Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin, here, to serialize a lecture that is about humanity’s most eminent, treasured written works—and about the biggest matters in the daily life of everyone, things we worry about, hope about, are confused about. Eli Siegel gave this talk in 1972. Its title is A Poem Is in the World. And its basis is the principle on which Aesthetic Realism itself is based: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

For this first installment of a rich and vivid yet leisurely talk, I’ll mention some of the central matters the lecture has to do with.

1) Mr. Siegel speaks about those books that are “classics,” works felt over the centuries to be irreplaceable, and that are sometimes called “the great books.” Is each of these a oneness of the largeness of things and a single individual who is the author? Does a classic put together the opposites which are the world-as-size and a particular human self?

2) And is that world (present in an enduring work) itself a oneness of rest and motion, unity and multitudinousness, sameness and difference, the known and unknown, the expected and surprise—and other opposites?

3) Is every good poem like that too? Yes. The poem’s subject has been seen so truly by the person writing that we feel in the lines a oneness of reality’s opposites, become poetic music.

4) And is this what we want for ourselves, for our so personal, particular selves: to make a one of opposites that come from the world and are in poems and lasting books? Yes—because those opposites are intimately ours too, and often battle in us. I’ll mention some more: logic and emotion, pride and humility, fierceness and gentleness.

5) And is it necessary for us to see how other people have the world as structure, the opposites, in them? That is, do we need to see them aesthetically? Is it necessary for humanity’s decency and safety? Yes; and in a while I’ll comment some about why. But for now I’ll say that trying to see oneself and others aesthetically has with it the emotions and use of mind humanity longs for, and the absence of such seeing has with it danger and cruelty.

This Is Going On

There is an emergency going on in people all the time. It arises from an inner battle that Aesthetic Realism has explained. There is a fight within everyone between the desire to like the outside world, find large continuous meaning in it, and the desire to have contempt, to elevate oneself through the lessening of other things and people. We need to learn about this fight, and through Aesthetic Realism at last humanity can.

Unless we’re learning about what contempt is and how it works in us, we will succumb to contempt in various ways—including through seeing the world as dull, through taking the wonder out of it. We’ll see the world as lessening and insulting us, to give ourselves reason to punish it and people, who represent it. From contempt, Eli Siegel explained, has come all brutality—from snobbish coldness to wars. And that means wars of the past and wars of now.

One of the terrible mistakes people have made, both in their personal lives and internationally, is the following: Since I or persons I associate with myself have been treated unjustly, I shouldn’t be concerned about being unjust to others. I don’t have to think about what they may feel, what they deserve. Usually, of course, this feeling is unarticulated, even to oneself. But it is real. It has otherwise “nice” people be cruel, and go along with tremendous cruelty.

Mr. Siegel explained: “As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.” And here we come to what I earlier said I’d comment on a little: there is a burning need to see other people aesthetically. That is because aesthetics is the thing against all injustice. The real and lasting alternative to contempt is to see another person in keeping with art: to see the person as having the world itself, with its opposites, present in him or her.

We can begin with sameness and difference. There is a need, on every continent, for a person to ask about another: “She is different from me—but is she like me too?” So we’ll have someone we call Ms. A ask that about Ms. B, who is of another nation. Ms. A thinks:

She is different from me—but is she like me too? Does she have hopes as real as mine? (Oh, I haven’t wanted to think about them!) And can she be afraid—shakingly, sickeningly afraid, as I can be afraid? Oh, yes. (And maybe she’s even more afraid than I have been.)

Does she love music, as I do? She probably does, and maybe even likes to dance—but dancing is probably far from her mind now. Or maybe she remembers herself dancing and thinks “Am I the same person now that I was then?” (I’m moved and surprised as I think of that.)

And as I think of her life—I bet she’s been confused about love; and so have I.

I heard that Eli Siegel asked the question “What does a person deserve by being a person?” Well, this woman, Ms. B, by being a person, deserves at the very least, as I do, to have enough food, a safe home—and to be thought about as she truly is.

That was about sameness and difference from oneself. Then, there are all the opposites of the world in a person. And when you think of that person as being (for instance) a composition of lightness and burden, depth and surface, knowledge and feeling, humility and pride, gentleness and toughness, and other opposites—you may like or dislike aspects of the composition, but you are seeing something of the world in a person. And that much you feel respect for him or her, and cannot be cruel.

