Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part two in our two-part publication of Poetry and Evil, by Eli Siegel. It was in May of 1964 that he gave this lecture on what he called “the toughest subject in the world, and that subject in relation to poetry.” The achievement of this talk is immense—and immensely kind. Mr. Siegel explains what evil truly is in its structure, its make-up, in its everydayness and its ferocity. And we have the experience of seeing that “toughest subject” presented with authentic seriousness, and the experience of having (inseparably from the seriousness) an exceedingly good time.

The source of both the seriousness and the good time is this principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

At the beginning of this lecture, Mr. Siegel described what he would be doing throughout it. I’ll quote that description here as a means of placing what you’ll soon read in this second half. He said:

I am going to read and say something about some poems in the English language that definitely hint or show or say that the world is evil; and furthermore, I am not going to read any poem that contradicts them.

The contradiction is in the fact that these are poems. That is, if evil can be said well, it may be that the more evil is seen well, the more something which can be called good also can be seen. So the contradiction is in the fact that poems about evil, poems saying the world is evil, are poems.

Three Points

I ’ll mention, also by way of introduction, three central points in Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of this huge subject, evil:

1) In keeping with the principle quoted earlier, Mr. Siegel shows in this talk that evil is always a disjunction of opposites, a severing of them. Particularly, he shows that evil is “an insufficient junction of the ideas of junction and separation.” (You’ll read more about that in this second half.)

2) Aesthetic Realism is great in human history for its showing the following about art: When any subject or thing, including evil, is seen and shown by an artist deeply enough, accurately enough, sincerely enough, the result is always beautiful. Evil, seen and shown truly, is felt as evil—but the art, the telling of it, is beautiful. There is no more hopeful fact in the world. (Why this is so, Aesthetic Realism explains; and I said something about that why in our last issue.)

3) As I also wrote in the last issue, Aesthetic Realism explains what the source of all human evil is. That source is contempt: the feeling we are more if we can lessen things and people not ourselves—by looking down on them, fooling them, seeing them as less real than we are. The big fight in human history and in every person is between the desire for justice to things and the desire for contempt.

A Poem That, Most Certainly, Belongs

In the final half of his lecture, Mr. Siegel speaks about lines by Alexander Pope and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are no two poets in English literature more different from each other than these are; yet both are looking at evil with such deep honesty that their lines are beautiful. To accompany them, we preface this second half with lines of another poet: Eli Siegel himself. In his poems as in his lectures, Mr. Siegel dealt with subjects as various as reality is, and the subject of the poem we include here is evil. He wrote “Also Not Liking You: Observations on Sickness in Verse or Anywhere” in 1970.

At that time, the word sick was much used to describe a certain phase of evil: a sense of the repulsive, of ill feeling, of the painful non-fittingness of things. Mr. Siegel is somewhat jocular in his title, and the poem has humor. Meanwhile, it is a masterpiece. Its fourteen four-beat lines are in couplets. They’re simultaneously neat and surprising—and musical. Sometimes (not often) those four beats come in with a regularity; mostly, though, there are so many unaccented syllables present around each beat that there’s a feeling of rush and tumble and tripping—yet those four beats are always there. And the rhyme—which is difference felt also as sameness—is always there.

In this poem, what we can count on and what tosses us about and trips us up are felt as one. What’s immensely uncomfortable and unfitting, fits. The sickening-as-evil has such form with such speed, such neatness with such whirling, such clarity with such nuance, that it’s immensely interesting. Indeed, it’s thrilling.

So this work, too, most certainly belongs to the gathering of poems about evil—poems which tell us, through how they’re made, that reality is nevertheless a friend.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Also Not Liking You

Observations on Sickness in Verse or Anywhere

By Eli Siegel

Poetry and Evil, II

By Eli Siegel

The next poem I’ll read is a fragment that Mrs. Shelley included in her edition of her husband’s poetry. It’s quoted by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The lines were written in 1820, and are about the moon.

The moon has very often been seen as dazed, helpless, confused, mechanical even. We can look at it and think, “What’s it doing up there, so sad and comfortless?” Shelley identified himself with the moon, and felt the moon didn’t know what it was doing, and nothing knew what it was doing, and that is all. —This is the poem:

Those lines are some of the greatest in the English language.

“Art thou pale for weariness / Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth.” One of the evils felt by people is, they don’t know what they’re living for; and the moon is as confused as any mortal, as any human being. If you think you’re confused, think of the moon: put up there, not knowing what it’s doing, having phases, none of which is in its control; looking sad, looking sultry, being different in Venezuela from what it is in Sweden; and having to look at the earth and occasionally working with the sun for something called an eclipse—it’s all foolish.

“Wandering companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth.” That is about insufficient junction. There have been two things seen as evil in history: people telling you what to do (which everyone has undergone, and which is excessive junction), and also being too apart from other people. To live is to have the “pleasure” of both.

“And ever changing, like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its constancy.” Evil here is seen as the doing too many things without any unity, or oneness, or direction. And then, doing one thing without any division is also evil. There is the evil of unfettered, directionless or undirected versatility, and there is the evil of doing one thing only; and the moon can give the feeling of both. It does have its laws, which astronomers have pointed out; but it does seem to be so changeable.

So these lines are in the field of evil, and if aesthetic problems come from the idea of evil—why, let them; they are there.

