Dear Unknown Friends:

We are publishing sections of a powerful, vivid, literary, immediate, exciting, urgently needed lecture that Eli Siegel gave in 1974: Truth & Beauty Have a Love Affair. The title is playful, yet it’s also a five-alarm matter. That’s because unless we feel that truth is beautiful, attractive, and to be honored and loved, we are in trouble.

America has been under siege by persons who—far from seeing truth as beautiful—have seen truth as something to hate, make unimportant, submerge, disfigure, and kill, because what is true didn’t go along with what they wanted. Americans have been seeing an attempt, on a massive scale, to turn lies into “truth” and impose them on a whole nation. And millions of people, rightly, find this onslaught against truth loathsome, and dangerous.

Yet few people have, in their own lives, loved truth. In the last issue, I quoted this definition by Eli Siegel: “Truth is the having of a thing as it is, in mind.” If what’s so about something—a fact, person, situation—seems to interfere with one’s comfort, with having one’s way, I’m afraid truth has been resented: there’s a terrific desire not to have that thing “as it is, in mind.” In everyday life, people have gone against truth in thousands of ways, beginning with such quiet dishonest assumptions as: a person who praises me is good; a person who doesn’t seem to like me is bad; things I’m not interested in are unimportant; people who seem different from me are not as valuable as I am.

The seeing of truth in terms of what makes us comfortable and important is basic contempt. Aesthetic Realism describes contempt as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” And this contemptuous way of dealing with truth is not only the source of much cruelty—it also makes oneself feel profoundly unsure, self-disgusted, agitated, empty.

Here we have a big reason humanity needs the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism—and that means, centrally, Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of poetry. We need to feel that going after truth, seeing what’s true, honoring what’s true, is not sacrificial, self-lessening, or dull—but is thrilling, self-enhancing, beautiful! The living evidence that it’s the latter, Aesthetic Realism explains, is in all real poetry. And this is what Mr. Siegel is showing in the present lecture.

The Result Is Music

Though John Keats said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” people haven’t agreed. And Keats, I’m quite sure, could not give the basis for that important statement. The basis is in this description of poetry, by Eli Siegel: “Poetry…is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” Mr. Siegel explained that whatever the subject of a poem—from a passion to a grass blade, from death to a rose—the writer has been so deeply and widely fair to that thing, has seen it with such a union of accuracy and emotion, that how the world is made, what the world itself is, has been felt truly. And the result is music. We hear in the words-as-sound, and feel in the words-as-meaning, the oneness of opposites, which is reality itself.

In every good line of poetry, we are meeting, we are hearing, a oneness of tumult and calm, point and width, strength and delicacy, firmness and flexibility, continuity and change. So real poetry, as the oneness of opposites, is always truth about the world, what reality is. And what happens? This truth, presented in every good poem, does not make us feel miserable, disgusted, empty. Rather, poetry shows that the truth about reality is beautiful, musical, meaningful, vastly pleasurable, and makes us more ourselves. We need, desperately and grandly, to know this.

What I am describing is what I love most in the world: the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry.

Truth in a Line

In the section of the lecture published here, as part of the study of how truth and beauty are inseparable in art, Mr. Siegel looks at a poem that, he shows, is likable yet not fully poetry. It does not have the large, musical, imaginative truth that poetry requires. So he changes the lines to bring them closer to this truth. And he comments briefly on each change.

Due to the requisites of space, I cannot quote what Mr. Siegel said about every change, but his comments on most are here. While he points to how the revisions make the lines truer, he doesn’t—perhaps out of modesty—comment on the fact that his revisions make the lines beautiful. Yet they do. In Mr. Siegel’s reworked version, the lines have simultaneously a firmness, definiteness—and also nuance, gentleness, width, wonder. They have, and differently in every line, what the original lacked: the oneness of immediacy and mystery.

I could show this specifically, in relation to each line. But I won’t—again, due to space. I’ll say simply now that Eli Siegel himself loved truth always, was true to it in every aspect of life and thought. And this fidelity to truth, no matter what the circumstances, made him beautiful. The beauty included magnificent scholarship, humor, kindness, and the great knowledge that is Aesthetic Realism itself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

What’s True & What’s Not

By Eli Siegel

To show what is true and what is not true in art, we need to look at many kinds of work. I’ll use, for now, an issue of the magazine Poetry, of May 1918. There is a poem in it by a person who later would be a fairly popular novelist, and who, in 1918, worked for the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. government: Viola I. Paradise. In the poem, she writes about the wind and the moon—how, while the wind is carrying on like mad, the moon is there, and still.

The moon can look radiantly, coldly smug. That is a quality of the moon—it’s been thought to be even smugger than the sun. And if the wind is tearing about, there is a contrast. The moon, in other words, beats any television personality for smugness, or seeming smugness.

So there’s a poem about the wind tearing about, likely in 1918 in Chicago. The war was going on in Europe. March 1918 was a terrible month, because the Germans had been released from the Russian front—thousands of them—and they put on their greatest offensive. I remember how much America was worried that the Germans would get to Paris and London before the American troops would arrive. This issue is May 1918; that month the American troops showed themselves and very shortly were in the Battle of the Aisne. Meantime, poetry was written. In this magazine we have the matter of truth about the war but also of truth about nature—for instance, the wind.

