Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 in our 6-part serialization of the powerful, kind, glowing talk by Eli Siegel titled Technique and My Poems. He gave the first half of it on Wednesday, November 28, 1951, and the rest a week later. The audience of then was men and women who studied in the poetry classes he taught; and perhaps there were, too, people present who studied in the other Aesthetic Realism classes he taught. But even in those early years of Aesthetic Realism, one could rightly say about Mr. Siegel what Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” In 1951, the Aesthetic Realism curriculum was composed of thrilling ground-breaking classes, taught by Mr. Siegel, on such subjects as history, philosophy, all the arts, ethics, mind itself and the confusions and hopes of human beings.

A Landmark Lecture Comes to Be

One can surmise that students of Mr. Siegel who cared much for his poetry, and had heard him speak on poets of many places and times, requested that he speak about his own poems and what he was going after in them. As I described last month, I think another large impetus behind this talk was the important letter the poet William Carlos Williams had written earlier that November. In it, Dr. Williams says, very carefully, about Eli Siegel, “He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists”; and about Mr. Siegel’s poems, “This is powerful evidence of a new track….The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new.”

And so, in late 1951, Eli Siegel spoke about his own poetry. And it was as no poet had ever spoken about his or her own poetry before. Take, for example, Matthew Arnold, whom I care for very much. He is an important, and often charming, critic, as well as a true poet. But he does not—and could not in any extended way—look, as critic, at his own poems and say, This is what I see as happening here, why I made this choice and why I think it matters; and he does not speak about what the structure—the technique—of a line means for people’s lives. That is because, with all Arnold knew, he did not know what Eli Siegel was the critic to explain: that poetry, and beauty as such, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” That principle is the basis of Aesthetic Realism. And Matthew Arnold, so likable, so important, did not see that a life question of every person was being dealt with musically in the structure of every poetic line.

The Oneness of Logic and Feeling

Last month I wrote a little about how the opposites of personal and impersonal were one in Mr. Siegel himself. Now I’ll mention opposites related to those, but different too: logic and feeling. “Poetry,” he wrote, “is logic and emotion brought together so well, music ensues.” I have seen that this is true about all good poetry, including his. And yet I do say that there was a relation of logic and feeling in Mr. Siegel himself larger, fuller, more beautiful than in any other person I’ve known or read or heard about.

There is feeling of a tremendous kind in his poems—and prose writings too. Sometimes that feeling has playfulness in it, but it is always large feeling. And at the same time there is an exactitude of thought, seeing, logic. This was so in his life too. And that rich inseparability in him of feeling and knowledge included the exceedingly rare ability to explain what was present in his own poems—and certainly in others’ poems too. He was the greatest critic of literature and could not only show what a poem was saying but how it said it and how well. And he was never aloof, unfeeling, insensitive—no matter what work, and whose, he was speaking of.

That same magnificent oneness of logic and feeling was in how he saw everything, from an event in history to a person with whom he was speaking. I found it the most beautiful thing I had ever met, and I still do.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Technique and My Poems, II

By Eli Siegel

I am going to read now a popular poem of mine, one of the most popular. First I am going to talk about part of one line. It reads: “Smoke goes silently up to the sky.”

I put it that way because I felt that was the way fairest to the words, to what the words stood for. Suppose we put it this way: “Silently smoke goes up to the sky.” I must admit, if I saw it that way, I would shudder. The silently has to go after goes, and if it didn’t go there I’d feel like yelling. If a person says, “It comes to the same thing,” I’d say to that person, “Keep off poetry; it does not belong to you.” If you cannot see that where a word is placed is part of the power of that word, then you might as well say that a bed in the center of a room is the same thing as a bed in the corner.

So there is a difference between “Smoke goes silently up to the sky” and “Silently smoke goes up to the sky.” The reason is that the silently has a certain value that is best where it is. The idea is to have the word silently so placed that a kind of smoothness and gentleness occurs. And this goes, if the poem is carefully written, for every word. If the word could be put elsewhere with the effect being just as good, there is something that is wrong with the poem—which, of course, is possible. But since I have taken great care to see that that doesn’t happen, at least I thought the words were in the places they should be.

Anyone can test this. If there is a certain phrase that means a great deal to a person, if the words are put out of order it does not have the same effect—or if a word is changed. “Life is what you construct it to be” is very different from “Life is what you make it.”

I’ll take up this poem, “Smoke Goes Up Slowly,” and talk about it a little.

In every poem, along with the particular human meaning, there is a relation of things that are permanently of the world. Those things can be called the everlasting forms, if one wishes—the everlasting things. One of those things is quiet. Slowness is another. And another thing is noise. And speed. This poem does say that while granting the noisiness of things, this noisiness of things can be seen as friendly to the quiet; and while granting the sharpness, the staccato, of things, this sharpness and staccato can also merge with gentleness and curve and loftiness. And granting also the existence of specific worries and pangs and angers, these too can be seen, without running away from them, as part of the quiet truth of everything.

“Smoke goes silently up to the sky, while the sun is setting”—as I said, if the word silently were elsewhere, it would not be what I wanted it to be. I don’t want “Smoke goes up to the sky silently”; the silently should be closer to its good friend smoke; it has to be there. And if you say, “Well, why?” I can say this: every time a person reads a poem carefully, each word is seen as looking for its relation, and the relation of silently is of such a kind that, to be fair to smoke, it must be after goes. The idea here is to give a certain quiet, curving, flat picture; and having silently elsewhere would interfere with that curved flatness.

Sounds—and All of Reality

“Setting, setting, this day after thousands and thousands and thousands of days.” There is a way of using sounds that gives a feeling of space. Sounds that are in every word have to do with all of reality, and it can be said that anything that reality does is also done by words. If a child wants to give a picture of something far-off or big: “Oooh, was he big! Oooh, was he there a long, long, long time!” There would be a desire for the long syllable.

