Dear Unknown Friends:

As I described in our July issue, TRO has the honor of presenting this summer two portions of a great 1975 lecture by Eli Siegel. It is about what mind is, what poetry is, and their relation. The subject is tremendous, and Mr. Siegel’s seeing of it is definitive—also thrilling. Published here is the second portion of that talk.

Mr. Siegel is discussing passages of a lecture given a century and a half earlier, a lecture by William Cullen Bryant, on poetry. It is a means, Mr. Siegel explains, of looking at important aspects of mind. And so he has titled his own talk Preface to Sensation, Understanding, Imagination, Emotion: A Lecture of William Cullen Bryant, 1825.

Central to Eli Siegel’s greatness as a philosopher and critic is that he truly understood the human mind, including its deepest purpose, and what in oneself interferes with this purpose. The purpose of mind, he showed, is to like the world honestly, through knowing it. Further: the enemy, from within ourselves, of our own mind is our desire to have contempt: to look down on things and people as a means of elevating ourselves. Contempt is the stupidest and most hurtful thing in the mind of anyone. It’s the source of every injustice, from a certain coldness (which Bryant writes about) to murderous brutality.

What does poetry have to do with this fight in mind—of the desire to see meaning in things, versus contempt? Well, every instance of true poetry and art is respect for the world, with a fullness. Art arises from a person’s being his or her individual self through being passionately fair to what’s not oneself!

“All beauty,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Two central opposites for everyone all the time are those I just mentioned: care for our dear self, and justice to the outside world. Our contempt wants us to feel these must fight. Meanwhile, every instance of good art is telling us: You want to have those opposites be one in you—as they’re one in me! This message of art was not known until Aesthetic Realism made it clear.

The Repulsive—a Poetic Subject?

At the end of this section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks on a matter that I want to illustrate here at least a little—because there is nothing I consider more important. Mr. Siegel quotes Bryant as saying that some things cannot be dealt with in poetry: for instance, things that are disgusting, repulsive, trivial. And Eli Siegel (who respected Bryant) firmly and eloquently disagrees. “Anything that’s ever disgusted anyone,” he says, “is as much a subject of poetry as a sunrise.”

For centuries there was a tendency—in teachers and students of poetry, in critics, in writers—to feel, as Bryant did, that some things are not the province of poetry. Over the last hundred years or so, that view, I believe, has mostly changed. And there are many writings, presented as poems, that deal with things repellent, repulsive. But what has not been seen is this all-important matter: What differentiates a good poem about something sickening, from a bad poem about something sickening? That question is really the same as What differentiates a good poem about something lovely from a bad poem about something lovely?

The big question is: What makes a poem, on any subject, a true poem? And the follow-up question is: Why does that distinction matter? Eli Siegel has answered these questions—answered them greatly, on many occasions and always freshly. This is from “The New Simplicity,” his preface to Martha Baird’s Nice Deity:

A line of poetry is an existence in words containing—as a painting or a dance does—freedom and order, motion and rest, mobility and tightness, surprise and expectation, flexibility and firmness; and qualities, or pairs of qualities, akin to these. The subject doesn’t matter—as long as one sees that subject with enthusiasm and clearness….

Poetic intuition discerns the presence of what the whole world is like in a specific object.…A poem is a snug, vivid employment of philosophic oppo­sites.…A poem, then, shows reality where it begins in the reality that is before our eyes. [Pp. xv, xxiv-xxv]

Further, I learned this from Mr. Siegel: When the writer of a poem, thinking about his or her subject, sees that subject with a fervency at one with logic, and with deep sincerity—the writer feels in it the structure of the world itself, the oneness of opposites. And the words and lines the writer comes to will have the sound which is poetic music.

This music, Mr. Siegel showed, is the chief sign that the writing is a true poem—whether it’s about a rose or about that which could turn one’s stomach.

I present as an instance a passage by Edmund Spenser, from the first book of The Faerie Queene, published in 1590. These lines are about an evil and disgusting dragon that the Red Cross Knight is fighting. Even though this dragon is allegorical (she’s supposed to stand for a certain approach to religion) Spenser has us feel something ever so repulsive. The Knight is trying to choke her—and there is this, in stanza 20 (parbreak means vomit; maw is stomach):

It is all being told in this 9-line stanza form, a form that came to be called the Spenserian stanza. And there are a neatness, connectedness, and also surprise in the way lines arise from other lines yet are different.

