Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value, a 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel, which we have the happiness of serializing. As he discusses passages from a literary periodical of then, Mr. Siegel is showing, with ease, depth, grace, point, and richness, what criticism is and what true art is—and how we, in our own lives, hope to see.

There is so much in simply the part of the talk that is published here. And this principle of Aesthetic Realism is thrillingly alive in it: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

In the present section there is, for instance, his showing what imagination is, the imagination that makes for art. The matter of imagination, with all its grandeur, has been a source of deep unsureness in people and also shame. That is because, though they may throw the term around, they don’t know what distinguishes the imagination that makes for beauty from the imagination that shows off insincerely, or from the imagination that’s behind a lie, or behind a picture in one’s mind of things and people that’s unjust. Eli Siegel is the critic, and Aesthetic Realism the philosophy, who and which have explained the distinction between true and false imagination, and some of that explanation is here.

Is There a Drama in All Objects?

Something magnificent in this section of the lecture is Eli Siegel’s discussion of the drama in objects. Art comes, he shows, from a person’s seeing, feeling, that drama. And the drama to be seen in any object, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the presence in it of what the world itself is: the oneness of opposites—such opposites as quiet and tumult, the unbounded and the precise, likeness and difference, the known and the unknown. This matter of feeling the drama in things has to do with the daily life of everyone—and how one’s daily life may lack life in the fullest sense.

Each of us has been born into the world—which is the whole world, but also a world of ever so many objects, things. How do we see them? Mainly, we do the reverse of what art does: we take the drama out of things. Is there a drama in a leaf—in the way, for instance, it is at the same moment fragile and strong? Look at how, this spring morning, a wind tosses that little leaf about, every which way. And yet—see how, while the delicate leaf yields to the wind, it also does this powerful thing: it holds its own; it’s untorn, and steadfast in its attachment to the tree it’s part of.

Further—is there a drama in the corner of a room? As two walls meet perpendicularly, are they at once opposed to each other and lovingly joined to, supported by, each other?

An object can be something we see, but also something we hear. And always a drama is in it. Take a shout you might have heard—a sound uttered by someone you never met. You don’t know the feelings and life-history that were present as someone shouted “Hey, hey—right now!!” You don’t know the shouter. But you have shouted sometimes too, called out with feeling. So this shout you heard has in it a human being’s sameness to and difference from yourself, apartness from and closeness to you.

Aesthetic Realism has identified that in us which prefers to rob things of their drama, take the meaning out of them. We do this because of our desire for contempt, which is the most hurtful thing in everyone. It’s the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” Because of the education Eli Siegel founded, this dulling and mean contempt need not win in us. We can learn to have the art way of seeing—which is the just way of seeing, the truly exciting way of seeing, the way of seeing we were born for.

The Decisive Thing

In this section of his lecture, Mr. Siegel explains what no other critic has: he explains the decisive thing in poetry and in art as such. He defines that which distinguishes a real work of art from an arrangement that may be impressive but is not the true thing, the living thing. I’ll quote him from another source, his landmark Preface to Personal & Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists. Mr. Siegel explains that when there is real poetry, when a poet has seen the drama of the universe in his or her subject,

the words then take on a music, which is the poetic music….Do all poems have a music which comes from seeing?…The words in a poem are heard musically as they fall logically. [Pp. xiii-xiv]

This logical music, Eli Siegel showed, is the thing distinguishing poetry from not-poetry. And in the present lecture he explains that in each of the various arts there is something which corresponds to that decisive thing, that sine qua non, which in poetry is music.

So this lecture we’re serializing, while dealing with criticism, is itself some of the greatest literary and art criticism in human history.

A Note

I ’ll mention swiftly one more fact in relation to what you’ll soon read. The passages Mr. Siegel has been quoting in this talk are from reviews in the February 1970 issue of Poetry. And in the passage Mr. Siegel looks at here, there are references to the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Eli Siegel himself is the foremost critic of Williams’ work—as Dr. Williams himself made clear. That fact can be seen through The Williams-Siegel Documentary, edited by Martha Baird and myself, a book about (among other things) one of the most important knowings of each other by two people in world literature. For now I’ll simply quote a single statement, which appears on page 94. It was made by W.C. Williams to Eli Siegel during the discussion that followed the 1952 lecture Mr. Siegel gave on the meaning and value of Williams’ poems.

