Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the lecture by Eli Siegel that we have been serializing: Is Hope Worth Money?, of 1969. It is powerful, exciting. It is important as literary criticism. And the understanding in it is vital to the life of any person. It is about value, and the relation of value to its opposite, fact. Value is such a vast subject. It includes both how much one will pay for a banana and the value of beauty, love, knowledge, and the world itself.

Aesthetic Realism has identified the biggest fight about value in the life of every person. This battle is between the following opponents: 1) the value of having things and people managed by you, dismissable by you, used by you to feel superior, versus 2) the value of being deeply affected by people and things, wanting to understand them, seeing meaning in them, and becoming, therefore, your own expressed self. That is the fight between contempt for the world and respect for it. And it is the chief fight about value in every aspect of our lives—and our nation’s life.

For Example, There Is Economics

We know that economics as a study looks at value in various ways—looks, for instance, at “exchange value” and “use value.” However, there is the matter of what value ought to impel the economy of a nation. On what value should it be based?

For many centuries the world’s economy was largely based on a certain notion of value—the contempt value embodied in what has been called the profit motive: that human beings should be used to aggrandize oneself financially. Workers should be paid as little as possible so that the wealth they produce with the labor of their minds and bodies can come, as fully as possible, to you, the boss. Buyers of your products should be made to pay as much as possible so as to enrich you—even if that price is ever so difficult for them.

Seeing people and the world in terms of financial gain for oneself is a notion of value. And Eli Siegel showed in the 1970s that economics based on it is increasingly inefficient and increasingly objected to in America. There is a growing feeling that the economy of America should be based on another value: justice to every human being.

The primal reason for the ailing of our profit economy is in a sentence by Eli Siegel from his Self and World. The sentence has grandeur. And it is about value, including the value our minds were made for—that justice which is knowing:

The world was meant to be known, to be felt, not to be parcelled out into huge segments or lesser segments for the complacent but deleterious delectation of some and the domination and manipulation of others. [Pp. 279-280]

Poems and Love

In the final section of Is Hope Worth Money? Mr. Siegel continues to discuss poems from the point of view of what values they’re about. The last poem he speaks about is by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), and it has puzzled people—also taken people—sometimes shocked people. The poem is “Dolores.” In Mr. Siegel’s discussion of it, I believe there is an understanding of a way of seeing had by Swinburne that was never understood before—including by Swinburne himself.

I don’t want to “give away” what Mr. Siegel explains. But I must say just a little about it, in order to place the particular reason for my including in this TRO three poems by Mr. Siegel himself. That is, I want the following to be very clear: while Eli Siegel explained what no one else had seen—that Swinburne felt love should not be complex, should not involve one in the complications of another’s life, and that this is why Swinburne speaks as he does in “Dolores”—Mr. Siegel himself utterly disagreed with such a way of seeing.

He saw the wanting to know a person—in all that person’s nuances, hopes, worries, depths, thoughts, interests, possibilities, and relation to everything—as the same as love itself. And he saw the trying to comprehend a person and one’s own feelings as not only necessary for love, but as thrilling. So while this TRO presents his powerful understanding of how Swinburne saw love, I wanted it to include as well poems of Eli Siegel, which have a vastly different way of thought.

1. There is “November Afternoon.” It is an early poem of his, written in 1923, when Mr. Siegel was 20 or 21. It has, beginning in the 4th line, a man speaking deeply to a woman, from whom he must part. In its words, but also in the musical richness of the free verse lines, we feel some of the complexity of a self affected by another self. There is a feeling of fervor and sorrow. There is bewilderment—yet also, there is a feeling of structure in these lines, even magnificence. The poem is a oneness of confusion and deep order, unsureness and sureness.

As the man told of in the poem speaks achingly to the woman, always the outside world is present. And the man is aware of, in fact interested in, those outside things—leaves, grass, birds, sky, people talking—even as he tells the woman what he feels about leaving her. Two decades later, when Mr. Siegel had developed the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, he showed that “the purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole” (Self and World, p. 171); the purpose of love is to like the world through knowing another person. This poem has in it, I believe, some of his early thought in relation to that great principle.

The Fundamental Value of Anything

The fundamental value of any single thing or person is that it, he, she is related to everything and contains the structure of reality itself: the oneness of opposites. (I mentioned, commenting on “November Afternoon,” confusion and order, unsureness and sureness; also, a single person and the outside world.) Art is the great honorer of value, because art shows truly this structure of the world in whatever it deals with—whether through paint, or sounds that instruments may make, or through bodies moving in a dance, or through words. Mr. Siegel explained: “Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

2. We come to another poem by Eli Siegel having to do with love. “Hooray for Jake and Conscience, Anyway” was written in 1927, and it is humorous. It seems Jake feels he was unfair to his wife—and he will tell her that, but, it seems, not too clearly or fully. There is a lot of apologizing in love relationships. But if people aren’t interested in really knowing themselves, and are not attracted by the idea of being exact about the outside world, apologies won’t fare so well.

