Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the fourth part of the 1972 lecture we are serializing: We Approach Poetry Variously, by Eli Siegel. He is speaking about the great subject, the beautiful subject, a subject urgent for humanity: what poetry is. I’m aware it is unusual to say that this matter is urgent, that the difference between a real poem and something that may be wrongly taken for one has a happiness-vs-unhappiness meaning, even a life-vs-death, kindness-vs-cruelty meaning. But it has. And the reason is: poetry—true poetry—is justice, justice to a particular thing and to reality.

I am very glad to say again: I have seen that Eli Siegel is the critic who, after all the centuries, showed what poetry really is. And Aesthetic Realism itself arose from his doing so. The basis of Aesthetic Realism is the principle “All beauty”—and poetry is beauty in words—“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The Distinguishing Thing

In the section of the lecture included here, Mr. Siegel is speaking about the importance of poetic music. He is showing that a certain kind of sound is what distinguishes a true poem from one that may say something interesting but is not authentic poetry. To describe poetic music is a large, rich, subtle matter. But as a means of placing what you’ll soon read, I’ll quote some other statements by Eli Siegel. First, from “The New Simplicity,” his preface to Martha Baird’s collection of poems, Nice Deity:

Poetic intuition discerns the presence of what the whole world is like in a specific object. The whole world, seen philosophically, is rest and motion, being and change, good and evil, general and particular, perfect and imperfect, order and freedom. To see these philosophic things as one in a thing or things, and to show them there, is to be poetic….A poem, then, shows reality where it begins in the reality that is before our eyes. A poem shows the grandeur of the universe in an experience of sense. [xxiv-xxv]

And, he explains, in a real poem we hear that presence of the universe, that oneness of reality’s opposites. In his preface to Personal and Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists he writes that in every good poem “there is a seeing that is also hearing. The words in a poem are heard musically as they fall logically” (p. xiv).

This Is about People

All this has to do with literary criticism, with art. But it is also about how people see people. Take, for example, a poem Mr. Siegel comments on in the present section of his talk. It’s “The Griesly Wife” (griesly means grisly) by the Australian writer John Manifold (1915-85), and Mr. Siegel shows that the needed music is not in it. However, in another class, two days earlier, he read the poem in a different context, as part of a discussion of how people affect other people. He did so because of the story the poem tells: about a young wife who leaves home and turns into a fierce supernatural animal. There are various tales, he explained, in which a woman, displeased with how a man sees her, gives herself over to supernatural powers. That idea is in folklore and it has symbolism in it—symbolism of something quite ordinary. He said, “The desire to run out of the house is frequent in married life. Usually it doesn’t take a complete form, [but there are] discontent and fear. What is the cause?”

There is anger between people, in homes and elsewhere, at how oneself is seen. And what I am trying to point out is that people won’t be clear about how they want to be seen, and see another, until they are studying that way of seeing which real poetry arises from and has.

In a bedroom right now a person feels, resentfully, about the person he or she is so close to, “You don’t see me right!” In that feeling there are opposites. There is the sense, “You’re not interested in me as I am, in ME, the me of mes.” That is about one’s tremendous particularity. But there is also the feeling, “You see me in some confined way. You don’t see me largely enough, widely enough”—which means, though the person doesn’t put it this way, “You don’t see me in relation to the world itself. You flatter me, you seem to need me, but you see me in terms of some narrow purpose of your own!” Did the wife in the Manifold poem feel something like this? Did it get her so angry and confused that she didn’t know what to do with herself?

Every person is thirsty to be seen as real poetry sees: we want to be seen as vividly particular and as having to do with nothing less than the whole universe. This way of seeing a person close to one is what’s needed for love truly to succeed. And this way of seeing people is the one complete alternative to the contempt from which injustice comes—including economic injustice and racism. Through the Aesthetic Realism education, the justice every good poem embodies can be in human life itself. It is what Eli Siegel had all the time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Music: The Main Thing

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel has been using as text the anthology Sound and Sense, edited by Laurence Perrine.

We come to an early poem. And as I said: about poetry, the chief difference of Aesthetic Realism from Prof. Perrine and many others is their not giving a crucial, decisive value to poetic music. Prof. Perrine says many things about music. He deals with prosody. He deals with the interior of words. But at the same time, he does not see the meaning of music—or sound which is the same as the relation of force to matter, also grace to matter, in the way that Aesthetic Realism says must be if there is to be a poem. That is why he can bring three poems together and not see that only one is a true poem: “The Twa Corbies.” That is a ballad. Then there’s something somewhat like a ballad, by Robert Frost. Then, on the page next to “The Twa Corbies,” there’s the poem that I read on Friday, “The Griesly Wife,” by John Manifold.

I find some value in “The Griesly Wife,” but “The Twa Corbies” is in another world of sound and force. And it is in another world than that of the Frost poem. This is important. I would like people to ask, why do I say this?

