Dear Unknown Friends:
As we publish the conclusion of the definitive 1948 lecture Poetry and Technique, by Eli Siegel, I am grateful to speak a little here about the poetry of Mr. Siegel himself—which is, in my careful opinion, some of the greatest poetry ever written. This principle, the basis of Aesthetic Realism, is true of all poetry, including Mr. Siegel’s own: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
No poet wrote and was at ease in a greater variety of styles and diversity of poetic forms. Eli Siegel wrote in couplets, stanzas, blank verse; he wrote some of the best sonnets in English; he wrote in such intricate verse forms as the medieval French ballade and the rondeau; he wrote much, much free verse. In his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems and Hail, American Development are some of the most complex poems in American literature, and some of the simplest. His poetry is passionately serious—and sometimes wildly funny. In the 1960s he wrote with musical intensity and sometimes satirically against the Vietnam war; he wrote with passion about what human beings deserve economically—and he also wrote “To a Slushy Pear” and about determinism and free will in lifting a water stopper.
The large matter is the way of seeing the world which is in the poetry of Eli Siegel: it is, in my opinion, the most beautiful, complete, truest way of seeing the world that ever existed in a person, and it makes, in his poems, for music that is very large.
William Carlos Williams, in his famous 1951 letter to Martha Baird, describes, as he sees it, the quality and importance of Eli Siegel’s poetry. Of “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” which won the Nation Poetry Prize in 1925, Williams writes: “I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world.” And he continues, about other poems of Eli Siegel:
As I read his pieces I am never prepared for what will come next….This is powerful evidence of a new track….The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either a great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new.
Williams describes too what Mr. Siegel met from the literary establishment: “The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the ‘authorities’ whom I shall not dignify by naming” (Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, ed. J.E.B. Breslin [New York: New Directions, 1985], pp. 250-1).
A Child: Dignified and Bewildered
On pages 80-83 of Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems are “Twenty-one Distichs about Children.” I use four of these distichs or couplets to comment on the poetry of Eli Siegel, which they represent, and on Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of people. The first is:
1. Bernice thinks a little.
Bernice is two months old; the world is new for her.
Ah, will her parents’ angry world quite do for her?
I love this couplet for what it comprehends and for its beauty. Here, through the measured, firm, thoughtful sound in iambic hexameter rhythm, a little child is felt as having dignity; and also, as these two long lines reach out in delicate wonder, we feel too her bewilderment.
The deepest desire of every person, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to like the world. Meanwhile, often a child very early is aware, from a bassinet or crib, of two representatives of this world—her parents—showing anger, scorn, displeasure toward each other and at other things. Sometimes they clutch at the child for consolation against a world they dislike; sometimes they want to dismiss that same child, who is part of the disliked world. And so a child, Bernice, who wants her parents to help her in what is most important for her life—to like the world she was born into—becomes mixed up. She may be praised, hugged; she may receive presents; but she is being thwarted as to her deepest, most essential hope. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson when I was two years old, Mr. Siegel said to my parents, who had just begun to study Aesthetic Realism:
You don’t bear a child to have a possession but in order to have that child like the world. If you don’t like the world, you can’t show a child how to do that. Ellen wants to be known and understood and not to be coddled and to be a snob. I am interested in Ellen’s not withdrawing and thinking the world is a mess.
I thank Eli Siegel for understanding me and everyone; for fighting to have the best thing in a person win, fighting (to use an old-fashioned word) for my soul. The lines about Bernice stand for the powerfully beautiful way of seeing that was present every time he spoke to a person. Within the dignity of the first line is a drama of two sounds: the inwardly whirling er and the sound of happy, outgoing wonder: oo. A child as in herself and out, confused and sunny, is in that dignified musical line: “Bernice is two months old; the world is new for her.” Then, the second line has a wide ache or sigh: “Ah, will her parents’ angry world quite do for her?”
Littleness and Grandeur
The tenth distich is called “Magnificence in Jackie”:
A child has come—we know not whence—
In Jackie, there’s magnificence.
This couplet, with its concise four-beat lines, has neatness and grandeur, small and large, as one. The name Jackie is so non-mighty. Yet it has a likeness in sound to the exceedingly different word magnificence: the as are in common; the ck is related to the hard g. Eli Siegel has us feel organically, through the way the words as sound and meaning are used, that indeed “In Jackie, there’s magnificence.”
What is the magnificence of a child—or any person? It is not, Aesthetic Realism shows, in the fact that the child may be yours, or the person may make much of you. The magnificence of any person is that the structure of the world itself—the oneness of opposites—is in him. Every child is hoping to be, at once, in motion and at rest: to feel agog, keenly interested, and also composed. Every child is one and many-has many thoughts, many feelings, often swirling within a single being who takes up not so much room on his father’s lap. Every child wants to be free yet also just to the things and people he meets. These opposites—reality insisting within him-are the magnificence of Jackie.
