Dear Unknown Friends:

We are honored to publish, in two parts, a lecture that Eli Siegel gave on one of the subjects most bewildering and frightening to people: the subject of evil. Mr. Siegel speaks about it in a way that makes one greatly clearer, a way that is both exciting and composing. He shows that poetry—real poetry—and art are the truest, most powerful contradictions and opponents of evil. “I will talk,” he began, “on the toughest subject in the world, and that subject in relation to poetry.”

He gave this historic, truly landmark lecture on May 10, 1964. And we publish it here under the title Poetry and Evil.

The Basis

The basis of Poetry and Evil is the central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” As you will soon see, Mr. Siegel shows two opposites to be fundamental in what all evil is. He explains: evil of any and every kind—the very structure and operation of it—is “an insufficient junction of the ideas of junction and separation.” How that is so, he shows logically, vividly—also thrillingly.

And not only does Mr. Siegel explain what evil fundamentally is, he takes up poetry that presents evil as victorious, as winning in the world. Yet this lecture is the farthest thing from dire. It is lively, is in many places humorous, is enormously hopeful.

I’ll comment a little on something Mr. Siegel states but doesn’t explain in this talk—for it was not his purpose, here, to do so. That is: speaking about the victorious evil told of in the poems he’d discuss, he says the one real contradiction to evil-as-winner is the fact that these poems are authentic poetry. And I’ve seen that the reason this is so is in Aesthetic Realism’s magnificent explanation of what poetry is: “Poetry…is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

Abundantly, thrillingly, in print and in classes, Mr. Siegel showed the following: when a true poem comes to be it’s because a writer has seen a subject so deeply, widely, sincerely, that reality’s opposites can be heard as one in his or her lines. This is poetic music, which Mr. Siegel showed to be the thing distinguishing a good poem from something else. Poetic music—the structure of reality heard through words saying something—is in a true poem on any subject, including a subject that is unattractive, frightening, desolating.

So the contradiction of evil-as-victorious is in poetry—because even when a poem seems to say evil wins, the music of the lines gives evidence that the world is constructed well!

Take the first line of a passage by Dryden that Mr. Siegel speaks of in this talk. The line is: “When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat.” That line is utter in its condemnation. Yet it is beautiful. It happens to be a oneness of wide thoughtfulness (“When I consider life”)—and lip-curling angry thrust (“’tis all a cheat”). The line is at once slowness and speed; inclusiveness and dismissal.

There is a lingeringness at the beginning, with those spacious I sounds—leading to that speedy summing up, as the ch sneers with disgust in “a cheat.”

Yet these sounds work together as one line, with its steady iambic pentameter. The idea in the line presents reality as unkind. Yet the verbal music—in which the world’s opposites are felt and heard as one—is a showing that reality seen truly, presented honestly, is not unkind: indeed, is even beautiful.

In the Self of Everyone

In this lecture Mr. Siegel is speaking, as I said, about the structure of evil: the disunion, principally, of junction and separation. And, you’ll see, he describes that rupture, that severance, of opposites richly. Yet he is also the person in the history of thought to explain what evil arises from in people, in everyone. He showed that the source of evil, injustice, cruelty, in the human self is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

I love the lecture we are presenting here. No one saw justice and injustice more truly, passionately, and logically than Eli Siegel did. No one understood art and its power as fully as he. On the huge subject of evil, as on the mighty subject of beauty, Eli Siegel is at once the greatest of philosophers, the greatest of literary critics, the great friend of every person and of art.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Poetry and Evil, I

By Eli Siegel

I will talk tonight on the toughest subject in the world, and that subject in relation to poetry. By this I mean that I am going to read and say something about some poems in the English language that definitely hint or show or say that the world is evil; and furthermore, I am not going to read any poem that contradicts them.

The contradiction is in the fact that these are poems. That is, if evil can be said well, it may be that the more evil is seen well, the more something which can be called good also can be seen. So the contradiction is in the fact that poems about evil, poems saying the world is evil, are poems. That is the only contradiction that can work; the aesthetic contradiction or questioning of evil. If you don’t feel that, just take the evil straight.

These poems are different from poems written recently, because in the last thirty years, and particularly in the last ten years, nearly every poem that has been praised or thought much of is a poem in behalf of evil, a homage in some fashion to its victory. Those poems, however, are not forthright. There is a great deal of messiness and mightiness and ponderous mischief in recent poems, but the evil is not straight. So evil as a subject of poetry, it can be said, has won out; but won out with a kind of weak ambiguity.

The poems I am going to read honor evil unmistakably.

The first of these is by William Drummond, who has maintained his place in English literature for years and is seen as the most important poet of Scotland in between Dunbar and Burns—that is, between the 15th-and-16th centuries and the 18th. He himself is 1585-1649. It is supposed he died because of what happened to a person he saw as a friend, King Charles, who was executed in January of that year.

Drummond also has become a subject of musing because Lamb said that one of the sweetest names in English literature is “Drummond of Hawthornden.” Hawthornden is where Drummond’s estate was. Meantime, in any thorough history of English literature, he will remain. And all his work, including the prose work The Cypresse Grove, which is the rival of Browne’s Urn Burial, says: Evil, thou dost prevail. Some of it says it faintly, some of it not so well, but it can be said to say it. There are poems also; there are epigrams that are very secular and have enough boldness of language and unchastity of idea to attract nearly anybody—but those we’ll save for another time.

