Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of the lecture by Eli Siegel that we are serializing: A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances. He gave this talk in August 1970, and it is about that magnificent thing—that vitally needed thing—the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry. Authentic poetry, Mr. Siegel explained, no matter when or where it came to be, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

In the present talk, he quotes statements, some famous, made in the history of literary criticism. Mr. Siegel is showing that when, over the centuries, a critic with knowledge and honesty has tried to say what real poetry is, there is often a pointing in some fashion to opposites as one. He himself is the writer who has made clear this previously unrecognized agreement among critics ever so different from each other across thousands of years.

Yet as I described in our last issue: what Eli Siegel saw about the opposites, while in keeping with what others said, goes far beyond them. The philosophy he founded, which is about every aspect of reality—from economics, to love, to history, to science, to people’s woes—is based on the principle that “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Opposites in Art—& in Us

Let’s take the opposites which (we’ll soon see) Longinus pointed to notably, around two thousand years ago: part and whole. Neither Longinus nor any critic before Eli Siegel saw that these aesthetic opposites, art opposites, are also in people’s worries, mistakes, even frenzies, and that we are longing to do with them what art does.

For example, there is a woman of our time, named Chrissa. She is a lawyer, and is married to Nick, an accountant. Chrissa’s life, like everyone’s, has various aspects or parts. And—unlike what happens in a work of art—those parts do not seem to go together in their differences. They do not, for her, make an animated whole. Chrissa wouldn’t put it in those terms. But she does not feel that her domestic life with Nick—maybe talking about home renovations, watching a movie, commenting on the neighbors—is of a piece with, a part of the very same reality as, her hours talking to a client or planning how best to represent that person.

Then, there’s her mother. The Chrissa who has a tremendous sense of coziness being with her mother does not seem in her own mind the same Chrissa who gets intensely annoyed with that mother. And Chrissa would feel very uncomfortable if she, her mother, and one of her clients were together in a room. (Once, when she and her mother were at a coffee shop, a partner in the law firm walked in, and Chrissa became exceedingly nervous. She didn’t know why.)

There are other parts of Chrissa’s life which do not do what art does: come together to make a whole, even as each is itself. Her feeling about her 10-year-old son, Tad, does not join well with her feeling about his father, Nick—or with her feeling about her mother, or with her work as a lawyer. She has used Tad to get solace when she’s been angry with Nick. But she has also gotten Nick to commiserate with her about how “impossible” Tad can be.

I have said just a little about the opposites of part and whole in Chrissa’s life—opposites that are one in every instance of art. A central reason these opposites work against each other in people’s lives is the desire in us for contempt. Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” It is the feeling, however unarticulated, that we should be superior in some way to what, and whomever, we meet; that nothing should have us entirely; that something of us should be apart from everything and everyone, even those we’re closest to; that we should have our self to our self; that we should be able to manage things rather than be fully affected by them; that a big way to do that is to play off aspects of the world against each other. All this has made people’s lives be disunified. And it has made people ashamed, agitated, angry, nervous, and deeply lonely. Contempt is the most anti-art force in the world.

Longinus, Sappho, & a Translation

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel is speaking about many instances of criticism; and so he cannot do what he often and richly did, look at length at particular passages. You’ll see that he discusses a famous passage in which Longinus comments on a poem of Sappho. And Mr. Siegel, reading the translation of the poem in the book he has been using, indicates that the translation is not so very good—and that for a possible future occasion, when more could be said, a different translation might be found.

I have wanted to provide one. The Sappho poem is among the most translated poems of all time. I have looked at many versions in English, from rhymed stanzas to free verse, but couldn’t find any I considered adequate to illustrate Longinus’s comment on it. So I have translated it myself and included that translation in a note.

I do not see this translation as adequate either. But I tried to have in it some notion of what Sappho was getting at in the Greek that she used so musically. And I tried to convey in the sound of the lines something of that music which has made her matter forever: her relation of thoughtfulness and throbbing, stir and order, delicacy and something utter, immediacy and reverberating meaning.

These opposites are the world’s. Mr. Siegel once said of her, “One thing we can be sure of: Sappho wanted to have the best way of looking at the world.” In the poem included here, she uses the turmoil of her own feelings to see, to feel, the world itself truly. And so, there is poetic music.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Three Critics & What They Saw

By Eli Siegel

Note. In this part of the lecture, Mr. Siegel is reading from Types of World Literature, ed. Houston and Smith.

When the great critics are mentioned, the writer in Greek who follows Aristotle is Longinus. Though just when he lived is not known, it was quite a few centuries after Aristotle. His writing addressed to his friend Terentianus, On the Sublime, has been seen as one of the great critical works, and I’m sorry that today we can’t discuss it more.

There is the remarkable fact that Longinus, whenever he lived, found something sublime in the first chapter of Genesis. Among the writers exemplifying the sublime, he includes the person called, in this translation, the Jewish legislator:

So likewise the Jewish legislator—no ordinary person—having conceived a just idea of the power of God, has nobly expressed it in the beginning of his law. “And God said—What?—‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

As to the statement This is sublime about “And God said, Let there be light”: Longinus has been called correct every year, nearly, since he made it. And that’s not a bad fate for a person.

