Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue of TRO and (I estimate) five more, we will be serializing a lecture that Eli Siegel gave in two parts: on November 28 and December 5, 1951. He called the talk Technique and My Poems. And it is a masterpiece in many ways.

For example, it is a masterpiece of the Personal and Impersonal, opposites that are in the title itself. Technique: offhand, that’s impersonal. Technique in poetry concerns what must exist in the makeup, the facture, the construction of a poem of any time and place, for the poem to be truly that—real poetry. Eli Siegel is the critic who has explained poetic technique, with depth and fullness. And he has explained why the technique of an authentic poem matters—and does it ever matter! (It matters terrifically, and for our time, as well as all time.)

So Technique can seem the impersonal aspect of the lecture’s title. Then there is the title’s second aspect: and My Poems. People at that Aesthetic Realism class of 75 years ago heard Mr. Siegel speak about his own poems, which contain his own seeing and emotions. That can seem personal, and from one point of view it is. But Eli Siegel always had largeness, exactitude, love for reality itself and for truth, no matter what he spoke about—even if he was speaking about his own seeing and feeling. I consider this fact infinitely beautiful.

I, of course, was not at that lecture of so long ago which we’re serializing. But reading the transcript, I see what I saw with my own eyes, heard with my own ears, in classes taught by Eli Siegel later: knowledge that was tremendous and also warm; passionate and exact. He was himself what he showed true poetry to be: at once grandly personal-and-impersonal.

There Is Aesthetic Realism

As Mr. Siegel gives this lecture on poetry, he speaks too about Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy he founded ten years earlier. It is ever so alive now, and for all time. Its basis is the following principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

For example, a good line of poetry, Mr. Siegel showed, is always a oneness of the opposites firmness and flexibility, the definite and indefinite. The line of poetry is complete, has solidity, is definite. Yet it is beautiful because at the same time there is a stir in it, even a tremble in it, a sense of wonder, a leaning-toward something, a needing of the lines that preceded and follow it. And Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that says we want to be like a poetic line: to make a one of these and other opposites in ourselves.

Take the opposites just spoken of. Whether we’re aware of this or not, we too want to be at once flexible and firm. We’re pained that in our life those opposites seem apart from and against each other. At one time we waver, can’t make up our minds; then at another, we “lay down the law,” insist in a way that’s not accurate and makes us feel mean and ashamed.

Eli Siegel showed that in a good line of poetry we hear those opposites, and others—rest and motion, sameness and change, for and against, and more. We hear them as poetic music. This music is the decisive thing showing that true poetry is present.

Again: the opposites in an authentic line of poetry are our opposites, made one as we long to have them one in us. Aesthetic Realism shows this great thing: we can learn from art how we want to be. And we can learn it richly from the art that has as its material words: the very words we use in our thoughts and in talking to others every day.

W.C. Williams and Some History

In late 1951, when the lecture Technique and My Poems took place, one of the most important happenings in American literature was beginning. I refer to the knowing-each-other of Eli Siegel and William Carlos Williams. Williams was then perhaps the most noted poet in America.

At that time, no collections of Eli Siegel’s own poems had yet been published. He had won, in 1925, the Nation magazine’s poetry prize—an award which then was more prestigious than literary awards of now. That 1925 prize poem was “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.” Its author, Eli Siegel, was not yet twenty-three. And he and his great poem were met with fury by persons of the literary establishment. Meanwhile, many people across America were stirred very deeply by the poem; and Eli Siegel was suddenly, and for a while, famous.

I speak here about the 1925 Nation prize and the vicious outrage of various literati, because in early November 1951 William Carlos Williams, in an historic letter, comments truly about these, and writes truly about the importance of Eli Siegel’s work. And I think this letter has to do with the coming to be of the lecture we’re serializing.

Some weeks before the lecture, Williams (then age 68) had been sent a number of Eli Siegel’s poems; and on November 3, 1951, Williams wrote his important, deep, excited letter to Martha Baird. I’ll quote passages from it now, because I believe that through it Mr. Siegel felt encouraged to describe more richly than ever what technique in poetry truly is, and to speak of what his own poems came from and are about.

