Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the 1974 lecture Truth & Beauty Have a Love Affair, by Eli Siegel. The title is somewhat jocular; the subject has to do richly with philosophy and art. Yet that subject, Mr. Siegel makes clear, is immediate for everyone. The reason is: truth has as competitor the feeling in people that the main thing is to make oneself important, comfortable, superior. Unless a person sees truth as beautiful, ever so attractive, lovable, the person will judge truth in terms of whether it seems to enhance him- or herself. If it doesn’t, there will be a desire to evade truth, extinguish it. Also, one will try to have others accept one’s “version” of truth, not what is so.

That has been occurring hideously on a massive scale at the highest reaches of American politics and governance. It has disgusted and frightened people, and should. Yet, seeing truth in terms of whether it makes oneself comfortable and important, resenting truth if it questions one’s superiority—this is something millions of people do in various ways every day.

So the need to see that truth and beauty are inseparable is not some pie-in-the-sky impractical notion. It’s an emergency. Otherwise, people won’t really care for truth. We won’t love truth unless we see it as beautiful.

To do so, we need to see what art is, as Aesthetic Realism explains art. In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel speaks about poetry, looks closely at the lines of particular poems, good and bad. He is showing that whenever art is art, whenever a poem is good, both beauty and truth are there—and indivisible.

The Question of Imagination

A matter that involves truth and beauty intensely is imagination. In the present section, Mr. Siegel speaks about the term imaginative truth. Is there such a thing? Aesthetic Realism shows that imagination not only has to do centrally with truth, it has to do with something all truth involves: ethics. People have wanted to be imaginative, but haven’t usually related imagination to justice for their fellow humans—to the unjust or just running of a nation; to cruelty or kindness.

Aesthetic Realism is great on the subject of imagination. It shows, as nothing else has, that there are two kinds of imagination—good and bad—and shows the difference between them. This principle is about imagination—as it is about everything else in the world: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Imagination always involves opposites—chiefly, self and world. In every instance of imagination, there is a self, a person, meeting some aspect of the world: the person looks at it, adds oneself to it in some way, changes it in some way. When imagination is good—whether in art or life—as you meet something in the world and use your thought upon it, you change it to show it truly. You change it not to show how brilliant you are or to have your way, but to be fair to its possibilities. That is imagination based on respect for the world.

The other imagination, the bad imagination, in both art and life, is based on contempt, which Mr. Siegel described as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Not wanting to see one’s material truly in any instance of art—wanting to use words or notes or paint to serve one’s ego, make oneself look good—is related to a politician’s changing the facts to aggrandize himself. A writer can see the material of a poem as a means of showing off, impressing, getting plaudits—and a person can see political office that way.

Some Forms of Bad Imagination

All lies are results and embodiments of bad imagination, including in politics. And all bad imagination is a lie in some way. Sometimes this lying imagination can be rather elaborate. For example, conspiracy theories are instances of imagination arising from contempt, and they appeal because contempt appeals.

Why do certain conspiracy theories attract a person we’ll call Craig? It’s because Craig hopes to see the world as ugly and inimical as a means of feeling he is better than the world, and therefore is Somebody. Craig wants to feel that various people, whom he sees as far inferior to him, are out to ruin the nation and his life; and he goes after liking himself through feeling he is too good for such a heinous world. Craig preens himself on feeling that he sees what millions of others don’t and is one of the few real patriots. Meanwhile, he’s not interested a bit in knowing, in finding out what is true.

Here I’ll say swiftly that a tremendous, horrific instance of bad imagination is the idea of “white supremacy.” This imagining, which has so brutalized people, came to be and was welcomed because of one thing alone: contempt, the desire to make oneself big by lessening what is different from oneself.

We won’t understand imagination, good or bad, beautiful or sleazy, in human life unless we see that it is the same subject as imagination in art. And in order to combat the bad imagination of contempt, we need to see that the alternative to it is in what art does.

