Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we conclude our serialization of the 1974 lecture Truth & Beauty Have a Love Affair, by Eli Siegel. In that playful title is something everyone is desperate to know: that what’s true and what’s beautiful, attractive, delightful not only can be but are fervent friends; and this is why, if we divide them, we suffer and cause suffering.

Every person is ashamed because he or she does not love truth enough. In fact, people often see truth 1) as an interference; 2) as an enemy; 3) as boring; 4) as something that does not really exist; 5) as something to be created by oneself—that is, persons can feel, Truth is what I want it to be and therefore I can pass off a lie as what’s so. Yet we will never be happy or at ease unless we feel what’s in the title of this great lecture. We need to feel that truth—truth as such—is beautiful, alluring, appealing. And we need to feel that our honoring of truth is what will make us important.

To introduce this final section of his 1974 lecture, I am going to quote from a lecture Mr. Siegel gave ten years earlier, in which he also spoke about truth and lies. It was part of a series of lectures he gave on instinct. These eloquent, logical, passionate sentences from Instinct Is Concerned with Truth describe not only the fight in every person, but the fight in a nation:

Truth is the most avant-garde idea still, and always has to be. Truth can be defined as fairness by an individual to reality, and there is nothing that is more avant-garde than that, nothing more terrifying, and also nothing sweeter….Aesthetic Realism says that the greatest desire a person has is the desire for truth….

[Yet] the instinct to lie…is a terrific instinct. It is based on the idea that what a person can do with the world is better than what the world has done with itself….

As soon as a person consents to lie,…he is welcoming tumid anger; he is welcoming swollen contempt, and Lord knows what else. The lie that I am talking of is the tendency to carry on a successful war with reality and have something so because it suits the convenience of the individual….Since the fact as such can very easily be associated with hindrance, frustration, not voting for us, we can go for the lie….At the base of everything that is bad there is this inaccurate love of the lie. [TRO 613-617]

Respect versus Contempt

The fight between truth and lying is a form of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the big, continuing fight in each individual: the fight between contempt for the world and respect for the world. And in Truth & Beauty Have a Love Affair, Mr. Siegel is explaining that art meets our great need: to see that truth, the desire to respect reality, stands for us—not contempt and lying. This is because all art shows the real inseparability of truth and beauty, of respect and power, of justice and glory.

In the lecture, he has been looking at poems. And he has been showing that in a good poem, the beauty arises from the fact that the writer has seen his or her subject with such a fullness of honesty that the poem’s lines are musical. What we hear as music in those lines is the structure of the world itself: the oneness of such opposites as tumult and calm, intimacy and width, the abrupt and the continuous, the heavy and the light. This musical truth about what the world is, is felt through words used with large sincerity. Poetry, wrote Eli Siegel, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

For Example: What Does a Tree Deserve?

In our final installment of Truth & Beauty Have a Love Affair, Mr. Siegel speaks about two poems. One is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Chorus,” about death. The other is the very popular Joyce Kilmer poem, “Trees.” And Mr. Siegel shows, with depth and also humor, that the Kilmer poem is untrue, insincere, not beautiful. Due to the nature of serialization, the discussion published here is separated from the rest of the lecture; so to place a little Mr. Siegel’s criticism of Kilmer, I’ll comment on some other writing about trees.

Mr. Siegel mentions two poems on the subject that are very different from Kilmer’s, one of which is William Cowper’s “Yardley Oak.” Cowper wrote that 161-line uncompleted poem in blank verse in 1791. It is about a massive and ancient oak tree that had lived through much, had flourished, had had great strength, but then, after hundreds of years, lost bark, became much hollowed, lost branches—yet lived on. There are these two and a half lines:

The blank verse is stately. And through it we feel something true about the particular tree—but also feel the grandeur and weakness of things in the world: that what’s mighty and what’s pitiful are not separate. We feel this, because the lines in their sound have scope yet also groan. And the presence of the owls in that tree constitutes a terrible comedown for it, yet also brings it a new kind of life. In both statement and music we hear something true about the world—that it is a oneness of opposites. And what we hear is beautiful.

Cowper imagines the oak’s very early life, when it was a mere shoot, and then when it came to have tremendous size and strength:

Here, imagination is truth. In a sentence I quoted earlier, Mr. Siegel said, “Truth can be defined as fairness by an individual to reality.” Part of that fairness is imaginative: the trying to see the possibilities of a thing—for instance, what might have affected a tree, what it had to do with (here, a fly), how it might have changed. The big question, differentiating the imagination which is lying from the imagination which is art and justice, is: are we using our imagination to be fair to the object and the world, or to mold reality contemptuously to suit ourselves? Cowper has us feel, hear, the delicacy and agitation of fly and infant tree, then the slow firmness of the grown oak—and both as the blank verse continues, stately yet resilient.

I’ll quote one more passage about this tree, to give perspective to what Mr. Siegel says of the Kilmer poem. This is about the tree’s branches—which are gone. Cowper thinks that winds have severed them and that people have burned them:

These lines tell of something that seems insulting, painfully lessening. We hear the pain too, in the sound, but it is at one with dignity and wonder. Is that oneness of insult and dignity true about Yardley Oak—and do the lines bring us truth about reality itself: that those opposite qualities, lessening and grandeur, are present mysteriously yet profoundly in the world? Did the beauty of the lines come because Cowper was lying about a tree and the world, or telling the truth about them? It is the latter.

