Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the fourth section of These Speak of Poetry, a 1973 lecture by Eli Siegel that is great, definitive—even as it has casualness and humor. Mr. Siegel is discussing poems included in the Louis Untermeyer anthology Modern American Poetry. And he is showing this all-important thing: what differentiates a poem that’s really that—a true poem—from something that is in line structure and may have been much praised yet is not authentic poetry.

Eli Siegel is the critic who has made this distinction clear. Poetry, he showed, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” And the sign that a poem is the real thing is a certain kind of sound, which is poetic music.

All this has to do with us, because we want—with the very depths of ourselves—to be like an authentic poem. We want our logic and feeling to work together, as one. We want to be simultaneously exact and free. We want to have a oneness of strength and sensitivity. We want to have clarity of thought, and also nuance. We want to have a sense of wonder and also be down to earth. In a good poem these opposites are one. And so we need to see and feel what poetry really is—because if we take something false for the real thing, we’re cheapening our own largest hopes.

Readers of this journal know that I love how Aesthetic Realism sees poetry, and that, through decades of questioning and comparing, I see Eli Siegel as the greatest of critics. (He is that greatest critic not only of poetry but of art itself, and all that’s human.)

Required by Poetry

In this section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel has come, in the Untermeyer anthology, to Robert Frost. And he gives reasons why Frost, with all his apparent popularity, is not a good poet. Earlier, he had spoken on the verse of Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose work, Mr. Siegel showed, has various qualities but not the quality that poetry requires: music. He discussed, too, poems of Stephen Crane—which, Mr. Siegel explained, are the real thing.

I am very moved by Eli Siegel’s speaking, in the present section, about “the kindness that is in art.” What does that mean? How is it that all good art is kind—deeply respectful even as it may condemn something fiercely, or describe something that’s ugly? I have learned that the kindness of art is this: a true artist wants so much to see what a thing truly is that he or she has felt the structure of the world in it, the oneness of opposites. And so the kindness of art is its seeing and showing meaning, dignity, what the whole world is like, in whatever thing the artist deals with. If the art is poetry, we hear that meaning, that dignity, as music.

In this lecture Mr. Siegel reads quite a number of poems, and therefore does not discuss each one in as much detail as he sometimes would. So let us take the first poem of Frost that he reads and that you’ll soon see, “The Cow in Apple-Time”—and in a prefatory way I’ll comment a bit on it in relation to Mr. Siegel’s tremendously important critical statement that it lacks the kindness of art.

I think the way this cow is described by Frost is demeaning and contemptuous. Take the fourth line, which you’ll see in context soon: “Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools.” In the sound of that line there is a curling of one’s lip, a sneer. And take the poem’s final line: there is a disgust and smallness in “Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.” Painful, even repellent, things can be told of in a poem—but if it’s a true poem there’s always present too a dignity and wonder. These are absent in the Frost lines.

To place further what Mr. Siegel explains, let’s look at another poem about a cow. Though the speaker in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Cow” is a child, this poem has the strict, authentic kindness that is art:

In the poem’s third line, with its humor, there is respect for the work of this bovine being, and we hear, as music, effort and freedom together: “She gives me cream with all her might.” There are thrusts in the rhythm, meeting the smoothness of cream. As material as the line is, there’s a sense of awe.

There are these lines (5 and 6): “She wanders lowing here and there, / And yet she cannot stray.” Some of the trouble within a cow (as within us) is here: perhaps she feels hemmed in; perhaps she’s looking for something without knowing wholly what it is. Line 5 has that slow, searching motion—and the feeling of both the animal’s bulk and her mind. The lines have dignity and the unknown.

In the final quatrain, this cow is meeting some of what the world has: wind, rain, grass, flowers. And she is both passive and active amid them. Through it all we feel both the bodily mass of this being and her deep delicacy too.

These lines of Stevenson are poetry. And real poetry, Eli Siegel showed so greatly, has the exactitude-as-kindness, the kindness-as-music, that humanity needs.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

How Are Words Used?

By Eli Siegel

We come to a person who at this time is being looked at critically: Robert Frost. Untermeyer has a high opinion of him and sees him, in a way, as a more effective poet than Wordsworth. He writes of Frost:

His devotion to the intimacies of earth is, even more than Wordsworth’s, rich, almost inordinate in its fidelity; what his emotion (or his poetry) may lack in windy range, is trebly compensated for by its untroubled depths.

Well, that’s a pretty impressive statement.

“His devotion to the intimacies of earth—” Earth is made up of secrets; also things that you can see if you look a little; and then, things you just can’t miss, like a stone as you bump into it or stub your toe on it. Meanwhile, Untermeyer says Frost had a “devotion” to earth’s “intimacies” and this devotion had a “fidelity” that was “almost inordinate.” Words are used here with affluent sloppiness.

“…what [Frost’s] emotion (or his poetry) may lack in windy range”—there’s an implication that Wordsworth was given to windy range—“is trebly compensated for by its untroubled depths.” That is denied by me: Frost did not have “untroubled depths.”

I’m going to read his poem “The Cow in Apple-Time,” because it is felt that Frost is so kind:

So it’s a cow in difficulty.

