Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, by Eli Siegel. In this landmark 1970 lecture—so learned yet so immediate, deep and truly lighthearted—he looks at many passages of literary criticism, beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics. I see these passages as both affirming and asking for the magnificent Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry: Mr. Siegel’s showing that all true poetry “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

In this talk, and others, he has one feel the importance, power, and authentic charm of previous critics. Yet he saw what no other critic had seen: that art, in its technique, shows what reality itself is—and how we thirst to be in our lives. “The world, art, and self explain each other,” he wrote: “each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

Urgent Now

Take a statement Mr. Siegel quotes in the present section of his talk. Along with other passages from William Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, he reads one in which Wordsworth says poetry makes for pleasure through having us feel sameness and difference as inseparable. Wordsworth calls this “the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude,” and continues:

This principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder….Upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings.

Since 1800, ever so many persons have been aware of that statement. But without Aesthetic Realism, never was it given the value, the life-and-death urgency, it deserves. How we see sameness and difference is the largest matter in our lives. How people as a nation see sameness and difference is the rightness or wrongness, justice or injustice, of the nation.

Let us take that huge ugliness which is racism. Every instance of that foul thing—Aesthetic Realism makes clear—is about the opposites of sameness and difference. Racial and all ethnic prejudice use those opposites against each other. What prejudice does with sameness and difference is completely opposed to the finding of “similitude in dissimilitude” which Wordsworth says is in poetry.

A recent New York Times opinion article pointed out that while workshops in “diversity training” abound, they are singularly unsuccessful. They don’t undo people’s prejudices. What will? What does? I am certainly, and passionately, for laws that will have Americans, in all our difference, be treated equally, with justice. But what will change the injustice in people’s feelings and minds about persons one sees as different from oneself?

There are two things necessary for such a change. And both can be and have been learned—truly, thrillingly learned—from Aesthetic Realism. One of those necessary things is what I’ve been writing about: each of us needs, for our own well-being, to see that the oneness of opposites in art is literally what we want in our lives. In this journal 25 years ago I wrote the following (I quote it here because I believe it describes a vital need of now):

Racism won’t be effectively done away with unless it is replaced with something that has terrific power. What needs to replace it is not the feeling that the difference of another person is somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful. People need to feel, with feeling both intimately personal and large, that difference of race is like the difference to be found in music: two notes are different, but they are in behalf of the same melody; they complete each other; each needs the other to be expressed richly, to be fully itself.

It is possible for millions of men, women, and children to have an emotion about race that is like an art emotion. And it is necessary. It will happen when America is studying Aesthetic Realism. [TRO 1264]

Wordsworth’s statement about “similitude in dissimilitude” has usually been seen as a passage, not the most exciting, in a famous critical essay. Aesthetic Realism sees it as a resplendent emergency. We can think of someone different from us (perhaps obviously different) and see that in this person is a tremendous likeness to us. We can see that this person has hopes like our own, worries like ours, an ability to learn like ours, a care for music, a yearning for love, anger at unfairness, shame because oneself has been unfair, pleasure at the approach of spring like our own pleasure—and more and more likenesses. We need to feel this to be proud. America needs our feeling this.

The Understanding of Contempt

There is the other thing America needs to learn in order to get rid of prejudice. We need to learn about the central fight in everyone: between the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it, and the desire to have contempt. Contempt is that in the self which lies about sameness and difference. Mr. Siegel described contempt as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.”

Our desire to lessen what is different from us does not begin with race or ethnicity: it begins with the world itself. Our biggest sense of difference is between just me and things and persons not me. And there is a feeling in people, however unarticulated, that “I am made of finer stuff than the outside world, with all its insults, and things I don’t understand, and people who don’t appreciate me and don’t do what I want. I’ll take care of myself by looking down on a lot, dismissing a lot, sneering inwardly (and maybe outwardly) at a lot, showing my superiority to a lot.”

The looking down on a person who seems ethnically different is an outgrowth of the desire to look down on the world itself. When we see what contempt is in all its sleazy lying and emptiness, we increasingly do not want to have it. And we can learn from Aesthetic Realism how art is always respect for the world: even as an artist criticizes things in the world, the world in its fullness is loved.

So I am writing—sketchily for now—about this necessary knowledge, which is in Aesthetic Realism. I’m describing a little how the study of aesthetics, and the study of contempt as un-aesthetic, will not only (what an only!) end prejudice, but will make us immensely happy and proud. It can have there be much less cruelty and shame among people—and much more justice and beauty.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Dance of the Opposites

By Eli Siegel

Next, I’ll comment on some critical statements of Goethe. He is a mingling of wildness and sedateness. Goethe wrote on nearly all the arts—a famous work of his is Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre).

Some of his statements about artistic ideas are lovely, and I’ll read several:*

What is original in us is best preserved and quickened if we do not lose sight of those who have gone before us.

People can feel, We’re writing now—why do we have to know all this from the past? Goethe felt that was going on in his time.

There is this about the use of antiquity:

If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men.

It should be asked why Goethe said this.

Another statement about antiquity:

In the presence of antiquity, the mind that is susceptible to poetry and art feels itself placed in the most pleasing ideal state of nature; and even to this day the Homeric hymns have the power of freeing us, at any rate, for moments, from the frightful burden which the tradition of several thousand years has rolled upon us.

