Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 5 of the 1970 lecture A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, by Eli Siegel. It is a work of enormous literary meaning, and human meaning—meaning for everyone’s mind and life.

Mr. Siegel comments on statements of literary criticism spanning two millennia. Beginning with Aristotle, he gives evidence that what people have been affected by in art, and what critics have in various ways called for, is the oneness of opposites. I have said in my commentaries on this lecture that I see those critical statements Mr. Siegel quotes as a reaching toward Aesthetic Realism. They’re certainly important in their own right. Yet Eli Siegel came to see so much more about the opposites than anyone before him had seen. Just one example, huge, is this: he showed that the opposites in poetry are our own opposites. They’re present in us, often so confusingly and troublingly, every day. “All beauty,” he explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Eli Siegel is the philosopher who showed that the self of everyone is an aesthetic matter: we long to put together such opposites as our logic and our feeling, our desires for order and for freedom, our having an effect and our being affected, our care for ourselves—and for what’s not ourselves. To have these opposites make proud sense in us, we need to see how they are one in art.

Sincerity: Longed For & Feared

A subject spoken of passionately by two of the writers Mr. Siegel comments on here is the tremendous subject of sincerity, of honesty. The writers are Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Nietzsche.

One of the most useful happenings of recent years is: millions of Americans have something of a sense that honesty is a national emergency. That is because people have seen, and felt sickened by, vast, overt, insistent lying from high places, and have seen the nation really endangered by it. At the same time, there is deep, usually unexpressed agitation in people about everyday dissimulation, by persons one knows and by oneself. After all, insincerity is so frequent, goes on hour after hour: you say or show something other than what you feel inside. Everyone has a sense that this dissembling is cheap, sleazy; yet, people tell themselves in various ways, I can’t be sincere in a world like this—I’ve got to pretend. And this pretense goes on, amid self-justification and inevitable shame, in social life, also business life, romantic life, family life.

Sincerity is about the largest opposites that exist in life: self and world. It’s important to be clear: sincerity is not the thrusting out whatever comes to one’s mind; honesty is not the pouring forth sloppily resentments one has been accumulating. Sincerity and honesty begin with the desire to be exact, to see, to know. Sincerity is the trying to see truly what something in the outside world is and what your own feeling is, and to express both as accurately as possible.

What Happens in a Poem

Aesthetic Realism shows this—which I find thrilling, infinitely magnificent, and exact: Real poetry is always sincerity. Authentic poetry, however wild, “imaginative,” strange, is honesty. Whatever the subject of a poem, or its style—if the poem is the real thing, the writer has wanted to see the things dealt with and his or her own feeling so truly that this writer gets to, feels, what the world itself is: a oneness of opposites. That structure of opposites, the structure of reality itself, is in the lines. And it is heard as music.

Take, for example, a line—the 181st—in Milton’s “Lycidas.” Lycidas, a young man, has died, and toward the end of the poem Milton says that the saints in Heaven sing to Lycidas—

That line is, for the grand John Milton, very simple; every word but one is a monosyllable. It is intimate—we feel touch in that slow line. Because of the way these words are both meaning and sound—the way (for instance) the accents fall so lingeringly, on wipe with its p, on the ev of forever with the assuring pressure of its v, on from with its tender labial m—we feel something of flesh and kindness. We almost feel the fingers of the saints on Lycidas’s face. Meanwhile, in the line’s immediacy there is nobility too; there is stature in its movement. And the longer word forever in the middle of the line says that the tenderness told of is the same as eternity.

This line is sincere. It has in it the structure of the world—a oneness of lingering and proceeding, of intimacy and eternity, of precision and fervency, of sadness and pleasure. We hear this structure as music.

What Insincerity Makes For

Wars begin with insincerity, with dishonesty. All cruelty begins with that: you don’t want to see truly a person you’ll be cruel to—what that person is, in his or her fullness. You also don’t want to see what your own feeling is—including its possible falseness, its ugly inexactitude. Aesthetic Realism explains that all injustice begins with contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” And the first step in contempt is insincerity: I don’t have to try to see something truly—nor try to know, questioningly, my own feeling about it! What I feel or want or think must be right because it comes from me! That way of seeing has impelled every brute, every fascist, and it is also very ordinary. Everyone has played around with it.

For humanity to be civilized, and safe, and for individual lives to be truly intelligent, happy, and proud, we need to see that sincerity is real in this world. We need to see that it’s not something which would be “nice” to have but is impractical. Poetry is that which shows that sincerity, full sincerity, is not only possible, but it is beautiful, it is powerful, it is happiness-making.

And since I am writing on sincerity—and we’ll soon come to Carlyle and Nietzsche writing on it—it is my great pleasure to say this: I studied with Eli Siegel for many years. I saw and heard him as he spoke with people, as he spoke on subjects from science to love, from Henry James to rock ’n’ roll, from Aristotle to the hopes of a child. He was sincere all the time. Such a statement may be hard to believe, but it is true. And it was beautiful. He lived what he taught.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Sincerity, Exactitude, Music

By Eli Siegel

The matter of sincerity and insincerity has been in the history of poetic criticism from the beginning. Sincerity in poetry has many good things said about it, but one of the most famous is by Thomas Carlyle in his lecture The Hero as Poet. In this passage he is speaking about the qualities of a Vates, a person who saw deeply and greatly, who was a prophet or poet. He says of such a person:

This man . . . could not help being a sincere man! Whosoever may live in the shows of things, it is for him a necessity of nature to live in the very fact of things. A man once more, in earnest with the Universe, though all others were but toying with it. He is a Vates, first of all, in virtue of being sincere.

