Dear Unknown Friends:

It is an honor to reprint here four quite early articles by Eli Siegel. The first three appeared in the Baltimore American in March 1925.

In February 1925 Eli Siegel, at age 22, won the celebrated Nation Poetry Prize for his great “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.” He immediately became famous. The Baltimore American (he grew up in Baltimore) invited him to write for that paper. I quote this description of Mr. Siegel then, given by Donald Kirkley 19 years later in an article in the Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore friends close to him at the time will testify to a certain integrity and steadfastness of purpose which distinguished Mr. Siegel….He refused to exploit a flood of publicity which was enough to float any man to financial comfort….He took a job as a newspaper columnist at a respectable salary, and quit it when he found that he would not be allowed to say what he wanted at all times.

Justice to People

The first Baltimore American article by Eli Siegel included here is about something that at the time was immensely and increasingly fashionable, with “scientists,” politicians, and the public as such: eugenics, the idea that genetically some persons and ethnicities are inevitably superior (or inferior) to others. Just last month (5-20-2019), a writer in Time magazine, commenting on a new book by Daniel Okrent, noted:

Politicians [of the ’20s] came to embrace the racist junk science of the eugenics movement in order to keep their country the way they wanted….Eugenics gave anti-immigration advocates a new veil of legitimacy.

In March 1925—not decades later but at the time it was widely acclaimed—we see Eli Siegel showing that eugenics is unscientific, lacks logic, is untrue. He does so with ease, kindness—and courage. Two years earlier, in his Modern Quarterly essay “The Equality of Man,” he had written that people

have not had an equal chance to be as actively powerful as they might be. And if they had been given an equal chance to use all the powers they had at birth, they would be equal….I wish very much to show the Equality of Man to be true. It is my business to go on showing it to be so.

He was faithful all his life to that statement.

A Hair Style—& Its Value

The second article we reprint is on a very different subject: “bobbed” hair. By 1925, short hair for women had become popular, though still looked on askance by many persons. Eli Siegel’s writing in this article has a lightness, but is serious too. He is the philosopher who was to explain what beauty is—all beauty, whether in a poem, a play, a leaf, or a style: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In this early article there is respect for beauty in the largest sense. And there is something he had always: respect, in the fullest sense, for women.

In the third article we see something of how Eli Siegel thought about, loved, and was fair to words—and to what beauty in words is.

The fourth article we reprint is of 1930. It is Eli Siegel’s review, in Poetry World, of Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poets. I love this review. Years later, he would describe a good critic as one who “makes a good thing look good, a bad thing look bad, and a middling thing look middling.” That is what he himself does. I love the vivid, deep, precise way in which he shows the strength of Amy Lowell, and her weakness. And—glowing, vibrant through the sentences, there is the fact that he is understanding the self of Amy Lowell. His sentences convey the depths of her, critically and compassionately, with beautiful prose style. The review, for all its brevity, was written by the greatest of literary critics.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Eugenist’s Beliefs Wrong, Says Siegel

By Eli Siegel

Albert E. Wiggam spoke yesterday at the Hippodrome on “What Saline Can Do to Us.” Mr. Wiggam is a eugenist and has the biological beliefs that eugenists usually have. He is now the best-known popularizer of these beliefs.

These beliefs, I think, aren’t much. The reason I think they aren’t much or—to use a more academic phrase—are not particularly valuable, is that they have not reality or truth with them.

Mr. Wiggam did not say just what eugenics is. He said, and most of us know, that it has to do with the marrying of the fit, and the bearing of children by the fit; and the marrying and bearing of children by the fit only. Biology was the thing talked very much of by Mr. Wiggam and so was science. The way that the speaker dealt with these, could make one imagine that biologists and scientists were all agreed about the biological and “scientific” statements that he made. They are not; they are pretty much in a fight about these statements, and also, even about what biology and science themselves are.

Mr. Wiggam spoke of scientists, and biologists particularly, as being the people whom the country needs most, and who can save it. At this very time the best-known novel is Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, and this book shows that scientists are not better humans than the rest of us; that they do their work not so much with truth as the thing to be gone after, but money, place, popular esteem. This is very much true. There is now a worship of “science” which is just as bad as the worship of politicians or aesthetics or economics, in the lesser sense of the word, or any other thing which deals or presumes to deal with the world as a whole, yet sees and uses only one way or part of it.

