Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 3 of the thrilling 1964 lecture we are serializing: Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sensation, by Eli Siegel. It is an illustration—groundbreaking, also delightful—of this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Mr. Siegel is showing that sensation, what our senses do, is a making one of the tremendous opposites self and world. We may be angry at the world, want to get away from it, sneer at it, see it as separate from our inner life. But the purpose of our senses—for sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch—is to take within ourselves that outside world and have it become of us. The deepest desire of every person, Aesthetic Realism explains, is “to like the world through knowing it.” Our very senses are grand evidence for the truth of that explanation.

Sensation & a Poem

In the section we’ve reached, Mr. Siegel is in the midst of discussing John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” He comments on the opening stanzas of this poem of 1819, which is composed of 42 Spenserian stanzas. Mr. Siegel’s purpose is to illustrate what the senses, in their intricacy and simplicity, everydayness and grandeur, are. He is not, here, speaking about Keats’s importance as poet—on what makes his work authentic and powerful art—nor is he speaking on who John Keats as self and writer was. These big things Mr. Siegel did speak about at other times, always greatly and definitively; and I had the happiness of hearing him do so. Yet, somewhat earlier in the talk he alludes briefly, in one sentence, to what makes the poem art: he says, “As these sense impressions are presented…, there is something heard—which is Keats managing his words and lines and syllables.”

Eli Siegel was the critic to show that the thing distinguishing true poetry is music. This music arises from the writer’s having seen his or her subject and the world itself with such fullness, depth, accuracy, and love that the opposites of reality are heard as one in the lines: for instance, tumult and quietude, immediacy and wonder, delicacy and strength.

There Is Love

“The Eve of St. Agnes” has to do with love. And so, swiftly, I’ll relate it and the lecture to a recent New York Times article that deals, in a fashion, with marriage. The article (9-27-19) is titled “They’ve Got the Post-Wedding-Bell Blues.” And it reports that many people after their wedding feel (in their own words) “depressed, lonely, and like I didn’t have a purpose”; “very down…for six months”; “sad, and it didn’t go away.” The supposed “experts” quoted do not understand the cause. The best they can muster are statements like the following: “These [newlyweds] were the center of attention, and planning a wedding takes up so much of your time, it would be weird not to feel some kind of letdown.”

Aesthetic Realism consultants do understand the phenomenon written of. That is because Aesthetic Realism explains the purpose of love—which is the same as the purpose of our very lives and our senses. “The purpose of love,” Eli Siegel wrote, “is to feel closely one with things as a whole” (Self and World, p. 171). Love is the using of a particular person to know more truly, deeply, excitedly, and kindly things and people as such. And the big interference with love is the thing in a person which Aesthetic Realism shows to be the cause of all injustice: contempt, the “disposition…to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

Contempt can take the form of using love and one’s getting married, not to see more meaning in all things and people, but to make oneself superior, a queen or king. Let’s take a woman we’ll call Kate, who in four months will marry Sam. She is making two awful and ordinary mistakes. One is: she sees Sam, not as a person she should know, want to understand deeply, steadily, and joyfully, a person she should encourage to be in the best relation with all things and people—but as someone she now owns, who will glorify her and be a sanctuary against other people. The second mistake is: she sees her wedding and the planning for it as a glorification of her—she does not feel a need to ask what reality and human beings deserve; she is supreme. Like the people in the article, after the wedding she will feel awful. And the reason will be, deeply, beautiful: after the victory of contempt, the triumph of having conquered the world, there is the pain that comes because the ethics of our self is inextinguishable and demands, “You, Kate, should be using everything, and certainly your husband, not for contempt but to be fair to the world itself!”

