Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second part of a landmark lecture, The Poetic Trinity; or, Poetry—Whence, How, Whither?, which Eli Siegel gave in 1970. The title, he explained,

has to do with the fact that poetry comes from something, which is the whence; it has a way of showing itself, which is the how…; and it also has a purpose, which is the whither.

To comment on these, he uses essays by George Moir published first in the 7th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and then included in a book of 1839 titled Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric. In the part of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel reads passages about and from Homer’s Iliad—and discusses them in a way great and new after thousands of years.

Affected by events of our own time, I say this: The Iliad, it is well known, is about war—the most famous war in world literature. But what has not been known these millennia and is shown only by Aesthetic Realism, is that the answer to war is in it. The way of seeing which can have war not be—which can have justice be—is in every true work of art, and is certainly in authentic poetry.

“All beauty,” Aesthetic Realism shows, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” The biggest opposites for every human being—whether of the 7th century bce or now—are self and world. The largest need we have is to feel that the way to take care of our own self is to try to see justly what is not our self, what’s different from us. The fact that people have not felt this—and haven’t known they needed to—has made for everyday unkindness and massive cruelty.

Meanwhile, there has been literature, no instance of which has been more commented on than Homer’s Iliad. And it has been felt that Homer was powerfully just to his material. But that this justice is the same as the justice people need to go after having in our everyday lives—the same as the justice nations need to give—this has not been seen.

As Mr. Siegel discusses passages by Thomas Campbell that Moir includes in his essay, as Mr. Siegel discusses passages from the Iliad itself, and as he talks about characters in that work, we feel that great thing which is the artistic beauty arising from good will. We hear it, feel it, in Homer; somewhat in the Campbell statements; and so much in Eli Siegel’s own descriptions and understanding. Good will is the desire to be just to things and people, with the feeling that being just is the way to be oneself. This good will, which is in all art, is the thing that can end war.

Justice to People’s Feelings

Homer, as he wrote in his grand and immediate dactylic hexameter verses, was not psychological: that is, he did not write about the intricacies of people’s feelings, as, for instance, Henry James would. But his characters, as the millennia have attested, are alive. Eli Siegel, speaking of some of them here, has us feel their livingness, their bewilderment, their depth. I love the way he speaks about Helen, and has us feel her feeling. He meets the feeling that Homer saw in her, that Campbell comments on, and Mr. Siegel has this feeling come forth richly and delicately for us, enter us, in its particularity and largeness.

Then, there is the way Mr. Siegel speaks of Agamemnon. What he says of Agamemnon here is brief. But the way it has compassionate comprehension, also criticism (certainly), and humor—in sentences of nuance and exploration and vividness—makes it a wonderful thing in literary criticism.

The opponent in humanity to good will is contempt. Contempt is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” It is the feeling that the way to take care of myself, is to be superior to things and people not me: manage them, dismiss them, rob them of meaning. Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the source of every injustice. And it is THE cause of war.

The justice that art gives to things is the seeing that this object, happening, person has to do with the whole world. Though artists have not been conscious of doing so, they have felt in what they were dealing with the structure of reality itself: the oneness of such opposites as motion and rest, complexity and simplicity, surface and depth.

Let’s take an exceedingly concise instance from Homer, one of his famous epithets: “rosy-fingered dawn.” It is a beautiful phrase. We feel a singleness—mysterious, spreading—in that brief word dawn, but such manyness (of both sound and meaning) in “rosy-fingered.” The phrase in Greek has too that relation of unity and manyness. As Homer wrote it, it is, transliterated, “rhododaktulos Eos.” The dawn seems both large in quietude, and, with “rosy-fingered,” profoundly and sweetly busy. These are the world’s opposites, unity and manyness, quietude and busyness. And there are more opposites, felt as one, in that phrase, making it dear to the centuries.

This is about the alternative to cruelty. When we see that a person has to do with the whole world, we may be very critical of the person—but we won’t be cruel to that person.