A poem presenting evil, which has got into many anthologies, is one that Drummond, strangely enough, calls a “Madrigal.” And the answer to that is, Some Madrigal! I’m reading it from The English Poets, edited by Ward:

This is not as great a poem as some in various languages, but it is a good poem. The subject is tremendously depressing, and it is told without any optimistic pulling of punches or optimistic interferences. It says that the world is hunting us, to do us harm. Very often we feel without knowing it that while we were unconscious the world was hunting for our weak spots and now we are suffering.

So, “the Nimrod fierce is Death”—death is the hunter. And he hunts “With all those ills which haunt us while we breathe.” Haunt is a word anticipating the idea of the unconscious ills that are around us and that we don’t know we have. And Drummond says if we avoid this kind of hunting of us, we’ll be got anyway: “Old age…casts up his nets, and there we panting die.” Old age is the fisherman, and we die as a fish very uncomfortable in a net.

So a very distressing and fearful thing is said, and the question is, why can it be said well? Why has it been said well? Why could it be said even better?

“The Twa Corbies”

Then, in the field of evil, we have the Scottish version of a poem that is accompanied in anthologies by an English version. The English version, “The Three Ravens,” tells good news about a wounded knight; but in the Scottish version, two ravens exult in the fact that no one cares anything for the wounded knight. I’ll read for this purpose, of course, the Scottish version. No good ravens today! “The Three Ravens” tells of man’s interest in man, but this poem tells that no one is interested in anybody else.

A thing about evil we have to see is that there is a problem of junction and separation. Two things that make evil are bad exertion of power or managing collision, and aloofness or separation. All evil can be seen to fall under the fact that something hits us on its own terms, not caring for us—that is, there is too much exertion of bad power and collision—or the fact that there is separation.

Good is a sufficient junction of the ideas of junction and separation. That makes it like art. It would be interesting to make a comparison between the goodness of a poem and goodness as such, between the badness of a poem and evil. According to Aesthetic Realism, evil in the world is that which makes, in the field of poetry, a poem bad. Ethics and aesthetics are clamorously said to be the same thing! The evil of a bad poem is the same as the evil of the world.

Getting to this poem, supposedly earlier than the Drummond—it might be the 16th century: this is “The Twa Corbies,” the Scottish version. It generally is pretty understandable. The word theek is thatch; hause is neck, and the word fail is turf.

Now, separation is in the field of evil: the fact that things are not related rightly, things are too apart. This is a poem of apartness. It has that terrible line “The wind sall blaw for evermair”; and there are other terrible lines.

One field of evil is in how things use each other, and it happens that some birds eat people, even as people eat birds. Well, that seems to be the wrong sort of collision, the wrong kind of exertion of power, the wrong closeness. Closeness for the purpose of management is evil; closeness for the purpose of seeing and understanding is good.

This poem has the evil of aloofness and the evil of bad exertion of power. These two corbies are going to dine triumphantly on the body of the deserted knight. We have: “And naebody kens that he lies there / But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair”—that should be enough.

“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane, / And I’ll pike out his bonny blue e’en.” That is a terrible line because it shows hurtful exertion of power: too much closeness. If you’re going to take anybody’s eyes out, you have to be close in one way or another—or the thing that does it has to be close.

“Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair / We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.” There is the use of something else for our purposes: the ravens, the corbies, are going to use the golden hair of the knight to make their nest when that nest grows less thick.

“Mony a one for him maks mane”—people act as if they were sad. “But nane sall ken whar he is gane”—but no one will know really where he is gone. “O’er his white banes, when they are bare, / The wind sall blaw for evermair.” This is the evil of separateness.

John Dryden in Aureng-Zebe

I’m reading these poems, not discussing now their approach to evil. However, the approach, I feel, is obvious. It is not as in the poems of Eberhart or Lowell or Wilbur, where the evil permeates the lines but you don’t see it very definitely: you just know it’s sad, rather messy, muggy, and obscure.

John Dryden, among other things, wrote plays in verse and some of them are famous. There are The Conquest of Granada and The Indian Queen; and another that is famous is Aureng-Zebe. Aureng-Zebe was a ruler of India of the 17th century of whom England had heard. And because the country was so far away, Dryden could write a play almost on a contemporary subject. (It’s not really contemporary: Dryden didn’t know anything about India.) It is about the rivalry of father and son for a lady, Indamora; and it had an influence that can be seen on The Prince of Parthia by Thomas Godfrey, the first American tragedy, which I discussed lately.

The lines of Aureng-Zebe are very well made, but there are some lines that have been known almost since they were first said on the English stage—about life being a cheat. They’re said by Aureng-Zebe when he thinks things are too much for him. (The date given in the text I’m using is 1676, but I have seen 1675: mid-Restoration.)

If you are for evil, you begin thinking less of hope and you think life is a deception. One statement here is belied somewhat by a person whose autobiography I discussed on Friday: Benjamin Franklin says he wouldn’t mind if he lived his days over. Most people would mind: unless there were tremendous revisions, the hell with it!

This is the couplet at its Restoration comeliest: “When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat; / Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit.” And this, mind you, is part of a play. The following lines, it is said, gave the idea to Pope for another depressing line, “Man never is, but always to be blest.” The Dryden lines are: “None would live past years again, / Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain.”

“I’m tired with waiting for this chemic gold, / Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.” So Aureng-Zebe is decidedly of this day.