Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue of TRO we begin to serialize the 1975 lecture Poetry, Atmosphere & Neatness, by Eli Siegel. What it shows about literature and life is immensely important and thrilling. Aesthetic Realism explains that the only way we can authentically like the world, the one way that will hold up, is through seeing that the opposites that comprise the world are in an aesthetic relation: that they’re one, as they are in a good work of art. A principle of Aesthetic Realism is: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” That the world can be liked because of its aesthetic structure is not something one is going to see by looking skimmingly or grabbingly. Yet evidence for it abounds.

And we can ask (for instance): Is any instance of good music both orderly and free? In any good painting, does what’s on the surface bring to us a sense of depth, including depth of meaning? Is any good novel both motion and rest; as the narrative moves along does it also have us see things that remain, like the quality of each character? Then we can ask and keep asking: if the arts just mentioned do put opposites together are they lying about how those opposites are in the world? Are they providing an offset to how the opposites are in reality? Or are they expressing what’s true about the makeup of the world?

The Opposites in the Lecture’s Title

In the present talk, Mr. Siegel is speaking about the opposites of neatness and atmosphere. These correspond to other opposites including definiteness and mystery, nuance, subtlety. A world without nuance and mystery would be unbearable. A world in which nothing was firm or definite would also be unbearable. These opposites are in us too, though often awryly, not as one. Millions of people are ashamed because they feel they go from being indefinite or wavering, to asserting themselves forcefully in a way that sums things up.

These opposites also have to do with what a nation needs. There are things every person deserves, and they can be put definitely, even neatly: for instance, every citizen deserves to have sufficient food, housing, money, education, the ability to vote. But each person also deserves, from a nation, things that have to do with human subtlety and nuance: each person deserves to have his or her best possibilities brought forth.

There Is Keats

In this talk Mr. Siegel speaks of a writer whose works he discussed richly on many other occasions. Here, he speaks of John Keats in relation to atmosphere and neatness. The whole talk is tremendous as literary criticism. And in this first section, Mr. Siegel does something that swept me when I first heard it years ago. He explains what one of the most famous of English poems is truly about: Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The lady in the poem, the “belle dame,” has mainly been seen as cruel, like Circe, like a vampire or siren, out to weaken men. Mr. Siegel shows she is not that. He shows that the poem has to do with how we see beauty and the world in their largeness and that it also has within it why people who saw themselves as in love can come to quarrel and resent each other.

There are sentences in another work of Eli Siegel that have to do with what he is describing here. So I quote these musically rustling and firm sentences from his Preface to “The Ordinary Doom”:

To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth. It is the universe we want to skip.

A person as specific stands for the neat, finite, bounded. The person as having the universe in him or her, stands for the unbounded, mysterious, infinite, subtle. If we make a person ownable by us, ours, and don’t want to see that she or he has to do with everything, we are dooming ourselves as to love. Aesthetic Realism enables that not to happen.

I have looked at the work of Keats over many years, carefully enough to be able to express this opinion: I think he would be enormously grateful for how Eli Siegel understood him and his work. I think he would say something like what his fellow poet William Carlos Williams said in 1952 after hearing Mr. Siegel speak on his, Williams’, poetry: “It’s as if everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”*

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poetry, Atmosphere & Neatness

By Eli Siegel

What I’m talking about today, Poetry, Atmosphere & Neatness, is part of the only argument I know of that can justify the world, and have it seen as good, and make life seem sensible. The case for the world as good is in the meaning of poetry and in all the arts, which is the same thing as the meaning of reality when honestly seen by a person.

To say “atmosphere and neatness” is the same as saying a thing doesn’t end—it continues, makes for vagueness and suggestion—and also is very clear. It’s a little like a porcelain cup in twilight. The cup is flashing and smooth and polished, but it is surrounded by twilight and maybe it’s on a gray tablecloth. The relation of the flashing to what is vaguer is in all the arts. It’s in music, painting, drama. A statement without suggestion is not complete.

There have been some persons who represent the stating of something with the feeling that the mystery of the world is present. Every poet, every artist, has shown specificity with meaning, the certain and uncertain. But the person I shall emphasize today is John Keats—who, because he didn’t, as I see it, know the question he was trying to answer, was more for death than he might have been. So I’ll look at a poem of Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”:

A question is: does what is being said in this poem have something to do with the import of the last lines of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”? Those lines read:

The Meaning in Both

Roughly, in the Keats poem we are told to beware of a lady: there’s something that lady stands for, or has, and it can make for great pain. In the Coleridge poem, the person to beware of is a man. The meaning of both the “Kubla Khan” lines and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is that every human being has something which stands for the whole world; and that in possessing the person, unless we want to find what that person means, we are going to be hurt.