Translations

Mr. Siegel speaks, some, here, about the various translations of Homer. And I have included, after the section of his lecture, a translation by Eli Siegel himself. It is of the first lines of Homer’s Odyssey. In his note to it in Hail, American Development, Mr. Siegel explains that he began with Pope’s translation—in tight couplets—but used free verse “to approach the effect of the Greek.” I think his translation is beautiful, and true to Homer.

Matthew Arnold, describing what he saw as central qualities of Homer and his music, wrote that Homer “is eminently plain and direct” and “eminently noble.” These are opposites. And nobility and directness are one in Eli Siegel’s translation—grandeur and a simplicity. There is in its sound a great richness, a sense that the depths of things are with us, even as there is immediacy and point.

It happens this TRO is being published on the day that is also the 45th anniversary of Eli Siegel’s death. I have written much about his death, and its cause. I am not doing so here. But this I say: all his life, and to the very end, he was, in Matthew Arnold’s words, eminently noble.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Looking at Homer

By Eli Siegel

George Moir is very sensible in quoting from Thomas Campbell, the author of “Hohenlinden,” when he talks about the Iliad. I cannot think of anywhere Campbell is better than when he deals with Homer. Campbell is eloquent, accurate, surprising, Homeric himself.

Moir quotes Campbell on the death of Hector, and Hector’s relation to Helen—which is one of the big things in classical thought. It is well to think of two kinds of life, two kinds of reality: the life of Hector and the life of Helen; with Hector doubtful of his brother Paris, and certainly ready to question Helen, but understanding in a way that is good to see. This is Campbell, quoted by Moir:

In delineating Hector by the eulogies of his weeping country and friends, the climax is exquisitely perfected by Helen. All others who had bewailed him, she says, were bound to him by reciprocal ties; but hers was the grief of gratitude for the undeserved and gratuitous kindness of his mighty heart. He had interposed when others had reproached her; he had soothed her when her tears flowed at their reproaches.

There have been presentations of the Trojan women, the women who, like Hecuba, were saddened by the war of Troy and Greece. And we can get some of the feeling. Here is this woman who—because Paris was so taken by her—was the means of having a war that affected the city of Troy, the land of Troy, so much. Helen could hardly expect to be popular. She walked the streets of Troy, and people would say, “There’s the girl that denied us peace. There’s the girl that made for so many deaths.” To have Hector understand Helen and not just be objurgatory to her—that is something. And this is what Campbell is saying. There are still new things to be said about Helen of Troy. All the things of mind’s employ / Haven’t yet been used about Helen of Troy.

Then Moir, quoting Campbell, deals with a strange person, Sarpedon. There are quite a few strange persons in Homer. The Odyssey is made up of people you usually don’t meet—you had to go wandering around the known world of that time to meet them. How well Sarpedon knew that Jupiter, or Jove, was his father is a question. But he is on the side of Troy; and when Patroclus, taking the place of Achilles for a while, fights the Trojans, among the persons who die that day is Sarpedon. Moir quotes Campbell as saying: “Sarpedon, bleeding in warfare not his own, spends his last generous breath in exhorting the brave to rally the battle.”

The passage he refers to is there in Homer, and in any translation it’s effective. I hope to talk more closely about the translations of Homer. Matthew Arnold began, nearly, his poetic criticism by comparing various English translations of Homer. The Lang, Leaf, and Myers is a famous prose translation. As to the many in verse, there are translations in blank verse, there are translations in the original hexameter; and of course there are translations in other languages. But the translation that for many, many years was the most popular—and it’s regaining some of its popularity—is Pope’s translation.

There are a few statements about books that have remained. One is by Bentley, the Greek scholar, who saw the translation of Homer by Pope that was doing so well in England in that handsome edition. Bentley, after reading the translation, said, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” That’s a very famous statement. And Pope’s translation is not Homer. But in it you get an idea of what Homer was dealing with.

