Dear Unknown Friends:

In this TRO are poems by Eli Siegel; and a paper in which I comment on poetry and one of the fifteen questions in his definitive Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? Published as a broadside thirty years ago by the Terrain Gallery and reprinted in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? has never been publicly discussed by art critics, though they have used its ideas without acknowledgment copiously these decades. Aesthetic Realism exists because Eli Siegel saw what no one else had: “The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.” He not only defined beauty—he showed that it is the one practical answer for every person’s life.

The poems by Eli Siegel that follow, comment on what Aesthetic Realism shows are the two purposes that fight in us all. One purpose—the most hurtful thing in a person—is to have contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” The other is the purpose we were born for: to be ourselves through seeing meaning in what is not us—that is, the purpose to like the world.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poems by Eli Siegel

Rehabilitation

Our Very Selves

Preferring Cellars

Poetry: Impersonal and Personal

By Ellen Reiss

Eli Siegel’s Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? explains, after centuries of literary criticism—after Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Boileau, Pope, Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold, and more—the art from which Aesthetic Realism itself arose, the art of poetry. I shall use English poems of five centuries to illustrate the fourth of Eli Siegel’s fifteen questions: Impersonal and Personal. I think there is nothing people need to understand more than what is in this question. It is because Eli Siegel taught me that I wanted to be like a poem, personal and impersonal at once—with a man, with other women, with my thoughts to myself—that my life is now a useful and proud one. I know to be true what he writes in the preface to the book of poems Personal and Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists: “It is beautiful when the personal and impersonal worlds are one. It also makes for the happiness philosophers and charwomen desire.”

This is question 4: Impersonal and Personal:

Does every instance of art and beauty contain something which stands for the meaning of all that is, all that is true in an outside way, reality just so?—and does every instance of art and beauty also contain something which stands for the individual mind, a self which has been moved, a person seeing as original person?

1. Geoffrey Chaucer Answers Yes

This human being, who lived for about sixty years during the fourteenth century, has the first name of might in English poetry—because with Chaucer, with great consistency, an “individual mind” became the same as “reality just so.” Take a noted line of his, the first line of The Parlement of Foules: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne” (“The life so short, the craft so long to learn”).

This is about dissatisfaction, a personal thing. But it is in a certain metre—an unaccented syllable, then an accented syllable, five times—which became in the centuries after Chaucer the metre of Shakespeare and much English poetry, the iambic pentameter: da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM. These five beats are impersonal—they are a matter of pure physics. But Chaucer made them become “The lýf so shórt, the cráft so lóng to lérne.” This means a person was using an organization of what the world is made of—gentleness and force, lightness and heaviness, motion and rest—to tell about his own feeling.

Yet the dear iambic pentameter alone is not enough to make a line of poetry good: there are thousands of poems in this rhythm that have not made it through the years. In this line of 1382 or so, as Chaucer tells us there is an ability, a “craft,” he’s trying to have which he does not think he will ever get to, what we hear are four syllables that are abrupt—“The lyf so short”—which join with syllables that drag, yearn, and are reluctant: “the craft so long to lerne.” What this comes to is that the dissatisfaction of one man, Geoffrey Chaucer, became the same as the structure of the impersonal universe: a oneness of speed and slowness, frailty and force, staccato and dragging: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

In his great preface to the book Personal and Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists, Eli Siegel writes,

What distinguishes a poetic emotion or, generally, an art emotion from the customary kind is that while a poetic emotion is personal and impersonal at once, the customary kind can be seen as just personal.

This is also what he taught me in Aesthetic Realism lessons, saving me from agony. He showed me, for instance, that I was in pain because the way I saw a man was “just personal.” He said, “You are not interested in how a man sees truth; you’re interested in how he sees you.” And he said, “You think being impersonal is the same as being cold.” He taught me that I had to learn from poetry.