The unfortunate use of words that’s in Edwin Arlington Robinson is also in Frost, no matter how simple he seems. We have: “She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten / The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.” The windfalls are the apples that have fallen from the trees. Frost says they “sweeten” after they fall, and that’s not wholly true. Then there’s the saying that the stubble has “spiked” the windfalls, and that is simply bad observation.

I do not see, here, Frost being fond of the “intimacies of earth.” He’s not such a good observer. But that is not the major thing amiss. The major thing is that he lacks the kindness that is in art.

Words and a Person

A poem that should be read is “The Death of the Hired Man.” In it, a hired man who cannot work anymore and is sick comes back to the place where he had worked most—a farm—and dies there. The farmer’s wife is kinder than the farmer himself, who thinks the hired man is trying to take advantage of him.

There’s the Frost way of putting something. For instance, one of the lines is “What help he is there’s no depending on.” Another way of putting that statement would be There’s no depending on his help. But Frost makes the statement blank verse, iambic pentameter—and that’s supposed to have it be transcendent: “What help he is there’s no depending on.” It’s fetching, but it doesn’t have what it should to be poetry.

The farmer and his wife are having a conversation about the hired man, Silas. (The farmer complains about him—that apparently Silas would sometimes leave before completing his work.) There is this:

That last statement is as famous as anything of Frost.

But we look at this. “‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die. / You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’” The chief gaucherie here is the getting in that you. It doesn’t sound conversational. It could more rightly be You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave this time. The you shows that Frost wasn’t aware of things he should have been aware of. And that interferes with the possible music of the line. It’s a little like changing “Hold that tiger!” to Hold that tiger for the gentleman in the back room.

Then: “‘Home,’ he mocked gently. ‘Yes, what else but home?’” That reply of the wife, “What else but home?” sounds a little forced. Yes, sure—home: that’s more the way this woman would talk.

Then Frost has her say: “It all depends on what you mean by home.” That wouldn’t be necessary. She would more likely say, He does see where we are as kind of home. That’s a little more natural. It’s the way Ring Lardner would put it.

Frost has the wife make this comparison: “Of course he’s nothing to us, any more / Than was the hound that came a stranger to us / Out of the woods.” Talking about a doggy that way—blank verse or not, there’s something put on. Words can be put on too thick, as other things can. One should look at this, look very deeply and don’t stop—because one thing about poetry is this: if it’s real poetry, the more you look at it, the more you’re relentless, the more it stands up.

The wife tells her husband about Silas’s large difficulty:

This shows that Frost is a faker. After saying what she does about the man’s pain, she’s going to “sit and see if that small sailing cloud / Will hit or miss the moon.” Of course it’s supposed to be symbolic, but I do not think this writing is true.

I call this a disdain of hired men—that the center changes to the lady and the little silver cloud and the moon.

The poem ends with these lines:

That’s supposed to be a famous conclusion.

I have to say this poem is not true. This is not the way a farmer and his wife would be. And feeling for people is not as large as it might be.

What Kind of Looking?

Also in this book is the famous poem of Frost called “After Apple-Picking.” We can look at these lines from it:

There is something that people have been affected by and is one of the specific grand things divinity or reality has done. That is the scent of apples—particularly lots of apples on a tree, and lots of apples just taken off a tree. But Frost, while mentioning this, has other things going around in a way that weakens its meaning. (For instance, there’s the way the pane of glass and the drinking trough come in—and more things as the poem goes on.) How Frost cannot look at an object with intense love and steadiness can be seen here.

There’s a sense of disdain: “But I am done with apple-picking now.” There’s a certain contempt for the possibilities of apples.

“Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples.” This seemed profound to various readers. But to say, as Frost appears to, that the scent of apples provides, or even is, the “essence of winter sleep” is questionable. And to say that the essence is “on” the night is not such good writing either.

Factuality and Pretense

Untermeyer includes a poem of Frost called “Birches,” which is also famous. In the midst of this poem there’s a line that is factual, but the line after it is pretentious:

“Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away”: that is, the birches had been frozen, but the sun is working on them, and their darling crust is falling and seems like broken glass. But then, that line is followed by “You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.” No, you wouldn’t think that. There’s just the important possibility of winter and birches—and to have the inner dome of heaven fallen is too much.

Also in this anthology there’s a poem about Frost (or somebody) being alone in the house. It does have pain in it. It’s called “Bereft.” [This is line 6 to the end:]

The loneliness that was in Robinson is also here. But the question is whether the way this is said is honest enough for poetry.

We have these lines: “Summer was past and day was past. / Somber clouds on the West were massed.” This is kind of lively. But does the rhythm go along with the whole purpose of the poem?

And there’s the falsity of “Leaves got up in a coil and hissed.” Earlier, we had Stephen Crane’s flowers chanting—and I believed more in Crane’s flowers than I do in these leaves’ getting up in a coil and hissing. I have to say that the beginning—the source—of the Frost poem is something false.

I haven’t dealt with as many poems of Frost today as I’d like, but this is important: if Frost and Robinson are poetic, the validity of many statements of mine can be questioned, because the whole basis of Aesthetic Realism is what I have seen about poetry. The meaning of that, I’ll say more of.