Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing, in three parts, the 1965 lecture by Eli Siegel titled Poetry Is Concerned, and the final part is in the present issue. I’ve said much about this lecture in our past two issues. What shall I say about it here?

Well, I’ll mention afresh that Mr. Siegel uses as his text the fourth book in the Heart of Oak series, books of literary selections compiled toward the end of the 19th century by Charles Eliot Norton. Mr. Siegel speaks in the lecture about works that are very different from each other. And as he does, this Aesthetic Realism principle (without his quoting it) is alive, kind, explanatory of the beauty of the literature, the feeling of the writers, and the hope of the persons reading or hearing each passage: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Two Writers and What Art Is

The last two poems Mr. Siegel discusses have, he points out, a certain apparent similarity in their construction: each is a series of four-line stanzas. And yet, he shows, one of the writers is truly poetic, while the other is not. He is very technical in his showing of what’s amiss with the Felicia Hemans poem, and what is right—organically and grandly right—in the other, by Thomas Campbell. But Mr. Siegel’s being technical is not a bit dry or “specialized”: it is thrilling. And you will meet it soon.

That beautiful technical discussion also, I have felt, gives a chance to say something about a subject that people have usually treated as unknowable: what is the way of mind that makes for art? What is the state of mind that must be if true art is to be? The seeing by an artist, the feeling of the artist, like the work of art that comes from it, is a oneness of opposites.

For Instance, Universe and Object

The artistic way of mind, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, wants to be fair to the immediate object, the subject matter one is dealing with. And this desire to be fair to the object is so large and exact that it includes being fair to the world itself—for every object is an ambassador of reality itself. So the art state of mind is always a oneness of justice to what’s before one and justice to reality in its mystery, might, strangeness, unendingness. It is a oneness of care for the object in its deep particularity and care for the universe. It is a seeing of these as inseparable.

Further, the art state of mind is a oneness of self and what’s not oneself. The artist, in trying to give full justice to something outside him or her, does not feel sacrificial. To the contrary: there is a sense of taking care of oneself greatly, warmly—of being oneself through justice to an object and world other than oneself.

This state of mind is also a oneness of humility and pride. Eli Siegel writes of that fact in his book Self and World, in relation to Walt Whitman:

Take Whitman’s Song of Myself. Whitman yields himself to what he sees; to earth, to people; and he is proud doing so….[In] Song of Myself, a man becomes exultant through modesty, modest through exultation. The intense, wide, great fact sweeps Whitman truly; he yields and he has a feeling of deep independence and pride. [P. 97]

The following, too, I think needs to be said about the art state of mind. There’s still a notion that artistic creation must have suffering in it—that it’s a painful thing. To the contrary!—the way of mind making for art has always in it a deep happiness. That’s so, even as one may be dealing intensely with injustice, pain, evil. Byron put this idea charmingly in his Don Juan:

The reason, Aesthetic Realism explains, that we need to know what way of seeing makes for art, is that this way of seeing is what we need to go after having if we are to be proud, and kind, and truly happy. Artists themselves have not known what the art way of mind is, and therefore they couldn’t have it steadily. In fact, like others, they mainly have not had it in their daily lives, as to people and happenings and their thoughts to themselves. Because Aesthetic Realism explains what the art way of seeing is, we—humanity—can learn about it; and, if we do so honestly, we can come closer and closer to having it. Here I add, with much feeling: the art way is the way of seeing and being that Eli Siegel himself had all the time.

Art versus Contempt

At the beginning of this third section of his lecture, Mr. Siegel reads and comments briefly on a passage by John Bunyan. It happens to be a beautiful passage describing evil. And so I’ll say, as a swift prelude, something that Mr. Siegel explained in other lectures and that people are thirsty to know: the greatest evidence that real justice and truth are stronger than evil is that when evil is described truly, beauty comes to be.

