Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the third and final section of Poetry, Atmosphere & Neatness, a 1975 lecture by Eli Siegel that is a masterpiece of literary criticism. In this talk Mr. Siegel speaks centrally about the poet Keats. And, in doing so, he explains something every person is hoping—indeed, thirsting—to understand for the wellbeing of our own individual life. In the final section, Mr. Siegel discusses a little known, generally disregarded poem of Keats, “Calidore: A Fragment.” He shows what no other critic has: what it’s about and why it is very important. Its importance is an urgent matter for us now.

The Big Fight in Everyone

Aesthetic Realism explains that there is a fight going on within every person. It is the fight between our deepest desire, to like the world through knowing it, and our desire to have contempt. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

Like of the world is no flossy thing. Nor does it come from getting praise and feeling we’ve outclassed other people. To like the world is the same as the desire to know and the hope to value truly. It is a pleasure in seeing meaning, a pleasure in being able to respect authentically. It is the same as care for truth. It is, Aesthetic Realism shows, the same as full sanity. And, Aesthetic Realism explains, the one basis on which reality can be liked with fullness and staying power, is through seeing that the world has an aesthetic structure: that reality is a oneness of opposites, the very opposites we feel as one when we care for something in art—rest and motion (for instance), continuity and change, order and freedom. And there are the opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of in this talk: neatness and atmosphere.

Our desire for contempt, meanwhile, says: “The hell with finding value in things—to see value in the world, including in other people, lessens me! I’m big by despising—and by managing things, facts, people, to elevate myself.”

Through this lecture we see that the tremendous desire of John Keats (1795-1821) was to like the world honestly. For him, liking the world was the same as seeing beauty. And he was right. This lecture shows: we need to know how Keats saw, as a means of having our own desire to like the world win, and our contempt countered.

Every real artist has cared for beauty, gone after it, wanted to respect it—otherwise he or she would not have produced art. But no artist has been more vocally fervent on the subject, more outspoken about that fervency, than Keats. His life ended, through tuberculosis, when he was a little more than 25; and he wrote in a letter the year before:

“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.”

He is both remembered and immortal. And while he is sincere in saying he “lov’d the principle of beauty,” he would not have been able to say what that “principle of beauty” is. Eli Siegel is the critic who explained it: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Nor did Keats know what liking the world is. Yet, Mr. Siegel shows, he was going after both like of the world and love of beauty, passionately—and as the same thing.

There’s How the World Should Be Owned

There is the relation of liking the world to how the world should be owned—and by whom. Keats did not write explicitly about economic and social justice and how England was run, as Shelley did, and somewhat Byron did. Yet in his saying with a certain fullness and ardor that the world is to be cared for and beauty found in it, Keats was against the use of the world, human beings, and earth for financial profit.

The large matter in the life of John Keats was that the world should be seen beautifully. The big fight in America now is how this nation, as representing the world, should be seen, and used. Should what America is, and has, be for all citizens—to know, benefit from, get value from? Or should our nation be something for select people to get rich by, make profit from, see as owned and controlled by themselves and persons they consider to be like them?

Keats’s way of seeing the world was utterly opposed to the profit way. It was in keeping with what Eli Siegel described in the 1940s in these sentences from his Self and World: “We can own the world only by knowing it. We can possess the world only by having it in our minds; that is, by having knowledge of it.” And Mr. Siegel continued:

All other possession, both in love and economics, is false and hurtful….The world was meant to be known, to be felt, not to be parcelled out into huge segments or lesser segments for the complacent but deleterious delectation of some and the domination and manipulation of others. [Pp. 279-280]

The real purpose of real democracy—which includes economic democracy—is the same as the art purpose: for the world to be seen, used, and felt justly. Wrote Mr. Siegel:

All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs. In the same way as 10,000 persons can be listening to an exciting composition of music, each feeling that he is listening to it, while others are listening—so each person can see the wonder and delicacy and largeness of the universe as his, while knowing that other selves are apprehending pleasantly this universe. [P. 270]

That way of having our nation owned has been coming closer. And it’s because this is so, that there is a real, massive, and very dangerous campaign to kill democracy in America. The effort to stop people from voting and to make any election invalid if it doesn’t go how one wants; the unremitting spreading of stupendous lies—this is happening because the persons involved do not like the world and are not going after like of the world, but want to make sure the nation continues to be owned by themselves and their cronies.

There is a lovely statement by Keats in an 1817 letter: “If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” That stands for how we want to see everything, and certainly every person: You are different from me, but I want to see, feel, know who you are. This is the aesthetic way of seeing, and it should represent America.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

He Wanted to Like the World

By Eli Siegel

There is a poem of Keats that appeared in his first volume, the Poems of 1817. The poem is “Calidore.” And its rather funny first line has been made fun of: “Young Calidore is paddling o’er the lake.” The poem itself is all about the subject of the world as neat and atmospheric, or fixed and moving, or stating and hinting, or certain and vague. Reality is like that. Art is. We have Mondrian, who begins with definition, abstraction, and goes toward vagueness. And we have Corot, beginning with vagueness and getting to pattern. That is in all the arts. There is a difference between Schoenberg and Sibelius. Sibelius goes more for notes that seem to get into forests, and Schoenberg says, I can be neat, and there’s enough mystery already. There’s electronic music, which has brought neatness to a new state.

