Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue our serialization of the great 1972 lecture We Approach Poetry Variously, by Eli Siegel. The question he is answering in it—answering magnificently, definitively—is this: Is there a difference that firmly exists, and can be stated, between a true poem and something that is arranged in lines but is not an authentic poem? Yes. And what that difference is, and why it matters vitally to everyone’s life, is described in this 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.”

In the present section, Mr. Siegel is speaking about the opposites of excitement and ease; that which stirs, rouses, and that which is calm, soothing. Poetry makes these one. And oh, how we need to see what that means. How we need to see that these opposites can be one, including in us, and that they are one in reality itself. We need to see this, because the way stir and soothing are in people’s lives is usually messy, confusing, even desolating.

This Is Happening Now

Every human being wants excitement and also quietude—but a person usually shuttles between the two. There is a tremendous desire for calm. And people have gone after calm in ever so many ways. They have lain on beaches for hours. They have sipped tea. They have knitted. They have taken naps.

Then, after a while, that quietude dissatisfies. They feel bored, stuck, and want some excitement. Yet the excitement people go after—whether through sex, or sports, or through spending money, or rappelling down cliffs, or beating out someone in a matter of career—usually comes with a deep letdown. As I’ll try to describe: that’s because the exciting activity, whether good or bad in itself, is usually not seen by the person in such a way as to make him or her truly composed. So again there comes to be a pervasive dissatisfaction.

How the opposites of stir and calm are in us is affected centrally by what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the large battle in the human self. This battle, writes Eli Siegel, “is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality” (TRO 151). The first, respect, is our deepest desire: we were born “to like the world through knowing it.” And quietude and excitement will make sense in our lives only if our purpose in both is to know and see meaning in the world. Then those opposites will not make for a shuttling within us. They will be friends—as a tumultuous passage in a Beethoven symphony is friendly to, at one with, a quiet, tender passage.

But if we don’t feel that seeing meaning in people and things is exciting and makes us important, a result will be this: we’ll feel that excitement is to be found in conquering things and people, in combating and defeating them. Further, unless we hope to see the world as a friend, we’ll feel that the way to be soothed is to get away from the world.

This happens too: A person is in the midst of something truly exciting and composing—perhaps she’s at a baseball game or great theatrical performance and has a joyful feeling about it. Yet after the event, her excitement does not last, nor does her composure. That’s because she doesn’t know that the game or performance is not some pleasing anomaly, but stands for the world itself, is an ambassador of the world. When she studies Aesthetic Realism she’ll begin to learn that it does stand for the world; and why; and how.

The Attraction to Violence & False Soothing

We come to a particular way contempt has one be wrong about what excitement is. A large reason people are attracted to violence, including in films and video games, is the feeling that the world is dull and the one way to have a thrill from it is to get to a certain extremity: to be shocked, horrified. The attraction to violence also has with it the contemptuous feeling that there’s nothing more exciting than cruelty—cruelty from the world and to the world.

Then, there are two matters very much in the news. 1) Contempt has had people see opioids as the desired form of soothing, because these drugs get rid of the world with a certain thoroughness. 2) Contempt for the world is what makes a person feel that shooting others—perhaps many others—is the thrilling, culminating solution to one’s confusion and resentment.

Meanwhile, contempt-as-excitement and contempt-as-soothing are also very ordinary. Thousands of people right now are longing to be alone with a chocolate cake and to eat, if not all of it, a very disproportionate quantity. That, they feel, would be the grand soother, and also adventure.

In Government Too

What human contempt does with the opposites of stir and calm is immensely personal: it interferes with the life of each individual. But it also has national and international repercussions. The identification of both excitement and repose with contempt can be in the highest reaches of government. Many heads of state and powerful politicians, in history and now, have been impelled by the following unspoken way of mind: “I don’t get excitement from wanting to know—including the feelings of people and the facts as they truly are; I get excitement through defeating anything that questions me.” Various national leaders (like people who aren’t national leaders) have felt: “Nothing is exciting unless it flatters me and makes me feel superior. Also, the one thing that can soothe me is flattery of me.” To that way of mind—in a politician or anyone—what other human beings deserve is either irrelevant or a threat to oneself.