All human evil, Mr. Siegel explained, arises from contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.” That is so about the awful allegorical characters whom Bunyan tells of here. But as he tells of them, there is in the writing a oneness of hurry and lingering, sharpness and winding, brevity and fullness, manyness and unity. All these have us see and feel a hideous injustice. But also, as structure, they bring to us a composition fair to what reality is—and with some humor too. The ever so fine prose wins out over the cruelty it truly describes.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

About Words, Life, and Poetry

By Eli Siegel

In this book, too, there is John Bunyan, with a famous passage from The Pilgrim’s Progress, of 1678. Mr. Faithful and Christian are in trouble. They are accused of being subversive, and have a terrible judge trying them. And there’s a jury. Bunyan had a way of making up names, and often they’re very good. Here, he gives each juror a name to show he doesn’t like any one of them. —The jury is conferring about Faithful:

Then went the jury out, whose names were Mr. Blind-man, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable….First, among themselves, Mr. Blind-man, the foreman, said, “I see clearly that this man is an heretic.” Then said Mr. No-good, “Away with such a fellow from the earth.” “Ay,” said Mr. Malice, “for I hate the very looks of him.” “Then,” said Mr. Love-lust, “I could never endure him.” “Nor I,” said Mr. Live-loose, “for he would always be condemning my way.” “Hang him, hang him,” said Mr. Heady. “A sorry scrub,” said Mr. High-mind. “My heart riseth against him,” said Mr. Enmity. “He is a rogue,” said Mr. Liar. “Hanging is too good for him,” said Mr. Cruelty. “Let us dispatch him out of the way,” said Mr. Hate-light. “Then,” said Mr. Implacable, “might I have all the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him; therefore, let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death.” And so they did…, to be put to the most cruel death that could be invented.

About the names: “Mr. High-mind,” as the phrase is used here, meant someone falsely lofty-minded—although high-minded means something good now.

The use of the “Mr.” does something; the making of anything personal can have an effect. And here the use of “Mr.” for all these abstract terms makes for a juxtaposition and a tension—for instance, “Mr. No-good.” The abstract and the particular are in a wonderful fight in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Not in Poetic Territory

Within this book is a poem that once nearly every child in America knew: “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England,” by Felicia Hemans (1793-1835). She is perhaps at her best in this poem, and I’ve tried very much to like it and to think it is a poem. I haven’t been quite able to. There’s another poem here, in almost the same structure, that is a true poem: “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” by Thomas Campbell. It is in a territory where the Felicia Hemans “Pilgrims” poem is not. So I’ll try to say why I think that judgment is just.

The Felicia Hemans work used to be recited a good deal. It has some of the best description going—it’s not to be scorned. And it was kind of an Englishwoman then to write about American happenings. But her lines are given to that looseness which is against poetry. There is less looseness here than in other writing of hers, but there is enough to make the poem not fare so well. It begins:

This stanza is as good as any in the poem, but the fact that Mrs. Hemans does not have a grip on what she is saying is to be seen in the using of “breaking” and “dash’d” in the same line about the same thing. If a wave is breaking, to have it dash in the same line interferes with the full effect of both “break” and “dash.”

“On a stern and rock-bound coast”—that is as good a line as any in the poem. “And the woods against a stormy sky”—that line, by itself, is to be praised. But we have “And the woods against a stormy sky / Their giant branches toss’d.” If the woods are being beaten about by the winds, then those giant branches are not being tossed by the woods: the woods are in too succumbing a state for that. Those branches are being tossed not by the woods but by wind and storm.

This matter has to do also with another big thing in poetry: the static and dynamic properly seen. In life we have the static and dynamic, and when they aren’t in the best relation, bad things happen in life.

Keeping Your Eye on the Object

There are two things necessary in poetry: one is, keep your eye on what you’re looking at; the other is, get in suggestion and wonder. Mrs. Hemans does not keep her eye on the object.