2. Andrew Marvell

Three hundred years after Chaucer, Andrew Marvell wrote a poem complaining about time—something many people do. But the way Marvell complained was personal and impersonal at once; therefore it was beautiful. Midway in the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” are these four lines:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

The line that is most personal—getting in his own back—is the line that in its music has the dogmatic and firm knock of reality itself, somewhat like the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: “But át my báck I álways héar.” This is the world saying, “There’s something larger than your personality, and you follow my rules.” In the next line, one of the most impersonal things one can think of, time, is made personal by being given an interesting vehicle in which to take trips, a “wingèd chariot”; and the line rustles, flutters, has a more personal and delicate texture than the line that preceded it: “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” Then Marvell writes two lines about eternity—so impersonal. The lines are wide, fearsome, but they are warm too, partly because the poetic unconscious of Marvell was impelled to get those rs into them: “And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.”

Because Marvell, while being, as Eli Siegel puts it, “original person,” was fair to “reality just so,” sound came to him which, according to Aesthetic Realism, is the decisive thing in poetry: poetic music. Marvell and poetry itself stand for the most important thing I think people now need to know: that when you are fair to something representing the impersonal world, “reality just so,” you are individual, original, personal, just yourself—and the greater the fairness, the greater the individuality. That fact is in the music of these lines:

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

3. Robert Burns

In his preface to Personal and Impersonal, Eli Siegel writes about this man who ploughed fields in Scotland:

Burns suffered from love, and saw his suffering with impersonality, too. So there were poems. Many other Scotch young men in the l770’s and 1780’s suffered from love, but the way they saw what happened to them was not the way Robert Burns saw what happened to him.

In his “A Farewell to Nancy,” Burns writes these lines about the personal pain of two people:

Had we never loved sae kindly,

Had we never loved sae blindly,

Never met—or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

When rhyme is used well, we are hearing what Eli Siegel calls “the meaning of all that is,” because we are hearing sameness and difference, sheer—and that is what reality begins with. We hear this in the way Burns rhymes kindly and blindly, two words freighted with human meaning and confusion, but in their structure simply the same and different. In fact, a single impersonal sound, a k versus a bl, is the only thing differentiating the first two lines; yet through this utter, abstract sameness-and-difference, we feel personal passion, pain, bewilderment: “Had we never loved sae kindly, / Had we never loved sae blindly.”

It is a tremendous thing that rhythm, which is simply impersonal physics—in this instance, the trochee, an accented syllable followed by an unaccented—can become the same as the human rush of hope and falling back in disappointment: “Hád we néver lóved sae kíndly.”

Then there is a phrase about two constant activities of the universe, present in molecules and tides—coming together and separating: “Never met—or never parted.” Burns joins it with a line tremendously personal: “We had ne’er been broken-hearted.”

What is in these lines is what Eli Siegel was teaching me to go for when he said, “Try to see Mr. V the way a French ethical academy a hundred years from now would see him.” That is, something standing for the impersonal world should be able to ratify my personal feeling, the way the structure of reality is musically ratifying the emotion of Burns in

Had we never loved sae kindly,

Had we never loved sae blindly,

Never met—or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

4. Walt Whitman and Eli Siegel

Poetry tells us a person can so much want to be fair to “the meaning of all that is, all that is true in an outside way, reality just so,” that he can feel truly his personality is as permanent as earth itself. This feeling is in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and it is at the end of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” as Whitman and earth, personal and impersonal, are greatly the same:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

Yet the greatest oneness of personal and impersonal in both poetry and life is Eli Siegel; because he, as one man, came to an explanation of the whole world: Aesthetic Realism. And it is his thought, impersonal and permanent philosophy, which has made people, including me, feel comprehended at our deepest, most personal. Therefore I conclude with the last lines of Eli Siegel’s “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” because they have what the whole history of poetry leads to and asks for: one person, forcefully and with grace, speaking for the world itself, and the things the world has:

Hot afternoons are real; afternoons are; places, things, thoughts, feelings are; poetry is;

The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it! The past is in it;

All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls, trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it; and all are to be known;

Afternoons have to do with the whole world;

And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!

The world of girls’ beautiful faces, bodies and clothes, quiet afternoons, graceful birds, great words, tearful music, mind-joying poetry, beautiful livings, loved things, known things: a to-be-used and known and pleasure-to-be giving world.