The mingling of straightforwardness and delicacy in the lines of this poem is both musical and humorous.

And there is the last line, which is the same as the title. What is the value of the fact that we are critics of ourselves at all, that we can’t like ourselves if we’re unjust? There’s nothing more valuable about the human self. We may want to evade our conscience, but we can’t. And so, as the poem says, Hooray!

3. “Love; or, When Good Will Wins” was written in 1970. This poem itself has been loved, ever so deservedly. Swinburne needed to know what is in it, and so has every person who ever lived, and who lives now.

Eli Siegel defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” And so to have good will is to encourage what is best in a person: his or her desire to like the world. And it is also to be a critic of that in the loved one which interferes with the person’s true self—it is to be a critic of the person’s contempt.

The lines of this poem, as structure, as music, are like love itself. They each have a drama, in their brevity, of sounds touching one another, embracing each other, even as each line also feels wide, reaches out. And the whole poem is strict thought, is logical. It is strictness and majesty. It is logic and embrace.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Rossetti, Swinburne, & Value

By Eli Siegel

The dealing with value is in all the Victorian poets. There is a sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti that represents the desire to have feeling and not feeling, blankness and something else. It is “Silent Noon,” from Rossetti’s House of Life, and is definitely a good poem. In it there are two people, just silent and liking the silence, and, for this while anyway, liking themselves. The outside world is present, quietly. It begins:

The last lines are “This close-companioned inarticulate hour / When twofold silence was the song of love.” The poem does represent the richness of stillness. There are some lesser points, but the charm of just being, the charm of silence, the charm of noon at its noon-est, is in it.

Swinburne—What Value Was He After?

Victorian poetry dealt with the emotions that I began with, as I gave the longer version of the lecture’s title in lines:

A poet who hasn’t been explained in his attitude to pain as necessary for happiness, is Algernon Charles Swinburne. It is felt that he was a kind of philosophic sadist—or that, at least, he was given to sadism. One of his most difficult poems is the poem that Oxford students were supposed to have chanted after midnight: “Dolores.” In it he compares two kinds of love, and he prefers one kind because with it you don’t get tied up with relatives, you don’t get tied up with domestic worry. It’s simply red fingernails and “love.”

The poem is deep though, and could be looked at exceedingly carefully. That has never occurred, as far as I know. It’s been thought to be one of Swinburne’s most unfettered debauches. But in the poem there are the two values: 1) worrying about a person—How do you feel, how do you feel?; or 2) should there be simply pleasure without its being attended by Will you be able to be here next week? Will you get the plane or the train? What do your folks think? and that kind of thing. I’ll read some stanzas from Swinburne’s “Dolores.”

Here is one. The idea is: you would like a woman without a heart, because as soon as she has a heart she gets complicated and begins asking questions:

—Meaning that at least the love is simple. You don’t get into all kinds of complications. Swinburne didn’t like all the complex situations human beings were in, all the sense of obligation and worry. He related the alternative to some kind of pain, which, though, would not make for that reverberating unpleasant unknownness of worry.

In another stanza he says to Dolores:

In other words, this woman, Dolores, would make pain and pleasure one, and you wouldn’t have to have all kinds of domestic complications. Another stanza begins:

That last is the key line. Swinburne felt: with lust, at least you know what you’re getting; but love—you don’t know what you’re getting; you never will. That stanza continues:

People recited these stanzas. They didn’t know what they were saying in the slightest.

Swinburne has the lines (169-170): “The desire of thy furious embraces / Is more than the wisdom of years.” He was interested in some kind of concentration, where the universe could be liked momently and immediately, with a sense of keenness and forgetfulness. The old fight between emotion coming from sensation and emotion coming from retrospect and contemplation is a fight having to do with value.

Meanwhile, it was felt that with Swinburne a new kind of music had come to English poetry, and that this music was perhaps at its best in the “hounds of spring” chorus from Atalanta—which I think is so. “Dolores,” though, has important music.

He Wanted Opposites to Be—Somehow—One

There are these lines (179-180): “Pain melted in tears, and was pleasure; / Death tingled with blood, and was life.”

And these:

This is a way of saying (which is something that has been felt) that in sensation itself the purpose of the world is seen, and immediacy has all the absolute that one wants.

Greater than the desire to have pleasure is the desire to make sadness and pleasure one, or pain and pleasure one. That is: those two emotions from which all the others come—pain and pleasure—there is a desire to see as one. Swinburne did feel this somewhere: that pain and pleasure were one and pain had to be seen as pleasure; also that the immediate had to be seen as enough of the absolute if one was to see wholly what one hoped to see and should see. That is the value of “Dolores.”

There will be other talks on value, good will, emotion, which will make clearer what I have said tonight.

Poems by Eli Siegel