Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second part of the great 1975 lecture Poetry, Atmosphere & Neatness, by Eli Siegel. Neatness and atmosphere are opposites. And they have other forms: for instance, the definite and the mysterious, firmness and nuance, exactitude and wonder, strictness and subtlety, fact and meaning. Whatever form they take, this central principle of Aesthetic Realism is true of them: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Every instance of good art makes atmosphere and neatness one—art of any time, place, style. Whatever it deals with—whether an apple painted by Cézanne, a battle described by Tolstoy, a chord felt and conveyed by Bach—art honors the definite reality of that thing and simultaneously its wonder, nuance, ever-continuing meaning. This way of seeing, Aesthetic Realism shows, is ethics too: we need to see that a person different from us is as definitely real, as firmly and categorically human as we are—and that he or she has feelings as mysterious, rich, subtle, continuously meaningful as our own.

The Opposites Misused

I ’ll comment a little here on how neatness and atmosphere, the definite and nuance, exactitude and subtlety, are present in what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most hurtful thing in the human self. That thing is contempt. Mr. Siegel described it as the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” And he showed that from contempt arises every injustice and cruelty.

In contempt there is the feeling, “I don’t have to be exact, clear, about anything. No matter how firm the truth, I can make it seem shadowy and even false. I’ll act as though what enhances me, what makes me comfortable and important, is the definite thing, clear thing, the salient, inexpungible thing. I can lie (to myself or others)—and make the lie appear oh so certain.”

Then there’s the matter of nuance. Contempt says, “I don’t have to see the nuances of anything—they interfere with my dealing with things and people however I please, in my mind or outwardly. But I can be vague when it suits me: if a clear truth is set before me, I can make it appear murky—make it even seem to evaporate!”

In America today there is an escalation of a false, vicious “definiteness.” It is being used to try to kill a true definiteness, which has been increasing. The true, kind definiteness is: Americans are seeing more, and more firmly, that this nation, including its wealth, should be owned by all its citizens. As that way of seeing has shown itself powerfully, including at the ballot box, the opponents of it have become increasingly brutal. Indeed, they’ve become increasingly fascistic—and fascism is a cruel, dishonest definiteness with no holds barred. This determined phony definiteness in America has taken the form of lying virulently and continuously, of encouraging racism to grow and be active, of engaging in an attempted coup d’état, of trying to stop any just instance of legislation, of trying to disenfranchise millions of people. All to have America belong, economically and ethnically, to only certain people. This effort to murder democracy is, really, a tribute to the power that the effort is opposing: the power of Americans demanding justice—a power so large that its opponents feel they must work more brutally than ever to undo it.

John Keats & Aesthetic Realism

Throughout the lecture we’re serializing, Eli Siegel speaks about the poet Keats. In the present section he quotes from critics who were very angry with Keats, and he does so in order to show something of the trouble people can have about neatness and atmosphere. Meanwhile, those critics stand for a certain fury that has been in history and culture because there was more for one to see. They considered themselves authorities, and now they were meeting, in Keats, something new and big, beyond their supposed “expertise.”

The critics who were scornful of Keats look both nasty and ridiculous now. I have felt, and said for many years, that they are a means of placing the anger Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism have met. Various persons have felt that Aesthetic Realism was an assault on their sense of supremacy because they had something so big to learn from it. Further, they’ve felt that in its description and explanation of contempt, something they based their personality on was being attacked. Further again, they’ve felt that the grand integrity of Aesthetic Realism and its founder was a showing up of them and their own dubious purposes.

For now I’ll say simply: Eli Siegel himself was great in his relation of definiteness and nuance, clearness and subtlety. Through a fullness of scholarship—lively, rich, vastly diverse, tender—he came to principles that are exact, about the relation of art and the human self. Yet these firm principles never “sum up”: they are fair to all the nuances of things, the delicate feelings of people, including bewilderment. And as he spoke to a person—to oneself—that is what one felt: that he was exact about oneself, saw one truly, as he honored one’s subtleties and brought to them longed-for light.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Reviewers & Keats

By Eli Siegel

In the second part of this talk, I deal some with how Keats himself was seen. The annoyance that Keats gave to the critics was his presentation of things that didn’t stay put. People wanted, in poetry, to feel they were seeing something definite—as they saw, more or less, in Alexander Pope. And at this time, in 1817 and 1818, they saw it in Wordsworth. Also, as Wordsworth’s plain style was coming to be seen as belonging to poetry, his poems were felt to be saying something. His “We Are Seven” doesn’t have some of the ornate verbal arabesques that Keats has.