To Conclude

To follow this final section of the lecture, I have included 12 maxims on the subject of truth, from Eli Siegel’s wonderful book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. The book contains more than 800 maxims—brief yet rich, succinct yet deep, vivid, often humorous statements on many subjects. These, as I said, are about truth—and I would like to comment, but cannot here, on the beauty of each of them.

Throughout his life Mr. Siegel not only wrote and spoke greatly about truth, but he lived that way: loving truth, honoring it, finding it, showing it, being magnificently true to it. His lifework, and his life, are as great evidence as any I know that truth and beauty are the same.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poems—True & False

By Eli Siegel

What music is in poetry can be seen in a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay about death. In this instance, I’ll try to make a poem worse by changing it—as with the Viola Paradise poem I tried to make it better. This is the great poem of Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Chorus.” It doesn’t have hurtful, debilitating frills, and it uses simple things in a way that’s musical and intense. It’s very dramatic. And it is true. It’s the greatest poem of Ms. Millay, and is one of the great poems of America and the world. The poem, “Chorus,” as we have it, is:

Sometimes, to show the power of a poem, I’ve done some changing of the lines, and then usually the power is less. So this poem can be changed. The fact in it is: a girl has died; there doesn’t seem to be much use for her clothes, so what shall we do with them?—and the best thing to do is to give them away. There are one or two details, like “fragrant” and “padded,” and the adjectives are used carefully—like “narrow” for shoes. Most of the poem is monosyllables. It could be changed this way:

What I’ve done is: I’ve taken away a certain bedrock-something. And bedrock is sometimes a thing necessary for beauty. Take a very popular poem I mentioned earlier, Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”: the quality of bedrock is what is lacking in it, and it’s lacking in other poems. The poem of Kilmer happens to be rather pretentious and it has the same fault that the MacLeish poem I spoke of has: it’s not true.

So I’ll be as serious as I can about this, and as just.

Exactitude & Love

Kilmer’s “Trees” is very popular because people like to think of trees, and everyone should. But one can love trees and at the same time be exact about them. Love is not an enemy of exactitude. True love always makes for greater exactitude. First I’ll read the whole poem:

It’s a very soothing poem and takes your mind off the municipal police force.

Well, we have a first statement that can be questioned: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” One can ask: What is your frame of reference? On what level are you speaking? What do you mean by “lovely”? There are other questions, which I could rudely ask too. One could compare Milton’s “Lycidas” to a tree in terms of loveliness, or compare Ms. Millay’s “Chorus” to a tree. Then, a beech tree is sometimes seen as not as lovely as an oak tree. And since one tree is lovelier than another, it’s also possible that a tree doesn’t have everything yet. There’s no doubt that an elm tree is lovely. But to say that an elm tree is lovelier than certain parts of Paradise Lost would be a little rash—or “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I’d ask Mr. Kilmer, Which poem is the highest in competition—which poem do you think could almost make it and be as lovely as a tree?

Is It Fair?

The next stanza, or couplet, is vile: “A tree whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.” To have roots compared to a baby looking for her mother’s breast—it is not fair to roots or a baby or a breast. I don’t think any mother feels that a tree is doing with earth what a baby did with her. The water that a tree needs comes differently. And the roots don’t exactly work the way a baby does: to say that the roots suck is not fair to roots. Kilmer gives the tree one mouth (“whose hungry mouth is prest”). It would have to have more than one “mouth” because all the roots are busy.

There are many poems about trees. There is one by William Cowper about a very old tree, “Yardley Oak.” And Tennyson has an oak tree talking in “The Talking Oak.”

“A tree that looks at God all day, / And lifts her leafy arms to pray.” That, in the worst sense, is imputing too much. Also, there are some trees that seem to droop—they don’t lift their arms. The branches seem to go down, and they’re in a state of fetching sadness.

“A tree that may in Summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.” Wearing a nest of robins—it sounds as though the tree has a hat.

“Upon whose bosom snow has lain.” Giving the tree a bosom—I find it very hard to see. You might as well give a clothes hanger a bosom.

“Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.” It could be said—as Peirce would say—that since God made man and man made poems, God made poems too.* But this poem is essentially false, and it illustrates the relation of truth and beauty—that anything which is not true is not beautiful.

So, today I have been talking about the relation in poetry of truth and beauty. And I have to grant proudly that the subject has not been covered.

Twelve Maxims about Truth

By Eli Siegel

1) If you say the truth, so much you follow the truth; and truth follows you; and you reach the truth and the truth reaches you; and there’s a quiet and definite little celebration at this time which many people don’t know about.

2) You can see a wrong thing rightly, and a right thing wrongly: this shows you can’t tell what truth will do next.

3) Tell the truth about yourself to yourself, or you’ll think you’ve been deceived and grow angry.

4) If the journey to truth does not have in it the quality of a fierce gallop, and of the steady, lumbering covered wagon, and of a most grand waltz, it isn’t truth that is being journeyed towards.

5) Fakers have a motive, but they can’t fool themselves into really liking it.

6) A pessimist is a person who wants the half-truth, the half-truth, and nothing but the half-truth.

7) When she spoke to him insincerely, he helped.

8) Stern truth becomes sweeter the more you know of it.

9) Facts are always whispering, uttering, and shouting advice.

10) When truth is divided, errors multiply.

11) If truth is not invited as a guest, it becomes a porch-climber in the night.

12) The facts never give up.