Gautier—& Art as Firm

I’ll mention now three poems in French literature that have to do with poetry and beauty. And they’re all important. There’s a 16th-century poem on beauty by Joachim Du Bellay—my translation of it is in Hail, American Development with the title “The Idea of Beauty Is Adored in This World.”¹ Then, there is the poem called “L’Art,” of Théophile Gautier. And there’s the Paul Verlaine poem on poetry, “Art Poétique.”

In the Gautier poem, art as firm, as neat, is accented. It’s one of the most important of critical statements, though a poem in its own right. It does make poetry like sculpture; Gautier was taken by poetry that would be like sculpture. This poem needs to be known by anyone interested in the history of criticism. So, translating the first stanza:

In poetry there is the feeling that you’re dealing with something shapeless, something that doesn’t have edges, and you do give it form. This is to be seen in all art: you begin with something more shapeless than what you hope to end with. That goes for music. It goes for the art of the dance: first it was a sketch, then choreography. It goes for painting. And it goes for the turmoil in thought that is present before the lens is definitely placed, or the camera is used.

The other thing in art is that a person looks at something too symmetrical and says, This could be wilder. All art goes from shapeless to shape; but a shape that is too academic is seen as shapeless, so the principle holds. Gautier accented the fact that poetry should take the shapeless, a tumult in a Parisian street possibly, and give it precision.

I translate the next stanza:

—Meaning there’s a tendency to be sloppy, and something has to discourage you from being sloppy.

Then—and here Verlaine would agree with Gautier:

Verlaine also, though he wanted suggestion, is against that—laxity, “like a too big slipper.”

We come to the 4th stanza. Gautier must have had the feeling of things crumbling, which can be very disgusting. People have wanted to give up God because sponge cake crumbled in their hand. He says:

That is, you’re thinking about something else and suddenly the clay gives way under you. What a happening. It could make one an atheist in an afternoon.

In the next stanza Gautier mentions the famous marbles of Carrara and Paros:

Marble does have in it the possibility of something fine, as Michelangelo felt whenever he saw it. He felt he could find a Pope in it, a handsome Pope.

Some lines later, Gautier gets angry:

Now, the most famous stanza in the poem—it is thrilling—and the one that follows it:

This aspect of poetry took the form of Parnassianism somewhat. Then it took both a wrong form and a true form. For instance, it took the form of the stanzas of Eliot in his earliest work—like his “Sweeney” stanzas, which are very neat—and took the form of some of Auden’s work. However, it also took the form of careful and musical stanzas of Yeats. We have that firmness in art, because art is exact.

At the same time, as might have been said in the 18th century, art has draperies that float at the behest of God. So I present the Verlaine idea, which is different from Gautier’s.

Art as Mystery, Nuance, Flow

This is my translation of Verlaine’s “Art Poétique”; it is in Hail, American Development:

That had, as I say in my note to the translation, a large effect. It is an important critical passage. And it’s concerned with technique, though it has principle.

There Is Nietzsche

Poetry can be talked about with useful explosiveness, as if it were the representation of the honesty that has been mocked and kept away from. Nietzsche does some of that in his Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-92). You can’t see wholly what he’s getting at, but you know he feels, as Coleridge felt, that song can do good things, is good sense. We find that in the chapter called “The Great Longing” (part 3, chapter 58, of Thus Spake Zarathustra). A very famous, very poetic phrase in this book is: “and arrows of longing for the other shore.” What I’ll read first, though, is from “The Convalescent” (part 3, chapter 57, of the book):

Up, abysmal thought out of my depth! I am thy cock and morning dawn, thou overslept reptile: Up! Up! My voice shall soon crow thee awake! . . . Rub the sleep and all the dimness and blindness out of thine eyes!²

That is like what Wordsworth and Coleridge said: Get out of your customary feelings. Don’t let your ego be an immortal film over you!

Another passage—this is from “The Great Longing”:

O my soul, now have I given thee all. . . : —THAT I BADE THEE SING, behold, that was my last thing to give! . . . Sing unto me, sing, O my soul! And let me thank thee!

So what is the meaning of “I bade thee sing”? In the preface to Personal & Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists, I quote Valéry, who said a poem must “sing.” And I said that real poetry even now is music. Music, as Aristotle felt, is an organic sign of a person’s honesty.

Hearing, Honesty, Joy

The next statement of Nietzsche is from the chapter called “The Drunken Song” (part 4, chapter 79, of Zarathustra). Nietzsche is speaking about midnight:

Then is there many a thing heard which may not be heard by day. . . .

—Hearest thou not how it mysteriously, frightfully, and cordially speaketh unto THEE, the old deep, deep midnight?

O MAN, TAKE HEED!

The meaning of hearing is here, which is next to music, next to song, next to honesty. —Another passage:

Ah! how she sigheth! how she laugheth, . . . the midnight! . . .

—Her woe doth she ruminate over, in a dream, the old, deep midnight—and still more her joy. For joy, although woe be deep, JOY IS DEEPER STILL THAN GRIEF CAN BE.

This is a strange thing: having midnight feel joy and also be interested in song. And it can be meditated on. It’s a way of dealing with poetry that is not easy.