Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of Poetry Is Alphabetical, a 1971 lecture by Eli Siegel that is authoritative and lighthearted at once, playful in its scholarship, literary and about the life of everyone. In it, Mr. Siegel uses the alphabet to present qualities poetry has: a quality for each letter, beginning with A. And by the end, we have traversed more than half the English alphabet. In this final section he speaks of qualities beginning with letters J through P. They are, respectively: Je ne sais quoi; Kindness; Likeness; Majesty; Naïveté; Order; Persistence.

The use of the alphabet in this talk, while having a certain lightness, is not meant to be clever. Mr. Siegel is using it to illustrate the fact that poetry has the things, qualities, subjects that reality itself supplies—as represented by that organizer of the world which is the alphabet.

There Is Persistence

The qualities Mr. Siegel speaks of in this talk are in the lives of people too. And in us, and in nations, there can be a terrific mix-up and even cruelty about them. Take the final word Mr. Siegel speaks about: Persistence. How beautiful persistence can be!—as the heartbeat persists; or as tulips bloom in spring because what they are persisted underground through months of coldness; or as a true scientist found a remedy for an ailment by persisting carefully, passionately—amid many disappointments perhaps.

Yet so much persistence in people comes not out of love for reality and truth, but in order to get what one sees as one’s own way. This ugly persistence has been in everyday life and in the affairs of nations. It can be the persistent effort of one spouse to manage the other—rather than trying to see that person deeply. It can be the persistent determination of an employer to pay workers skimpily (a determination countered by the beautiful persistence a union in action represents). It can be the persistent massive lying and machinations of someone who lost an election but is determined to have people think he won, determined to get the power that voters denied him.

What impels all bad persistence? It’s contempt, the thing Aesthetic Realism identifies as the source of every meanness in a person. Contempt begins with the feeling that what we need most is to be superior, more important than others—not to be just.

What Art Does

As Mr. Siegel showed early in his talk, the qualities he is speaking about can be present in a bad poem as well as in one that’s good. What has them present as art is told of in the following principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Eli Siegel is the critic who explained that when there is a true poem, it is because the writer has seen the poem’s subject so justly that the structure of the world itself—the oneness of opposites—can be felt, can be heard, in the words used. There is that sound which is poetic music.

In the lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks of many poems—discusses some very richly. It seems right that as preface to this final section, a poem of his own be present. So here is a great poem, an immensely musical poem, that he wrote in 1926. And I’ll say something of how all the alphabetic qualities he speaks of in this section are in it. The poem is “Quiet, Tears, Babies”:

To show the beauty of this poem, one should look closely at every line. I cannot do that here. But as to one of the alphabetical terms Mr. Siegel speaks of, Kindness: this poem, as both statement and music, is enormously, reverberatingly kind. It is kind to babies, and to people who were babies; and, one can rightly feel, to reality itself.

Every line of the poem is different, but I’ll comment principally on two lines—to stand, in a fashion, for all of them. They are the 9th and 10th: “O crying soul, hardly heard, / For you cry not so loud.”

As to that quality which is kindness: Real kindness has always the desire to be within the feelings of another, the desire to understand that person. In “O crying soul, hardly heard,” one feels the withinness of that baby, his or her trouble. The large o sounds in “O crying soul” have one feel something so wide, and yet bewildered. In “hardly heard” we hear, with those h sounds, a muted tumult of expelled breath. And in “O crying soul, hardly heard,” with its sense of unknowingness, we have also another of the terms Mr. Siegel speaks about: Naïveté.

But we have, too, something that can seem very different from both kindness and naïveté: the term Mr. Siegel chooses for M—Majesty. Majesty and innocence, might and tenderness, have been felt—wrongly—to be against each other. Here, we feel that this baby, in all his or her unknowingness, had that size of meaning which is majesty.

Then we have line 10, which, as rhythm, is two amphimacers. An amphimacer consists of three syllables: the first accented, the second unaccented, the third accented. And two amphimacers are here: “FOR you CRY   NOT so LOUD.” Those words in that metrical structure make a music that is hesitation, uncertainty, at one with symmetry. And symmetry is an aspect of the term Mr. Siegel speaks of for the letter O: Order. Order and a right awryness are together throughout this poem.

In the whole poem there is a sense of the term he chooses for L: Likeness. Centrally, the poem has to do with a likeness of all people to that grandly uncertain baby. The likeness becomes explicit in the 14th line, the longest line in the poem, about the men and women walking on the street: “Who were babies once, who cried once, and who now make men and women and babies cry, and who cry, and who cry now, O but they do.”

That single long free verse line, with its many different phrases, spreads, changes, also seems to go up and down. But the way it changes gives it what Aristotle talked about in his Poetics: a living continuous relation, in time, of beginning, middle, and end, which makes for unity. The line, then, has the quality Mr. Siegel speaks of for P: Persistence. And the whole poem, like every true poem, has a persistence from the first line to the last: a central purpose that continues with each line, amid all the differences and changes and surprise.