From an Essay

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel refers to his essay “Great Books; and the Kick.” It was published in 1962 in the journal Definition, then reprinted in TRO 821 in 1988. It is gracefully comic and deep as it deals with a matter about which there has been discomfort and also insincerity. I’ll quote some passages as a prelude to A Poem Is in the World:

Always people have wanted to read great books. Really, people would just as soon read great books as little books, or what is called “ephemeral literature.” The only trouble, and it is a big one, is that they don’t most often enjoy the great books….

That day will be the day when somebody will say, somebody who isn’t too special, “I’m reading Spinoza’s Ethics and can’t tear myself away from it. Poker, my friend, beckoned; a drive beckoned; a conversation with a favorite niece beckoned; but Spinoza and his Ethics won out. Boy, is this the life.”

…Great books will really be the great books when people talk of them with a glow of the eyes, a pleased quiver of the lip, and if need be, an enthusiastic stamp of the foot. In other words, they will show unmistakably they are getting a kick out of a great book.

Mr. Siegel’s own beautiful, constant, graceful, relishing love of books was present with him all the time. It was thrilling without limit, deep without limit, and made one feel at ease. He was, I believe, the person who most encouraged others to love books truly.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Poem Is in the World

By Eli Siegel

Today I’m speaking about the world and poetry in terms of what works of mind many people, and for a long time, seemed to say were important. They correspond to what have been called classics—or to what have been called, in a more academic way, the great books. When one sees what kind of book has affected people for a long time, one can see more whether a poem is a oneness of manyness and oneness, of general and specific, and is like the world itself.

That is: at various times in the history of the world, someone has written something and other people have felt this should remain. And if it is what is called a classic, it has remained. So we can, through these works, get a notion of something startling and intense and also lasting.

As I wrote some years ago in my essay “Great Books; and the Kick,” when persons talk about “the great books” there can often be pretense. It can be a matter of looking more authoritative than you really are and sounding more grandiloquent than your self can maintain. So, though I don’t admire it much, I’m using the Mortimer Adler work How to Read a Book, because in looking at it I said, This can be a starting point to have people empirically see what a poem is. And I was thankful for the book for that reason.

Authors & the World

There is the first passage I’ll read. It comes after Adler has asked his readers to imagine a school at which some of the noted writers of the centuries are teachers:

Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Shelley discussed the nature of poetry and the principles of literary criticism, with T.S. Eliot thrown in to boot. In economics, the lectures were by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Marshall. Boas discussed the human race and its races, Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey, the economic and political problems of American democracy….

That brings up one of the definitions of world. The world is that in which anything you can mention will find a place. In other words, the world is ready to welcome and receive anything. And everything comes from the world: here, people—semi-classic some of them. Aristotle (certainly a classic) was in the world, and is still there. The world is indefinitely miscellaneous—it’s the most confused thing ever. And one of my purposes is to show that the likeness of that is in a poem. A poem has structure and is also an infinite miscellany, insofar as it is a good poem; that is, a poem.

Sameness & Difference

So we have, at the start of the passage I just read, Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, Wordsworth, and Shelley. There is some sameness among these four. There’s that which brings them together, because Aristotle wrote a treatise on poetry in the 4th century BC; Sidney wrote a treatise on poetry, his “Defense of Poesy” (and a slightly different version, “An Apology for Poetry”) in the 16th century; Wordsworth wrote about poetry in his 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads; and Shelley wrote “A Defence of Poetry” in 1821. And they are very different.

Meanwhile, one can see in them the things that are in the world. Aristotle is methodical, orderly. He lately became an Athenian, so he’d better behave. He is not corybantic, like Aeschylus, and he writes about poetry as if he were constructing a house. He is architectural. Sir Philip Sidney in his essay is very angry—it’s thought that he was angry with Stephen Gosson, who attacked poetry and the theatre. Gosson said that players weren’t good citizens, that plays corrupted Elizabethan juveniles. And Sidney wrote the “Defense of Poesy” showing how holy poetry is. He’s not so strong on technique, not so much on prosody, but he makes poetry sound as if it were the meaning of all the churches and stars in the world.

Wordsworth is different. He brings together what he called the ordinary language of people, and precision. Also, there is something of the feeling that poetry is knowledge of the world. Shelley is even more intense. He thinks that poetry is a kind of truth that really will stir humanity and make one just to others and worthy of being a legislator—that poetry is the means of good legislation.

