then, that a macaw is not exactly an African bird. I don’t think this has worried many people; it’s worried me a little. The macaw is a very colored parrot, and very bold; it’s mostly in South and Central America. But I didn’t want to say “American branch” or “South American branch.” Meanwhile, the relation of lions and macaws—this upright bird with the form and color and the silliness it has—the relation is something I wanted to affirm.

You may notice that I don’t say spoons and cups; it’s spoons and coffee-pots. This is what is called intermediary relation: you put spoons in cups, not in coffee-pots. The same disparity that is between spoon and coffee-pot can be felt between macaw and lion.

If one doesn’t feel that there is a certain relation between macaw and lion, as there is between spoons and coffee-pots—well, it’s to be regretted. But I think that the relation is fruitful, and the rhythm is very assertive: as if there were no doubt about it.

(To be continued)