Alexander Pope & the Victory of Darkness

Then, in the field of evil we have the idea of darkness, the lack of interest in what the world is like; and that evil has been presented with tremendous power in the concluding lines of The Dunciad. These lines make one feel that the lights will sometime be out in the whole world, just as, in early 1941, say, people felt that the lights were out in Europe.

Pope, when he wrote The Dunciad, was a successful poet, but he felt people were not interested enough in what poetry stood for; he likely felt that the interest of the lord who subscribed to his Homer translation was not all it should be. And The Dunciad, seemingly against dunces, is really against that dullness in human beings which 1) makes them aloof, and 2) makes them vaunt themselves, makes them brandish that dullness inimically. This is the triumph of evil.

Every poem I’ve read today is a good poem, and the fact that these horrible things can be said beautifully is the one contradiction to evil that I choose to have present in this talk. I could read some of the cheerful poems of the world, including a sonnet of Shakespeare and the Hellas or Adonais of Shelley, and God knows what else; but we’ll let evil have its day in fact, combated only by the beautiful way in which that fact is presented.

So this is Pope in the concluding lines of The Dunciad. Pope has called on the Muse to do something about all this dullness or duncedom, but the Muse can’t—the goddess Dullness will prevail and take over everything:

These are great lines too, some hard to follow, but it is well to look at them.

There is a principle of composition in things and a principle of decomposition. Each one of these things has its good side. The good side of decomposition is analysis. Each bad thing has its good side, but each good thing has its bad side. To compose oneself is good; but to change one’s composing oneself into obstinacy or saying “I can’t change my mind”—that is bad. Stubbornness is the chemical ailment of composition. We have again the idea of evil as not having the principle of closeness and separation as one thing; or being, as I put it earlier, an insufficient junction of the ideas of junction and separation.

What This Goddess Is

“She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold / Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!” Night can be evil because it is one thing uninterrupted. Chaos is evil because it is numerous messiness. There is a separation in chaos; and in night, monotony.

“She comes”—this “she” is the principle of chaos, and of dullness; and also the principle of ego. It is the unwillingness of persons to see, become a goddess. “Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay, / And all its varying rainbows die away.”

“Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires.” We have weakness here, and a lack of continuity. Evil has been seen as a sort of effort that gives up too soon.

“As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain, / The sickening stars fade off th’ ethereal plain.” For something like night interrupted with form by stars, to have to give up those stars—would be the victory of evil.

“As Argus’ eyes, by Hermes’ wand oppressed, / Closed one by one to everlasting rest.” The changing of energy into inertness is evil, and Argus’ having his eyes be closed is a way of dishonoring energy.

“Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, / Art after art goes out, and all is night.”

At present we have a situation related to what Pope describes as to the fields of knowledge. There is not a seeing of junction and separation among the sciences, and between the arts and sciences. It is very well to see the difference between biology and sociology, or biology and painting; but it would be also good to see where they have something in common. There is separation among the fields of learning—and the junction that a journal can seem to make for, or an encyclopedia, is not a true junction. There is an insufficient oneness of learning as separate and learning as continuous. A lot of that goes on in the learning of the world, and with all the attempts at distinction and synthesis that the colleges of America and elsewhere go for, I am afraid that what is hinted at in the lines of Pope is still present. But that is a story by itself.

Pope complains that the fields of learning are not related: “See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, / Mountains of casuistry heaped o’er her head!” Man cannot find truth, but God, can he argue!—that’s what Pope is saying. Casuistry has taken the place of truth: the being able to appear bright has won over the desire to see what may be true.

“Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, / Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.” At the present time there is a desire to relate philosophy or metaphysics to the sciences. Wherever there is a separation between an interest in why water boils and what existence is, there is trouble. One should be interested in why water boils or ice melts or birds can fly or a gong is a gong—all these things are wonderful studies. But if you cannot be interested in acoustics and the reality without which even acoustics could not be, then you have, as Pope might put it, made a separation between second cause and first cause. Here Pope is with Hegel. Hegel complained that the English philosophers were more interested in why a tube was inflated or deflated, or what air would do if it were put in a jar in a cupboard for nine days, than in what things were about. Well, the sciences exist, but any person who believes they are really related in America is exceedingly naïve.

“Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, / And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!” What we can have is too much abstraction, as in a good deal of metaphysics, and also too much looking at only the tangible.

“See Mystery to Mathematics fly! / In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.” Pope says the sciences, the ways of looking at the world, look to each other for some kind of help, but it’s too late.

“Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, / And unawares Morality expires.” Religion and morality are two of the things that have fought. It was felt that ethics was something apart from religion in the biggest sense.

“Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; / Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!” Pope says persons don’t have the energy to see, either publicly or privately.

“Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; / Light dies before thy uncreating word.” Light is the form of chaos. Light is the first successful getting by reality of form, because it made space energetic. Also, light made chaos discernible. So light is the first artist and should have a statue in honor of it in every museum.

“Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And universal darkness buries all.” Darkness is associated with evil and light with good.

Always, Junction & Separation

So I’ve read instances of poetry that tell about evil.

The ills they tell of all belong to the junction and separation matter. There is a junction which, as I said, is the bad exertion of power; and then, there is aloofness. While a person tries to affect another and is aloof, that person is evil and represents what makes a poem bad.

The understanding of evil is necessary for one’s true care of poetry.