In that discussion, Dr. Williams ratified in many ways the eleven-word statement I’ll quote. But here it is by itself, a critical response to the comprehension he had just heard of his own life’s work. Said William Carlos Williams to Eli Siegel that March night: “It’s as if everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

How Should We See?

By Eli Siegel

One of the books Laurence Lieberman discusses is Essays and Reviews, by Thomas Carter. And as he comments on Carter’s writing about William Carlos Williams, we have the problem of how things exist in poems. Lieberman says this:

Though his remarks on some of [Williams’] short poems are perceiving, Carter overextends himself embarrassingly into areas where he is on very shaky footing, as in his contention that Williams does no more than present objects as they exist in themselves in his poems. This is, of course, plain nonsense. Williams renders objects in poems as if he were presenting them directly and unalteredly, but that as if makes all the difference….

The question as to what an object is, what a thing is, how a thing should be seen, what knowledge is, what epistemology is, is a raging question in philosophy today, and it has been all this century. It is hardly settled. However, the honest asking of what an object is and how should I see it?, and how in poetry the view of an object changes into music, or to poetic expression—even if the answer gotten doesn’t suit you, the questioning as such is valuable.

“Though his remarks on some of [Williams’] short poems are perceiving—” The quality of Williams, as I have said, is that in some of his poems he felt the drama of an object—the contraction and expansion, depth and surface, specificity and meaning—in such a way that, because the object was felt as drama, music ensued. And every object is indefinitely dramatic.

This has to do with all art. Take Giacometti: he tried to see the tension of a plane wishing to become a line, the tension between contraction of an object and expansion. The goodness of Giacometti is not that his figures are elongated, but that there is this tension of expansion and thinness or elongation. That is present in someone very different, Titian, who also has the contraction of an object and the expansion. One of the jolliest expansionists of the Renaissance, Rubens, is also given to that.

The Decisive Thing in Every Art

Every object is seen by an artist as dramatic. There is the seeing of color and line—or a thing’s withinness, its mass, and line—as in a state which these days has been called “tension.” That is, the line is trying to compress the color, while the color is trying to burst out of the line. When a painter looks at the object and feels this, or feels the drama of other opposites, then that which in poetry is music becomes painting-as-such in painting. At a certain time, then, painting does the equivalent of singing and uttering melody. That happens when the drama is seen honestly. The melody is more perceptible in poetry: you see the drama in the object; you see the drama in yourself; and out of that, music occurs. Music is the poetry of poetry; and the equivalent of this music is the drama in painting.

We can say that objects hope to be seen a certain way, and if you see them dramatically you will tend to see them musically. A good question for the critic is: why does music take place in some poems? Then, what is the kind of music that should take place? And when can we say of a painting: this is not just an aggregate of things having boundaries and what’s within boundaries—this is an expression of the great friendship and war between line and mass, or line and color? When is a painting really a painting, not just a personal gathering?

So we have to ask whether the equivalent of music in poetry occurs in all the arts. Aesthetic Realism says it does. It occurs in music itself. It occurs in drama. There’s a certain time when the friendliness of the things in a work is the same as enmity. And drama is the oneness of friendliness and enmity in reality. —I am taking up a philosophic question arising from the statement “Carter…is on very shaky footing…in his contention that Williams does no more than present objects as they exist in themselves.”

How Do Things Exist?

Those who were here when I discussed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason remember all the to-do about whether we see things in themselves at all. But it can be said that things exist in three ways, and these ways are all a part of knowledge. 1) Things exist as they are. We don’t have to say they exist “in themselves,” but we can say of a carton of milk, or, in the old days, a bottle of milk (a milk bottle is more interesting than a carton), that somehow it existed by itself quietly. It was there all night though no one saw it. It had a nice, quiet, milk bottle existence all for itself. 2) The next way it exists is: we take a look at it, and then it becomes part of us, exists for us. And 3) it’s also very useful—it has to do with other things. So a thing exists as it is, exists for the person seeing it, and exists in relation to other things.

A poem sees an object simultaneously in these ways, and they are all pretty rich: a thing as it is, a thing for us, and a thing in relation to all things or some things. A milk bottle, for example, everyone knows is related to a violin case. It has some of the contours of a violin case. Some persons have said a milk bottle has a relation to the Venus de Milo.