We Need Poetry

Poetry, real poetry, is respect for the world. The excitement in poetry comes from justice to reality and to the immediate things written of. The composure in poetry comes from justice. Poetry, Mr. Siegel is showing here, has us feel these opposites, agogness and repose, as one. And they’re our opposites. We hear them as one through that thing which is poetic music: that all-important sound which comes from the writer’s fullness of sincerity about the subject of the poem and reality itself. And so, we need to see what poetry is in order to be the self we want to be.

Four Beautiful Sentences

I am going to quote, from Eli Siegel’s book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims, four maxims relevant to our subject. Maxims themselves, as a literary genre, put together stir and calm: they have the containment of a brief, well-formed statement, yet are supposed to provoke, make for new feeling, even wonder. That is, if the maxims (like La Rochefoucauld’s, for instance) are good; and Eli Siegel’s are ever so good. The first I’ll quote is number 18 of Part One:

The seat of a chair of 1676 can, if you think hard enough, make you a little less tired.

To be made less tired is to be soothed, also enlivened. And an emergency question for everyone is: will we be soothed and enlivened by trying to see what things are, by thinking about them—including about things we don’t see as owned by us, things like this 17th-century chair? Then, there’s the structure of the sentence itself. It’s beautiful; it is surprising and right. It has, in its first phrase, a music of specificity, a pointing to just that object: “The seat of a chair of 1676 can.” Then, there is effort in the delicate pounding of “if you think hard enough.” And the sentence ends with a gentle curve of repose: “make you a little less tired.”

The next maxim, number 98 of Part One, uses a word much connected with soothing, comfortable:

The room for improvement we have should be comfortable.

That short maxim puts widely and kindly something urgent for us: we should welcome with lovely ease the fact that, yes, we need to be better.

There’s this, about love—maxim 123 of Part Two:

Love, as we find it most often, is an arrangement by which two people become less than themselves with apparent comfort and glamour.

Comfort and glamour are related to soothing and excitement. The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to care more for the world itself through knowing a particular person. And the so frequent mistake is to find comfort and a victory in looking down on the world, putting it aside, because someone has made us important. Thus we lessen our true selves; we curtail what we truly are. This maxim says it with point, grace, humor.

The last maxim I’ll quote is number 173 of Part One. We have comfort again, and that ardent thing that is courage:

A person is courageous who is comfortable in larger territory than is usual.

That maxim describes various people, including Shakespeare, Darwin, Michelangelo, Martin Luther King. It describes Eli Siegel himself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

What All Art Does

By Eli Siegel

In chapter 2 of Sound and Sense, the editor, Laurence Perrine, has a statement about something important. I’ll say first: the purpose of a poem is the purpose of life; it is supposed to excite you and, in exciting you, also bring you greater serenity or repose. All art, according to Aesthetic Realism, instigates, pinches, scratches, hits—cuts, even—and also gives more repose. There is no instance of the art effect that isn’t both these things. Prof. Perrine says about poetry:

Its purpose is not to soothe and relax, but to arouse and awake, to shock one into life, to make one more alive. Poetry is not a substitute for a sedative.

I’d agree with that second sentence. But this passage shows the trend of poetry since the end of the First World War, with the publication of “Prufrock” and that which was against the Georgians.* There was a feeling, much acted on, that poetry should also trouble, should deal with the ugly, should shock; it should be a little like a cramp in the middle of one’s thigh. And so you’d get away from Tennyson and the Georgians. You’d get away from the la-de-da poetry, the women’s clubs poetry, and the Oklahoma-is-a-great-old-state poetry, and that kind of thing. However, what Prof. Perrine leaves out is that poetry bothers and soothes at once. All art does. It incites, it pinches, it squeezes, it shocks, terrifies even, and also it gives you more of what you want.

