Dear Unknown Friends:

We publish Eli Siegel’s 1964 essay “The Immediate Need for Poetry,” and seven poems by him. Eli Siegel explained what poetry is; and from that explanation arose in 1941 the philosophy Aesthetic Realism. That is a quiet historical statement; but it is about the greatest occurrence in culture and kindness.

In the decades when Freudianism loomed and failed and other ways of seeing mind rose, disappointed, and fell, Eli Siegel was presenting what is true: the answers to the questions of our lives are in poetry. “All beauty,” he stated, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves” (Self and World, p. viii). He showed that in every line of good poetry, whether the subject is the plague or a daisy, the opposites we need to put together in ourselves are one: logic and feeling, order and freedom, heaviness and lightness, power and yielding. Mr. Siegel showed this in thousands of ways in his writing, lectures, lessons. He showed it with the utmost scholarship, imagination, passion, ease, humor, depth, integrity, and love. The Aesthetic Realism way of seeing poetry and life will live forever. It meets the hopes of children in Kansas and Sainte-Beuve.

We need to know what poetry is in order to be truly against contempt for the world—which Eli Siegel showed to be the cause of all cruelty and mental weakness. In every instance of good poetry, a person has seen a thing with so much sincerity and fullness that he has seen in it the structure of the world: the oneness of opposites. We hear that structure in the poem, as the music of syllables, words, lines. Only Aesthetic Realism shows what the music of poetry is and means: that the world, seen truly, is beautiful, not something we have any right to despise and manipulate.

The poems by Eli Siegel printed here are published for the first time; they do not appear in his collections Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems and Hail, American Development. I comment a little on four of them. “Speech of Moon in the Heart of Ceylon” has in it Mr. Siegel’s seeing of ethics as inseparable from earth itself, ethics as equivalent to reality. It is my opinion that in the poetry of Eli Siegel is the greatest oneness of logic and feeling, knowledge and passion, philosophy and the primal, that exists in literature. Those opposites are one in this poem, making the moon’s ethical requests tremendously musical. As sound, as meaning—inexorable ethical incisiveness is the same as romance and kindness in this poem.

“To Homes” says, I think, that our sense of ourselves should not stop us from seeing all things fairly. Our tear should not stop us from seeing what clouds are. Our home should not stop us from seeing that other places are of us and we of them. “Lines on Eternity” are some of the most melodious in English: grand and delicate. Man’s ache is in them—and also the friendliness of things, small and large.

No poet was more various in subject matter and form than Eli Siegel. Some of the best sonnets are his. “Whence? and Hence; and Whence?” conveys people’s miserable dislike of world and self—with lucidity, rich music, and the strictness of the Petrarchan sonnet.

Eli Siegel was true to his poetry all the time. He was the most beautiful person who ever lived.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Immediate Need for Poetry

By Eli Siegel

What is forgot these days—and it was forgot in other days, too—is the need to be affected by poetry. There has been much said about the writing of poetry, and much said about the appreciation of poetry; but not enough has been said about the possible effect of poetry. Poetry is a thing and does something.What it does, can do, should be looked at.

According to Aesthetic Realism, poetry is a picture of reality at its truest, most useful. We look at reality, we look at it mostly in a contradictory way. We are for it, and we retreat from it. It is, sometimes, most sweet concord; but how much discord do we feel in it! Reality hurts and pleases. It frightens and allures. It surprises and soothes. It shrieks and coos.

It happens that our deepest desire is to make sense of the contrarieties in this world. We cannot, safely, prefer the blandishing in reality, or what seems so, to the forbidding. Our purpose, when sound, is to see what’s real entirely. We need to see reality as one thing, with discord present. We need this very much. Poetry meets this need.

However, in order to meet our need to see the world as one thing, through poetry, we must see poetry as what it is, not something else—not something occasionally imposed by a timid and arrogant personality. We need poetry, and so we need to see it; not something else.

When we are born we hope to make some sense of the forces in us. We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose. All through life, really, we are trying to make jarring, separating propensities to act as one; we are trying to have forces coalesce in an other than languid oneness. —And it is poetry that makes jarring, separating propensities to act as one; it is poetry that coalesces forces in a oneness that is not languid.

From this one may properly gather that the immediate need for poetry (also the permanent one) is to see it as a means of our own organization, strengthening, instigating. Poetry represents the good sense we desire. Poetry is the exacting shepherd of our emotions.

Poetry, though, means something to us the more it, as such, affects us. Within a poem are possibilities of being affected non-poetically, that is, wrongly. It is so easy, in some hidden way, to use a poem to soothe a darkly exacerbated personality, or to allay a discontent of ego, without organizing that personality or strengthening it.

We should find excitement and repose in a poem; from the poem itself. However, there can be a bad exchange in one’s reading of a poem. A certain excitement is found in a poem because the reader’s fears are stirred, but not so clearly as to mean much; in this way a spurious repose ensues. All this is difficult; but it is true that the activities taking place in a mind during the reading of a poem may be intricately soothing and subterranean.

Admitting then, asserting then, that there can be false effects got from poetry, we should consider the possible true effect. The words in a poem are composed; and we want composition. Composition is the friendly presence of oneness and diversity. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to be composed.

A poem is excitement and repose. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use it as an encouragement to have excitement and repose in ourselves. There are quietude and mobility in a poem. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use an example of quietude and mobility.

This means that there are qualities in Coleridge’s “Christabel” that we want for ourselves. There are dreaminess and precision in the poem of Coleridge. We need these. If we honor them in “Christabel,” we call for them in ourselves. There are firmness and flexibility in the lines of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.” Firmness and flexibility are of the very poetry in this eighteenth-century work. If we see the poem, therefore, we advocate firmness and flexibility in ourselves. There are wonder and exactness in Rimbaud’s “O saisons, O chateaux.” If we see the poem rightly, we befriend wonder and exactness in ourselves.

Poetry, then, is a beautiful necessity; a beautiful heightener, organizer, impetus, example. Poetry enables us to see reality where it starts; it enables us, also, to see reality as a process, and reality as purpose. The way beginning, process, and conclusion cohere in a poem is a picture of how we want to see reality and ourselves.

The agonies of the person are present in the technique of the poem. The swiftness and slowness of the poetic line; the smoothness and surprise of the poetic phrase; the rightness and wonder of the word used poetically, are answers to the desires of men and women. And they are the reason for poetry; they are the qualities that are immediately and permanently needed.

Poems by Eli Siegel