For instance, there’s “When a band of exiles moor’d their bark.” One would get the idea that this band of exiles was like the people, let’s say, in a motor launch, or the Coast Guard: that they get to the land and then moor their bark themselves. The Mayflower didn’t land that way at all. It’s not that Mrs. Hemans doesn’t have a right to change the Mayflower into a bark the pilgrims seem to be managing themselves. But it happens that there were sailors, and there was apparently a big fight on the last day about something like how much beer the sailors should get before people left the ship—something about beer came into the story. But the “band of exiles” just wasn’t the way Felicia Hemans describes, here and in the next stanza. They paid a captain or a shipping company for passage, and it was a commercial transaction.

It happens that elsewhere people have landed and they too didn’t have stirring drums and a trumpet. It wasn’t so necessary. This way of saying the Pilgrims didn’t come as conquerors is not the way of being most effective. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hemans knows her metrics: the metrical quality, the way rhythm is arranged, is the thing here that’s most successful.

I’m not sure if Mrs. Hemans is correct. I don’t think there were hymns sung at just that time. They were likely pleased at having arrived, and I guess they said to each other something like, We have to see just when we can leave the ship. There were people onboard the ship that evening. But the way Felicia Hemans tells it is too utter—the contrast is too easy: “not…in fear,” but with “hymns of lofty cheer.” I think they weren’t in any mood to sing hymns of lofty cheer.

That is a business of which Mrs. Hemans is not certain: what “the stars heard and the sea.” There is a desire to put on “poetic” trappings here. —In the next stanza, there’s this:

Mrs. Hemans shows her carelessness there. When she has just had the Pilgrims singing in the aisles, she shouldn’t have the rocking pines of the forest roaring so soon. You can’t have two operas on the same stage. —There is the final stanza:

Well, that’s a question. New England got into trouble as to the way it saw Baptists and Quakers later. But I am pointing out some of the mishaps of diction and approach and composition.

The Real Poetic Thing

Now, the poem written by Campbell, “Lord Ullin’s Daughter.” This is a poem. And it has in it the story quality too, very notably.

[Editor’s note: The poem is in fourteen quatrains—stanzas of four lines each. Here are the first four quatrains, followed by some of what Mr. Siegel said about the whole poem.]

The chief thing that makes this a poem is the relation of energy to control or ease. There are staccato effects in poetry, and they need to be there, just as there are sharp lines in the visual arts. “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” has a kind of I’ll take it easy quality: I’m thoughtful, tearful, moved, but I’m not going to pound the table. Or if I do, I won’t know why. The Campbell poem has the abrupt beginning, and the abruptness goes all through the poem. The suspense of life, the worry of life, the travail of life, is put in some motion, as of a verbal drum. Meanwhile, the words say something.

What one can see quite easily is that there is a definite iambic: “A chíef | tain tó | the Hígh | lands bóund.” And ts and ds, which show something of the structure of the world, are presented swiftly. Then the other phase of the world’s structure, the r, which is things in motion, is in the second line: “Cries, ‘Boatman, do not tarry!’” Campbell related these sounds; he composed them. He felt there was a drama among t and d and r.

“‘And I’ll give thee a silver pound / To row us o’er the ferry.’” The music is of the drum, while something poignant is being said.

[Note. As the narrative continues, the two lovers, trying to escape a father’s murderous rage, drown together in the storm. Then the father is remorseful.]

The Difference

Throughout the poem, as something sad and frightening is said, and said directly, the rhythm is against that frightening thing, rightly and deeply. The rhythm has the inevitability of hoof beats, while the thought itself is ever so grieving.

The difference between Thomas Campbell and Felicia Hemans is that Campbell knows how to place his broad realities with his narrow and sinuous realities. That occurs in poetry. Campbell was an artist.

All the writings I discussed today say things about poetry. And perhaps one of the best thoughts that we can have is that nothing in any year whatsoever will say things that are not, in one way or another, about poetry.