Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize the culturally great, always immediate, supremely kind, often humorous 1972 lecture A Poem Is in the World, by Eli Siegel. In it, he speaks about three things: what constitutes those works called the Great Books, or classics; what an authentic poem is; and the world itself, in its unity and manyness. As he does, he is speaking too about things that are everyday and intimate for us: feelings and thoughts that we have, our inner tumult and mistakes. The basis of what he is teaching us—whether about Homer’s Iliad or a mood we were in yesterday—is this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

It is a thrilling thing that Eli Siegel is able to show what a great book has which makes it great—and that as he does, those often intimidating things, the classics, feel friendly and close to us.

For instance, he speaks in the lecture about the opposites of feeling and knowing. In all art, those opposites are one. And in a great work—be it Virgil’s Aeneid or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—emotion and logic are made one widely, deeply, multitudinously. Well, we have feeling and thought all the time, but they often seem to fight in us. The Me that feels can seem apart from and at odds with the Me that tries to be exact. Yet—we can see these opposites together in a Virgil line, with its musical dignity and yearning. We can see them too in a pulsatingly reasoned idea of Kant. The more we know it is these opposites—reality’s and ours—we’re seeing, the more able we are to have them one in us. And we see the world itself as friendlier.

What Makes It Great?

There is the huge matter of what makes a work great—not only good; even not only beautiful. (What onlys!) Mr. Siegel explained that greatness always has to do with how much the world itself is present in a work—with what fullness and nuance. And the world is always that structure which is opposites as one.

Here, I am going to quote from another class taught by Mr. Siegel. It took place in 1963, and in 1975 was published by the Terrain Gallery with the title The Opposites Class. At one point Mr. Siegel speaks about the opposites of grace and energy or boundingness. He mentions a kitten, which is beautiful in the way it makes these opposites one. Then he mentions that instance of great art which is the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, and which also has energy and grace. And he describes the difference:

What Beethoven [without articulating it] is saying is: “I’m going to use the opposites to see, not just a kitten, not just a season, but the whole universe in all its fury and all its grace.” And the universe seems to be on the tip of one’s finger….

When the opposites show a person and the universe in a way that is many enough, deep enough, surprising enough, and sincere enough, we have something like a great work. [Pp. 16, 22]

The Opponent to Reading & Life

In the present lecture, Eli Siegel comments on passages from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. And Mr. Siegel is humorous as he speaks about that in humanity which is against reading accurately and deeply. He’s jocular. Yet he is describing something not described before. You’ll have the pleasure of reading that description soon. But I’ll point out that what he makes fun of delightfully here is an aspect of contempt. And he is the philosopher who showed contempt to be the source of all injustice. It’s the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

Part of contempt is the feeling that Anything to which I seem to give myself should glorify me—and if it doesn’t, I have a right to feel insulted and angry!

Meanwhile, all true art is the ally of the thing in us which is against contempt. It’s the ally of our largest desire, our purpose from birth: our desire or purpose to like the world honestly, see value in it. And if we study what Mr. Siegel is explaining—that art is a person’s becoming magnificently oneself through giving justice to the world in its immediacy and scope—then respect can win and contempt lose in people at last. The Aesthetic Realism study of art and life can beat contempt, including the contempt that makes for sleazy politics, cruel economics, and war.

We Come to History

Toward the end of the portion of his lecture included here, Mr. Siegel speaks about books that deal with history.

He loved history very early, and always. He loved it from his boyhood, wrote about it throughout his life, spoke about it in the classes he taught. I’m going to quote some sentences from one of Mr. Siegel’s earliest published writings, as a means of placing how he speaks in this lecture—and also because we today so much need to see history rightly.

Eli Siegel was 21 when his article “The Middle Ages, Say,” appeared in the Modern Quarterly, December 1923. It is a review of F.J.C. Hearnshaw’s Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization, and he begins it writing about history in a new way:

There were people who lived in the Middle Ages and, who, so, suffered and enjoyed; the one difference between us and them is that their pains and pleasures are over and ours are not. These people are our fellowmen over the years.

The way of seeing which would become Aesthetic Realism is here: everything that is or has ever been should be seen as fully real—as existing just as much as anything else. Mr. Siegel considered a specialization people constantly engage in abhorrent and dishonest: the specialization of This and he and she are perhaps rather important; all other things and people don’t matter much; and of course no one and nothing has the fullness I feel myself to have. In the opening words of the review (quoted above), Mr. Siegel has put our relatedness to people succinctly, logically, and musically.