So I’ll read from some criticism of Keats. The book I’m using is Contemporary Comments: Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century as They Appeared to Each Other, edited by E.H. Lacon Watson (London, 1931).

The Quarterly Review critics and the Blackwood’s Magazine critics were annoyed by the fact that in 1816 Leigh Hunt, in The Story of Rimini, had made the couplet, which was supposed to stay put, more fluid. That is, it became a little more atmospheric in its structure. And also, Hunt acted as if England weren’t right in her war with Napoleon. I’ll quote from the famous John Wilson Croker review of Keats in the April 1818 Quarterly Review. Keats’s Poems had appeared in 1817. Then Endymion appeared in 1818. Then there would be the 1820 Poems. Keats would die in 1821, and after his death other poems of his would be found. Croker is reviewing Endymion; it’s 1818.

Endymion is a hard poem to follow because you feel that, for Keats, as long as it’s beautiful let’s mention it. It’s as though a person is saying: a smile of a young woman is beautiful, and so is a cloud as it looks in the east, and so is a batter who knows how to bat and can hit one into the outfield where no one can get it; and also, when I feel that I got the right message, I think things are beautiful. You get the idea: you want to praise things, so you go from food to a cloud to a sweater to a smile to possibilities of Israel, and such things.

But in poetry, we have something fixed all the time. Poetry itself is a relationship of the fixed and the unexpected, the fixed and the unfixed.

Early in the review, Croker says that Keats doesn’t have any definite idea of what he’s going to say. And that’s in the field of the atmospheric:

He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the rhyme with which it concludes.

It’s a little like saying (using a person now present), Among the audience was Sidney Marris, / And Charlemagne was a hero in early Paris.

There is the beginning of Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Then, as Keats gets into the poem, it’s true that the rhymes are somewhat telling him where to go. Here, we have something fixed, neat, because rhymes are neat; yet we also have something rambling, because it’s said that Keats does not follow “the thought excited by [the] line.” Again, it’s a bit like: I have already talked of Cora Durfee. / The land outside Asbury Park is warm and surfy. Even in prose, to stick to the paragraph and not ramble is hard. There is prose that starts wandering, in which you write the last thought that came to your mind. —So this statement of Croker has to do with the problem of atmosphere and neatness.

Then he quotes a passage from Endymion, and I’ll read the last lines of it:

In the first of these lines we have sprinkling, which is quite definite, while the phrase musk-rose blooms is very atmospheric, wide. Then: “And such too is the grandeur of the dooms / We have imagined for the mighty dead.” That word dooms after musk-rose blooms does seem surprising. It’s a little bit like saying, One of the persons listening is Claire Maurice, / And the Argonauts went after the Golden Fleece. Croker is saying that Keats got to dooms because he had already written blooms. And a case could be made for that. If that were the worst thing Croker said! But what’s most important is, Croker doesn’t see the poetry—the fact that the lines he quotes, however rambling, have true music.

It’s a little like getting eight ballroom dresses from one messenger: it’s rather crowded, but luxuriously acceptable.

Then we have the tremendous insult. Croker writes:

If any one should be bold enough to purchase this “Poetic Romance,” and so much more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success.

“If any one should be bold enough to purchase this ‘Poetic Romance.’” Instead, it should be: If anyone were wise enough to purchase and hold on to it. There’s a specific situation Croker is talking of: the possible buying of this book in 1818. That’s specific. In the meantime, every year since 1818 has built up an atmosphere about that possible purchase and the book itself.