Some persons have found this being freed, this liberation in Homer.

Then Goethe says that the particular and the general can be one, are one:

If a man grasps the particular vividly, he also grasps the general, without being aware of it at the time; or he may make the discovery long afterwards.

And the following is a comment on the Aesthetic Realism principle “In reality opposites are one; art shows this”:

The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.

This means that beauty is the banner of science.

Goethe could be quoted more, but the statements of his that I have just read are criticism that is sober and that also presents art as deeply, subtly, pleasantly, boldly saying things about the universe.

The Useful and the Sweet

What has been called the most famous single sentence in English prose is about the tumult of life and the quietness of it, and how it can reposefully end. The sentence is usually quoted by itself, but it is part of Sir William Temple’s essay “Of Poetry.” I’ll read the sentence first. Saintsbury takes up the rhythm of it in his History of English Prose Rhythm:

When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.

It is a beautiful sentence. If you look at it, you’ll see a rippling free verse, among other things.

At one point in his essay, after mentioning the emperor Augustus as a friend of Virgil and Horace, Temple says:

Certain it is, that the great heights and excellency both of poetry and music fell with the Roman learning and empire….Yet, such as they are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and sweetest, the most general and most innocent amusements of common time and life.

The opposites Horace spoke about, the useful and the sweet, are in Temple’s essay, and he goes for the sweet, or pleasing. But the other idea, that poetry can shake us up and change our lives, is also present. That second attitude to poetry is what has been prevailing, and it should prevail, because the purpose of poetry is to leave you different from what you were. If it can entertain you while shattering you, let it. And I can mention that, in the 19th century, Keats’s life was torn apart because he couldn’t make up his mind whether to see poetry as pleasing him or asking him to be different.

Temple, as the 17th century largely did, goes after poetry as that which can introduce some much needed harmony in our turbulent lives. (He himself was an ambassador of England to Holland.) But he presents the other possibility too, that the purpose of poetry and music is to change your life:

They serve to revive and animate the dead calm of poor or idle lives, and to allay or divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men.

The next century, the 18th, was given to this attitude to poetry: that it is a very large thing but that there is something reposeful in it.

Temple says about poetry and music:

Happy those that content themselves with these…and do not trouble the world, or other men, because they cannot be quiet themselves, though no body hurts them!

And then, that sentence:

When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.

That goes along with the most famous line about music, which is Congreve’s (though thought by many to be Shakespeare’s): “Music has charms to sooth a savage breast.”

Details versus Source

There is a statement of John Dryden that should be read in this consideration. In his last prose work, the Preface to his Fables, Ancient and Modern, Dryden is dealing with the poetry of Abraham Cowley and questions his manner. The passage has one great statement about poetry in it. But first, Dryden says this about why Cowley has become much less popular. He says that in Cowley’s work,

There was plenty enough, but the dishes were ill sorted; whole pyramids of sweetmeats…but little of solid meat….[He] perhaps knew it was a fault, but hoped the reader would not find it. For this reason,…he is no longer esteemed a good writer—

And here is the statement:

For, as my last Lord Rochester said, tho’ somewhat profanely, Not being of God, he could not stand.

That’s the statement. It brings God into poetry, as others have.

There Is Wordsworth

While the 18th century has much to quote, I am trying to have the present talk casual and representative. So (and as I say this, there is a pang) we skip ever so much and get to Wordsworth and the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. The Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1798, and the Preface is in the second edition, 1800. So it’s a hundred years after Dryden’s Fables. We’ll find that the whole history of criticism is a dance among the opposites, and sometimes the touching of them.

Here, in his Preface, Wordsworth says:

The principal object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.

These sentences are studded, adorned, punctuated by opposites.

Wordsworth says he wanted to deal with situations of ordinary life but “throw over them a certain coloring of imagination”—which would make the ordinary also not ordinary. Those opposites, the ordinary and the extraordinary, are in the way we see ourselves. We sometimes get tired of ourselves, yet we also feel we’re extraordinary.

Then, Wordsworth wanted to present people talking naturally, in “language really used by men,” and also wanted to show there “the primary laws of our nature.” To do that is to put together what appears and what is deeply real, what is on the surface and what is not on the surface, what is momentary and what is primary.

He writes that in his poems, “Humble and rustic life was generally chosen.” He tried to show that the drama of the world was in the fairly humble citizen, the humble child.

Sameness and Difference

Wordsworth describes what he sees as the big reason people are pleased by a poem’s “metrical language.” It’s because of

the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder….It is the life of our ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings.

That is a warning: if you don’t like dissimilitude and similitude, what’s going to happen to your moral feelings and your taste? Anybody who doesn’t think that Wordsworth is a threat doesn’t know him.

Then, a famous sentence, the most famous sentence, perhaps, in the Preface:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

That puts together rest and motion, tranquility and emotion, and the spontaneous and what is thought about, or the conscious. Wordsworth and Coleridge saw that whenever we feel intensely and truly, there’s a certain composition that goes on in the way we express our intense feelings. If our intense feelings are an honor to us, they will take on more composition than when we are talking humdrum.

Well, that statement of Wordsworth stirred up English poetry. It’s still stirring it, and it should.