In “The Eve of St. Agnes,” Madeline and Porphyro love each other, though Madeline’s aristocratic family is against Porphyro. On St. Agnes’s Eve there is a ball in the mansion where Madeline lives; Porphyro enters unseen, and—after much—they run away together. Through Keats’s descriptions and his music, we feel that the largeness and richness of the world are constantly present as “these lovers [who] fled away into the storm” are told of. And the poem begins and ends not with them, but with other people, including the old Beadsman—a person, poor, hired to say prayers. Keats, in how he writes, is showing Madeline and Porphyro to be “closely one with things as a whole.”

John Keats would have been very thankful to know that to like the world itself was the purpose of poetry, love, his senses, and his much too short yet so important life.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Sensation & John Keats

By Eli Siegel

We’ve come to the third stanza of this poem in which sense is present so importantly, Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” (The “he” spoken of is the Beadsman.)

We have the phrase “Music’s golden tongue,” and one can object. It’s quite possible that Keats would not have used the word tongue if he didn’t have to rhyme with rung, sung, and among. However, since the text is what it is, it should be pointed out that there can be duality among the sense organs. The tongue tastes; and treatises have been written on the relation between tasting and swallowing, how something arranged that taste can be a means of your swallowing successfully. Wonderful thing, really. But music here is given a “golden tongue,” so there’s a doubling of function for the tongue: it tastes but it also makes for music. Fine.

“Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor.” With the word tears we can have an example of something I spoke of earlier: getting impressions from oneself. There’s a lovely feeling that some people have more often than they should, of seeing and feeling tears run down their cheeks, being aware of their course, warm and pleasant and beguiling.

“But no—already had his deathbell rung: / The joys of all his life were said and sung.” Sounds are different. The church bell, including the deathbell, has a different sound from that of the lute. The ear distinguishes. And related to that fact is something about the senses which is also about mind itself: there are two procedures, distinction and gathering; you see difference as you increase or compose.

Words Affect the Senses

Meantime, words themselves make for different sense impressions. The word joys said four times slowly will make your mouth water if you are salivarily equipped as you should be.

“Another way he went, and soon among / Rough ashes sat he for his soul’s reprieve.” Two words that, in their sound, make for different sense impressions are ashes and reprieve. They represent the contrast of the world. Ashes is so luscious, even though the word can be so sad. And reprieve is so neat.

Motions, Snarling, & Philosophy

We come to stanza 4:

There is motion in “for many a door was wide, / From hurry to and fro.” Keats was not as speedy as Shelley. Shelley was always looking for a chance to get things into speedy motion. But some speed is in Keats, and some of it is here.

Motion has been thought to be deduced from the senses; for instance, we see a thing in one place and then in another, and we get the idea of motion. But this is not the time to talk of motion. Mind is at ease with the contemplation of crushed blackberries, and it’s at ease with the contemplation of swift Cappadocians running across some field of Asia Minor, or with twenty high school students running a hundred-yard dash.

In the next line we have “snarling trumpets.” Snarling is a possibility, which the world has come to, of affecting the ear, and it has been put in amber by having the word snarl; that is, it’s been made permanent. Various things snarl, but I’m glad to say most things don’t. An oak tree is respectable and never snarls. Even a swamp does not snarl, though if it gets the wrong wind it can seem to. Snarling is for various animals given to ill temper and not being able to overcome heredity. Trumpets are heard; and Keats sees these trumpets as snarling—and that has been praised.

“The level chambers, ready with their pride.” One of the biggest things in sense is a philosophical matter. The chambers here are level. Level is next door to smooth. And one of the earliest differentiations of sense was between rough and smooth. It was felt very early. Something that one wears may have ridges, or be without ridges. That is a study: rough and smooth, manyness and oneness. There’s nothing that was ever rough that didn’t have some manyness. And there’s nothing that was ever smooth that didn’t have oneness. A level thing accents oneness. The senses, in being able to tell the difference between roughness and smoothness, also tell the difference between manyness and oneness.

“Were glowing to receive a thousand guests.” In glowing, two things involving different senses can be present. One is brightness, which is for the dear eye. The other is warmth, which is for that general sense called touch.

