Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the magnificent 1973 lecture These Speak of Poetry, by Eli Siegel. And in the section we’ve come to, there is a particular matter that concerns everyone enormously: how shall we see—what shall we feel about, do about—the repellent in this world, the distasteful, the messiness in reality? It is a subject present at every time in history. It is very much present now. And what does poetry have to do with it? I think there’s nothing more thrilling and hopeful than what Aesthetic Realism explains about this subject.

In his lecture, Mr. Siegel is speaking about what differentiates authentic poetry from something which may seem to be that but is not. And in the section we’ve reached he reads a poem of Stephen Crane about the incoherence and non-loveliness of things. And he says it’s a good poem—unlike many others on that subject. What can we learn from the distinction—what do we need desperately to learn from it?

Eli Siegel has described the basis of Aesthetic Realism in this principle: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” In every instance of true art, the artist has looked at a subject—looked not for the purpose of impressing but in order to see and feel deeply, accurately, widely what that thing dealt with, that subject, is. This is so whether the subject is a bright daisy or some murky mess. If the desire to see is deep enough and thorough enough, what the artist will get to is the structure of the world: the oneness of such opposites as rest and motion, force and gentleness, complexity and simplicity, immediacy and depth.

If the art form is poetry, we hear that oneness of opposites as the words meet each other. This heard thing is poetic music. It is, Mr. Siegel showed, what distinguishes a true poem from some other verbal arrangement. If the writer’s seeing has been deep enough, sincere enough, the music will be there—no matter what the poem’s subject matter.

In fact, the greatest evidence that this world can be cared for, liked, is in poetry. The reason is: poetry shows that when the world, through any subject, is felt with full sincerity, the structure of reality comes to us as verbal music. And the message of reality-become-poetic-music is: See! You may meet turbulence in me, even heartbreak, but in my fullness I am beautiful; I am your friend.

Where Poetry Is and Isn’t

In These Speak of Poetry, Mr. Siegel is discussing poems in the Louis Untermeyer anthology Modern American Poetry. In the present section, as Mr. Siegel speaks about Stephen Crane, he contrasts him with a person he’d just discussed: Edwin Arlington Robinson. Robinson, Mr. Siegel had carefully shown, was not (though much praised) a true poet.

In order to place a bit further what Mr. Siegel says about Crane, and the great matter of how Aesthetic Realism sees poetry and the displeasingness that’s in reality, I’m going to quote three short lines of another poet. They’re from a poem that has grandeur as it describes the terrible. Robert Graves (1895-1985) seems to have written “In the Wilderness” when he was a captain in the British Army in World War I. There are various troubling and troubled creatures in this thirty-line poem. Some are in these lines:

Offhand, the beings told of here are uninviting—are part of a case one might make against the world. Yet we have this line (the eighteenth in the poem): “Great rats on leather wings.” The first two words seem to ache in their width and slowness: “Great rats” has a poignancy in its sound, and a sense of these creatures’ being puzzled in whatever largeness and power they have. Then, “leather wings” seem strong; yet they also (through both the meaning and the sound of the phrase) seem to obstruct the beings who have those wings.

In the line, we’re feeling, hearing, a oneness of reality’s opposites. The sense of some power had by these animals seems inextricable from the creatures’ uncertainty. There is something definite yet mysterious; there is simultaneous revulsion and sympathy.

One could say much about the next line, “And poor blind broken things.” But I’ll mention the p and two bs in “poor blind broken”: those plosives, placed as they are, seem to make one’s lips go forth, tenderly, slowly, almost to kiss these creatures.

Then, in the third of these lines we have again revulsion joined with sympathy: “Foul in their miseries.” “Foul” comes in so forcefully; but then we have the short ih sound in “in” and “miseries”—with its sense of whimpering, perhaps, and pathos.

All thirty lines of the poem are in the metre called dactylic dimeter: an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables, twice (“Fóul in their   míseries”). There are both a grandeur and a falling in the way Graves uses this rhythm—a way that has us feel the might and the weakness in things, feel what’s repugnant as akin to what’s dear.