Keats as Seen by Blackwood’s

Then, there’s the criticism from Blackwood’s, August 1818, which is much more remembered. It is supposedly by John Gibson Lockhart, who, as reviewer, called himself Z. And his not wanting to say he wrote the review as the years went on, with Keats seeming to matter, I think helped to kill Lockhart. Meanwhile, he is important, with his biography of Scott, and with his translations of Spanish ballads.

There is the mingling of medicine and poetry in Keats’s life. Keats did study definitely in the field of medicine, and the reviewer for Blackwood’s was aware of it. This is specific:

His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town.

This sounds so specific. —And, I may mention, medicine was on its way at this time to finding the idea of the cell, which is one of the vaguest things and also the most definite. The vascular is as mysterious as Endymion. Vascular comes from the Latin word meaning a little vessel, which carries something.

Going on: Keats is called definitely crazy by this critic—in “a state of insanity.” Z, in the following sentence, refers to Keats’s book of the year before, Poems:

The phrenzy of the “Poems” was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable driveling idiocy of “Endymion.”

These lines are quoted by Lockhart, with their false rhyme: “Couldst thou wish for lineage higher / Than twin sister of Thalia?” There are some peculiar rhymes in Keats, as there are in Mrs. Browning.

And Keats is said to have an objectionable attitude to women. For instance, Lockhart, or Z, quotes these lines, which make Blackwood’s think Keats is some bounder:

This is from the conclusion of the Blackwood’s review:

We venture to make one small prophesy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture £50 upon any thing he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to “plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,” &c. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.

(Sangrado is the fake doctor in Lesage’s Gil Blas. Extenuatives are things that would loosen the system.) Meanwhile, there is some definition, something definite, when a person is told what to do.

They Speak Differently

Now, here is one of the few communications we have of Shelley to Keats:

Pisa, 27th July, 1820

I have lately read your “Endymion” again, and even with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, though treasures poured forth with indistinct profusion. This people in general will not endure, and that is the cause of the comparatively few copies which have been sold.

People felt, There are too many things talked about. It’s like various kinds of flowers, with the whole flower shop not well arranged.

Thomas De Quincey felt that Endymion, with its lusciousness and the great elaborateness of its sweetness and the multitudinousness of its caressing softness, could not have been written by the person who later wrote Hyperion. Softness, lusciousness, sweetness are in the field of atmosphere. De Quincey is talking of Hyperion after condemning Endymion:

The other [Hyperion] presents the majesty, the austere beauty, and the simplicity of a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture.

Hyperion is like that.

Then there is Charles Cowden Clarke saying why there was this fierceness as to Keats. And we have here the idea of association. Association can sometimes be another word for atmosphere. Guilt by association is guilt by sociological atmosphere. This is Cowden Clarke from his Recollections of Writers (1878). He is referring to Keats’s friendship with a person the critics disliked, Leigh Hunt:

Such an association was motive enough with the dictators of that day to thwart the endeavours of a young aspirant who should presume to assert for himself an unrestricted course of opinion.

Hunt and Keats are still being studied.

I’ll read something about Keats from Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. This is a sentence about Keats’s face:

Every feature was at once strongly cut, and delicately alive.

To have a face that’s alive is in the field of atmosphere. To have a face that’s delicately cut, a Norma Shearer face, as they used to say, is in the field of neatness.

Then Hunt says that the persons who met Keats’s writing wanted their ground to be well shaven, the lawns to be well kept, and Keats didn’t provide that. He could mingle flower with flower. This is one of the best sentences of Hunt; he’s talking of Endymion:

It was a wilderness of sweets, but it was truly a wilderness; a domain of young, luxuriant, uncompromising poetry, where the “weeds of glorious feature” hampered the petty legs accustomed to the lawns and trodden walks, in vogue for the last hundred years; lawns, as Johnson says, “shaven by the scythe, and levelled with the roller;” walks, which…have been re-consecrated…by the beadles of authority, instead of the Pans and Sylvans.

So landscapes have to do with atmosphere and neatness.

Many things could be said about how the life of Keats is in this field. He was a tremendous mingling of deep elaborateness and simplicity and great strength.