“The carved angels, ever eager-eyed, / Star’d….” Carving is something that can be looked at, but also felt, and it’s an interesting mingling of roughness and smoothness.

Then, “eager-eyed, / Star’d.” Does sense discern something going towards you, even rudely, and something going away? We know that a child can be bashful, and no bashful child ever stared. The eyes seem to become somewhat religious when one is bashful. In staring, the eyes go forth. What does the distinguishing? Something is seen, but what is seen is “seen,” dealt with, in turn. And as soon as a sensation is seen by the person having it, sensation is in the field of perception, which is as large a term about mind as any. So a question that concerns sensation is: what in ourselves distinguishes a stare from a shy look? Without our eyes we could not know that there was either a stare or a shy look. But what makes us able to tell the difference?

The carved angels have “hair blown back.” And: what is the relation between a feeling that something (like hair) is a particular color and a feeling that it is back? How do we know that a thing is forward or backward? It doesn’t seem to be through sense alone; but without sense, that knowledge could not be.

Again, What Distinguishes?

The fifth stanza begins:

Plumes, tiaras, and gowns can make for sense impressions. But the distinction between a plume and a tiara, which all medieval people could make—that is something else. The relation of sense to distinction is one of the large problems of mind. How can we tell a plume from a belt? Plumes are material for sense. Belts are material for sense. But that which enables us to distinguish, that is something else.

“Numerous as shadows…” Shadows are material for sense. The eye seems mainly concerned. But there is such a thing as fear, which often has been with shadows. And the fear is not the eye.

Madeline Is Body & More

Then Keats says we should think about a particular person, Madeline. We should

There is Madeline. A problem of novelists very often is to present the body with the appropriate religious feeling. And in this poem, Madeline has to be presented as having a body, but she also has to be presented as noble, religious, romantic, unforgettable—having something more than body. The senses are always ambitious and want to be something more.

Stanza 6 is about what Madeline has been told could happen on St. Agnes’s Eve:

A Victorian could read this poem before Keats was definitely accepted, and could find certain corporeal businesses in the phrase “soft adorings.” This person wouldn’t be so wrong, either, because there’s a tactual quality in that phrase “soft adorings”—and then in “Upon the honey’d middle of the night.” All this proves that Madeline has a body.

This stanza has to do with love, and to love is inclusive, but there is also great exclusiveness: the feeling of Madeline is distinguished. Meanwhile, the senses are like that. The senses must be able to work on their own, must be ferociously, ineffably distinctive, and must be also able to mingle with the other senses and with every other possibility of mind. When the pressure of a fingertip goes along well with every other thing of mind, we have an organism pretty felicitously placed among things.

A line in stanza 7 has been much written about: “The music, yearning like a god in pain.” How is music “yearning like a god in pain”? The question arises, how are the senses related to desire and hope?

The eyes, in getting and giving attention, must know what to leave out. So the senses can be heedless. If we are concerned with something, the senses can say, This is not for me—let the self be concerned. And the ears, eyes, taste, touch, and smell are for a while in abeyance: we have something to find out. If a person is wondering what street to take next, he might just do a little looking, but the other senses wait like good dogs until they’re told to be in action again. They’re all on their paws, quietly.

“This Is Sweet”

Every word I’ve discussed in this poem is a little arrangement standing for the universe of sense possibility. For instance, the last line of stanza 7 is “She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.” The word sweet has taken in so much else of the world, but originally it began with something that man came upon: there were things that seemed to have a taste different from other things. The history of sugar is a long history. Perhaps the first feeling that something was sweet came through honey, because the bees did the work there. Honey was found early, and so the word honey has a long history. Sweet originally meant what would happen to you if perhaps a half cubic inch of honey were on your taste buds. Then the whole organism would respond, and it would say, This is sweet, and you would love the bees. But from that came many other uses of the word. Sweet can take in so much, and should take in more.

—Those were some stanzas of Keats.