Is there structure within the hideous? We find it so here. We find in the first line (and the others too) a lively neatness, even as our lips curl in distaste. Line 2 tells of an overflowing of awfulness; it sounds overflowing too—and yet the rhythm is neat.

In the third line, there’s a touch of syncopation (yes, in 1590), which gives a certain jauntiness to a gagging quality that’s also present. Further, the hideous can have interesting differences within it, and here the lumps are apparently somewhat different from the gobbets.

The sixth line, “Her vomit full of books and papers was,” is of course funny. It is, in its way, chipper, even as we feel, Ugh, this is horrible! —Much more should be said about the stanza. But it is poetry. It has the music which comes from the writer’s finding, in what he’s thinking about, the structure of reality: opposites as one.

There Are These

Eli Siegel himself, who wrote poems on every aspect of human experience, wrote about the repellent. And he wrote about it greatly. There is his magnificent, landmark poem of 1929, “The World of the Unwashed Dish.” There is his 1970 poem “Also Not Liking You,” which was published in this journal 10 months ago. That poem begins:

That poem has musical grandeur as inseparable from what you can’t stand.

And there are short poems by Eli Siegel about the undesirable. Take “Needed Statement about Dirty Hospital Gauze”:

In the first two lines about that repellent item, the rhymed sound of “gauze” and “laws” is so yearning; so mysterious. And the final, unrhymed line is both poignant and tottering.

Aesthetic Realism explains that real poetry on any subject is evidence that the world can be liked. That is because what one hears in the music of a true poem is the structure of reality—how the world is made. We need to feel this world can be liked; it is our deepest, most pressing desire. And so, we need to know the difference between an authentic poem and what’s not that—because we need to see and feel what the world authentically is. To consider something a poem which is not one, is that much a giving up the chance to feel the world truly. On the other hand: to feel and distinguish and love real music in words, on any subject, is a needed means toward feeling this world in all its vastness and puzzlingness is a friend.

As to authentic poetry about the repulsive: the largest evidence that reality can be liked is in it. Such a poem shows that if what you can’t stand is seen with full fairness, the structure of the world will be present, saying, Here I am, and I’m musical.

I thank Eli Siegel for his magnificent justice to poetry and humanity, and for enabling others to go after having it too.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Imagination, Accuracy, & Warmth

By Eli Siegel

I’ll read another passage in Bryant’s lecture. Here, he is saying that although imagination is necessary for poetry, there is such a thing as “cold” imagination. You arrange things; you’re not moved yourself. He says:

Those poems…which are apparently the most affluent of imagery, are not always those which most kindle the reader’s imagination. It is because the ornaments with which they abound are not naturally suggested by the subject, not poured forth from a mind warmed and occupied by it; but a forced fruit of the fancy, produced by labor, without spontaneity or excitement.

You can imagine and be much more driven than usual, in a bad way. Delirium is imagination that is driving. A nightmare is imagination that’s quite driving. Then, there is imagination that is much colder. At the time Bryant wrote this, there was a feeling that good poetry has accuracy and warmth.

For example, Coleridge was against the poetry of the grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin. In “The Botanic Garden,” Erasmus Darwin uses his learning a great deal, and there are all kinds of fanciful things said; but it was felt that a clever scientist was writing this, who also had a capability with meter.

Imagination can be cold. Understanding can be warm; that is, you understand something and you’re very moved. The relation of the two, imagination and understanding, is a large question. Poetry can be used to make that relation clearer.

Imagination and Poetic Music

I have found that when imagination is cold it is impossible for that imagination to get to a certain music in words. That is why the most decisive criterion for poetry as against non-poetry is whether there is music. If the music is accurate, deep, and spontaneous, poetry that much is present. The being able to have images, the being able to have metaphors—that can come without real poetry being present. But the being able to have music—that can’t be unless your emotion and seeing are of a true kind. There’s a music that you can’t get to unless there is the real poetic feeling.