A human being, also, can be seen as having those three possibilities. A human being can be seen that way. We exist as ourselves; everyone is something to himself or herself. Then, everybody is seen by mother, friend, superintendent, train conductor, airline steward: we are something for everybody who sees us. Then, we also are in relation to things, even those things that didn’t see us. Every person, for example, seen with a mountain as background, would change the mountain a bit. You can’t even lounge next to the Woolworth Building without changing the Woolworth Building a bit. I’ve seen persons who made the New York Public Library steps different by hopping on the steps.

Since the purpose of poetry is to see all the drama in an object, and since there is a drama among these three ways an object exists, poetry would include them. Williams was good at all three, and that is why there is music in his poems.

Imagination

Going on with the Lieberman statement: “Williams renders objects in poems as if he were presenting them directly and unalteredly, but that as if makes all the difference.” The thing that is important in as if, which Lieberman does not deal with, is the large question that art has: What can I do with this object which is true to the object and will bring out more of what it really is? That is imagination. Imagination in terms of art is the possibility of an individual’s bringing something out of an object which it had all the time, but which was brought forth because this individual was around. The purpose of individual artistic perception is to bring out something that hitherto had not been brought out and that it was good to bring out.

In the visual arts, imagination alters the way a thing is seen visually so that what it truly is, is seen better. Giacometti said, If I make these people thinner, you will see more of what they really are. Every artist does something like that. It is what Cranach did when he made his ladies look a little ill. And Memling also played a few games with Renaissance people: he said there is something of them-as-them, as they are in themselves, which I have to present this way. Later, when Picasso confounded a woman with a certain portion of a table so you couldn’t distinguish between table and woman, he said he was helping the woman, let alone helping the table.

So the purpose of imagination is to bring out good possibilities not hitherto seen in an object, but to be true to the object as it truly is. The purpose of imagination is to do startling good deeds.

What this has to do with the Lieberman sentence is that the as if can be honoring or not honoring. Let’s say a painter presents two-thirds of the face of Cromwell and joins to it part of the face of Helen: if we feel that Cromwell is helped by that, and Helen is, and also the thing come to is helped—then what the artist did would be justified. In ancient times somebody first came to the idea of a centaur, with the face of a philosopher and the body of a horse. And that has remained—it has been found that the centaur is quite a necessary being, though no one ever saw one. And the griffin has remained: a mingling of lion and bird.

Then, in imagination there is this large thing: to feel that an object represents all of reality. Imagination would show how a thing represented reality, not just what it was as itself. In all art the world is represented. You cannot look at an object artistically without trying to see the world, just as you cannot really love a person without trying to see the world in that person. As I said, all art is a presentation of world, object as is, and yourself looking at world and object. It’s the interrelation of these three that the work consists of. It’s never less than that. If, in poetry, there’s drama felt there, if the quarrel among these things and the friendliness is seen, music ensues.

Animate & Inanimate

The Lieberman passage continues:

We are speaking of a particular stylistic mannerism—a stylization of objects into words—no less artful than Hemingway creating the illusion of dialogue as it exists in itself, when actually Hemingway’s characters speak with a kind of artificial primitivism.

These terms have to be looked at. There is stylization—what is that? Something stylization does is make things more inanimate. There was once a person who made a bet: he said he could be in a store window and be a mannequin all night and the people who passed by would take him to be a mannequin. From what I hear (since I made up this story), he did a good job. This is evidence that, beneath the animate, we have a stock of the inanimate. And as soon as we exercise our right to be inanimate we are becoming stylized—for instance, as soon as we walk with a mechanical strut.

Since everything can be seen as having something like the inanimate, it is part of poetry and belongs to poetry.

These Opposites Too

Lieberman uses the word primitivism. The opposites that are in all art include the primitive and the sophisticated. The primitive, for this purpose, can be described as depending on the next inclination of one’s body; the sophisticated, as depending on the next glance at what one’s body is doing—on one’s looking, sometimes in a prolonged fashion, and asking What am I doing? As soon as we ask What am I doing? and try to describe it, and become aware of a choice, the primitive—like instinct changing into a flourishing, elaborate work—comes to be sophisticated.

This has to do with poetry, because poetry represents the world as simple and sophisticated, or primitive and elaborate. And if there’s simultaneously a war and a friendship between the primitive and the elaborate, music will ensue.