Early in his letter, Dr. Williams writes about Eli Siegel: “He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists.” And Williams writes of “Hot Afternoons”: “I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world.”

About Mr. Siegel’s other poems—Williams speaks of them as ever so important. He writes: “The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new.”

And Dr. Williams speaks about the anger Mr. Siegel met: “The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the ‘authorities’ whom I shall not dignify by naming.”

I agree with what Williams says about the “extreme resentment” to which Mr. Siegel was brutally subjected. And I have seen what it was that so inflamed those “sclerotic” (i.e., diseased and hardened) minds against him. Over the years there was a fury at Eli Siegel’s honesty: he would not butter or flatter or utter an untrue word. There was also the vastness of his knowledge, at one with great emotion; and people were angry because they couldn’t feel superior to that. (I, myself, shamefully, was angry that I respected Mr. Siegel so much—an anger that I’ll regret searingly forever.) There was (and still is in various quarters) fury at Mr. Siegel because his integrity was felt as a rebuke to one’s own lack of integrity.

The story of W.C. Williams’ and Eli Siegel’s knowing each other had its beginning at the time of the lecture we’re serializing. That history is told in the still definitive book The Williams-Siegel Documentary, which I had the honor to co-edit with Martha Baird. And I’ll conclude this commentary with a statement about Mr. Siegel made by Martha Baird, his wife: Eli Siegel, she said, was poetic all the time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Technique and My Poems

By Eli Siegel

Today I am going to try to talk as objectively and as usefully as I can on some poems I have written and also say something about what poems are.

The technique of poetry is like Aesthetic Realism itself. The purpose of Aesthetic Realism is to give individuals a chance at really their true individuality while having them see that the relations they have with things will bring out that full individuality, and that those relations are something one cannot afford to let go—if one does, there will be dreariness and calamity. Now, this has to do with the technique of poetry, because poetry is always a bringing out the meaning of something through relation.

Technically speaking, poetry is a way, through words—what they are in themselves and what they have to do with each other—of bringing out the full meaning of things. The technique of poetry, first, has to do with words. A person who does not really care for words (and most people do not—they use them, but don’t care for them) cannot give a poem what is coming to it. The way the words are chosen in themselves, and the way they are placed, can bring out meaning.

The technique of a carpenter is to take wood and show that it isn’t just the log of a tree but is something that can be used as a table. The technique of a watchmaker, in the long run, is to take steel and springs and show that these things can be used to tell time. So the technique of a person writing poetry should be to use words so truly in themselves, so truly in relation to other words, that the meaning of things, which most often is brutally unfelt by people, has a chance of coming forth.

What a carpenter does with wood is what a poet does with words. It is a job. Of course, in a sense it is much more complicated than the job of carpentry, but there is a similarity, because technique is a putting things together in such a way that the meaning in them, or the power in them, can come forth.

Only Words

All arts have their techniques. From a technical point of view, a painter uses paint and canvas and shows meaning through what he does with paint and canvas. A musician shows meaning through what he does with sound. The thing about poetry is that the words a person uses, though they are materials, are different materials from the materials of wood that the carpenter uses, or even the paint and canvas that the painter uses, or the sounds that the musician uses. I am talking strictly technically: from a technical angle, what we are concerned with as to poetry is how words are used. I am not talking now of thoughts: the thought can be compared to the power behind a machine. I am talking now of the means that a person has in writing poems; and those means, that technical material, is only words, written words.

It happens that if the writer does care for thought very much, and is interested in reality, this person will also care for words. No one has ever been interested in thought in the fullest sense who hasn’t been interested in words, because words are the means of being fair to thought.

Words technically are a material that can be seen in at least three ways. First, every word is a sound; it’s music. Second, every word also has something related to picture. Even a word without color has something like line in it; it is pictorial. Then, third, the biggest thing is, every word has meaning or suggestion—it has a certain kind of history. Sounds and colors by themselves do not have the aroma of history that a word has. If a word like orange is used, or love, or mother, that word is not only a thing to be found in the dictionary—it has accumulated to itself all kinds of meanings. A word is a history—more so than the sounds that are the immediate technical material in music, or than the canvas and paints that are the material in painting.