Music in Poetry

There is no more important means than poetry for seeing the difference between good imagination and bad—and for seeing that truth and beauty are one. Eli Siegel is the critic who explained why. The reason is the central place in poetry of music, the music of words. Mr. Siegel showed that if the writer of a poem sees with large, wide, deep, vivid truthfulness the thing he or she is writing of, a sound comes to be—a sound that is a oneness of reality’s opposites. A line of poetry is a composition having in it the structure of reality itself: a oneness of motion and rest, point and width, freedom and order, surface and depth, surprise and continuity, and other opposites. This oneness of opposites is in the way words are used—and in the music they make for. Poetic music is a sign that a person, meeting the world, changing it, has respected it grandly and has (however wildly, perhaps) told the truth.

In the section published here, Mr. Siegel is looking at a poem that, he shows, is not truly poetic. It’s by Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982). Meanwhile—since the present section is separated here from the rest of the lecture—to help place what Mr. Siegel is showing I’ll comment a little on some lines that are on the same subject as the MacLeish poem, but are the real thing: they are beautiful, true; they arise from authentic imagination. They’re by an older contemporary of MacLeish, William Butler Yeats, born 27 years earlier.

These five lines from Yeats’s “Ephemera” are, like the MacLeish poem, about autumn. Yeats tells of two people who once seemed to care very much for each other, but now no longer do. About midway he says:

These lines should be looked at more closely than I can do now. But they are a oneness, a heard oneness, of wonder and ache, of vibrancy and fading. In the first of these lines, the relation of wide resonant circularity (“The woods were round them”) and delicate specificity (“and the yellow leaves”) is beautiful.

The simile in the second line is bold: the leaves “fell like faint meteors in the gloom.” But we believe it because the sound corresponds to the thing told of, with its activity and faintness, brightness and gloom. And it is clear that the third line has, as sound, the motion of the animal told of.

Yeats’s imagining, here, was true, and it was beautiful.

As we go now to a discussion by Eli Siegel, I say again: I saw in him year after year a person who loved truth all the time, no matter what the circumstances. His love for truth was the most humanly beautiful thing—which means too the most intellectual thing, and the kindest thing—I ever knew.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

What Is Imaginative Truth?

By Eli Siegel

Every poem presents the problem of truth and beauty. We find the problem a little in something Coleridge tells about in the beginning of Biographia Literaria. He describes how a teacher of his would object to things in the students’ poems, saying something like, What do you mean “nymphs”? You mean the milkmaid, don’t you? In other words: keep out mythology unless it adds to the truth of a thing.

Archibald MacLeish is a poet who is seen as a very careful workman. I have said for a long time that Mr. MacLeish is not adequately poetic. And whenever a poem is not adequately poetic, it’s because the truth and beauty possible in what the writer is dealing with have not come to be, are not present. So I look at a poem of Archibald MacLeish, “Immortal Autumn”:

Once, in talking about MacLeish’s Conquistador, I called him “the snowshoe poet”—by which I mean that no matter what he does with words, at least in poems, he acts as if he were going on snowshoes on the snow. —It’s very hard to say this poem is inaccurate, because it sounds so solemn it must be accurate.

“I speak this poem now with grave and level voice.” That is fairly true—MacLeish has a right to describe his own voice. But the question is whether a grave and level voice is the voice for the subject. The rival poem here is Keats’ “To Autumn,” which has some things in it that don’t go with “grave and level.” He has “gathering swallows twitter in the skies,” and some other notions. I think making autumn so level is a mistake. It’s not true to autumn. Autumn is a serious season, but autumn can be brisk. And after all, it is the season associated with the pumpkin.

Then MacLeish gets precious: “In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.” True, horns are wound in autumn. But using far-horn-winding as the adjective for fall is, I think, untrue. Every object has its truth, including weather. And every object wants to be dealt with as truly as possible and as beautifully as possible. Those are union demands of objects: as much beauty as is possible and as much truth as is possible. I say that, by the way, as a dogma—I attended too many union meetings of these things not to present it as a dogma.