Adler continues: “[They] discussed the nature of poetry and the principles of literary criticism, with T.S. Eliot thrown in to boot.” As to T.S. Eliot’s writing about poetry: if I didn’t care so much for Aristotle I would say Eliot is like Aristotle insofar as he maintains his stolidity and doesn’t seem to get excited too much. But Eliot as a critic of poetry, I think is essentially valueless. I hate to say this. But he simply made what others had said a little less true, and made it seem more impressive. Except, that is, for one essay of his: “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where the past is presented as a living thing.

Meantime, are these people, mentioned by Adler, the world? Also, the approaches to poetry of Aristotle, Sidney, Wordsworth, Shelley, and T.S. Eliot—are they the world? They are. My purpose in this talk is to have one disencumber oneself of a weltering or a too glib notion of the world. That is necessary if one is to see poetry rightly.

Economics, Too

Adler goes on: “In economics, the lectures were by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx….” Adam Smith, being of the 18th century and wanting to affect people, maintained his writing-dignity—a certain largeness. He differs from Aristotle since in his prose he’s a little more resonant. He has the 18th–century grandeur. He is between Hume and Gibbon. Hume, in his prose, is a little more careful than Smith. And Gibbon goes all out in 18th-century and, shall I say, non-Byzantine splendor.

Ricardo is really excited, but he acts as if he were very methodical. There are passionate sentences in Ricardo. And when he writes about rent, you feel somebody’s on the move.

Then, Karl Marx: it’s hard to think that the great insurrectionist is included among the great books. But I haven’t seen a list of great books in which he wasn’t present.

Looking at some of the other people in the Adler passage I quoted: Franz Boas (1858-1942) is a leading anthropologist and the great opponent of exclusive ethnology—of the idea of race. His The Mind of Primitive Man is still a classic. Its subject is something Aristotle couldn’t well be interested in, though he had some notion there were people before. But as we think of the writers Adler mentions—what relation is there among them? Why did they stir people?

Thorstein Veblen is the comedian among sociologists or economists. Even his titles reek with verbal suspicion. The Theory of the Leisure Class—I think that’s mischievous. It’s kind of poetic. Then, The Higher Learning in America: it sounds respectable but isn’t so respectable, because Veblen has one feel the higher learning in America is always approached by and affected by such things as dividends.

What Adler has been saying is: Suppose all the persons who wrote notable or great books got together at the same college—wouldn’t you be interested in hearing what they had to say? The thing that would make them interesting is the thing that makes for a poem, because you’d have individuality and universe. Every poem is the universe seen particularly; that is, it is the utmost mingling of universal generality and individual specificity.

Do We Relate Things Accurately?

Adler compares—and it’s pretty strange—the coming to know the classics to playing tennis. He says:

As written about in books, the art of tennis consists of rules for making each of the various strokes, a discussion of how and when to use them, and a description of how to organize these parts into the general strategy of a successful game. The art of reading has to be written about in the same way.

I think this comparison is ill made. There is some relation between the art of reading and the art of playing tennis, but there is so much of a difference that the difference is more important. Central to tennis is the having to get the ball back to one’s opponent. In other words, tennis consists of back talk as motion. In reading, there is something a little like back talk: if we look at readers’ annotations in books we see someone has written “absurd,” “fool,” “not so at all,” “ill-stated,” “unfounded.” There are all kinds of remarks. And you can go as far as you like, nearly, because there is no talking back at you, unless you meet the author and he or she also has met your notes. But tennis has this riposte. And the idea of riposte is a very big thing.

Another unfortunate comparison is between learning about music and learning how to read a book. Adler describes telling a person:

There are rules for each of the different steps you must take to complete the reading of a whole book.

…The young man was a musician. I asked him whether most people, who can hear the sounds, know how to listen to a symphony. His reply was, of course not.

As I said, I don’t think this comparison is fortunate either, because—without knowledge-chauvinism or emotional-chauvinism: the field of the book, in terms of the material it deals with, is wider, so much wider, than that of music. A music critic can indefinitely write about music, but a composer cannot indefinitely compose sonatas or concertos about music critics—which means that words can go deeper into objectivity.* That is, you can use words about anything that may go on in or have to do with music or any other art. You can write essays on those people who have written music on something literary. You can immediately write, if you wish, about spoons thrown outside in the garbage can, but it would be hard to get to a sonata on the subject.

Objectivity has gone deeper with words. And this means a very great deal.