Another thing that Longinus did was make Sappho the most important artistic woman who had lived. In writing about her, he mentions something that has been felt in poetry: that you can see the parts of something separately and together. You have a sense of the whole thing, while having an intense apprehension of each part. That is in the idea of composition: that things’ being together should bring out intensity; that there should be something created in common among them and helping each of them. This intensity of composition Longinus finds in Sappho:

Sappho is an instance of this; who, in portraying the characteristics of intense love, always selects her materials from its attendant circumstances, and from the passion as it really exists in nature. But in what particular has she shown her excellence? In her ability to select those circumstances which are most striking and effective, and afterwards to connect them together.

As illustration, he quotes a poem of Sappho. It is given in this book in the Ambrose Philips translation:

Well, the ancients loved this very much, and it does seem, in the Philips translation, not such great shakes. However, the Greek could be used—English too, in perhaps another translation—to show there’s composition here, composition arising from intensity, not from the ability to play chess with one’s thoughts (which is no disparagement of chess).

Longinus, writing to Terentianus, says:

Are you not amazed, my friend, to find how…her ears, her tongue, her eyes, her colour [are] all of them as much absent from her as if they had never belonged to her?

These are the opposites of absence and presence.

And what contrary affections she feels together! How she glows, chills, raves, reasons; for either she is in tumults of alarm, or she is dying away. The effect of which is, that she seems not to be attacked by one alone, but by a combination of affections.

That is Longinus, who will be met; because if you’re interested in criticism, Aristotle will be around constantly—he’s omnipresent—and Longinus is next to him. You look around, and there’s Longinus.

The Useful & the Pleasing

Horace (65–8 bce) is a Roman poet of eminence whose quality is being seen more these days. In his Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry) there are things that have stood out. One is about how, when you write poetry, things should go together—otherwise you’ll put the head of a statesman on the tail of a mermaid. Things like that. Well, that’s wise. It’s good to know.

But there are certain opposites that Horace has represented because of how he wrote about them, and they’re opposites that are with us in our lives. We have two desires: one is to be instructed, to know more, and the other is to have a good time. He has the phrase “utile dulci”: that is, poetry joins the useful and the sweet. This is from Horace’s Art of Poetry as translated by Francis Howes:

That passage is known everywhere; but it is about opposites. We read something, including poetry, to have a good time and to become more ourselves—to improve ourselves even as we meet what we like. Then Horace says the poet who can do this, join these opposites, is the poet who can be praised:

If you can please somebody and at the same time make the person’s heart better, that’s wonderful. And Horace implies, at least in this translation, that this is what a poet should do.

Order, the Unsymmetrical, & Boileau

There are three arts-of-poetry that have been written by sober people. Longinus cannot be seen as wholly sober in his writing about the sublime. Some people have even felt that Aristotle has aspects of non-sobriety in the way he jumps from one topic to another. Also, he uses various words and people haven’t known what they mean—like katharsis, or purging. He says we need certain bad passions to be shown to us in tragedies so we can get rid of them in ourselves; and people ask, How does this occur? Aristotle is still mysterious.

The three critics who represent sobriety are Horace, Boileau, and Pope. They agree with each other, more or less, and they’re all different.

Boileau (1636–1711), in canto 3 of his L’Art poétique, says that there’s nothing so disorderly, so monstrous, that it cannot be a subject of art or poetry—and that has Boileau quite of our own years. This is the beginning of canto 3 in the Soame translation (a translation that is supposed to have been helped along by Dryden):

So the idea, which is very early, that an evil thing in life can be made into something likable in art, is presented by Boileau.

The passage of Boileau that is thrilling and gets in a little history, I think should be read too. It’s not included in this book, but is also from the Art poétique. The history as Boileau gives it has been shown to be inaccurate; his presentation of French poetry as being disorderly and unsure of itself and as not having the best taste, from, say, the 11th century to the late 16th, even the early 17th, has been shown to be incorrect. There were artists then. Ronsard particularly was seen in an unfair way by Boileau. Still, as we get this incorrect history of French poetry and then come to what Boileau presents as the change, with the phrase “Enfin Malherbe vint” (“At last Malherbe came”)—something big happens.

First, I’ll say that the history of criticism and the history of poetry both have this: there’s sometimes an accent on order and sometimes on what seems irregular. In music it’s so too. A person like Webern was seen as mocking Mozart and Haydn. The history of all art goes from the symmetrical to the unexpected or unsymmetrical.

You can see it in ever so many ways, because there are two instincts: one is to sit soberly in one’s armchair, and the other is to run around the room cursing somebody. We have those things. They’re in art, and have taken hundreds of forms. And then, critics have been that way. Pope, Boileau, and Horace represent the principle of order and composition in art. There are others who represent something else. Later I’ll get to Nietzsche, who seems to represent something else.

Neatness & Excitement Are Both Here

Now I’ll read those lines of Boileau. They say, We’re having, at last, order in French poetry. (That’s what he thought.)

I’ll translate this literally, with the title “Malherbe Came”:

One of the things that the Romantics did was: consciously let one verse flow into another.

That passage of Boileau is about the victory of order; but it is thrilling. The phrase “Enfin Malherbe vint” is one of the best known in French literature. Boileau, I may mention, is one of the most likable people ever. I know his faults, but he comes out nice.