So I’ll read “The Twa Corbies,” which has been seen as a poem for a good many years. It’s one of the ballads that have remained as powerful. This edition has a gloss: The word alane means alone; twa corbies are two ravens. The corbies make a mane—that’s a moan. Gang means go. The auld fail dyke means the old turf wall. Hause-bane means neck bone. Een are eyes. Gowden means golden, and theek is thatch.

The point is that this is that greatest combination in the world: things said with a meaning that goes through the world permanently. The music takes what is said and gives it a reality value, a life meaning, which one is looking for:

There Is Music

This is one of the great poems having to do with the loneliness of man, and the fact that it’s hard to care for anyone, and the ravens, or corbies, know it. There are other poems like this, and they show that the folk given to the writing of ballads were as bitter as any intellectual who reached the height of disappointment. Then, with the Scottish, there is music.

“As I | was walk | ing all | alane.” There’s a relation here of space and substance, which is part of music always—something that stands for matter and something that doesn’t.

“The tane unto the t’other say, / ‘Where sall we gang and dine today?’” Well, it happens that people feed on birds, but occasionally birds feed on people—which shows everything is fair.

“‘In behint yon auld fail dyke—’” That has music, and the idea of substance: an old turf wall. “‘I wot there lies a new-slain knight’”: we have the known and unknown; we don’t know exactly how this knight died.

But the important thing is to see that the sounds here have that music which many things looking like this poem don’t have. And that is the crucial matter. A good question to ask is why these few stanzas, five stanzas, twenty lines, have made their way. What is in them? The main thing about the Aesthetic Realism way of seeing poetry is that music is the heart of the poem. It is not an incident. The music shows that the things said in the poem were truly seen.

“‘O’er his white banes when they are bare, / The wind sall blaw for evermair.’” Prof. Perrine noticed that if you have words with wide vowels, you get more of a sense of space. In the last line—“‘The wind sall blaw for evermair’”—there is a music because of the way the vowels are so noteworthy there, so predominant.

What’s Not There

We come to the poem on the next page, “The Griesly Wife,” by John Manifold, of Australia. I’ve talked about it in terms of the relation of man and woman. And it happens that it’s pretty good, but it lacks that quintessence, the one thing needful. This is the first stanza:

I don’t think the writer of “The Twa Corbies” would have such a pother of the hard y sound: “‘You’re young and ill accustomed yet.’” Somebody might answer, It’s very pretty having those ys—You, young man, should yield to facts. All right, that’s pretty effective. Alliteration is a means of having similarity in verse, which ran English verse for a number of centuries and ended gloriously with Piers Plowman. —Then, the second stanza:

I’d say that the person arranging these words is one not completely at ease with the possibilities in sound of words. This discussion can be called a hymn to sound. Every sound is looking for meaning. The mew of a cat or bark of a dog is sound that is known. And Jonathan Swift made a great deal of the whinnying of a horse in the name he gave to those nice horse-people in Gulliver’s Travels: the Houyhnhnms. Now, a purpose of sound is to show that interference and progress are one thing—and if you have interference somewhat against progress, as it is in that second stanza with the way the consonants are present, the purpose of sound and verse is not achieved.

This is brisk, and it’s praiseworthy: it tells a story well. But it’s not a poetic telling.

“He trod the trail wherever it turned”—here we have too much alliteration. It simply holds up the treading and the trail and the turning.

A scree is a stony slope. Lines like “And an angry man was he” are used in the ballad, sometimes very effectively. In “Sir Patrick Spens” there is “And a loud laugh laughed he.” But I don’t think this line of Manifold is so effective.

So the question everyone should ask is: Is there something that actually exists that makes a difference between a poem and what is not a poem? Or is it only something readers insist on finding? The position of Aesthetic Realism is that there is a something which differentiates a poem from a non-poem, as the carbon in coal can be differentiated from the carbon in a diamond.

That, too, doesn’t have a proper relation of stoppage and space.

This is said with some effect, but it is not consummate. It should be compared to the ballad of “Thomas Rymer,” where the trip of Thomas Rymer is told of.

I think that to use the word wheeled at this point about a quarry, does not come from the best poetic sensitivity.

Another sign that a person is not seeing sounds right is the three sounds of “bed may wait.” The vowels here have a way of being angry with each other. “And long the bed may wait empty”: you can feel the sounds are just glaring at each other.

The Third Instance

Then we have Robert Frost. I cannot deal too lengthily now with any poem; but why Robert Frost is not Wordsworth is an important question. This, in eight-line stanzas, is called “Love and a Question”:

This is one of the coy poems of Robert Frost. He’s very good at being coy, and that, for many people, means he’s deep. He does want to say that something bad is going on. He hints at it, and then he takes it back. One can study this poem as having assertion and reversal, but I don’t think the assertion and reversal here are on the side of poetry. We have also that excess stoppage, as in “Her face rose-red with the glowing coal.” And that makes for a picture: the bride’s “face rose-red with the glowing coal.” It makes the face, well, look like shrimp in a high boil. There are other things that I could point out. I simply wish to say that evidence can be found here for Robert Frost’s not being just to poetry.