The review itself is very learned. Already, Eli Siegel’s scholarship was vast. I’ll quote, though, just two more sentences—from the concluding paragraph:

We should look on the past passionately; we should see all reality passionately, not only the part we have right under our noses or nearly that. Our feelings should have no limits in either extensity or intensity.

Mr. Siegel was true to those sentences: he saw all reality passionately, and his passion was always at one with the utmost exactitude, reason, desire to know.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

To Convince and Stir

By Eli Siegel

There is a passage in which Adler deals with the intent of an author, the motive of an author. A book consists of sentences that follow each other—sentences with company. And it is presumed that anytime a person writes a sentence and then writes another, there is a purpose in this writing of a sentence and many sentences. What we see in the history of literature is that there are two purposes in general. They’ve been put in ever so many words. But they come to: one, Gawd, how true this is! and the other, Gawd, how it stirreth me!

The purpose of literature, as the purpose of all expression, is to convince or to stir. This is one of the earliest things dealt with in criticism. When in Greece there was talk, or rhetoric, a great deal of rhetoric, what happened was: Demosthenes, for instance, had to convince the Athenians that he knew what Philip was doing (which usually wasn’t so good), and also had to stir the Athenians. Later, in Rome, Caesar tried to be convincing about Catiline and also tried to stir the Romans, to have them get a move on.

The purpose of all expression is to sound convincing and likewise to have an effect. This goes for a poem of now: the purpose still is to convince a reader that what you’re saying is, in the deepest sense, true, though it’s an imaginative poem; and likewise the purpose is to stir, move, please the reader. Adler writes about those purposes (at first presenting them as somewhat apart from each other):

The poet, or any writer who is a fine artist, aims to please or delight, just as the musician and the sculptor do, by making beautiful things to be beheld. The scientist, or any man of knowledge…, aims to instruct by speaking the truth.

The relation of convincing and moving is in every field of expression. How to hold an audience, delight them, and also convince them and make them buy the car you’re selling—that’s still in literature.

A Book & One’s Self

Every authentic reading of a book is an act of humility, because you either read a book to learn something, to see something you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, or you read a book to gloat over the author. From some of the annotations in library books, it would seem that people got books to gloat over the authors. But this is not usually recommended. And Adler says, quite wisely, if you read a book you should grant that the author may know something you don’t, or may have felt something you haven’t felt yet. It’s awful, but that’s the way it is. Otherwise, you’re either indifferent or you’re looking for books in order to prove that you don’t need them, which some people would say is an example of futility. Adler writes:

As in the one case the great book is able to elevate our understanding—

—That’s hard to admit, that anything could elevate our understanding! And I recommend that people try to fortify themselves against this, or at least console themselves.

As in the one case the great book is able to elevate our understanding, so in the other the great book inspires us, deepens our sensitivity to all human values, increases our humanity.

Certain words are used in that sentence, and they’re part of the critical vocabulary. What does it mean for a book to “elevate our understanding”? And why does our understanding have to be elevated anyway? Who wants any such thing?

Then, along with a great book’s “elevat[ing] our understanding,” Adler says a great book “inspires us”—which means that before we met this book we were, in a way, listless and didn’t know what to do. The next thing is also insulting: the book “deepens our sensitivity to all human values”—which implies that before we read the book our sensitivity wasn’t all it should be. The last phrase in Adler’s sentence is insulting too: the book “increases our humanity,” which means that there was something wrong with our disposition before we read it. So the very existence of great books is a constant threat to one’s superiority. Adler says so in his next sentence:

In both fields of literature, only books which are better than we are require skill and activity in reading.

In other words, in trying to read well, we’re saying we hadn’t been good enough before.

What Adler calls “both fields of literature” he describes as 1) “imaginative literature,” “belles-lettres,” and 2) “history, science, and philosophy.” He himself is much more at ease on, say, John Stuart Mill, or Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, or The Federalist than he is on belle-lettres. But he says this:

The greatest books most frequently combine these two basic dimensions of literature.

That is, they all have something inciting, dramatic, and also they teach or convince.