La belle dame sans merci is a phrase. It was in the French Middle Ages, and is associated with Alain Chartier. But something of this is in it: a human being can seem unkind; the face is beautiful, but if you know the face long enough, pain seems to come from it like a negative halo.

If we look closely at the Keats lines we’ll find, in the way the poem is made, the situation of atmosphere and neatness.

“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms.” It’s quite clear that the word ail is a little more toppling and uncertain than the phrase knight-at-arms. That is the way the world is, both strong and uncertain—as we can see a blade of grass in autumn, standing up straight yet having that brownish color that shows it’s not faring so well.

There is the iambic tetrameter structure: “O whát | can áil | thee, kníght- | at-árms.” But even as we have these grenadiers of sound standing at attention, there are all kinds of suggestion. It’s this presence in art of firmness and suggestion which, fully seen, makes the world something one can praise.

“Alone and palely loitering?” In reality there are very many forms of neatness, steadiness, firmness. The steadiness in this line is the continuation of one sound, the l. As we look at the line, we can get the feeling that the ls run it. And yet the ls are so un-firm themselves, because l is a letter which doesn’t exactly wave a sword at you, or glare at you.

The implication in the first stanza is: Knight-at-arms, why do you act as if something were not over? It is over. The birds don’t sing—don’t you know that? And the sedge is withered.

There is the very famous line, four syllables with three accents, corresponding to a trimeter: “And nó | bírds | síng.” In the firmness of the hesitation of the birds, or the nullity of the birds in relation to song, we see something of the firmness of absence, the firmness of nullity.

With the lily, we have a figure, a metaphor: since there’s lightness and moisture on the brow, why not call it lily? “I see a lily on thy brow.” In a way, the line is neat, because of the vowels in lily. The line doesn’t have the uncertainty of “The sedge has wither’d from the lake.” Meanwhile, Keats in this stanza has a feeling for things in process. We have three words of process in it, all of which are in the field of atmosphere: fading, fast, and withereth.

“Fast withereth too.” The abruptness of that line is part of the neatness, but the line affects one as if it were atmosphere.

We Come to the Lady

The 4th stanza begins: “I met a lady in the meads, / Full beautiful—a faery’s child.” She’s presented here as if she were not so baleful, not so threatening. This doesn’t seem to be a person who is given to tormenting men and making them unsure of themselves. “Her hair was long, her foot was light, / And her eyes were wild.” A real siren doesn’t have her eyes wild—she knows what to do with them. If your eyes are wild, you can’t do what you might with them.

Some lines later we have: “She look’d at me as she did love, / And made sweet moan.” One can say she really knows all the evil of the world and is acting naïve. I don’t think it means that. The question is: What is beauty? Beauty is naïve and also very knowing.

In the 7th stanza there is: “And sure in language strange she said / ‘I love thee true!’” We have sureness and strangeness, which means something direct and twisted at the same time. And the relation of a curved or twisted line to a straight line is in the matter we’re talking about.

Now, the question is why she weeps and sighs full sore. If she were simply a siren, I don’t think that would be the best thing to do. After all, the elfin grot is being visited. You can see her as completely insincere. But the large question is whether reality is la belle dame sans merci. That’s what I’m hinting at: that a thing can be fair and seem merciless. I think what is being said here is: Yes, you are much taken by me, but I don’t think you’ll ever see me the way I hope for.

Beauty & Ego

The meaning I give for this poem is: I’m much taken by beauty but I’m also much taken by ego, and I think that beauty will give me pain. In other words, if you’re taken by what is beautiful, make sure that your ego is for it too—because the greatest enemy of ego is beauty.

If I were dealing with Keats entirely now, I would give sources. There are many places in the letters sustaining what I just said, and, of course, in the poems and, to be sure, in the history of art and the history of poetry.

The loneliness of the knight-at-arms is this: Yes, beauty could be mine if I could shape my ego for its having. That’s the purport of the poem, and it is something which has affected people again and again. We have a problem, in liking anybody, of putting the finite and infinite together—as the world does. And it’s so much easier to make a person manageable, controllable, and finite.

Every person who has ever been interested in art knows that beauty is without mercy.

“I saw their starved lips in the gloam.” These kings and princes have “starved lips.” They want to love something and they can’t. The same thing is true for woman too. Woman and man have the same problem. If you want to love something, you have to see every day, every hour, that your ego is in the way. And if you don’t want to have it go along with what reality and beauty deserve, there are going to be quarrels.

“And I awoke, and found me here, / On the cold hill’s side.” In other words, because I do not want to see what is beautiful fully, I find that I feel rejected. “And this is why I sojourn here”: the knight-at-arms wants to see more.

The meaning of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is in the life of Keats. He was going after what is beautiful always, but he constantly had a sense that he wasn’t fair to it.