Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the fifth and final installment of the lecture Hamlet and Questions, which Eli Siegel gave in 1976. In this work of magnificent literary criticism and human kindness, Mr. Siegel speaks about questions that are asked in various passages of poetry, including early lines of Hamlet. And in my commentaries I’ve written a little about the beauty of Aesthetic Realism itself in its asking of questions.

Now I’m going to quote and comment, some, on a question asked early in the history of Aesthetic Realism. It is the most important question for every individual person. Mr. Siegel asked it in The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict, a work that would become chapter 3 of his Self and World but which had first been published by itself in 1946. On its opening page, he describes in a question the “duality facing every human being…: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself?”

That question, in its beauty and dignity, is raging in people’s lives. Sometimes the raging is quiet, sometimes flaring. If asked, nearly everyone would say being fair to what’s not themselves is important. Some might even mean it a bit. But the world we don’t see as ourselves consists of people, facts, objects, history, knowledge, ideas, people again, people close to us and far away, people we see as different from ourselves. And even persons who have wanted to go after greater justice in various fields have rarely felt that being just was the same as one’s own glory, one’s own importance, one’s own being (as Mr. Siegel writes) entirely oneself. That is why a husband and wife, say, can quarrel in a way that makes them deeply confused and ashamed: because with all their affection, each doesn’t see being fair to the other as the same as being and protecting and expressing one’s own self.

There Is Art

Can that question Mr. Siegel presented eight decades ago be really answered? Can justice to the world-not-us and our own self-valuing be really the same reveled-in thing? Aesthetic Realism not only asks the question but answers it. The answer is in this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The biggest opposites for us are those in the question we’re looking at: care for self and justice to the outside world. Well, in The Aesthetic Method, Mr. Siegel explains that these are made one in art:

Take Whitman’s Song of Myself. Whitman yields himself to what he sees; to earth, to people; and he is proud doing so….In Whitman’s Song of Myself, a man becomes exultant through modesty, modest through exultation. The intense, wide, great fact sweeps Whitman truly; he yields and he has a feeling of deep independence and pride. [Self and World, p. 97]

Later in his teaching of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel would show—powerfully—that the cause of all injustice, all cruelty, is contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” Contempt, then, sneeringly and stupidly pits against each other those very opposites in the question we’ve been looking at: care for oneself and justice to the world. In order to oppose contempt, we need to see that authentic art is those opposites as inseparable: as thrillingly and logically one. “Take Beethoven…,” Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World:

When you hear the Emperor Concerto you feel that Beethoven is entirely himself, that he is giving his ego a grand time; but you also feel that Beethoven is standing for other people, for reality, for you and me. [P. 266]

Hilda Rawlins

Since the lecture we’ve been serializing is about questions, I’m going to quote a number of questions Mr. Siegel asks about one of the persons told of in The Aesthetic Method. She is the young woman Hilda Rawlins. Mr. Siegel describes in many ways the rift in her between having herself to herself glorifyingly, and wanting to meet other things and people and be affected by them. The way he writes of her has been loved by readers these many decades, and has made her an important character in world literature. So to illustrate further the beauty that can be in questions, I’ll quote a passage in which Mr. Siegel asks about Hilda Rawlins, who is so particular yet stands for all of us:

Hilda wanted to be Hilda and nothing less, or more; she also wanted to be popular, go out, experience things. She had never asked clearly: Is the Hilda that acts with people just the same Hilda that thinks to herself? Is the Hilda under her skin, so warm, so taking-care-of-herself, the same Hilda that laughs at another’s joke, pours tea for a strange young man, calls up a publisher on behalf of a good cause? She hadn’t asked, was it the same Hilda who allowed her hand to be held by Stan Hayes for fifteen minutes, as the Hilda who thought about Stan Hayes while she was lying in bed? She had never asked was Hilda’s Hilda the same as other people’s Hilda?

What America Is Looking For

There is certainly much more to say about the question by Mr. Siegel that I first quoted. But since this TRO is being published on the day before America’s Independence Day holiday, I say with much feeling: It should be seen as a national question, consciously asked, gladly and carefully thought about, across the nation. Each American would be asking (and I paraphrase): How am I to be entirely myself, and yet fair to that world I don’t see as myself, represented by fellow Americans, each as real as I am? That is the basis for America to be safe, proud, kind, and truly prosperous.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Questions Go On

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel has begun to speak about questions not overtly put but suggested: statements that make you feel a question is in them.

A person who can manage suggestion greatly—how well is still not seen—is Alfred Tennyson. Some of the most musical lines that ask some of the most beautiful questions are in songs from Tennyson’s The Princess, of 1847.

As soon as there is a resonance, there’s a meaning that goes beyond what you first hear—as with a good piano you hear something that is more than the first plunk of the note. There’s plunk-and-eternity in good music.

A poem that has made people feel something pleasurably mysterious is one of the songs in The Princess. And it has a melody, a definite melody:

The mingling of something clearly seen and something that you have to think about all the time is here. Tennyson is very good at that. He brings up questions through what he states. And there’s the meaning of tears: sometimes it’s very clear, but often there is so much to say about why they occurred.