What Kind of Sound Is in the Lines?

“I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds…” One should ask whether flower-barren is the best way to describe the fields. There are some flowers in autumn too; some things persist in growing. But to express the idea, it is just as well to say the fields without flowers. First of all, flower-barren makes for a kind of sound that’s a little bit like having too much lemon in your cold drink.

“… the clouds, the tall / Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.” To say that the branches are “unanswering,” I think is libelous. The branches do show that the wind is among them, in a conservative fashion. After all, if venetian blinds can show that the wind is doing something to them, why shouldn’t the branches? I wouldn’t use the adjective unanswering. The truth and beauty of poetry, like the truth and beauty of science, sometimes gets down to the millimeter. It is very fine, and occasionally it’s gigantic.

“I praise the fall: it is the human season.” Mr. MacLeish may prefer autumn, but all the seasons have a way of being human.

“No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth.” I think that is particularly objectionable: that “the foreign sun,” which can look so interesting at sunset or even at dawn, is seen as something that meddles. The dawn in every month is a little different. Also, “does meddle at our earth” is bad diction: meddling at our earth or with our earth?

“No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth.” That’s simply not true: the sun is very busy even later than autumn, on Christmas Day. And Donne has it in a poem about St. Lucy’s Day, which is late autumn, December 13.

But to say the sun meddles, while everybody looks for the sun occasionally in a nipping day of October—I think Charles Peirce* would object to that. I hope to quote Peirce some more, because he’s very important on the subject of poetry when you fully see what he’s getting at. That is, once you see, as Peirce did, that truth is something that has usefulness, it’s midway to seeing truth as beautiful.

Was He Trying to Be Exact?

Then MacLeish has “Enforce the green and thaw the frozen soil to birth.” The diction of that is questionable too: whether it’s summer, autumn, or spring, I object to enforcing the green.

“… and thaw the frozen soil to birth.” We have a bad collocation of syllables, with those ths. Then, “Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough.” That means that winter could get snow to the pine bough and weigh it with silence. But the language is indirect, and it is offensively baroque. It’s too stately. It’s like the Infanta of Velázquez when she’s in a sour mood.

“But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows…” That, also, is insulting. Crows are supposed to live a long time; and try to make a crow an outcast—just try it! They’re not outcasts. They know what’s good for them.

“The whispering year is gone.” That would be hard to prove. Peirce might say, What in the world do you mean, “the whispering year is gone”? When did it whisper most? When, just when? Why should it stop whispering now? MacLeish might answer that this is imagination. Then we have the great problem: is imagination also of truth? There is the phrase imaginative truth, which is why a novel about Hannibal can be more true than another novel about Hannibal, or a novel about St. Paul.

“Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone: / There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn.” The punctuation really gets you nervous. In reviewing Conquistador I said that MacLeish tries to get by as a poet through the cunning use of the colon. If you read Conquistador, you’ll find the colon all over the place.

“… the once secret dawn / Comes late by daylight.” One would think that dawn and the coming of daylight were quite synonymous. And when was the dawn so secret? Even in mid-winter in the north, the dawn shows itself a little.

“Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves…” When someone in the country burns leaves, I don’t think the word that person feels about himself or herself is mutinous. Sometimes people enjoy it. It’s rather sad to have to burn the leaves, but I don’t think the word is mutinous.

What Poetic Music Has

“Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves / And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow…” The music here doesn’t have space in it. Music is an affair of space and collision, or space and contact. And the contact here submerges the space.

“We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know…” Who is the “we”? And why should one be “alone”? Just because there are “no evening birds”?

“I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.” That is the most musical line. But it doesn’t have the statement quality of Keats’ line “But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.” That line from Keats’ Hyperion is about the best single line about autumn. But the vowel sounds in this line of MacLeish are good: “I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.”

The poem ends: “I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.” That last line is what I would call contrived vagueness.

So I don’t see this poem as sufficiently true, nor as sufficiently beautiful.