Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin to serialize a lecture Eli Siegel gave in 1972 on what I consider the greatest subject in the world: the showing by Aesthetic Realism of what poetry really is, what distinguishes a true poem from something else, and why this matters vitally. The lecture’s title is We Approach Poetry Variously. The basis of Aesthetic Realism itself is in it: the principle “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

As a prelude, I quote from Mr. Siegel’s 1964 essay “The Immediate Need for Poetry.” The essay is with the best criticism of the centuries—including that of Horace and Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and Boileau. Yet what he explains in it, in sentences that are beautiful, no critic before him saw. “Poetry,” he writes,

is a picture of reality at its truest, most useful. …It happens that our deepest desire is to make sense of the contrarieties in this world… [and] the forces in us. We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose….And it is poetry that makes [these] jarring, separating propensities to act as one. [TRO 758]

Poetry, Eli Siegel showed, does what we want to do. And we’ll never see clearly what we want, or what it means to accomplish that, until we are seeing what poetry is—really is.

A Woman of Our Time

Included here is an article by Maureen Butler. As she describes herself of once, we see a person who is particular yet represents the tumult in each of us; a person trying to express herself, and at last, through Aesthetic Realism, finding out what that would mean—and how it can be. Ms. Butler is a technical writer, and this article is part of a paper she presented at a recent seminar titled “We Want to Feel Truly Expressed—but What in Us Interferes?” What interferes, Aesthetic Realism shows, is contempt, the most hurtful thing in us: the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Contempt for the world is exactly that which poetry does not have.

Poetic Music, & an Example

Early in his lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks about poetic music. He is the critic who showed that when a person, through words, is deeply, widely, mightily just to what he or she is dealing with, a sound comes to be which has in it the structure of the world, the oneness of opposites. This music is the definitive thing in true poetry.

He mentions as an example “Pease Porridge Hot,” that seemingly non-mighty nursery rhyme; and he says it is great. So I’ll comment on it just a little.

Every person, including every child, can feel stuck, sodden, drearily languid; and pease porridge (a porridge made of peas) can stand for that feeling—especially if the porridge has been sitting around awhile. Even the sound of the phrase “pease porridge” has that unpleasantly runny-yet-thick, coagulating quality. But there is the rhythm! It puts soddenness in terrific motion. It makes the words simultaneously leap and stick. It makes the word “in” burst out. It makes the line “Nine days old,” with its sinking wretchedness, also rise in triumph.

For hundreds of years the music of this poem has had people feel (without their articulating it) that qualities in the world corresponding to their own dullness and energy, sluggishness and soaring, are one and that in this oneness is hope—and beauty.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

We Approach Poetry Variously

By Eli Siegel

I have called this talk We Approach Poetry Variously. And in the text I’m using—the anthology Sound and Sense, edited by Laurence Perrine—the chapter headings, in their fashion, take in the various ways in which poetry can be seen: for example, “What Is Poetry?”; “Reading the Poem”; “Denotation and Connotation”; “Imagery”; “Figurative Language.” I’m not going to read all the headings, but there’s enough in them to see that poetry is like matter having miniature things in it—constituents, elements—and also is a large thing.

Something else I like about this book is that it seems to make poetry honestly something that matters.

The problem raised by the title, Sound and Sense, is the most important problem in poetry and, in a way, in life. Prof. Perrine thinks that music is something which it is good for poetry to have, that it’s praiseworthy for it to be present. However, the Aesthetic Realism viewpoint—that music in its fullest sense is the distinguishing thing, the heart of poetry, the thing that decides whether it is poetry or not—is not something Laurence Perrine agrees with. It would be well to see what that idea means.

In terms of philosophy, while not being at all mystical, it means that something called form or forceis that of which matter is an aspect, although force and matter are the two things in the world. Sound belongs to force, form. And sense (in the way the word is used in the book’s title) is more in the field of matter. This is a difficult subject, but the thing that can be said about the world is that it is matter and force; matter and form; if you want to go higher, you can say matter and idea. It is both. But the question is: which, when fully seen, is the principal?