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.” People can have tears simply thinking about life and its changes. And Tennyson expresses that well.

Tears, he says, “gather to the eyes” in “thinking of the days that are no more.” The human being is the one being who can think of the past. And it’s quite clear that the longer you live the more of a past you have.

“Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, / That brings our friends up from the underworld.” At that time—this is 1847—there was much expecting persons one knew who would be arriving on ships. There would be the seeing of a ship coming to port—knowing that someone might be there whom you want to see. (The “underworld,” here, is Australia.) “Sad as the last which reddens over one / That sinks with all we love below the verge.” About this time there would also be sighs for friends or relatives going to Australia, or America.

Then, something that has been in novels too: you wake up; it’s rather dark still; and then you hear the birds piping without the loudness they’re going to have a little later. “Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns / The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.” It’s good to think that even birds can be half awake.

A famous line in this poem is: “Dear as remembered kisses after death.” What are you going to do with that? The question arises: What does it mean? There are many lines like that in Tennyson, more perhaps than in any other writer, where the past and present are put together in a way bringing out the tearful power in both.

“Deep as first love, and wild with all regret, / O Death in Life, the days that are no more!” Every person, nearly, has felt something like what is in this poem. Tennyson is asking questions that all art is supposed to answer.

A Comparison

There is a very popular poem of his having to do with how the sea, as it goes toward the shore, mingles with one’s feelings:

This is sentimental as all get-out, and the question is: How poetic is it? For comparison, I’ll read the beginning of one of the more likable poems of Marianne Moore. In it, she too asks questions—questions about guilt and innocence—but the needed music is not there. However, it is seen as more modern than Tennyson. I’d say Tennyson is more modern than Marianne Moore. Being popular doesn’t destroy one’s modernity. This is the beginning of Marianne Moore’s “What Are Years?”:

Marianne Moore is saying that certain questions which can’t be answered—about innocence, guilt, the meaning of courage, the meaning of doubt, even as to death—can encourage one. But the way this is said is not art. It’s not poetry. I’m comparing this to the Tennyson poems, because when one sees poetry truly, one will get the difference between the cause of the Marianne Moore lines and the cause of Tennyson’s.

Structure, Feelings, & Music

Looking, then, at Tennyson: “Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!” As we know, people can spend hours looking at the waves coming in, and they feel they’ve spent their time well.

“And I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me.” —Which means, What are my feelings now, and how can I be just to them? That is a question everyone has. And an interest in literature can help one there.

“O, well for the fisherman’s boy, / That he shouts with his sister at play!” This is a little disparagement of the fisherman’s boy because he doesn’t seem to have the problems of Tennyson. “O, well for the sailor lad, / That he sings in his boat on the bay!” Even so, these are persons with thoughts.

“And the stately ships go on / To their haven under the hill.” They were here, and now they’re gone. —Then, these very famous lines, sentimental as anything; but anyone who’s not affected by them has something wrong with him or her: “But O for the touch of a vanished hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still!” As I’ve said, this is not the kind of poetry that is la dernière mode, but the dernière mode in poetry is less important than the poetry.

Technically, as to those two lines, there is the question of What is their structure? What structure makes for the emotion one can have from them? That is the great critical question. And something can be said. For instance, one can be pretty sure that the relation of the anapest and the iambic has something to do with the emotion.

“But Ó | for the tóuch | of a ván | ished hánd.” We have an iambic: “But Ó.” Then, “for the tóuch” is an unquestionable anapest. Then, “of a ván | ished hánd”: we have the anapest and then the iambic again. For some reason this combination of two syllables and three syllables (as they say in the American language) gets you. The next line is all anapest: “And the sóund | of a vóice | that is stíll.”

The question here is: Why have Tennyson’s poems made for feeling? I could read many more poems of Tennyson, because he is the master of asking a question even while he’s stating something, in a way that just leaves you quivering with meaning you haven’t seen wholly.

He, Too, Asked

In The Oxford Book of English Verse there’s a poem, not so good, of Shelley, called “The Question.” I had a debate: should I read any part of it? Since it is called “The Question,” and since it’s pretty good and ends with a question, “to whom?,” I shall read the last lines. Shelley has been describing flowers, and the last stanza is as follows:

That’s some question. So we look at this. It has, quite clearly, something to do with opposites. (It’s a little wordy too, I must say.)

Shelley says these flowers had the opposites: they had hues that mingled and also opposed each other. And because Shelley feels that the hues of these flowers make a one, and he wants his emotions to be a one, he’s thinking of someone to get this symbol of hope about himself. He felt: Well, these flowers are of varying colors; they are bright and not so bright, but they all make a one—maybe my mixed feelings can make a one. That is a very good desire.

How can I make sense of my life? Everybody asks that. And Shelley in his writing was very intense in asking that. He didn’t get a perfect answer. Here, for a while, he feels: These flowers give me the answer. But we have an example of difficulty and clearness in poetry. And when the two are one, we have the question ennobled.

About Anything

There are many places in poetry that questions are asked, and they are of many kinds, because you can ask a question about anything. Every study is made up of questions.