Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Eli Siegel’s historic lecture A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, of August 1970. In it he discusses statements made by critics over the centuries, statements that point to opposites as one in poetry.

Over the years, Mr. Siegel spoke on many more critics, and at much greater length, than he is able to in the present single talk. Yet here, he says, he is trying to be both casual and representative—and he is. He is swift (though never hurried), clear, and deep. He has us feel the writers as real human beings affected deeply by the opposites in poems. Meanwhile, as I have said in relation to this talk: Eli Siegel himself saw so very much about the opposites that his predecessors did not see. He saw, for instance, this immense thing: that poetry has what we as individuals long for, because “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The Everyday & the Extraordinary

In the previous section of this talk, Mr. Siegel spoke about William Wordsworth. There were passages from Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to the book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and himself, the Lyrical Ballads. In the present section, Mr. Siegel quotes statements by Coleridge, some of which are very famous. Critics have seen the Lyrical Ballads and the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge in relation to it as central to that huge thing in the history of art, Romanticism. But only Eli Siegel saw that these two were dealing with something every human being thirsts for and suffers from not having: opposites—including the everyday and the extraordinary—as one.

In various passages that Mr. Siegel quotes here, Coleridge speaks about the ordinary and the strange, the common and the wondrous. Yet it was not seen before Aesthetic Realism, that people have done two hurtful things with these very opposites. On the one hand, a person we’ll call Gabe sees the everyday world as dull, “same-old, same-old”; he feels his life lacks surprise, thrill, meaning. On the other hand, Gabe hates and fears the strange, the unknown, the unexpected, surprising: he feels reality keeps thrusting things at him, things that make him uncomfortable and unsure. He doesn’t know that what he’s looking for is what poetry has: the ordinary felt as wondrous; and the strange, even the wild, felt as somehow right, and friendly.

In relation to these opposites, Aesthetic Realism also explains something that Coleridge hints at, but which even he did not see fully: there is a desire in people to take the wonder out of everyday things, and all things—in Coleridge’s words, to “dr[y] up the sparkle and the dew drops.” Making things dull, humdrum, and making the unknown or unusual repugnant and fearsome, is the work of contempt. Eli Siegel identified contempt—“the addition to self through the lessening of something else”—as the source of every injustice. It is that in a self which weakens the ability to feel and know truly.

Spontaneous Feeling & Logical Thought

In two statements of Coleridge that Mr. Siegel discusses, we find pairs of opposites that are related to each other: emotion and logic; spontaneity and thoughtfulness. And with these opposites we have, again, the daily life of humanity.

People have felt that being logical and having large emotion could not be together, and this division between the reasoning self and the pulsatingly feeling self has made us ashamed. Again, contempt corrupts these opposites horribly. On the one hand, our contempt pits one’s feeling against the need to know; right now millions of people are impelled by the following: Anything I feel must be true, because I feel it—no need to think further. On the other hand, one’s contempt uses a spurious cleverness of thought to arrange facts however one chooses—contempt sees this as far preferable to being affected by things, facts, people in ways one can’t control.

Aesthetic Realism magnificently shows that the poetic question is the life question: we need to see feeling and logic as one in a poem, and as beautiful, in order to have these opposites truly one in us.

To give a sense of the difference between the way Aesthetic Realism sees the opposites in poetry and criticism, and the way they’ve been seen elsewhere, I am going to quote from a work that has become something of a classic: The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, by M.H. Abrams (1953). I’m not commenting on the book itself, which contains valuable things. But I quote this sentence of Abrams about Coleridge’s writing on spontaneous feeling and thoughtful order, because the sentence, while rather true, lacks that full truth which is aliveness. It is very far from the fact that those opposites are in us in all our days, throbbingly real, asking to be one—and that Coleridge had tremendous feeling about them, and thought about them with the fullness of his very being. Abrams says:

In sum, Coleridge holds that the greatest poetry is, indeed, the product of spontaneous feeling, but feeling which, by a productive tension with the impulse for order, sets in motion the assimilative imagination and (balanced by its antagonists, purpose and judgment, and supplemented by the emotion inherent in the act of composition itself) organizes itself into a conventional medium in which the parts and the whole are adapted both to each other and to the purpose of effecting pleasure.*

I look at this and love more than ever the magnificent work of Eli Siegel, which has literature alive in all its grandeur and immediacy and kindness.

Sameness & Difference

At the end of the brief, great discussion of Coleridge in this TRO, Mr. Siegel speaks about the opposites of sameness and difference. He explains something which he discussed more lengthily on other occasions. What he saw about the technique of Coleridge’s Christabel—the meaning of that technique—I consider some of the most important comprehension in the history of literary criticism.