What Does This Poem Do?

It happens that Prof. Perrine in this work has some poems that soothe; some soothe rightly, some wrongly. There is the anonymous and very good poem, one of the quietest poems in the world, “I Sing of a Maiden,” about the Virgin Mary. Now, one should be critical here. If this is a poem, it will stir you and soothe at once. If it doesn’t do that, you’re affected by something else, and also I’m wrong in my judgment—because the purpose of art is to show that soothing and stirring, pinching and caressing, are the same thing. So this, of the 15th century, is one of the quiet poems:

This poem has been written of a great deal ever since its quality was seen. It accents the fact that Christ came as stillness, as space comes to space. There is no turmoil.

The first stanza is assertive. “I sing of a maiden / That is mateless.” There is a note that the word mateless could mean either matchless or without a mate. The Virgin Mary, of course, is both. “King of all kings / To her son she chose.” This means that she went towards her son as king of all kings. There’s not much punctuation here, but there is a feeling of power and quietness.

“He came all so still / Where his mother was.” What does that do? Does that soothe one—and is one soothed wrongly? There’s the idea of Christ coming quietly to his mother: does that stir you? I think it can. It’s a little bit like a light blue color that’s honest—it stirs you and it soothes you. A blue sky, the right kind of blue sky, can make you feel that space is up to some great stuff, and also it soothes you.

“As dew in April / That falleth on the grass.” It happens that nature or reality is very restrained and also very definite. It shows its quietness in the way dew gets to flowers. The night goes on; you look at things in the morning and lo! dew is on flowers. How did it get there?—no one heard it.

This poem is truly a most subtle lullaby. The purpose of a lullaby is to have unruly children go to sleep. The purpose of a lullaby is to say that the world is less terrible than you thought. And if this is done honestly, it’s useful.

The study of quietness in poetry is a big thing. So I’d say that this statement of Prof. Perrine is to be disagreed with: “Its purpose is not to soothe and relax, but to arouse and awake….” The quality of poetry is that it shocks and caresses at once.

George Saintsbury helped this poem along by quoting it in A Short History of English Literature almost entirely. And he was right.

A Different Dealing with Quiet

That is a poem included in this book. Then, there is also a poem by Elinor Wiley that was popular in the ’20s and is thought of a good deal by Prof. Perrine. He says it is not as good as a certain sonnet of Shakespeare—and he’s right there. But the large thing is that in terms of authentic music and the sight that goes with music, it’s not a poem at all.

I’ll read it, though, because it is bravura and is a most conscious attempt to have things velvety. It’s worth studying because very few people could get that effect. It’s not worth getting, but still, it’s a bit like a person who was able to eat a meal off piano keys in motion: it’s not worth doing, but somebody is able to do it.

These are the first two stanzas of “Velvet Shoes”:

This poem can be described as adroitly meretricious. However, it was very popular because there are obvious effects. Since poetry is a dealing with the relevant and the surprising, a word after previous words should be relevant and should also be surprising—and the way Ms. Wiley changes is not the best. When, in the first stanza, she says that white snow is like white lace—that is a horrible likeness. It doesn’t do any good to either lace or snow.

Then she says: “I shall go shod in silk, / And you in wool, / White as white cow’s milk.” I think by this time the silk and the wool are a little displeasing.

“More beautiful / Than the breast of a gull.” And the getting in of the gull is not necessary. You can make all kinds of comparisons, but the comparisons should be central.

About this time, with the wool and the white cow’s milk and the breast of the gull, you simply don’t believe it.

This is contrived silence. However, Prof. Perrine should know that he has included this poem, and it does have the great quality of soothing and irritating, but it was meant to soothe. It’s like a floorwalker with a too viscous voice. He’s supposed to make you at ease in the store, but he can irritate you: Oh, you want the alpacas, please?