Dear Unknown Friends:

With the current issue we conclude our serialization of A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances. In that 1970 lecture, with its might and ease and kindness, Eli Siegel discusses statements about poetry made over the centuries. They are by very diverse critics, beginning with Aristotle. And Mr. Siegel shows that in those statements there is a seeing, in various ways, of opposites in poetry. Some passages are about opposites in a particular poem; others hint at opposites in poetry as such—or in the state of mind a poet should have.

These passages (and others) are earlier pointings-toward, evidence-for, what Aesthetic Realism explains with firmness, comprehensiveness, and vast diversity: “All beauty”—and certainly poetry—“is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

About the second half of that principle: no critic before Eli Siegel saw that the human self is an aesthetic matter. That is—he showed that we, every moment, are hoping to make a one of those qualities which are the very substance of poetry: rest and motion, exactitude and freedom, for and against, logic and emotion, assertion and yielding—and more.

About Criticism

This lecture, about poetry, is also about criticism. Aesthetic Realism sees the matter of what criticism is as the most important matter for the mind of everyone. And criticism here includes both literary or art criticism and our own criticism (expressed or not) of ourselves, of others, and of the world we’re in.

One of the earliest essays by Eli Siegel is “The Scientific Criticism,” published in the Modern Quarterly, March 1923, when he was 20. He begins it by defining criticism, and does so in a way I consider great, immortal.

Criticism is that action of mind, whose aim is to get the value of anything; and by value I mean size of power; and this power may be good or bad. It is clear that the value of a thing cannot be got unless the thing itself is known.

Over the years Mr. Siegel would also give this less formal description—playful yet exact—of authentic criticism: a good critic “makes a good thing look good, a bad thing look bad, and a middling thing look middling.”

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that we are all critics all the time. That is, we are constantly for or against things—from a meal we just ate, to how someone looked at us, to what a politician said, to something we ourselves said and feel bad about having said. We are constantly having some notion of the value of something—though that notion may be very inadequate and just plain wrong.

Being a critic, then, is inevitable. Being a good critic, though, has its rarity—because that requires both a purpose and a basis for judgment that are good enough. Their absence has made not only for bad criticism but for a flatness, deep ill-at-easeness, and even anguish in people’s lives. In keeping with what Mr. Siegel described in “The Scientific Criticism”: because one’s desire to know is inadequate, or lacking, one does not feel with exactitude or fullness the value of things one meets—whether objects, artworks, evening skies, the sounds of traffic, persons in history, persons down the block, the inner turmoil of somebody close to one.

Mostly, the basis on which people, consciously or not, judge the value of things is: Does this thing/person/happening make me important, make me comfortable?—if so, this thing or person is good. But if it/he/she doesn’t make me important but makes me uncomfortable, makes me in some way question myself, that thing or person is bad. This largely unarticulated basis of judgment is a form of contempt. And Aesthetic Realism shows that from contempt has come every human injustice.

From an Aesthetic Realism Lesson

What I just described, I learned in an Aesthetic Realism lesson, taught by Mr. Siegel. He was showing me that the basis for being a true critic in one’s own life is the same as the basis for being a true critic of literature. And I say with immense gratitude: that fact has been stated and explained for the first time, in Aesthetic Realism. It was never before seen, even by the finest critics. I’ll quote just a little from that lesson:

Mr. Siegel said to me: “You are a critic of your own experience. Your hope is to be someone who enjoys your life and at the same time is a good critic of it.” And he explained, “A critic is supposed to be fair to two things at once: the object, and his or her feelings as to the object.”

Then he described the impediment to good criticism, in both literature and life. He said, “There are two mes in everyone, and one is definitely not as good as the other.” There is one me, one aspect of self, that wants to know, to be fair to what is not oneself. But:

There is a me that says the best thing to do is to be inaccurate about the rest of the world. This has occurred in criticism and has made for some false judgments, many of them. A person can use a work of art to love oneself in a spurious way. That which enables one to be a critic of this kind is present in one’s life, and it comes to this: that is good in this world which pleases me or likes me.