In our last issue I wrote about sameness and difference as the basis of all prejudice, including the horror which is racism. I said that the one way fully to end prejudice in the human mind is to see how sameness and difference are one in art. In keeping with that fact: Eli Siegel’s discussion, here, about Christabel is not only literary criticism of the highest power, but an urgently needed document for Justice.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Coleridge Saw This

By Eli Siegel

We come to the person who has been seen as the most useful critic in the English language, but who has fallen on less appreciative days, a little. The largest value of Coleridge is his showing that the feeling of ours which is truest, and sometimes most intense, and our greatest logic come from one thing. Poetry is the highest logic: that, one can find, is felt and said by Coleridge.

In an early chapter of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge tells of what he learned from a teacher of his at Christ’s Hospital School, James Bowyer:

I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.

Here, as critics will, Coleridge meets Boileau, who said that Malherbe first taught the use of a word in the right place. That is an idea Flaubert continued in his desire to find le mot juste (the right word). A writer is trying to use the right word in the right place. So what do we go by? We go by feeling, and we go by a certain kind of logic.

In chapter 4 of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge says this, describing what he saw in the poetry of Wordsworth:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.

So a purpose of poetry is to make the world fresher than your goddamned ego sometimes wants it to be. Ego can make everything uninteresting to itself and then think it has made everything uninteresting. Coleridge and Wordsworth were aware of that. They fought that in themselves.

This Is What They Planned

A further passage—I’m choosing what I feel are the most important statements of Coleridge. Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria has the largest list of opposites making for poetry, and in that chapter Coleridge also says the following—about how he and Wordsworth planned the Lyrical Ballads:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real….For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them.

So the strange and ordinary were seen as two realities to be presented to the people of England, and others. We’re still trying to make sense of the strange and ordinary. Poetry always tries to, and, when it is poetry, succeeds.

Then, in chapter 15, Coleridge attempts to show that poetry is philosophic. That is something I continue in my preface to Martha Baird’s Nice Deity, at great length. I give reasons why philosophy and poetry are the same. Coleridge says:

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare’s poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace.

In this chapter, Coleridge discusses lines from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, and makes you take that poem more seriously than you’re disposed to. He knows there’s a great drama going on between “intellectual energy” and “the creative power,” but there’s also the sense that a poem is a mingling of the opposites Horace wrote about: strength and sweetness.

Spontaneity & Thoughtfulness

I mentioned that Wordsworth wrote about the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” feelings you’re also supposed to think about. That idea put together spontaneity and the voluntary, the planned, the thought-of. And in chapter 18 of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge says:

There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose.

That’s still true.

How Are Words Used?

We get to the problem of language. The idea in using words well is to use the word that is most accurate, simple, economical, and also the word that has the most overtones, resonances, callings to friends overseas and in a previous century. The language must be pure and resonant. In chapter 22 Coleridge has been listing the faults of Wordsworth; then he describes what is good in Wordsworth. And the goodness he begins with is this:

First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression.

So we come to this, from Wordsworth and Coleridge: a good person is one who wants to use words accurately.

Then, Wordsworth seemed, to Coleridge, kinder than others. He seemed to be more interested in humanity. A famous line in his “Tintern Abbey” is: “The still, sad music of humanity.” This is the fifth quality Coleridge mentions in praising Wordsworth:

Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer…but…from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine.

In life we have to be a participant and a spectator, and the purpose of a poet, as is implied here, is to be a spectator in order to feel you’re participating more.

Sameness & Difference, Mightily

Those are careful selections from the Biographia Literaria. But in terms of the technique of poetry, the greatest technical statement—a statement in which technique is thought of as to its effect—is in a little preface to Coleridge’s Christabel. I spoke of it in a talk on Christabel and its effect on poetry and its meaning in relation to jazz. That passage in Coleridge’s preface has similitude and dissimilitude, sameness and difference, really made a job, really made something that occurs. It may be seen as unimportant; there are no more important 3 sentences in English. Coleridge writes:

I have only to add that the metre of Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.

The purpose of Coleridge in getting to this new power, or new presentation, of the English tetrameter was to feel that one could be different and the same actually. His whole unconscious tried to get to shore, and felt it did get to shore somewhat, by seeing at least a possibility of the 4 beats being in 4 words, 6 words, 5 words, 7 syllables, 11 syllables. How tremendous this is, is yet to be seen.

As you hear the 4 beats in Christabel, you have a criticism of the world of the past. You have an idea of what could be, because the whole fate of the human race consists in whether we can see other people as different even while we see them as the same as ourselves. So I cannot be too enthusiastic—if you wish, too wild, too utter—in saying what this means. If that sameness-and-difference is to be felt, it has to be felt critically and in the moment. So I’ll read again some lines of Christabel and say that the future of the world is embodied in them, and in Coleridge’s purpose as put in those 3 sentences. If this seems exaggerated, well, I’ll take the chance; it’s hard won.

On other occasions I’ll say more why this matters so much, why it is so important. This metre is a criticism of life, and it goes along with Matthew Arnold’s idea that poetry is “a criticism of life.” In these lines, in all poetic lines, there’s a throb, a shudder, a vibration, a trembling, along with something firm. That is like life itself, which consists of fixity and trembling—trembling with something like fluidity possible, or flowing.