The Fighting Desires in Self

So there is the true, aesthetic way of seeing the unlikable. But Aesthetic Realism explains too that there is something in the human self which wants to see reality as ugly. There is a desire in everyone to be disgusted with people and things. This desire is a form of contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

Contempt in everyone treasures the feeling “This is all too much—I shouldn’t have to think, I shouldn’t have to try to be fair to anything! It’s all beneath me anyhow. What I see going on is evidence that I’m in a universe unworthy of me. I’m royalty, and I’m in a slovenly, mean world.”

Contempt is the opponent of the deepest and best purpose we have. That purpose, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to like the world on an honest basis, through knowing it. It’s the purpose art comes from. Eli Siegel, in the philosophy he founded, is the spokesperson for this truest purpose of ours. He is the spokesperson for reality itself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The World and How It’s Seen

By Eli Siegel

Stephen Crane was born in 1871 and died in 1900. And what with “The Open Boat” and his story “The Blue Hotel,” Crane is current, and he is quite important. This is not the time to discuss his Red Badge of Courage. It is a book that has a large circulation now, with its description of how a person feels going through the Civil War. Crane himself was born six years after the Civil War ended, and it’s felt that his ability to present so credibly a private in that war showed a powerful imagination.

Crane’s poetry is not very good, but there are some true poems of his, including “The Black Riders” and “War Is Kind,” and there is some of the early free verse of America.

The best poem of Crane, perhaps, shows the confusion of the world—not in terms of one person looking at it, but in terms of lots of things going on that don’t make any sense. This poem has more poetry than Robinson’s work. In fact, it is poetry, while Robinson’s writing is not. Crane calls this poem “Hymn.” The first two lines, in their staticness, are poetry as good as there was in any lines of Crane.

It’s hard to gather the inchoate. It is hard to show symmetry in the multitudinous and incoherent, though it’s been attempted. The line that’s best in the field is the line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth “The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

But looking at the Stephen Crane lines: we have first “A slant of sun on dull brown walls.” You can feel that in parts of the Bronx, and elsewhere. When Crane was writing this, apartment houses were getting to be more and more in the cities, especially New York.

Then there’s what’s called the pathetic fallacy—which nonetheless (however fallacious it is) is still being used and can be used: that is, the giving of psychological qualities to inanimate things. That’s in “A forgotten sky of bashful blue.” Crane says the blue of the sky is “bashful”—even as the sky is forgotten, perhaps by people who might look at it, or by God.

The large thing is: this is different essentially from the lines of Robinson. For instance, in Crane’s first line we have “slant”—something of form—and we have “walls,” with their vertical flatness, and they’re “dull” and “brown.” Then in the next line we have “a forgotten sky.” These mingle better than the things in the Robinson verses.

“Toward God a mighty hymn.” It’s fetching to have all this confusion called a hymn. “A song of collisions and cries.”

Then confusion is put this way: “Rumbling wheels, hoof-beats, bells.” That brings together various sounds. Rumbling wheels were very much in the 1890s, on vehicles drawn by horses. Autos were just waiting to come in. Meantime, we had grocery trucks that were drawn by horses, and there were drays.

Then people get in: “Welcomes, farewells, love-calls, final moans.” That’s all in one line. It’s followed by “Voices of joy, idiocy, warning, despair.” How in the world did the world get so various? After that we have something with a great deal of thought in it: “The unknown appeals of brutes.”

As the poem goes on we’ll have again feelings, or human abilities, attributed to things not seen as having them. In “The Open Boat,” which is an important story, Crane does give life to inanimate things: the water, sides of the boat, land itself, sky. It begins in a famous way: “None of them knew the color of the sky.” That is one of the famous beginnings of a story.