That, of course, can be affectedly put forth. But I wanted the feeling of something going on definitely to be related to something which was of all time and yet not to be forgot—because this poem, while it does have to do with the permanent, doesn’t forget for a moment the importance of a specific day. I wanted to relate one specific day to the going on of days; and so it seemed necessary to say “thousands and thousands and thousands of days.” If a person had said “millions,” I wouldn’t have liked it; if he’d said “hundreds,” I wouldn’t have liked it; if he’d said “scores and scores and scores,” I’d have shuddered—it would have seemed to me almost another scandal.

Then: how am I going to show that things which are very specific are going on, without interfering with the quiet of the smoke and the thousands of days and so on? There is a question here of whether there is enough life, and yet enough muting: “Feet move along pavements.” Try this: “Along pavements, feet move”—I would have shuddered a little at that; it just won’t do. Or: “Feet are moving on the pavements”—there is a certain effect that just wouldn’t be present, and as far as I have to do with this, I wouldn’t tolerate it.

“Feet move along pavements, people talk in the clean, cool time before twilight.” I wanted to get the sense of people talking and also the quiet. This is a way of getting together the permanent and the momentary.

And there is a way the syllables fall. “Work is over, rushes are over.” This, though it consists of a lot of noise, is put as if it were muted. Then I definitely get earthy: “those who went out of kitchens in the morning are now in kitchens again.” I think the word kitchens takes on a softness here. There is a feeling that what people are doing, though it is definite, has something to do with thousands of days, and all space, and smoke going up. And I think that the minute and the century were dealt with lovingly.

The technique of this poem would be the using of words that were fair to a certain meaning, or a certain effect. The purpose here was to say: Look, you can be aware of this day, and the fact that people went to work in the morning, and that they’re going to talk a little when they come back, and you can be aware at the same time that something is going on in the whole world—and so, you can be just to what you yourself are concerned with, and also to the great world that goes on, and has gone on even before man existed.

Friends through Words

I’ll read now another poem, called “2 p.m.”

This consciously was a take-off, at least in one line, of a stanza from Gray’s “Elegy”:

There is a certain rhythm in “Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour”—I play with that a little, I must say, just as a literary note. But of course the intention is quite different.

I am trying again to have objects friends through words; and one object in a warm spring day or summer day is an auto: “Auto speeding on the white, hot road.” That line is constructed technically in the following way: You have three long-shorts and then three longs—which gives the effect of the road going on. It’s a little like the effect in “Casey Jones,” which I like: “Got another daddy on the Salt Lake line”—those three heavy syllables at the end. This matter of having syllables be heavy or light, or swift or slow, is part of the reality of things. But, unfortunately, this matter of metrics has been looked on as something that people who have a lot of time give themselves to. That is wrong: from metrics you can learn about what you are, if you really want to.

The first line has a certain kind of motion: I see it as flat, generally—the motion of an auto is across. Then there is another thing that is moving at the same time, much older than an auto—much, much older: “Tree bending in the still warm noon.” It’s a motion that’s vertical and to the side. There is a difference of sound between “still warm noon” and “white, hot road,” but generally we have the same construction in the two lines, though tree is one syllable. However, “white, hot road” is quite different from “still warm noon”: one is space and the other is time. And the second line is much slower.

But what do they have in common, this auto speeding on the white, hot road, and this tree bending in the still warm noon? They have this in common: “Both await at 2 P.M.” And what do they await? Something different from either: “The quite sure coming of the white, cold moon.” That line is really in a kind of jazz rhythm, and I put it there because I like that moon’s taking on a quality of jangling rhythm. There is even an internal rhyme: quite and white. So they merge at 2 P.M., and merge again because they both await the coming of the moon.

The moon here is dealt with as if it were quite joyous and friendly. It is interesting that the word noon has a feeling of fat warmth to it, while the word moon, which should be even richer (because of the m), is most often associated with coldness. The poem is a certain composition of things and words. If there is felt a relation of oneness and also opposition of the words, the poem will mean something. If that relation isn’t felt, the poem will simply be read as so many words—which is what usually happens.

Part of a World That’s Like Her

I now discuss a poem that I wrote before “Hot Afternoons,” called “Trees in Rain.” One of the things that poetry goes after is the making clear that the relation among earth, rock, plant, animal, and people is indefinitely, immeasurably close; and that anytime there is a separation between a living being—conscious of him- or herself—and things, there is harm. In this poem, the girl who is tearful, walking in the wet grass, is part of a world that is like her at that moment. She is merged with the impersonal world. If the poem is not seen as beginning with the impersonal world and taking in a person who is sad, the poem is not understood. I wrote this in 1923:

This poem is in sections, and in the first there is a relation of the sky, rain, and trees. In technique, words and syllables are made to go slow and fast, depending on what is happening. You may have noticed that there was a full pause at the end of the second line, after sky: “Dark in mist is the sky.” But with “Much rain has fallen, / And this is why”—there is no pause at why because why flows onto the next line. This relation of pause and motion is central to the music of poetry.

So the first section is about sky, leaves, trees, rain. Then as part of this, in the second section there is a person: “And now a girl walks; / Her feet crashing against the wet grass.” I wanted the word crashing because there is a harsh opposition. In the third section, she is seen from within: “Love, love again. / Now it pains her.”

Then in the last section we go back to the sky, because the girl and the landscape are to be seen as one. “Mark, mark the grey / Of the sky.” —The word mark is very different from grey. To see poetry truly, you not only have to like words, you have to like the letters of the alphabet. If you don’t like them, you don’t like words, and if you don’t like words, you don’t like things.

(To be continued)