Mr. Wiggam said things that did not go well with each other. He declared as an instance that it was scientific, or eugenic, breeding that used the definite, incontestable facts of biology (whatever they are) which would give the world what he termed a good social order. He also said that such things as art, morals, education or culture could not do this. What Mr. Wiggam is trying to do is educate people to use eugenics; he does believe this much in education, a part of morals, too. And to go even further, when he talks of the “beautiful lives” that eugenics could bring about, eugenics has to do with art, too, in the very real sense of the word. What Mr. Wiggam is doing here is using words very confusedly and very hurtfully. The last thing that he is at this point is scientific—scientific where it means something.

The lecturer likewise talked of the uselessness of the unfit. What does it mean to be unfit? We need an answer to this question very much. Is one unfit if he is consumptive [tubercular]? Keats, a great poet and so a very useful man, was a consumptive. There have been men who have been sickly all through life, and men even who have been in insane asylums who yet were very useful beings. O, what says the eugenist here? He may talk of the “majority of cases”; the majority of men are not very intelligent now, yet that does not mean we should destroy man. If you carried out eugenist reasoning strictly, that’s what we should aim at doing, once you give him his “majority of cases” argument.

I dare say if eugenics was used a few hundred years ago people would have been called unfit who are the ancestors of some very important and esteemed people of today. All ancestors are “common people” if you go back far enough. The eugenists don’t go back far enough. At present they don’t see what environment really is. They give it too little meaning, and they use heredity, too, in a bad way. This may sound daring, but the truth is biologists fight among themselves as to what environment and heredity are.

I must say the biological beliefs that Mr. Wiggam has displease me. But that’s because they are untrue and because they are unscientific, if science means thought that goes along with reality. Mr. Wiggam again and again showed an imperfect knowledge of the world. He said at one time, we give charity to keep incompetents alive. There are some great writers who were allowed to live and write by charity.

Siegel Deplores Bobbed Hair Attack

By Eli Siegel

Some people can’t leave progress alone. Just at the time when that great aesthetic step forward of women, I mean hair-bobbing, had seemed to reach a victorious consummation, one more insidious attack is made on it, as bad as any of the attacks before. Some foes of progress say that hair-bobbing causes headaches, neuralgia and the like.

I had become satisfied that people had seen the wearing of short hair by feminine persons as a good thing. I had thought that prejudice and blindness to new beauty had ceased. It hasn’t. Bobbed hair is still attacked.

Of course we could expect what we got from hair net, hair pin and hair brush manufacturers, whose commercial interests are served by women’s wearing their hair in the old ungainly and improper manner. We might have been sure they would denounce, ridicule and try to stop the wonderful bobbed-hair movement of the world. Who are these people, though, who talk of bobbed hair causing headaches? Are they the same hair accessory makers? More than likely they are.

But, you see, they are changing their way of attack. Before we heard a good deal about “women’s crowning glory,” that terrible “burnt broom effect,” “the dewomanizing of the world’s loveliest object,” and so on. All this certainly is bunk; it just shows what these hair net manufacturers can do when they’re sore.

Where do they get their latest stuff? They say that just because a girl shaves the back of her neck she exposes her head in such a way she has a good chance of getting neuralgia. This not only insults women, but nature, for have men got headaches from getting a rather close haircut? Is the head of a human being so frail he can’t stand the weather if it isn’t covered with hair in places it needn’t be? Most certainly, no!

Hair-bobbing will stay. Beauty, truth and justice have won this time for good. There is more chance of women getting headaches from busying themselves in an awful fashion for hours getting long hair into shape and order. It is true, isn’t it, that headaches were common with women before the great bobbed-hair movement?

The forces of reaction won’t do away with bobbed hair. The forces of reaction are not that good. Most women look better with hair in the present fashion. The old days in the matter of feminine fashions in coiffure are the bad old days—most undoubtedly so.

I have seen some women who look good in long hair. Somehow they overcame the disadvantages that are in the having of hair that is rather fully grown. It takes a smart woman to look her best in long hair. But, I say again, such women exist. They really look as good as smart women in short hair.

I advocate bobbed hair. I resent all attacks on it. Bobbed hair was likable to me before even the most respectable bourgeois women got it. You know, don’t you, that some people say short tresses are an effect of Soviet propaganda? This much is true, though: stenographers in Moscow taking dictation from Soviet commissars, and New York East Side and Greenwich Village “intellectual” and “aesthetic” girls bobbed their hair before nice, average and good girls did it.

Bobbed hair is a big subject. I say once more, I’m for the present fashion in the wearing of the hair.

