Dear Unknown Friends:

For the people of America and the world, who, during this time of pandemic, long to have emotions they like and thoughts that make them proud—we reprint here six poems by Eli Siegel.

I learned this from Aesthetic Realism, and there’s no knowledge more precious to me: all true poetry embodies a way of seeing the world that we want to have. That is because in a good poem, not only the immediate subject but the world itself is seen justly. “Poetry,” wrote Eli Siegel, “…is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” And in a poem, a result of this true seeing of reality is poetic music: we hear—as word meets word—reality’s tumult and calm as one, its lightness and weight, surprise and continuity, mystery and clearness, difference and sameness, as one. Whatever the subject, a true poem is showing us—is having us hear—that the world has value, meaning, a structure we can like.

We need, at any time, to see that the world has this meaning, this beautiful structure. We need, desperately, to see it now. We need to feel that amid the present fearsomeness, there is something which is the world in its fullness—a world that is not the same as an epidemic, though it can contain one, as it also contains flowers and great paintings and acts of courage.

Every good poem, then, has a way of seeing we need. But the particular poems by Eli Siegel that I’ve chosen present this needed way of seeing with a certain clarity and richness.

1. “Put Zebras by the Mississippi”

The poems included here are from two collections by Eli Siegel: Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems (1957) and Hail, American Development (1968). In his Preface to the first of these books, Mr. Siegel writes:

Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality. [P. xi]

In everyday life, people suffer because they do not feel they’re in a world where things, in all their multitudinousness, are related, have really to do with each other—and with oneself. Relation is always about the opposites of likeness and difference, junction and apartness. People have felt, for instance, that their family was not related to their coworkers; that their thoughts alone were not related to ancient history, or a hill in Asia, or the thoughts of a person on the next block. They’ve felt that lounging under a tree in the country was not related to a busy city street. The seeing of things as unrelated has made people feel reality is incoherent and messy—and deeply apart from oneself. From that feeling can come an agitation, a sinking, an anger. And at the present time, with its fearsomeness, the sense that reality is incoherent and ugly can be intense. So here is a poem in which Eli Siegel writes about what we so much need to see: the relatedness of things.

This poem of 1926 is wild, yet logical. It has a deep, ever so musical conviction. It has humor, and throbbing wonder as it is definite.

2. “O, Wounded Birds”

In the last two issues of TRO, published at this time of Covid-19, I quoted the following question asked by Eli Siegel:

Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness—one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?

Yes, it is true. And I wrote that a large way of using this pandemic to like the world, not despise it, is to see that what is good, what is beautiful, is just as real as the coronavirus and the ugliness and evil it represents. “O, Wounded Birds,” which Eli Siegel wrote in 1928, is about the relation of evil and good, pain and joy. In a note he says of the poem:

…Rustling of leaves in Ohio is placed with the sound of the battle of Pavia in the early sixteenth century. And a bird wounded at the time of the Pavia battle is placed with a bird of later, joyously singing. —Which is more on the side of reality, evil or good? On which side is time?

The music of this poem is tremendous. The music, like what is said, is tenderness at one with firmness. The wounded bird and the joyously singing bird seem to become one at the end—and we are within both of them.

3. “The Stars That Summer”

We are looking for steadiness in the world. We want it very much now. The next poem is about steadiness. And we should see that the poem is beautiful because its music is a oneness of the steady and the changing: each of its three lines has a different length, a different rhythm—yet they form a unity, with grandeur.

4. “Afternoon”

Now, a poem of 1952, which is, with humor and compassion, about contempt. Contempt is the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself,” and Aesthetic Realism has identified it as the most hurtful thing in every human being. Contempt has many forms, but in them all is a victory (usually unarticulated) in feeling that the world, with its things and people, is not good enough for oneself. The aspect of contempt described in this poem is immensely frequent: the feeling in a person (here called Mr. Bulwer) that he should put on a show among people, act ever so smooth, while he really keeps himself to himself, apart, and fools everybody. Eli Siegel saw that people pretended, hid themselves as a means of getting a contempt triumph—and he also saw that they didn’t like themselves for it.

I love this poem. And the reason I am including it now is that the current need for “social distancing” and for the wearing of masks in public has given an outward symbolic form to something people have used secretly for contempt. That is: year after year, like Mr. Bulwer, millions of people, while seemingly close to others and social, have kept their real thoughts apart and hidden even as they smiled and shook each other’s hands.

The present social distancing, mask-wearing, and staying at home, while necessary, are of course not wholly pleasing. Yet a person can have inaccurate and troubling emotions about these things, because they make outward something one has used for a clever inward victory: having a self just for oneself, apart from and superior to everything. The upshot is: we should use social distancing and masks to criticize this contempt in ourselves—to feel that any separating of ourselves and covering ourselves should be in order to respect the world and people more, not less.

In “Afternoon,” Eli Siegel says that there’s something in Mr. Bulwer, in us, deeper than the self we think we know. He writes of it this way in Self and World:

There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious.…When we are unfair to the world, it can be shown that something in us which is the world itself, doesn’t like it. [Pp. 55, 45]

In “Afternoon,” that idea is present in some of the most beautiful and kindly triumphant lines I know, including: “Yet there’s a mystery of a heart, / Connected irremediably with Mr. Bulwer.” Here is the poem:

5. “This Is Your Cup of Tea”

Here is a poem about something that seems domestic. The domestic is, from one point of view, more with people than it ever was, as we’re confined to our homes. And as large a question about relation as any is: are the things we see as cozy, the items and rooms people have used as a solace against the world—are these related to everything, everyone? Whether something on our kitchen table is seen by others via Zoom or isn’t—is that item just ours, or does it say something about the whole world? The answer is: the latter.

In this poem, Eli Siegel tells us how our cup of tea has in it the structure of reality as such: the oneness of opposites. It’s through the opposites that we’re connected to everything and everyone—they’re central to us all.

The poem itself, both musically and as statement, is a oneness of strict logic and warmth; playfulness and exactitude; particularity and bounding abiding relatedness.

6. “Spark”

Relation in this final poem is clear—and it is relation thirsted for. The poem has charm at one with people’s yearning. The last two lines reach and yet are firm; they are greatly musical. The poem shows that our need for our fellow human beings is organic and proud.

The Poems, Aesthetic Realism, & Eli Siegel

Reviewing Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems in the Saturday Review, Selden Rodman wrote that Eli Siegel’s poems “say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read.” In the New York Times review of Hail, American Development, Kenneth Rexroth wrote that all of Mr. Siegel’s poems have an “incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say.” And Rexroth continued: “It’s about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets.” These statements are correct.

Who Eli Siegel was, is in his poems. Aesthetic Realism, in its logic and kindness, continues them.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education