And I’ll say, to conclude for now: There is in this poem the quality Mr. Siegel chooses for J: Je ne sais quoi (an I-don’t-know-what)—a something one cannot sum up; a deeply happy wonder.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Kindness, Persistence, & More

By Eli Siegel

We come to the letter J, and the term I have chosen is Je ne sais quoi. Je ne sais quoi is present in all great poetry, because the known and unknown are present in everything. Je ne sais quoi is simply unbanishable. You can’t say to the je ne sais quoi, “Go home.” The je ne sais quoi will answer, “I am home.”

With K we get to something else: Kindness. And kindness is present in many poems. We have it in a poem of Emily Dickinson that is among her clear poems:

This is not the customary Emily Dickinson, this going out to help people. Emily Dickinson, as we well know, was so busy studying the shady lanes of herself, the unexplored passages that were she, that the idea of being kind—. But we have it here. This is a poem in behalf of good will. And it is an authentic poem. There are many poems of this kind that fail.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, / I shall not live in vain.” Very melodious. “If I can ease one life the aching / Or cool one pain.” Emily Dickinson did see people ready to give up. Then there’s a change from people to a robin: “Or help one fainting robin / Unto his nest again, / I shall not live in vain.”

We Liken Ourselves to Things

After Kindness we get to Likeness, for L. There are poems of identification or likeness. One, in The Oxford Book of English Verse, is by a scholar, an antiquarian, William Oldys. It’s his one poem, and in it a person compares himself to a fly. This is “On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup”:

This has remoteness and nearness. And it is a good poem.

“Busy, curious, thirsty fly!” This is an early-18th-century use of the trochee. “Drink with me and drink as I”—trochaic again, God wot. This feeling for the fly as engaging has made Oldys known. He’s not known by his antiquarian work. Where he is known—I’m not saying he’s very well known—he’s known for this poem.

There are emptiness and fullness and a kind of pleasant loneliness as he says of his life: “Threescore summers, when they’re gone, / Will appear as short as one!”

So, the Oldys poem is about likeness.

The Alphabet Continues

Three very big things as to poetry are with the letters M, N, and O. There is Majesty, which is another term for sublimity: Homer, Dante, Milton are supposed to have these; also Aeschylus and the Bible.

Then, Naïveté. That’s something else. It’s in the Greek Anthology. And it’s in Mother Goose. And it’s in the famous two lines of Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things, / I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” They’re poetry, anyway.

Next, a very big thing, with O: Order. That is what abandon should have. And when you have abandon and order you’re starting out well: you’re poetically with poetry.

Persistence—& a Popular Poem

We come to P, and Persistence. Persistence is a big thing in history.

The most famous inspirational poem, Kipling’s “If,” is a real poem, though it used to be on the walls of many offices. It has to do with persistence. And it should be related to other inspirational poems, like Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth.” That is also a true poem.

“If” is one of the most cunning poems. It has, with its 32 lines, some falling off, but it is an honest tour de force. It’s all one sentence. And it’s all quite true. It’s deft.

This is the first stanza:

We have the first line: “If you can keep your head when all about you.” A certain pirouette is there, and also the thump.

“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” This has something of the Greek and Latin elegy quality. The first line is more emphatic than the second. There’s a subsiding in the second line.

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too.” This is in keeping with some lines in the Essay on Criticism of Pope. Pope says you should listen to criticism, listen and see what’s in it, but at the same time see what you see.

“If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.” This has to do with the definition of inspiration and genius, and so on. A very famous definition of genius is the ability to be patient.

“Or being hated, don’t give way to hating.” The danger of revenge is here—that you can hate a person not because he’s wrong but because he’s against you. And that is extremely perilous.

Then, the next stanza:

We have the second line of that stanza: “If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim.” That is, you should think not in order to show your adroitness in thought, not because you’re a debater, but because you want to see something.

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same.” This is in keeping with stoicism—that good luck and bad luck are both pretenses of reality.

“If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.” This says you will be misrepresented, and what should you do then?

“Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, / And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools.” That is a calling for courage as an inciting or exciting thing for oneself.

What Should We Risk for What’s Best in Us?

The third stanza:

“If you can make one heap of all your winnings / And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss.” It’s been said that those persons who cannot see the deepest things in them as belonging to chance or to casualty don’t believe in those deepest things. Kant was taken with that. The idea is that a thing you believe is a thing you want to bet on, and you bet a lot on it.

“And lose, and start again at your beginnings / And never breathe a word about your loss.” And whatever happens, see that the things worth caring for are still cared for. That is said wisely by Kipling.

We have the final stanza:

The most dangerous line there is “If all men count with you, but none too much.” That seems to be a curtailing of affection. —But I’ll say again: Kipling is one of the real poets in the English language.

So I have reached the letter P, with Persistence.

It happens that poetry should begin with things, should begin with anything, should begin with the possibilities of this world, and then see what can happen logically—and sometimes, if one wishes, just what can happen. Some showing of that has been done today.