Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is the conclusion of the 1973 lecture that we’ve been serializing: These Speak of Poetry, by the greatest of literary critics, Eli Siegel. He is describing what no other critic has seen clearly: that which distinguishes an authentic poem from something not that. And lest you think this is an esoteric subject—I’m ever so happy to assure you that the Aesthetic Realism way of seeing poetry is also about every person’s daily life, pulsating hope, worries, angers, desires, confusion, pleasures, discontents. The basis is this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Every Good Poem Has This
Every good poem, Aesthetic Realism shows, is justice become music. The poem’s writer has seen his or her subject with such point and depth and scope that the structure of the world itself has been gotten to in it. This structure is the oneness of such opposites as activity and calm, weight and lightness, assertion and yielding, separation and junction, control and freedom. And we hear that structure in the way the words are present—and meet—and do things to each other—in the poem’s lines. In every good poem there are three aspects of justice, inseparable from each other. There is the writer’s justice to the subject dealt with. There is the justice to his or her own feeling. And there is justice to reality itself, for the writer has reached, felt, honored, made hearable reality’s structure.
This matters—personally, to every one of us. It matters for several reasons. But the central reason is this: People mainly don’t think that the world, if it’s looked on accurately, is likable; they think it’s pretty much a displeasing territory, with perhaps some pleasing oases. Therefore they feel that so much of the world is something they should keep away from, or beat out, fool, hide from, cajole, conquer. Authentic poetry gives the needed lie to that view. For a good poem embodies the fact that when a person is deeply and widely honest with words, the world is there—and it’s not only present but shows itself to be musical. The music may even make a one of the joltingness and soothingness of things, the disorder and structure of things—as in the Gerard Manley Hopkins line “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)”
So we need to know what is real poetry and what isn’t: what is justice-become-music and what isn’t. We need to learn about this not only to see poetry truly, but to see what justice to anything really means.
The Known and Unknown
In the lecture we’ve been serializing, Mr. Siegel uses as text the 1936 edition of Louis Untermeyer’s anthology Modern American Poetry. Throughout the talk, he has spoken richly of various poems and lines, and now he concludes by commenting somewhat more concisely on a number of others. And throughout, he has been showing that great thing, what music in poetry is—the heard oneness of reality’s opposites. In this lecture he accents particularly the known and the unknown: the fact that in a good poem we hear, through words we recognize, the mystery that is also in things; we hear something immediate, solid—but also a boundlessness.
A Note about Two Poets
In this final section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel reads a poem of William Carlos Williams. It is included in the part of the anthology we’ve come to, and he describes its meaning concisely, yet with a deep clarity. And here I will simply say: there has been no more important knowing-each-other between two people of literature than that between William Carlos Williams and Eli Siegel. Anyone who has not already done so should read The Williams-Siegel Documentary, which it was my honor to co-edit with Martha Baird, and which was published by Definition Press.
It was William Carlos Williams who, in a letter of 1951, before the two men met, described Eli Siegel’s poetry this way:
He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists….[He] has outstripped the world of his time….The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new.
Also in that letter Williams describes the anger of various persons who were furious at Eli Siegel’s integrity and at how much they needed to learn from him:
The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the “authorities” whom I shall not dignify by naming.
And it was on March 5, 1952 that Eli Siegel gave, in an Aesthetic Realism class, his lecture Williams’ Poetry Looked At: A Critical Poem. Williams was present in that class. And Mr. Siegel spoke definitively, so widely, deeply, sometimes humorously, so comprehendingly that when he concluded Williams rose and said, “I am astonished. I value your words….It’s as if everything I’ve ever done has been for you….You have a lovely large way of putting things….And I respect it, and I value it.”
I tell of this as a note to Mr. Siegel’s comment on a poem of Williams in the talk we’re now serializing. The history I’ve described just a little has certainly much more in it than I’ve given here. That is presented with fullness in The Williams-Siegel Documentary, and America and humanity need to know it. —Of course, Mr. Siegel’s comment on a Williams poem in the lecture we’re serializing could stand on its own—but it seems I can’t bear to let it do so.
A Poem by Eli Siegel
The poems discussed in the final section of this lecture were written in the early 20th century, up to (apparently) the mid-1920s. So to celebrate the talk, I include here a quite early poem by Eli Siegel himself, which is of that time period. It was written in 1923, and has—as his poetry always did—the true poetic music. This is “Trees in Rain”:
The sky is grey with mist;
Dark in mist is the sky;
Much rain has fallen,
And this is why
The leaves of the trees drip
Slowly and sadly.
And now a girl walks;
Her feet crashing against the wet grass;
And she’s in grief.
Love, love again.
Now it pains her;
And there was a time
When bright it was
To her.
Mark, mark the grey
Of the sky.
Mark, mark the way
The wet green of the leaves
Seems strangely sad
Now after rain has fallen
And the sky is grey and dark.
Here, very much, there’s that music which makes the immediate and unknown one. Take the first line; there is a sound of width, reaching, wonder in those three iambics: “The ský is gréy with míst.” How wide (yet differently in their wideness) those words sky, grey, mist go. And yet the line is concise, is there.
There are the fifth and sixth lines: “The leaves of the trees drip / Slowly and sadly.” We feel the dripping that’s told of—yet we feel also the dignity of those trees, those leaves. And as we feel both, there is wonder.
The poem is published in Eli Siegel’s Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, with this note by the author: “Trees and girl are meant to be about the same thing.” He was seeing, as he wrote the poem, something that would be central to Aesthetic Realism: that everything in the world is related to everything else, and to reality in its fullness.