I think the poem of Viola I. Paradise is interesting. As a means of illustrating our subject, I changed the poem—I hope, believe, to something having more truth and more beauty. First, here is the poem as Viola I. Paradise wrote it. She tells how the wind disturbed her as it went into her room. She calls the poem “Wind and Moonlight”:

Well, I changed nearly every line. My purpose was to add to the poem’s truth and beauty, simultaneously. So, one can judge. I’ll read the changed version entirely, then comment on it. I call it, instead of “Wind and Moonlight,” “The Moon Tolerates the Mad Wind”:

The Reason

Since this is a critical problem, I shall say a little why I changed the lines. When you revise you have to go toward some quality: what you go toward is either in the field of truth or beauty, more credibility or more power.

There is the title. I feel “Wind and Moonlight” is too static: I changed it to “The Moon Tolerates the Mad Wind.” The idea in the poem is that there are two opposites in an autumn night or in a spring night of March: the tearing-about wind and the moon that just looks on, not doing a thing. Viola Paradise is quite right; she has something there.

Her first line is “The Wind’s a brute, a monster.” I changed that to “The wind is brutal and monstrous.” The reason is: I think adjectives put more motion in the line than two nouns. Sometimes you want a noun, with its substance. And sometimes you want an adjective, which is more in motion.

The second line is “Shrieking and yelling about my house.” I think the wind, since it is in such motion, should be seen as doing separate things. So I changed the participial phrase “Shrieking and yelling about my house” to another sentence: “It shrieks and yells about my house.” I think the fact that the wind is brutal and monstrous should be separated from the fact that it shrieks and yells. In changing this participial phrase to a separate sentence, there is, whatever else, a going after more beauty and more truth.

The next line, as Ms. Paradise has it, is also a participial phrase: “Tearing at the walls with frantic iron claws.” I couldn’t stand the word iron there. I don’t think it helps a bit to say that the wind has iron—it just interferes. So I changed the line to “It tears at the walls with unrestrained wind claws.”

Ms. Paradise’s next line is “Striking with frenzied panicked paws.” Now, the wind can be a little like a wolf or dog or even a pussycat, but if it’s given paws they shouldn’t be too close to paws as we understand them. So, while I felt the word should be retained, I changed the line to “It strikes with wind paws in a panic.” And I thought the idea should have a whole sentence. Then, I retained the line “At my windows.”

Ruckus & the Meditative

Ms. Paradise writes next, “I’m glad it has no mind.” That could be put more meditatively, because you have enough ruckus already. So I changed the line to “Perhaps it is best that the wind has no mind.” I felt something leisurely should go on at this time.

I changed “As it freaks about my room” to “As it goes about my room.” The wind, after all, is impelled by something else and doesn’t know what it’s doing there. I used the general verb goes, nothing very specific….

I changed Ms. Paradise’s two lines “At the window—incredible!— / The full moon” to “At the window—it is hard to believe— / There is a full moon.” I changed incredible, which is a word too often used, and I don’t think it is effective here. And I gave the line “The full moon” a verb: “There is a full moon”—not just “The full moon.”…

She has simply, as a line, “In a naked sky.” I repeat the moon: “The moon is in a naked sky.” I like this line as much as any.

Ms. Paradise has: “Looks down serenely on the anguished trees.” I have, instead, “The moon looks down serenely on the troubled trees.” I’d rather trees have trouble than anguish; I think it’s truer.

In Imagination, Too

What I’m trying to say is that truth is in imagination too. That’s why some music can be seen as truthful, and other music not.

I changed “The stiff creaking branches, the scurrying leaves” to “On branches stiff and creaking, on leaves that scurry”—with the leaves more noticeable….

Ms. Paradise says, “That monstrous moon,” and I make it a complete sentence: “The moon is monstrous.” And she says, “That great, strong, big full moon,” but I don’t think the word that is necessary in those two lines—something has been pointed to already. I follow with “The great, strong, big full moon.” It helps give a sense of rotundity, and one can feel the stillness of the moon is against the mad doings of the wind. There’s a certain pleasure in just thinking about it.

She has “Who sways a million tides with a little gesture.” I don’t know how many tides the moon sways, but I don’t think it should be said it’s a million. I changed the line to “That sways all tides with a little show of strength.”…

Viola Paradise has “Bald sluggard moon!—lets the mad wind rage.” I changed that to “Empty, lazy moon—it lets the mad wind go on.”

There Is the Matter of Sound

Then we have, I think, some really bad sound: “Countenances it!” That is very hard to say; you almost feel like you’re eating a toothpick. So I changed that to “Permits it!” Next, Ms. Paradise has “Sheds shameless light on all its obscene passions!” There are too many sh sounds there; the mouth waters needlessly in saying it. So I changed the line to “Gives light to all the wind’s obscene passions!”…

She has, for her last line, “Is there no limit to indecency?” I changed that to “Is there no limit to the improper in this world?”

The point is that truth and beauty were both gone after. Whenever you change anything in the field of writing, you go after those two things, more beauty and more exactness.