Meanwhile, in the poem we’re looking at we have “The chanting of flowers.” Offhand, that’s not true. But you can, if you want, see flowers as having little conversations. A hydrangea says to the dahlias or gladiolas, “How do you do?”—and so on. A hyacinth even tends to say hello to the far-off thistle. And the chrysanthemum is never mum. The statement about it is:

We can call this: “Complaint among the Flowers.” Well, it’s in keeping with Crane’s phrase “The chanting of flowers”—a phrase that seems unusual for him, because he’s seen as a realist. (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is his first work.) And in “The chanting of flowers,” the flowers don’t merely speak—they chant.

“The screams of cut trees.” In various mythologies, when a tree was cut you felt it screamed. A Dryad in the tree would say, “I’m here—I want to get out!”

“The senseless babble of hens and wise men.” That’s an interesting line with its motion, and the bringing together hens and wise men. “A cluttered incoherency that says to the stars: / “O God, save us!”

It would be interesting to make a comparison, because from one point of view this poem is in keeping with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”—which has in it a thesaurus of all the things that people shouldn’t like. But the Crane poem is poetry. The way painful or ugly things are told of should be looked at. When I say Mr. Ginsberg’s “Howl” is not poetic, I don’t want it to be felt that it wasn’t looked at with as much justice as I could have. But this poem of Crane, which deals with the customary confusion of the world, is a better poem.

How People See

Now, another poem of Crane—the meaning of which is that a person doesn’t want to be hopeless. It’s called “I Saw a Man”:

Well, that has a quality and I think is, by the skin of three of the teeth of the Muses, in the poetic field.

What I’ll read next is a better poem though—Crane’s “The Candid Man”:

This is a way of saying that how we see should be looked on with doubt. It’s one of the difficult poems of Crane.

“Forth went the candid man / And spoke freely to the wind— / When he looked about him he was in a far strange country.” This, I think, has to do with the fact that when you look closely at something you see it as strange. Nothing that’s looked at intently for, say, more than three and a half minutes will not seem strange.

Next, the stars have an effect on him. He’s looking at them, but they do something to his eyes.

“‘My good fool,’ said a learned bystander, / ‘Your operations are mad.’” The desire to see more deeply than is customary is called “mad.”

The candid man becomes angry apparently: “And when his stick left the head of the learned bystander / It was two sticks.” That’s not so clear, but a meaning is that through being hit, the bystander saw that every object has two ways of being seen. I can say: this is poetic, and one can look at it more and ask further, What does it mean?

The meaning does have to do with the opposites—that everything is a possibility of being seen two ways. For instance, an apple can be seen as an apple but also as expressing the great possibility of red, also the great possibility of sweetness, and also the great possibility of nutrition. Meantime, it’s that apple. So it’s specific but also stands for reality, and for qualities.

However, Stephen Crane wrote true poetry. It’s not large but it is poetry. And that differentiates him from the first person I dealt with today.

To Feel New Things

We next come upon Amy Lowell. She is still with her one poem that is really poetry, “Patterns.” I won’t now read “Patterns” again. But Amy Lowell wanted to feel new things. It’s one reason why she gave herself to Chinese poetry and also Japanese art. Untermeyer includes a poem of hers called “Free Fantasia on Japanese Themes.” It’s not free enough. Still, some lines can be read—these, for example:

Some writers who are often disdainful also have poems in which a hidden desire to be accurately humble can be found. There are some in the work of Sylvia Plath. And these lines of Amy Lowell are humble.

“I would experience new emotions, / Submit to strange enchantments.” In the same way that the Goncourts studied Japanese art and could feel they could be humble about something, so Amy Lowell is saying that maybe I can get an emotion that will suit me through seeing things that are Japanese.

Shortly after, there’s the line “Beating my hands upon the hot earth.” That could show a desire to be angry. Maybe as a girl she did beat her hands upon the hot earth.

Later there are these lines; in them there’s a desire to show love as exquisite and whimsical, at least likable:

I cannot say this is poetic. But it’s worth knowing.