The means in poetry of using words so as to be entirely fair to what may exist, and also to one’s thought, is something that I hope people will be joyously studying.

An Example

To show what technique is, I am going to use one line: “The waving and expensive corn.”

Most people would say, “It’s a little strange; what’s expensive doing there? What’s waving got to do with expensive?” However, the line is technically very careful.

For instance, there is a certain fall of each syllable; every second syllable is accented. Then, the word waving has a kind of meaning different from that of expensive. Waving is something that corn does in the wind—you look at it, see it wave—while the being expensive is something you think of as to price. They are two ideas that most often people want to see as opposed to each other. Putting them together in this way makes the corn look different, because at the moment you see it wave, you also see it as expensive.

Persons may say “I don’t want to see it that way; I want to see it waving one time and expensive another time. I don’t want to see it waving and expensive.” And the person writing poetry says, “You better had, because it’s better for you to see it as waving and expensive at once.” The value of the line has to do with both its sound and the words’ histories, or meanings. Waving has a w and a v, and it glides; but it also has a certain little history. The word expensive has another kind of history. As sound, expensive does a little hissing yet it has that v again; so it is like and not like waving.

Now, I could add another word that also has a long history: “The waving and expensive and immemorial corn.” By putting that word there, I shake up the meaning of “waving and expensive.”

The relations that words can have are part of the study of poetry. Words can have all kinds of relations, and that makes them like people. Every person is a drama in himself or herself, a set of forwards and backwards, goings this way and that, favors and oppositions—and every person has indefinitely to do with every other thing. To see a word as a person is something that I have tried to do. That’s one of the things technically in these poems. And I have never put down a word in poetry that I had not seen for itself, while also trying to see how it could be a friend to other words.

A Poem on the Subject

I once wrote a poem about technique, and I am going to read that poem as a putting in verse what I have just said. It’s called “Technique Is When”:

I’ll discuss this poem a little. —The first thing in art is to find relation. Just as every person has felt that in certain company he or she is better off than in other company, so are words. A person who doesn’t feel poetry will put words in bad company, and in this way have there be a bad time for all of them. So the first thing to see about the technique of poetry is this: what words are, and how can what they are and stand for be brought out through relation.

I say “Technique is when / Things which have been alone, / Their friendship not seen.” And we come to a basic thing: Aesthetic Realism says all things have relation. If the relation were completely seen—completely—that relation would be seen as friendly. Everything in this world is connected with every other thing. There is an indefinite symphony of all objects; and a person is happy who can honestly see oneself, in an orderly fashion, as related to that mighty, measureless, friendly collection.

How is this to be done? It is done through all the arts. In all the arts, things that are ordinary are, if they’re really seen, put in such a way that their deeper, more extraordinary meaning can come forth.

Poetry is a way of having you live more. Poetry is based on the idea that everything in the world wants to find all its friends. That friendship is announced through words, which stand for things.

I say here, “Their fervent love not seen.” There is another presumption: that if a relation is found artistically between two things, no matter how different ordinarily speaking they seem, something like love in the deepest sense has occurred. The love that exists between objects is really deeper than the love that exists between people. I discussed recently a poem of Swinburne, “A Match,” which hints at that.

Then, “Are brought together winsomely—” This means that there is a certain quality that should be honored, which is in the word winsomely. Words should be seen as solidities; they should be seen as having the fullness of a refrigerator, the fullness of a bar of iron; but they also should be seen as having lightness, and be used gracefully, “winsomely,” because words are like the world itself. Wherever there is good technique in any art, there is a oneness of lightness and heaviness.

“And deeply”: words can be used to make objects more deep or less. If the words are used truly, the object takes on a life and meaning that it didn’t have before.

The final line is “For evermore perhaps.” If a poem stands up, it takes on a certain lastingness. But even evermore should not be too fixed, so there is the word perhaps.

[To be continued]