Dear Unknown Friends:

As a means of placing the 7th part of Eli Siegel’s lecture We Approach Poetry Variously, I’m very happy to affirm what I said earlier in our serialization: this 1972 talk is about something great, infinitely to-be-loved, needed by every person and all nations. It is about the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry. While there have been other important literary critics, Eli Siegel is the critic who showed definitively what poetry is—and why it matters vitally. The reason it matters is at the very basis of Aesthetic Realism—this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Specifically, the lecture is about the following, which Eli Siegel was the critic to see and show: the decisive thing, the thing distinguishing a true poem from something else, is poetic music. “The words in a poem,” he wrote, “are heard musically as they fall logically.” This music arises from the passionate justice with which the writer sees the immediate subject and the world itself, for which the subject stands. We hear in the poem’s lines the structure of that world; we hear (for instance) a oneness of excitement and calm, change and continuity, vividness and nuance, clearness and mystery.

Looking at Surprise

Mr. Siegel is using as text the book Sound and Sense, edited by Laurence Perrine. In this section he is speaking about something big in the world, fundamental in art, and confusing in people’s lives: surprise.

Certainly, people want surprise. They like to open presents and be surprised by what they receive. They give surprise parties for friends. They like films with surprise endings. Yet there has been a persistent feeling of emptiness or flatness because people largely do not find surprise in life as such, in their daily lives. Two phrases of our time express that dreary non-surprise at things. One is “Same old, same old.” The other is “Been there, done that.”

Meanwhile, one reason those phrases are popular is that in their rhythm they give a little briskness, a little bounce, to dullness. They almost satirize the feeling of non-surprise. They’re not art, but they have a slight hint, a sliver, of what art is.

Art shows that there is surprise in things people sum up or yawn at. It shows there is surprise in everything.

There are three big reasons why people do not feel the surprise of things as they go about their lives:

1) A huge interference with our feeling the surprise in reality is that which Aesthetic Realism identifies as the most hurtful thing in everyone: contempt, the “disposition…to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” To be surprised is to feel the world is having power over us—which means we’re not superior to it. So our contempt has us be against surprise. It has us feel we’re important if things outside us seem dull, not good enough to stir us.

2) The second interference is related to the first, but here the contempt is perhaps less active. People can feel they’re so beset that they don’t want to be surprised anymore. If we feel we’ve been much tossed around by things, we can go after being unperturbed, unruffled—unsurprised.

3) Then, there is this: People haven’t learned what it means to see the surprise in things, to see as an artist sees. That is one reason humanity needs Aesthetic Realism.

The surprise the artist finds—whether it’s Cézanne thinking of fruit, or Beethoven of sound, or Dickens of a London street—is the presence of the world itself in what one meets or thinks about. To see that reality’s agitation and calm are in an encounter between two apples; to find that a chord in music can simultaneously thrust and caress; to see that a London street is one street as it teems with manyness, is to see the surprise in things—and perhaps immortalize it.

They Haven’t Known

Meanwhile, artists themselves haven’t been able to have in their personal lives the surprise that is in their work. This is because they haven’t known what that surprise came from, and also what in them was against it. Let us take a person I care for very much, important as both poet and critic, Matthew Arnold (1822-88). In this TRO, you’ll see Mr. Siegel speaking of a noted poem of Arnold as representing true surprise.

Matthew Arnold wanted, in literature and life, the surprise that has largeness. He wanted in literature what he called “the grand style”: writing so sincere that the wonderful might of things would be felt, no matter how ordinary the subject. And he tried, passionately, eloquently, to make clear what that grandeur is. Yet about his own life, he wrote to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough in 1853, “I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.” He worried that he was becoming colder as life went on; he says so in, for instance, a poem called “Growing Old.” Clearly, to be cold is not to feel the surprise, the tingle, the fresh meaning of things.

Matthew Arnold is the critic who made this important and, to me, lovable statement—made it in his essay on Wordsworth: “Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.” Yet just how any good poem, whatever the subject, is a criticism of life, Arnold did not see. Eli Siegel is the critic who did. In outline: poetry is a criticism of life because every good poem does what we long to do; what we have been unable to do; perhaps what we’ve tried to evade doing—it makes opposites one, including the opposites that are a person’s particular self and justice to the outside world.

There are the famous concluding 9 lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Eli Siegel speaks of them here in relation to the lecture’s subject, surprise. But through his Aesthetic Realism we can see that those lines stand for the most important, critical fact in our lives. The lines are, seemingly, a quite utter condemnation of the world. But—they are musical! They show that if, even in stating a case against the world, a person has that poetic purpose to be fully just, the upshot will be Meaning, Beauty, reality’s opposites heard as one. Poetry is a criticism of life because it shows that full honesty—even in describing a dislike of reality—makes us feel and hear a world that has grandeur and is a friend.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Problem of Surprise

By Eli Siegel

Proceeding in this book, we get to a poem that is well known. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” was popular; but as I said earlier about a poem of Frost, I do not see it as having that crucial thing, music. Why music in a poem is equivalent to that which differentiates a wooden representation of a person from the person himself—that should be looked at. And what differentiates music from well-arranged syllables?

“Richard Cory” has surprise in it. And Perrine quotes the critic Yvor Winters as saying:

The poem builds up deliberately to a very cheap surprise ending; but all surprise endings are cheap in poetry, if not, indeed, elsewhere.