“Calidore” is a long poem. It has never been esteemed very much. But the thing to see is that in it Keats wants to like the world: first, through the fact that something is in motion—Calidore is in a boat; then through seeing what the land is like; then through hearing that horses are on the move, with ladies on some of them; then through finding someone friendly. There’s an attempt—which cannot be called desperate but can be called comprehensive—to like the world in many ways.

The poem is important. It has in it a desire to see beauty, without any limit, in a likable world. In the meantime, the poem is not just gush; there’s observation. While Keats was panting for a good world, he looked at things that were of his life and of where he was. At the beginning, there’s a relation to some of the effect in Cooper’s Deerslayer, of a person being alone on a lake:

“His healthful spirit eager and awake.” Keats is the writer who makes health and beauty pretty much akin. It is so in Endymion very early: beauty will keep us healthy—that’s what it comes to.

The first thing mentioned that affects Calidore is something large: “To feel the beauty of a silent eve.” That is in the field of atmosphere, vagueness. There have been descriptions of an Oklahoma noon, and a New Mexico one o’clock in the afternoon, and much glaring on the patios in Mexico City. That’s beautiful too, and that’s in the field of neatness. Noon is neat. Dawn is uncertain, atmospheric, and so is sunset. Keats is saying that the evening, with the sunset, is loath to leave the “happy world.”

He Sees This as Beautiful

Keats said, If you like something, show it physiologically: Calidore “smiles at the far clearness.”

“And turns for calmness to the pleasant green.” Green is a study in neatness and atmosphere. Everything that’s green has atmosphere, but green is also neat. All the colors are studies, in different ways, in neatness and atmosphere.

“Of easy slopes”: a slope is more in the field of atmosphere than a precipice or cliff. A cliff seems to state something, while a slope seems to meditate. Then, “and shadowy trees that lean”: shadow is the most atmospheric thing one can get to; leaning is different, and Keats was fond of leaning. Something that leans can be neat, but you feel also that if it were very neat it would be straight up.

Next, as Calidore looks at a swallow, we have the tumult that can be in the ornithological world. Sometimes birds do seem giddy: “Scarce can his clear and nimble eye-sight follow / The freaks, and dartings of the black-wing’d swallow.” That is so different from the nightingale, which Keats would later write about. But here, Calidore is seeing a swallow:

That last line has the utmost in atmosphere—where a thing becomes nothing. You can’t see a train vanish in the distance without being drenched by atmosphere, let alone see Charlie Chaplin vanishing in the distance.

Some lines later there is:

Everyone knows that a road that winds is more atmospheric than a road that goes straight. And any color that is light is in the field of atmosphere, even light brown. But light blue—that’s the most atmospheric.

Ethics & Beauty—Inseparable

Another thing important in Keats is that while he brings health to the idea of beauty, he also brings ethics. Calidore is seeing water lilies, leaves, trees:

The objects seem to say, Look at us—there’s something to see here! “These, gentle Calidore / Greeted, as he had known them long before.” He sees them as friends. One of the best things present in the world today is the increased interest in gardening and the feeling that plants can be friendly.

In another passage, Keats shows that he has read Scott; and we have another aspect of Romanticism, the ruin:

We have the fir trees dropping things upon the ground. It’s a way of saying that what’s in the tree, high, is at one with the ground. —I’m reading this poem because it is a gathering of things that can be liked, in terms of the history of English literature, the history of English poetry.

To have the cross with “wreaths of ivy” is again a mingling of neatness (the cross) and what’s not neat, or atmosphere (wreaths of ivy). And Keats is aware of color. He has the white dove coming from purple clouds.

Then, while Calidore is interested in these things, he’s also interested in humanity. So we have a trumpet telling him about humanity:

That is, he’ll be with people again. It seems there’s a castle near here. Of course the castles had warders; and the trumpet sounds because people and horses have been seen. “Friends very dear to him he soon will see”: that’s one of the most domestic lines, and it’s metrical.

Calidore is so busy getting to the people that he doesn’t hear the nightingale. And although he’s really given to white swans, he’s not going to look at them too long: “Nor minds he the white swans that dream so sweetly.” Keats likes the way the white swans dream, and anyone should. “His spirit flies before him so completely”: Calidore gives himself entirely; that’s what that means. No grudgingness.

The next two lines are a study in the straight line and the curve: “And now he turns a jutting point of land, / Whence may be seen the castle gloomy, and grand.” The “jutting” is neat, and “gloomy, and grand” is atmospheric.

There’s this about Calidore after he enters the castle. He’s so eager: “Anon he leaps along the oaken floors / Of halls and corridors.” It shows that an old building can have a little speed in it.

Affection & Friendship

Two ladies arrive, on horses, palfreys:

Whenever there is this kind of closeness, Keats seems to think the world is good. He writes of love that way.

And Calidore shows he cares for friendship, as he greets Sir Clerimond: “and forward gently bending, / Thank’d heaven that his joy was never ending.”

There is a knight (a “young warrior”) present—Sir Gondibert, wearing armor:

Keats’s desire to have gentleness be at one with strength is in the holding out of the mailed hand.

“Calidore” is in keeping with Keats’s Endymion, which begins: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” And reality doesn’t run out of things of beauty. This poem, “Calidore,” has in it the world as neat and the world as making for thought or atmosphere or suggestion. Keats, being a true poet, is very useful here. In the meantime, the presence of neatness and the atmospheric, or the definite and the indefinite, fully understood, is a sign that the world can be truly liked. I’ll say more, later, on the subject.