One of the differences between Prof. Perrine and Aesthetic Realism is in the seeing of the poem “Pease Porridge Hot.” The poem is praised in this book, but not praised in a way that Aesthetic Realism would praise it: it’s seen as good but as in a trivial field. This would be so if the subject of the poem were the main thing.

Prof. Perrine, like many people, would say that Marianne Moore dealt with poetry less trivially. But if sound having some meaning—and this kind of sound does have meaning—is the principal thing, then “Pease Porridge Hot” is profound. That is, if sound plus some meaning is a profound thing. If it is only an incidental thing, added on, then Prof. Perrine is correct.

Then, on the next page, he quotes lines of Shakespeare, from a song in The Tempest. They have a likeness to “Pease Porridge Hot,” and also don’t seem to be about things that are too profound:

Now, I happen to like “Pease Porridge Hot” better than that, although the Shakespeare lines are good. I think “Pease Porridge Hot” is one of the great things of the world. And when Prof. Perrine deals with sounds in it, he at least approaches what I’m saying. So one of the questions raised in poetry is What is sound?, and that gets to What is music? All music is sound; all sound is not music. The problem of what is sound? has to do with the basis of the world, and there are two intimations of that in literature: 1) when the walls of Jericho fall down because of trumpets blowing; and 2) when Amphion, through music, has a wall built.

I’m mentioning these matters because sound accompanied by sense which is true to it can be a means of strengthening oneself.

Music is a validation of observation in poetry.

What in Us Impedes Our Expression?

By Maureen Butler

Before I studied Aesthetic Realism, though I had an active social life and friends I talked with for hours, I felt deeply separate from people, locked in myself. I was terrified I’d spend my life with this isolated, caged feeling. I was unable to express myself as I wanted, and didn’t know why.

“The question of expression,” Eli Siegel explains, “has to do with how much we take in and how we take it in….We have to be impressed before we can express ourselves.”

Studying Aesthetic Realism, I learned that how much we want to be affected by things, including the feelings of people, is an aspect of our attitude to the world. Is the world a friend to know or enemy to defeat? I felt it was the second. This attitude, I learned, was against my deepest desire: to know and like the world. Learning that changed my life. It enabled me to have large, proud emotions and be expressed as I had longed to be.

To Know the World or Beat It Out

My wanting to take in the world truly was why, at age 5, I broke away from my mother’s hand and ran into the classroom on my first day of kindergarten, exhilarated that I was going to meet lots of children my age and learn with them—and one day be able to read!

At home, though, I had a different purpose. I didn’t want to know and be affected by who my parents were and what they felt. Like most husbands and wives, June and John Butler were for and against each other in a way that was confusing. One minute they could be laughing and showing affection, and the next yelling at each other. I see now that I used their turmoil to feel I was in a messy world. I thought I was showing my profound insight in thinking, at age 12, “Adults really don’t know what they’re doing. I’m better than they are.”

This assumption of my superiority was contempt. Mr. Siegel explains: “Expression begins with our thoughts to ourselves.” We need to ask, Are our thoughts in behalf of respect for the world or contempt for it? Which of these our thoughts are for determines whether our expression is kind or hurtful.

My thoughts about my mother were not kind. I was competitive, wanting my father to like me more than he liked her. I saw myself as more “understanding” of him. She had a straightforward manner, which I saw as tactless and insensitive. My manner was more consoling and was really for the purpose of getting my way.

This attitude resulted in expression that was often mean. When I was with my mother, I’d come out with cool, insinuating insults, the main import of which was that I was more sensitive, refined, and intellectual than she was. Later I’d feel bad and even curse myself for my meanness. But I didn’t know what was running me.

My father, a criminal lawyer, often seemed to cross-examine his children at the dinner table. Though, as I said, I could console him when he seemed to feel bad, I also liked fighting with him, trying to outwit him. While he’d get angry with me for it, he also praised my ability to hold my own in an argument and said I should be a lawyer. I used that to think I was really somebody. I liked proving I was right and others were wrong. But this antagonistic kind of expression hurt me very much, and had me feel I couldn’t get close to people. I didn’t know it had to do with why, as I grew older, I often sat alone in my apartment, feeling miserable and unsure, with a glass of wine in my hand, thinking, “Where is my life going?”