I shall comment on two more of these beautiful, comprehending distichs. First, “14. Alexander has failed”:
He was a man of means; his name was Alexander;
His little Helen asked in vain; he failed to understand her.
The technical beauty of this couplet is the way it makes a one of pomp in the sound of the first line and such pathos in the second. And in that second line, with sounds having pain—the short is, eh, the long as—there are respect and tremendous compassion.
Distich 18, tells of the biggest mistake people make:
As much as little Alice was unknown,
She thought, I’m in myself and just my own.
In an Aesthetic Realism principle—a landmark in civilization—Mr. Siegel explains: “The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.” Alice, like thousands of children right now, is using the fact that no one sees or wants sufficiently to see what goes on within her, to feel she doesn’t have to be fair to the world: that what’s inside her is warmer and better than what’s outside. This poem has compassion for Alice, yet also embodies in its second line some of the bad triumph and smugness children can have—but which deeply they long to find unnecessary.
Standing for myself and them, it is my happiness to say with love: Dear Eli Siegel—you understood the hopes of children, and adults. You understood mine of once, mine of now. Because of you, little Alice or Jackie or Helen or Bernice need no longer be unknown. Because of your Aesthetic Realism—which criticizes contempt and teaches a person how, honestly, grandly, to like the world—the true self of every person can be a flourishing thing.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
Technique Is Ourselves
By Eli Siegel
In technique, we have the very meaning of organization. We should have the feeling that each word is there, as a single individual, as an organ of the body, but that all the words make a one. Every poem is like a human body. Every poem is like a mind: every mind is a oneness in diversity.
A big thing in technique is the feeling that while an object was looked at, a person was also present. Technique is a sign that the person and the object made a one. They are made one in all successful poetry. If we think of poems that have meant a very great deal, we shall find that. Take a poem that Shakespeare quotes in Hamlet—these are two stanzas from the 16th-century poem of Lord Vaux “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love”:
A pikeax and a spade,
And eke a shrowding shete,
A house of claye for to be made,
For such a gest most mete.
Me thinkes I heare the clarke,
That knoles the carefull knell:
And bids me leave my wofull warke,
Ere nature me compell.
This sounds very simple. A poem like this should be compared to the lines of Robert Lowell I discussed. Why is this poetry? The reason is that there is more art. I am willing to take many risks in saying that “The St. Louis Blues” has more art to it than T.S. Eliot. And so has “Frankie and Johnny.” I am not trying to be quaint. I am saying this with my critical heart’s blood.
“A pikeax and a spade”: in the way the syllables fall here, there is a staccato quality which fits what is going on very well. We should see that a sound like k is the opposite of a sound like l, which is very soft. And then, after the metallic quality, we have something in the way of fabric: “And eke a shrowding shete.” And then something softer: “A house of claye for to be made / For such a gest most mete.” And the homeliness of this is one of the reasons for the terror. The fact that the syllables fall with a thud and with suggestion is one of the reasons for the goodness of this particular poem.
Tightness and Expansion
A person has a problem of being tight and also expansive. A nervous person, for instance, has a spree on Saturday night and on Monday becomes very, very contracted. That problem is part of the technique of poetry: how to be neat and also expansive, tight and also loose. All good lines of poetry are a success there. The lines are neat, they don’t slop over, and yet they go into space. Free verse was a means of meeting that problem. We should see that lines that are very neat indeed are on the side of poetry, and so is a line like Sandburg’s “When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin…in the dust, in the cool tombs.”
That has expansion in it, but there is neatness anyway. The problem of free verse is the problem of how to get order even though the order isn’t obvious. The beat, which is a big thing in poetry, occurs unexpectedly in free verse, but it is there. The beat stands for backbone; the other syllables stand for muscle.
Lightness and Heaviness
I close with a poem which I’ve always felt, though it came almost cryingly, had technique. There is a little girl who runs across the street; and then there is the Missouri, the slowest and the muddiest river. There is something of the moment, and there is something of all time. And the poem has fun in it. As I look on it now, I see it as having lightness and heaviness; in other words, something like technique. That is for you to judge. [Note. This poem, “The Missouri,” is included in Eli Siegel’s Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems (New York: Definition Press).]
How a river goes its way
While little girls in April dresses
Run from a pavement
Across a street
To a pavement there.
How the Missouri
Before that dying,
That possessing of wide cloud
In June, in June,
Was warm and had
Warm twigs on it, going
With the water.
Well, the world is space and heaviness. And the problem of technique is to show that the world of nothingness is like the world that we kick and which sometimes bumps into us, that the world of speed is also the world of tranquility. So Aesthetic Realism says, in studying the technique of verse you are studying yourself, and you are studying what the world yearns for with the utmost logic.