We’ll hear the iambic pentameter couplet of Alexander Pope, who fared better with it on the whole than anybody else in history. Pope wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it hadn’t been for the iambic pentameter couplet. He was made by it. And he used it to deal with a metre that is quite different, because the Greek hexameter is not the iambic pentameter. The Greek hexameter, with its dactyls and spondees and six feet, wandering like an uncertain but determined procession of people, is not the couplet of Alexander Pope. Still, there’s an effect in the Pope translation—from which Moir is quoting.

The Gods Disagree

There’s the passage that comes as Patroclus and Sarpedon have been fighting and Jove sees that Sarpedon has been defeated and is going to die unless he, Jove, does something about it. The gods had a temptation: they seem to have been watching intently what was going on on the plains of Troy, and when something occurred—would they let it go on or not? Juno and her husband, Jove, disagreed. Jove had some Troy tendencies. He was oriented Troy-wise, while Juno didn’t care. Also, there was his daughter Minerva—she was for the Greeks.

So, Sarpedon has been fighting Patroclus, and Jove is saddened by the fact that a person he sees as his son is now being smitten to death on the plains of Troy. He wants to save Sarpedon, and his wife dissuades him. This is the couplet of Pope in the 16th book of the Iliad, used about Jove and Juno’s watching what’s happening:

Juno’s eyes are very notable. They were large, and they had a way of affecting you. Occasionally Homer says they’re radiant, and occasionally he’s a little more severe.

Those last six lines show that the couplet could do something that Chapman can’t do; that Bryant, translator in blank verse, and Lord Derby, whose translation I used when I talked of Homer some years ago, don’t do; which Cowper doesn’t have, Ogilby doesn’t have. The couplet occasionally is used in that sweet, lingering, comprehensive, mysterious, and final way. The eternity of poppies is in those couplets. And some of that is here, even as Juno talks. Juno is hardly ever more melodious than she is here.

Every translation occasionally does something that another translation doesn’t. Sometimes prose is the one way of translating Homer. Sometimes it’s not the one way.

There Is Agamemnon

The difficulties of Agamemnon, the way he has to change his mind, the way he has to ask that Achilles join him, the way he tries to make up to Achilles, show Agamemnon as one of the most perturbed of people. Also, he’s never clear about any of his daughters—or his son either, Orestes. How such a person, with such varying attitudes, came to be leader of the Greek armies, is of the mysteries of epics. But you feel that he is. He must have had something. And he suffers a great deal. He’s not been wholly described. We have the difficulties of his children Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia, and certainly of his wife, Clytemnestra. This is a description of Agamemnon by Campbell:

Alternately presumptuous and despondent, he is the readiest to tax others with deficient courage, and the first himself to despair under public reverses. He is also unmerciful in victory.

He does seem to represent human nature, abundantly.

Priam Is Here Too

Another passage of Campbell, and it’s very good writing. He’s dealing with Priam, after his son Hector is killed:

When the wail of the Trojans bursts from their walls, at the sight of Hector dragged in triumph by his conqueror, when the frantic father implores his friends to let him go forth and implore the pity of the destroyer, the struggle of his people to detain him, and the voice of his instinctive agony, surpass almost everything in the pathos of poetry, and affect us more like an event passing before our eyes, than a scene of fictitious calamity. Never was the contrast of weakness and strength more fearful, than when he throws himself at the feet of Achilles….Yet, hallowed by paternal sorrow, age and weakness prevail. The old man accomplishes his point, and the terrific victor condescends to the delicacy of even veiling Hector’s corpse from his view.

There is a great deal of feeling there. And when you have the Greek hexameter at its best and are dealing with feelings that are deep, simple, everlasting, and immediate—well, it is an Effect. The sense of loss is very much in Priam, and also the sense of dignity.

The book I’m reading from is of 1839, but no matter what else happens in the colleges of America and the world, the Homeric narrative will be looked at closely.

Towards Homer: Free Verse,
Beginning with the First Lines of
Pope’s Translation of the Odyssey

By Eli Siegel