The Fall Guy [&]
Modern Slang…as Real Art

By Eli Siegel

The Fall Guy is a play which pleased people living in the City of New York very much when they saw it a few days ago. If one called it a hit he wouldn’t be wrong.

The Fall Guy has been called good art by critics who use the word carefully and with all the proper solemnity. But note the inelegance of the title; it is in language a professor would call—perhaps has called—“outrageously vernacular.” The Fall Guy you see is slang.

Slang has of late been making new conquests. It has been going into places it never went before, and has been liked and admired when it arrived. Slang, like trees and healthy children, has been growing and becoming more powerful.

One of the authors of The Fall Guy is James Gleason. He takes slang very seriously. He believes it has its artistic rights. He thinks that just because you know French, or Greek, or nice dictionary English, that fact doesn’t give you the right or the ability to use slang as it should be in a work of art. He feels that too many upstarts, trained in colleges, who never really have known slang in all its might and beauty, have misused it.

It has done wonderful things lately. There is The Fall Guy I’ve just been talking about. Then there was, and is, Is Zat So? which Gleason also partly wrote, and Is Zat So? every night fills the theater with pleased New Yorkers. It has been doing this for some months now.

Nor would What Price Glory? be doing the business it is if it wasn’t for the well-used slang in it. And this, too, shows that beauty and slang go well together.

For instance, the authors of The Fall Guy have written a new play called The Bimbo. I think the slang of the title is in ill taste. Slang deserves better. Bimbo is really ugly: it hasn’t vowels and consonants properly put together for the occasion. I say, if the authors can’t do better than this they ought to try regular English.

Some slang is thrillingly beautiful. Oh, for crying out loud is a master-work of the slang spirit. I have looked at this phrase metaphysically. Why does it go so well, I have asked, even if it doesn’t seem to mean a thing?

Well, Oh, for crying out loud has both ow and I sounds, together with words containing other kinds of meaning and sound harmony. Why, the phrase is full of perfect, rapturous rhythm. The meter is wonderful, the half-meaninglessness is wonderful, too….

She Changed Things

By Eli Siegel

Poetry and Poets. By Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin.

Among the various impulsions that decided the course of Amy Lowell’s life was the very common one of getting ahead. Amy Lowell was very ambitious, and was fiercely disposed to change things. She did. No one does more.

We may be sure she was very gentle somewhere. In Poetry and Poets there is an essay on “Poetry, Imagination and Education” which is as wistful and softly dreamy as a young lady in white looking at a slowly dying sun from a high hill. Here Miss Lowell, as a rapt and knowing teacher might, pleads for imagination in the schoolroom and the child’s book.

But one can’t make one’s personal mark on the history of the world without introducing a few spiritual novelties, shaking up a few things, and doing some select slamming and cutting. As to some choice hell-and-gone sarcasm, read Amy Lowell on Francis Brett Young in the essay “Weary Verse.”

Amy Lowell was so bent on having the world take notice of the Amy Lowell qualities, she never took the time to find out fully where she was. A runner bent on winning out and being applauded can’t study the landscape or the finer points of his racing soul so well.

So Amy Lowell never got very deep. She saw the world, in poetic forms, as something like one big colored fly shimmering madly in the sun. She was all for speed and color. There are also quiet, deep worries in slow rain.

As a critic, Amy Lowell is pretty good….On Emily Dickinson, for instance, she’s very good. She’s new to me, here; I mean she says things and shows things I hadn’t seen elsewhere. She is the very valuable introducer of bashful or ill-known beauties. In the essay on “Weary Verse” she is very funny. You have a good time reading it. Certain poets of the famous English countryside get laced good and proper. Meanwhile, there’s glee among the onlookers.

On Whitman she falls down. Her general essays on poetry don’t go beyond the window-dressing of the dear, old art. When she gets on imagination in education (as stated before) she is plain wistful. She is large-eyed and rapturous but she doesn’t cover the subject.

On E.A. Robinson, because she praises him as much as most people do, she seems to me to be in error. Edwin A. Robinson I see but as a very astute versifier who also knows philosophy. He has correct and impressive emotions and he knows how to attire them in verse stunningly. But the poetic stunningness is not present.

Poetry and Poets, then, is not epoch-making. Two things in it need to be read, though: the essay on “Imagination in Education” and the one on “Weary Verse.” When you put the heartfelt love for imagination of the first together with the fierceness and dagger-pokingness of the second, you have the woman who changed poetic things in America and rightly.