There can be a surprise ending that is not cheap, but this one, I think, deserves the adjective.

Here we come to the problem of surprise. To live has surprise deeply in it. There’s such a thing as general surprise. There’s also such a thing as particular surprise. All awareness has something of surprise in it. That is why when a person wakes, to say that he’s not surprised at all, no matter how often he’s done it, is wrong. If you have a nap of ten minutes and then wake, when you come out of it there is a little surprise.

The Robinson poem has surprise, but it’s surprise that is too trim. The purpose of perception is to make a one of the surprising and the continuous. The surprise in this poem is too factitious—as in, say, the worst stories of O. Henry: “I thought it was spaghetti. Instead, it was a copy of the Boston Traveler”—that kind of surprise. Well, “Richard Cory”:

This surprises, but it was not written by a poet. That verb “glittered” has been pointed to with praise—“and he glittered when he walked”—but I think it’s essentially false. And it’s hard for a person to glitter right after, or along with, saying “Good-morning.” Then there’s the phrase “fluttered pulses.”

There is the mix-up of relevant and irrelevant that occurs when music does not impel one. To be impelled by music in oneself is to take care of the relevant and the irrelevant, the surprising and the germane or continuous.

A Different Surprise

There is another poem that also has someone aloof, and it would be well to compare the music of the two. Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” which is also in this book, is not the greatest poem of Shelley, but there is in it a relevance of sound to what is said. And there’s a relevance therefore of each thing said to other things that are said, which we don’t have in the Robinson poem. Poetry can be described as a feeling of surprising relevance. This is “Ozymandias”:

The last line is bravura and has space and quiet in it. Nonetheless, it is honest: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” You have a feeling of energy—because wherever there’s much space, you have energy—and then, there’s a feeling of quiet. This poem should be compared to the “Richard Cory” poem. I think Ozymandias fared better as poetic subject than Richard Cory did.

So again, though Winters says “all surprise endings are cheap in poetry,” some are not cheap. Take the ending of Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”: “And yet God has not said a word!” That’s sort of surprising, but you feel it belongs there. If the surprise is in keeping with what else is said, and the source of what is said, the surprise can be right.

In Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” there’s a kind of surprise toward the end. Arnold changes: he says, This is going on—therefore, please value me, and I should value you. It’s a little surprising. It’s not the thing which is expected, but it’s an honest surprise. “Dover Beach” (which is one of the best-known campus poems) is included in this book. It begins:

All right. But the way the poem ends—“Ah, love, let us be true / To one another”—just because the sea is behaving this way! It’s a little unexpected, but one can see there is some relevance. These are the last lines:

The going from the sea to “let us be true / To one another,” and then the changing to “ignorant armies” on a plain, is surprising. But it is fitting.

General Surprise

We have the matter of general surprise, which is one of the largest things there are. How does art surprise? Art surprises, and then we feel we have seen this somehow before. The familiarity and the surprise can be looked for and found.

A poem in this book that has quietude in it as well as surprise is Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of the Morning,” which appeared in The Tatler in 1709. It is a study in the couplet in a way that Pope didn’t get to, because Pope wasn’t as observant of what can be called the unhandsome in this world as Swift was. This has some of the best usings of vowel and consonant with the couplet:

This is a study in the music of London realism, and the music is poetic. I’ll talk of some effects, and causes.

“Now hardly here and there an hackney-coach / Appearing, showed the ruddy morn’s approach.” Swift uses a sociological thing, the hackney-coach, to show the arrival of an astronomical thing (as, let’s say, somebody lets down the awning and this is a sign that morning is in a certain state—and business is ready to begin). A hackney-coach is a sign showing that morning is approaching.

Then we have the part that at one time used to be excised from this poem: “Now Betty from her master’s bed had flown, / And softly stole to discompose her own.” The second of those lines is like Keats’s “The murmurous haunts of flies on summer eves.” It’s a study in the voiced s and unvoiced s, as they’re called. The voiced s sounds like z. The line of Swift does have the unvoiced s three times, but the thing that makes it is the presence of the voiced s in “discompose” after “And softly stole to dis—.” There is something which used to be called (by silly people) magic: “And softly stole to discompose her own.”

We have this line of gyrations—it’s as good as any, almost as good as “Ezekiel saw the wheel”: “Now Moll had whirled her mop with dextrous airs.” She has to whirl it before she starts being busy: “Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.”

Then there is Brickdust Moll. She’s a character. We don’t know who she is, but she starts carrying on in the morning, apparently: “And Brickdust Moll had screamed through half the street.”

Musical Surprise in Things as They Are

Meanwhile, this is poetry. It’s one of the early examples of strict seeing of reality as poetry. There’s a foreshadowing of, say, George Crabbe and a good deal more—because there are poems that tell of things as they are, musically.

After Brickdust Moll we have quietness. These lines are about how rogues had an arrangement with turnkeys in jail: “The turnkey now his flock returning sees, / Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees.”

The poem ends with two quiet lines. The first makes something in London like pillars in the desert: “The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands.” They want to see if the fellow they’re after will go out, or try to come in, so he can be nabbed. Then: “And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.”

This poem is a study in music as a means of making reality mean more and, in a way, liked more.