So Bryant is aware that people can be cold. The chief criticism of Bryant himself has been that he is cold. He often can seem so, but his “coldness” is deceptive: there is a great deal of warmth there, though sometimes the lines are not in motion enough.

He says about lines that are cold: “It is because the ornaments with which they abound are not naturally suggested by the subject, not poured forth from a mind warmed and occupied by it.” There is a synthetic way of writing poetry that has always been used: you see what poems have been popular, and you try to do what was done in such poems.

Bryant calls poetry that’s cold “a forced fruit of the fancy.” That description has to do with psychology, because no poem ever arose without a certain state of mind. The next thing to see is that every poem, no matter how different from others, if it is a poem has a state of mind as cause which is similar to the state of mind that has made for other true poems. In other words, there is something in common between “Hey, diddle diddle, / The cat and the fiddle” and Paradise Lost.

Mind Includes This

Poems, then, have to do with psychology. What I mean by psychology is the study of the thing called mind, in any one of its possibilities or forms—including the thing that makes you feel bad. That’s done by mind too, because whenever you feel bad, the body may have sent a message, but the thing that ratifies it is mind. And mind is that which makes body important. It takes down the messages of body and makes them seem ever so crucial for a personal life.

All words, and also grammar, arose out of what mind is.

Writing about poems that are cold, Bryant says, “The ornaments with which they abound are not naturally suggested by the subject.” Ornaments are also in mind. An ornament is something that would make an object (that is, what’s being looked at) more attractive but is not essential to the object. As soon as you have an ornament and it doesn’t arise from the center of the object, your imagination is not working well. Take this phrase about the nightingale’s song in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas.” That is ornamentation, but there’s a feeling that it arose as one thing from Keats’ mind.

Bryant has used the phrase “naturally suggested.” To use imagination is to have things suggested. You can think of the word green and then think of cloth that’s green, or grass, or lettuce. Everything is suggestive: as soon as you see anything, you can think of something else, and it can be quite different from what you’d been thinking about.

We’re studying mind that’s fortunate and unfortunate. And I recommend that persons who can, get the four lectures of Bryant on poetry. One reason is that poetry and good will are seen as akin by Bryant; also, poetry and liking the world are.

Imagination is related to pretense. And pretense can be authentic or non-authentic. Every actor has to pretend. He’s not the character he’s enacting. But you can pretend honestly and pretend dishonestly.

Bryant continues his discussion of imagination that’s cold, aloof:

A desire to treat agreeably or impressively a subject by which the writer is himself little moved, leads him into great mistakes about the means of effecting his purpose.

This means that in writing there should be two opposites corresponding to light and heat. In order to be clear—that is, have light—you also should be warm, have heat. That is what imagination says again and again. It was felt that Homer, in dealing with what happened in Troy, had a good deal of heat; but also, he knew what he was moved by. So we have the 24 books of the Iliad in really amazing order, or organization, considering how early they were fashioned.

“Unfit for Poetry”?

The greatest frailty of Bryant as critic is his saying that there are some things that cannot be subjects of poetry. He says poetry differs from prose

by excluding all that disgusts, all that tasks and fatigues the understanding, and all matters which are too trivial and common to excite any emotion whatever….[They are] unfit for poetry; put them into verse, and they are prose still.

I feel that the perception here is not complete. The large matter is whether there can be real poetry out of any happening or situation whatever.

Homer deals with certain wounds given, even certain ailments. And the hexameter lines are just as good about the wounds as about a clash in battle, or about a statement concerning the gods. In the Greek Anthology, though we have various insects becoming the subject of a poem, and also misery is talked of a great deal, it seems a person in the Greek Anthology did not look at an object and say, Can I make a poem out of this fragment of a cheap dish? Can I make a poem out of what remains in the bath? Bryant implies that you can’t; that you can’t make a poem out of the trivial. He says poetry cannot deal with the ordinary, or with disgusting things: that you can’t have a poem out of the details of a case history; or, you cannot talk, in a poem, about the difference between a varicose vein in June and one in July; or about the exact situation of a terrific sore throat.

Aesthetic Realism disagrees with that. Everything that has ever been talked of in medicine, anything that’s ever disgusted anyone, is as much a subject of poetry as a sunrise.