In “Trees in Rain” we hear too the dignity of this young woman, even as she’s sad. And dignity, while firm, always has a sense of the boundless with it. Eli Siegel would show in Aesthetic Realism: the fact that we’re related without limit to what’s not us is the thing that gives us dignity; and our dignity will increase the more we honor that fact.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education
What Does Poetic Music Mean?
By Eli Siegel
A person who affected many people with his column “The Conning Tower,” also with his statements in The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys, is Franklin P. Adams. His life is notable, and one of these days there will be the biography of a newspaperman and a person much interested in poetry and much interested in translating Horace. He did modern translations of Horace and they became fashionable. And he wrote a play with O. Henry. He may not be known now, but he represents—as Heywood Broun does in another fashion and as Frank Sullivan does—the humorist.
Untermeyer says of him:
Franklin Pierce Adams, better known…as F.P.A., was born in Chicago, Illinois, November 15, 1881. He…is the author of several volumes of a light verse that is unusually skillful….[They] reveal a spirit which is essentially one of mockery.
There is mockery in his work, but also other things.
These contain impudent—and faithful—paraphrases of Horace and Propertius, last-line twists…, and a healthy satire that runs sharply through the smooth lines.
So much more is there.
There are poems of Adams that are likable. But he tried to have a true feeling about poetry—as others have tried—and I don’t think he got to it. —This is called “The Rich Man”:
The rich man has his motor-car,
His country and his town estate.
He smokes a fifty-cent cigar
And jeers at Fate.
He frivols through the livelong day,
He knows not Poverty, her pinch.
His lot seems light, his heart seems gay;
He has a cinch.
Yet though my lamp burns low and dim,
Though I must slave for livelihood—
Think you that I would change with him?
You bet I would!
I have thought of talking somewhat lengthily on the work of F.P.A. because he is a technician in verse. There’s no doubt of it. In this anthology there’s a poem of his that in a sense reverses the trick ending. It’s “Those Two Boys”:
When Bill was a lad he was terribly bad.
He worried his parents a lot;
He’d lie and he’d swear and pull little girls’ hair;
His boyhood was naught but a blot.
At play and in school he would fracture each rule—
In mischief from autumn to spring;
And the villagers knew when to manhood he grew
He would never amount to a thing.
When Jim was a child he was not very wild;
He was known as a good little boy;
He was honest and bright and the teacher’s delight—
To his mother and father a joy.
All the neighbors were sure that his virtue’d endure,
That his life would be free of a spot;
They were certain that Jim had a great head on him
And that Jim would amount to a lot.
And Jim grew to manhood and honor and fame
And bears a good name;
While Bill is shut up in a dark prison cell—
You never can tell.
In other words, what you expected was true.
The Music Is There
Now, since it’s in the Untermeyer book and represents true music, I’ll read the poem of William Carlos Williams called “Dawn.”
This is a poem about stoppage, impediment, difficulty, and also release and making it. It’s about how, every day, the sun comes out of darkness and gets to being the sun as we know it. The mechanical is here too. The music is slow, it’s held back, but it’s there. (Some words can be questioned.) —This is “Dawn”:
Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,—runs free at last
out into the open—! lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
songs cease.
Of course, I could say much more about Williams. I have. But this lecture has to be infuriatingly selective.
And Sara Teasdale
There is Sara Teasdale, who, although she seemed to be such a lyricist, had a false kind of “belief” in herself that I think weakened her deeply. Her best poem (I’ve said this before) is “Night Song at Amalfi.” It is included in this anthology:
I asked the heaven of stars
What I should give my love—
It answered me with silence,
Silence above.
I asked the darkened sea
Down where the fishermen go—
It answered me with silence,
Silence below.
Oh, I could give him weeping,
Or I could give him song—
But how can I give silence
My whole life long?
Those last two lines have the rhythm of “Casey Jones”: “You’ve got another daddy / On the Salt Lake line.”
In time, Sara Teasdale gave up love. Vachel Lindsay was interested in her, and there was pain then. But just having pain doesn’t make you poetic. That’s one of the morals of the history of both pain and love in relation to poetry.
“Night Song at Amalfi” is the one authentic poem, as far as I know, that Sara Teasdale has written. Untermeyer also includes a poem of hers called “The Solitary.” It doesn’t have the music that poetry requires. This is the last stanza (the “them” referred to in it are men):
Let them think I love them more than I do,
Let them think I care, though I go alone,
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me,
Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone?
In Every Good Poem
In every good poem, there is a desire to see the thing thought about—the object—as having a center, as being as concise as anything, and there’s also a desire to give the expansion of it. It would be well to compare the lines of Frost and Robinson I questioned earlier to the poem I’ll read next. It’s by Carl Sandburg; I’ve discussed it before. It is truly musical—and there are others by him that are musical. It has a person placed in all space and time, on a train. This is the “Limited” of Sandburg:
I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”
It’s not that all poetic music has to be about something like this; because (for example) that phrase which is so different, “in that great gettin’ up morning,” is also grand. Poetic music can be with ever so many things said. It can honor the somber, and also honor the cheerful. There’s music with crash, and there’s music with groaning. But the large thing still is: what does music mean?
Music in poetry is a way of making the unknown something that is effective, even while it’s unknown. It makes the unknown be part of the party, present even while we cannot wholly describe it. Poetry, among other opposites, makes the unknown and known friendly.
Music is indispensable in poetry. It has been true for hundreds of years: if the music is not there, reality is not dealt with fairly. It is still true. We should distinguish poetry from something that isn’t. Otherwise, the way we see anything is somewhat perilous. Poetry is a way of being honest with everything you can think of, including yourself.