In Aesthetic Realism consultations I met the understanding I was hoping for. When I wrote, as an assignment, an essay titled “My Ideal Man,” one requirement I included was that he had to be “a worthy opponent.” My consultants asked, “So you like to make your point?”

MB. Yes.

Consultants. Much intellectual banter is for the purpose of winning out. We want the best in you to win out….Do you base a lot of your importance on your ability in that field?

MB. Yes.

Consultants. When we like to prove our point, we’re either sincere or trying to prove we’re smarter. Are you sincere when you engage in these combats with people, or are you being clever?

MB. I’m being clever.

Consultants. But do you see this winning out as the height of intelligence?

MB. I have.

Consultants. Aesthetic Realism would disagree. It says the height of intelligence is a person’s ability to have good will. Any person who doesn’t have good will is not intelligent.

I love this consultation. Studying it gave my life a new direction and purpose. Eli Siegel defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful”; and central to good will is the desire to know. His showing that good will is the height of intelligence and the impelling thing in all true expression is new in the understanding of the human mind.

It means so much to me that, through what I learned, I changed about my mother. Important in that change was an assignment my consultants gave me: to write about one thing my mother experienced, for every 5 years of her life; and, if possible, to have a conversation with her about this. June Butler was very happy as I asked her questions about herself, and I was amazed and moved as I began to see the person I had robbed of fullness, robbed of her relation to the world. I was tremendously affected to hear her say she’d wanted to go to college and study world history, which she loved, but her mother had told her no because the family didn’t have enough money. And I saw more her care for my father as she described with feeling how she began to know him—as they sat in a coffee shop in downtown Cleveland when she was 20 and talked about their lives, including his being a widower with three young children.

In the years that followed, because of what I learned from Aesthetic Realism, my mother and I had many deep, important conversations. We became true friends.

Trouble about Words

As an English major and technical writer, I had studied words, but when I spoke it was often in an agitated, staccato, hesitant yet insistent way. This ill-at-ease manner of expression troubled me, and in an Aesthetic Realism class I said I wanted to understand it. Here is just a small part of the discussion:

Ellen Reiss. Do you think you have come to a peace with words as such?

MB. No. One of the things I do which I’m ashamed of is, I leave words out when I write something. I’m too jumpy.

ER. Does that show a like of words? A person is jumpy who doesn’t want to be had by anything. And people can come to dislike words because every word is a tribute to reality: every word says, with specificity, the outside world exists.

Studying this beautiful discussion, I saw that what Ms. Reiss said was true: my agitated manner came from a wrong notion—that the world wasn’t good enough for me to join with gracefully, including through words that stand for that world.

What Kind of Expression Is Love?

A woman can feel, as I once did, that her most powerful expression is having a big effect on a man and making sure he’s devoted to her. In an early consultation I said I’d been going out with a man (I’ll call him Richard Banks) for a year and a half, but had stopped seeing him because he would not “commit.” My consultants asked me questions about what a man might actually object to in me!

Consultants. Did you want to understand what Mr. Banks felt, or give him orders?

MB. Umm. I thought I wanted to understand.

Consultants. Did he have a suspicion that you were after making him over—adjusting him to suit yourself?

MB. Oh, yes!

Consultants. When a woman plans on changing a man, that’s what she’s doing. It means that you weren’t interested in who the man was.

MB. I see what you mean.

Consultants. Aesthetic Realism explains that the only way to truly have anything (including a man) is to know it.

I am eternally grateful to have learned that having the expression I hoped for, both in life and love, depended on my wanting to see and take in the meaning of things and people. That expression, which I so much desired, now includes my love for and marriage to Aesthetic Realism consultant Ernest DeFilippis. When I had the chance to know Ernest, unlike my way in the past, I wanted to see who he was. And I was swept by what I saw: a man who really wanted to like the world and showed in so many ways that he wanted me to like it!

Aesthetic Realism makes beautifully clear that real expression is the same as trying to be just. That is the most hopeful news for everyone!