A Platonic dialogue such as The Republic must be read both as a drama and as an intellectual discourse.

Very often persons read Plato’s Republic, and they might be in the second year of high school but they write “Nonsense” in the margin. Meanwhile, Adler says there is drama in the Platonic dialogues, which is true. It has been felt that Plato, along with writing on philosophy, knew something about the disposition of characters. In other words, he blocked his dialogues quite well.

A poem such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy is not only a magnificent story but a philosophical disquisition.

What is in Dante’s Divine Comedy? can still be asked.

Knowledge cannot be conveyed without the supporting texture of imagination and sentiment; and feeling and imagery are inveterately infected with thought.

Feeling & Thought

This whole book about the great books is a constant affirmation—as poetry itself is—that the mind that knows is also the mind that feels. The making these one—the showing that to see clearly, deeply, truly, is one with feeling deeply, being moved—comprises the large meaning of the history of the human mind: how to have the two at once, seeing clearly and feeling deeply. Every great book is another example of how deep thought is at one with intense or deep feeling. In many ways that relation is different in Dante’s Inferno from what it is in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, but it’s there. It’s different in Wordsworth’s Prelude from what it is in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, but it’s there. And the study of how the two are one is the central study of a poem. A relation of the two is in that sentence of Adler:

Knowledge cannot be conveyed without the supporting texture of imagination and sentiment; and feeling and imagery are inveterately infected with thought.

I wouldn’t put it that way. The use of the word infected, I think is a little crass. But we know what he means.

Then, what different feeling do we get from various books? It has been felt by many people that to read Dante’s On Monarchy (De Monarchia) is not the same as reading Dante’s Inferno. In fact, it isn’t the same, and not so many people will read De Monarchia. They won’t read, even, Il Convivio. Some do read La Vita Nuova, but they’re less interested than in reading The Divine Comedy. So, what is the difference?

And what is the different feeling we get reading Machiavelli’s The Prince from the feeling we get reading Guicciardini’s History of Italy? Not that you have to worry about that, but there is a difference. Nobody knows what they feel about Machiavelli’s The Prince yet. But we do know that we get a different feeling reading Machiavelli’s The Prince from the feeling we get reading another Italian two centuries earlier, Dante in The Divine Comedy.

What is the difference? What did it come from? And does it say something about the world as having difference?

History Is Fact & Meaning

Adler has a difficult time with history, because people still haven’t gotten away from the fact that history is a story. It’s still a story. The popular history of the last few years is Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. She gives something like reasons for the First World War, but she does deal with that month of August 1914, the month in which the war began, the European war. She deals with messages, and she tells how Bethmann Hollweg wrote this, and the Kaiser said this, and Edward Grey said this, and Sazonov said this. But it’s still narrative. And The Guns of August has been very popular (more popular than her book on China).

Adler says:

The historian must write poetically, by which I mean he must obey the rules for telling a good story.

This dealing with histories as perhaps great books brings us to something else about poetry. The world is like a poem: it is fact and meaning at once. Every point in the history of the world is fact and feeling or meaning or significance, at once. A poem is a presentation of fact as meaning, and meaning as fact, and that makes it like the world itself.

History consists of a certain kind of fact. Natural history consists of what goes on in, say, the forests of New York at any one time. And those facts can be given meaning. But history would deal with some of the battles in the forests of New York State, like the Battle of Oriskany, and the battles that Sullivan had with the Indians. So we have facts and meaning.

Everything that happened we must think had some meaning. Is there a meaningless occurrence in the world? For that matter, is there a meaningless fact? What does it mean for something to be meaningless? The purpose of the historian is to deal with the fact in such a way that meaning is at one with it.

There have been excursions in the showing of meaning in facts. For instance, there might be a person writing a history of the Civil War, and he gives a whole chapter to the manufacture of iron during the Civil War years and leaves out Grant more or less. Or he writes on the use of new farm implements and leaves out Jefferson Davis.

“The historian…must obey the rules for telling a good story.” That is felt now—that a history should be a good story. That is why there have been various books focusing on one day, like A Night to Remember, the day of the sinking of the Titanic. And Jim Bishop wrote The Day Lincoln Was Shot, about what went on during that one day.

But the thing we see is that all the great books are a oneness of fact and meaning. And that makes them like the world, and also like a poem.