He explained that when a critic has not seen the goodness in a work, or has described the work as bad when it was good—“it’s been because the goodness of the work has been seen as a threat to something in [the critic’s] self.” When a critic praises something that does not deserve it—it’s because “this work as good would please something in him- or herself.” He said, “Self is the one bad judge in this world: the narrow self that is not interested in the object.”

I was meeting in this lesson what literary critics have thirsted for—including such persons as Matthew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve. They, like others, felt with pain that their cultural endeavors were apart from their personal lives, that the two did not have a real basis in common. Mr. Siegel explained: “I’m trying to have Ellen Reiss convinced that her criticism of herself, the world, the people she knows, has a likeness to the criticism of poetry.” Yes, I am convinced. And in my conviction is the happiness and gratitude of my life.

“What Poetry Is About”

To follow the final part of A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, we publish a poem by Eli Siegel. While being poetry, it is also poetic criticism—great criticism—because it describes what makes a poem matter. The poem, “Prosody Is Ours,” is a sonnet, and has the subtitle “Relevant to the Time Enough Poetry Club.”

The Time Enough was a class in poetry taught by Mr. Siegel, originally for persons below the age of 18. (Later, due to popular demand, the upper age limit was removed.) There, at age 13, I first met what I would come to see as the most beautiful, important, and exciting knowledge in the world: the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry. That explanation is present in “Prosody Is Ours.”

The word prosody refers to the technical aspects of poetry as sound: for instance, rhythms, metre, line lengths, stanzas, rhyme, assonance. Eli Siegel showed that in a real poem, a person has been so fair to what he or she is writing about that we hear as music the structure of the world itself: the oneness of opposites. That is the basis for the critical seeing of a poem: have the opposites of reality come to be one in it, through the depth of a person’s honesty, so that the lines are musical?

I think this poem is among the finest of sonnets ever written. It has the tightness of that 14-line, rhymed form—yet in that strict form the words as music rustle, bound, go deep, go wide. There is such a diversity of sound at one with idea. There is the expectant sound of the first line, with its delicate rhythmic suspense, “They come to hear what poetry is about”; then, 10 lines later, a sound so different but in essentially the same metre, “Let stanzas sigh and let a sonnet curse”; then two lines after that, so firm yet innocent and wondering, “The music of the world is in us, too.” —And so, here too is a Statement about Poetry.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Mallarmé & Tsurayuki, Looking

By Eli Siegel

The person who is seen as the quietest French person of letters in the latter part of the 19th century is Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98). He has all the quietness of Boileau—but the things he says! He had great trouble about poetry, and I’m going to read some instances of his expressing this, and say that it goes along with everything that I have read this afternoon, and will read on another afternoon or evening.

Mallarmé is decidedly alive. He is looked on in Paris as more alive than President Pompidou. The book I’m reading from is Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters, translated by Bradford Cook. I’ll read some statements from the letters.

Body & Mind

On June 4, 1862, Mallarmé is talking about a poem he has written. The letter is to Henri Cazalis:

It could be called: Springtime Spleen. If the combination is well harmonized, and if a work of that sort is neither too physical nor too spiritual, it can be rather effective.

So Mallarmé felt, as he would in his poem “Afternoon of a Faun,” that somehow body and thought or self could be seen more as one. We suffer when we don’t see them as one—and we usually don’t.

Being Affected & Expressing

Then, Mallarmé has torment about feeling, and about whether the poet evokes himself or is affected by what he sees. In a letter to Cazalis, January 1865, Mallarmé says that if “the poor poet” is not moved by things, he can say nothing:

But the poor poet—one who is a poet only; that is, an instrument played upon by the fingers of various sensations—is silent when he lives where nothing moves him. The strings stretch, then, and dust and forgetfulness succeed.

Mallarmé deals with his troubles. He writes to Henri Cazalis, December 5, 1865, and we have Mallarmé as like anyone else who has been affected by life in a way he doesn’t want to be:

Forgive me for the past and the future. For the past: because I haven’t written to thank you for your splendid book. I spent the whole week suffering horribly from neuralgia. It beat at my temples day and night and wrung the nerves in my teeth.

The next sentences of the letter are about himself as a poet:

Whenever there was a let-up, I rushed madly, desperately to my table to try and write an overture for my poem. I could not. It eludes me. I hear it singing in me, but I cannot write it down.

—Which means, as Sappho said, there’s something in us that doesn’t seem to be just ourselves. And he says:

For the future: because I must find isolation in the unknown regions of Revery for the sake of this enslaving work; I must have no distractions, no friendly, easy conversation. I live in inviolate solitude and silence.

That means that in the months since the first letter I quoted from, Mallarmé seems to have changed: now he doesn’t want all those impressions from the outside world. He doesn’t want his friends telling him things. He wants to be “inviolate.” Those are opposites too: being affected and being inviolate. In fact, you could go for being inviolate just because you had welcomed people.

Sensation & Nothingness

There is this in a letter to the symbolist dramatist and story writer, chiefly, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; the date is September 24, 1866:

And so you will be terrified to hear that I discovered the Idea of the Universe through sensation alone—and that, in order to perpetuate the indelible idea of pure Nothingness, I had to fill my brain with the sensation of absolute Emptiness.

My poem “Nothing: A Study,” in Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, is on the subject.

Personal & Impersonal

Mallarmé has an awful time being personal and impersonal. It has caused a lot of trouble. If you read Mallarmé’s letters you’ll see how much trouble it can cause. He says to Henri Cazalis on May 14, 1867:

Which means that I am impersonal now: not the Stéphane you once knew, but one of the ways the Spiritual Universe has found to see Itself, unfold Itself through what used to be me.

I remember—this happened twice—somebody at a party suddenly said, “You don’t know it, but I am dead.” I knew he meant it.

From a letter to Eugène Lefébure, May 17, 1867:

To think I have to go through all that to have a unified vision of the Universe. But if you don’t do that, then the only unity you feel is your own existence.

And to Léo d’Orfer, June 27, 1884:

Poetry, when human language has been reduced to its essential rhythm, is the expression of the mysterious meaning of the various aspects of our existence. It therefore gives true value to our life on earth and is the only duty of our soul.

Self & World in 10th-Century Japan

In Carl Van Doren’s Anthology of World Prose there are some Japanese essays. One is by Ki no Tsurayuki, who, it is thought, died in the year 945. The translator is F.V. Dickins.

For many centuries the Japanese took their poetry with a certain simplicity. They felt that if anything moves in the grass, it’s a poetic subject—write a haiku—or if something floats, particularly a petal on the water, or if a child smiles while having a red ribbon. But they wanted to get a thing as is.

The old idea that poetry is about the more pleasant aspects of life, and the deeper aspects of life, is in this essay on poetry, by Ki no Tsurayuki. There is something true in that idea—because summer and spring and autumn and winter are still original. Tsurayuki deals with some Japanese poets whom he doesn’t like. But in this passage, he mentions things in life that affected people and about which they wrote poems:

Again to verse were they moved when they saw the ground white with snowy showers of fallen cherry blossoms on spring mornings; or heard on autumn evenings the rustle of falling leaves;…or trembled as they watched the passing dewdrop quivering on the beaded grass, or the river’s flow flecked with perishing bubbles—symbols of their own fleeting lives.

You get the idea that there was a feeling the earth itself—not just earth as cosmos, but in its delicacy—is a subject of poetry.

What Emotions Has It Caused?

What I have read are aspects of the criticism of poetry. There are many other aspects. One can go from poetry to criticism, but a necessary way also is to go from criticism to poetry, because how people have seen something is a way of seeing what that thing is. If you want to study something in the field of art, you have to see what honest emotions that thing has caused. You cannot know a thing unless you’re interested in whatever accurate emotion it has caused.

The criticism of poetry says something about the world and about who oneself is. It says something about life and death—popular subjects in poetry—with love in between somehow and standing for all three. These subjects, as Ki no Tsurayuki says, have moved people. But they are a phase of sameness and difference. Even life and death belong to sameness and difference.

So Coleridge is right: at this moment, in thinking of what criticism has been, one can get the feeling that the utmost logic is the utmost emotion. As people see that more, I think they will be juster to themselves.

Prosody Is Ours

Relevant to the Time Enough Poetry Club

By Eli Siegel