Dear Unknown Friends:

We publish here the conclusion of the 1970 lecture we have been serializing: Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value, by Eli Siegel. This magnificent talk is about the two big territories of criticism: life and art.

Everyone’s life is a life of being a critic, however imperfectly. That is because, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are always dealing with the questions What value is there in the world and things? and Do I want to see their value? Our need to be a true critic—to value rightly the multitudinous world—is the same as what Aesthetic Realism shows to be a person’s deepest desire: to like the world on an honest basis. The unarticulated ambition of a baby born today is to like the wide world she came into; and that ambition includes being against what deserves her againstness and for what deserves her esteem. However unaware of it she is, and however much she may betray it in coming years, her desire to be a good critic is as real as her heartbeat and her reaching fingers.

The other tremendous territory of criticism is art. A literary critic, an art or music critic, has the job of responding truly to the value of a poem, painting, novel, concerto, and showing what that value is.

What Interferes

Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy that has made clear the big interference with true criticism, in the fields of both life and art. That interference is contempt, the most hurtful thing in the human self: the feeling we will get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

When we respond wrongly to the value of anything—from a fact, to a poem, to an ordinary object, to a person who seems different from us—there are two reasons. One is, we don’t know enough. But the other, the horrible reason, is contempt. Contempt in a person says: The value of other people makes my value less—if I can’t feel superior, I’m nothing. Contempt says: to see value in object after object, to see them as having meaning and drama, insults me—for it robs me of my feeling that I’m too good for the world I’m in. Contempt, expunging meaning from things, makes a person bored and dull. It also makes a person cruel. For instance, Aesthetic Realism shows that contempt causes wars—which come from the refusal to respond truly to the value of people in another nation, their feelings, their deep likeness to oneself.

Every human-caused matter distressing America now, arises in some way from persons’ being false critics, from their not responding justly to value but instead welcoming their contempt. I mention swiftly the terrible multitudinous mass shootings. For someone to shoot others, arises from not wanting to see and respond to who they are. Instead, the shooter sees those children and adults as representatives of a world he has decided is an enemy. And in revenge—using weapons made easily available—he mows them down. It can seem an understatement to say, This is a result of being a bad critic. It is not an understatement—it is evidence for the tremendous need to learn to be a true critic of the world and people. Aesthetic Realism is the magnificent and effective means for humanity to learn that.

The World’s Opposites

Central to the lecture we’ve been serializing is this principle, which is the means to see truly the value in things: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In the lecture’s final section, Mr. Siegel discusses a prose passage, down-to-earth and musical, of Walt Whitman. He shows that Whitman saw and felt a oneness of reality’s opposites in what he was dealing with—including the opposites of individuality and relation, disturbance and calm, tightness and expansion. Whitman, he explains, felt a simultaneous battle-and-welcoming between one opposite and the other in their unity. This fight-as-friendship is always present when opposites are seen as one by an artist. And in poetry it makes for music.

As we publish the conclusion of this remarkable, definitive talk, I want to celebrate the lecture by quoting two maxims from Eli Siegel’s Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. A maxim, in its brevity, is very different from a lecture. Yet these—in their succinctness and graceful nuance, in their musical logic and surprise—are also about “the art of responding to value”:

1. Respect for anything is an achievement not a donation: if you respect space it is a victory for you; and if you find more to respect in an uncle or in a businessman in America of the 1840s, a desire of yours has been attained, and discreetly you may congratulate yourself.

2. When a thing is beautiful—a sentence, a cup, a smile, a fabric, a color, a chord, a dance—it is because the world as it deeply, truly is, got into it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Welcome to So Many Things

By Eli Siegel

One of the strangest essays on poetry is Walt Whitman’s first Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855. In Whitman’s poems there’s a welcoming of the complicated. But a frequent complaint of people is that life is too complicated. Well, the world is complicated. However, Whitman tried to utter a sincere bravado to the manyness of the world: Bring on your manyness, universe. Change any way you like. All right, you want to have snipes? Have snipes. You want to have palmettos? Have palmettos. You want to have Lake Ontario? Have Lake Ontario. Bring on your variety. His “Song of Myself” is a challenge to diversity and variety.

I’m going to read a sentence from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass. It is a very long sentence; Whitman is talking about the poet:*

To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events—of the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines—the tribes of red aborigines—the weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky coasts—the first settlements north or south—the rapid stature and muscle—the haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution…the union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable—the perpetual coming of immigrants—the wharf-hemm’d cities and superior marine—the unsurveyed interior—the loghouses and clearings and wild animals and hunters and trappers…the free commerce—the fisheries and whaling and gold-digging—the endless gestation of new states—the convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all climates and the uttermost parts…the noble character of the young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen…the general ardor and friendliness and enterprise—the perfect equality of the female with the male…the large amativeness—the fluid movement of the population—the factories and mercantile life and labor-saving machinery—the Yankee swap—the New-York firemen and the target excursion—the southern plantation life—the character of the northeast and of the northwest and southwest—slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease.

What Whitman writes here about the poet would mean that many persons would be disqualified, because they’re not interested in all the things he mentions. Matthew Arnold would get nervous.

We Welcome—& Also Don’t

Unconsciously, this is felt by people: there are too many things in the world. The entrance of impressions into mind can make for opposition. We yearn for new impressions, but we also would like to have them fade. So we oppose and welcome new sense data. Our sensorium is very peculiar. Data are eschewed and also invited to sit down—this goes on all the time. Whitman made the possible welcoming of diversity a thumping thing, a thing blatant in prose melody and in free verse melody. He says: all these things you should just welcome!

There is Wordsworth, who says very quietly: you should welcome a lizard; welcome a Cumberland beggar; welcome waterfalls; lichen; a daisy; a celandine. But he didn’t have you go around thinking of all the things in Bristol or Yorkshire and tell you to welcome them. Whitman, though, felt: if it exists, it ought to be said hello to. That’s his motto. And the hello should be eternal. Poetry is a way of saying hello eternally. The seeing of the world as diversity, multitudinousness, the seeing of reality as both one and ever so many things—that was furthered by Whitman. In “Song of Myself” and other poems, we have that. But in various prose places of Whitman we have it too, including this sentence.

Whitman says the poet welcomes “the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines.” Wordsworth didn’t do that. He would say that Britain has diversity, that the Shetland Islands are certainly different from Kent, but he doesn’t see it as something to get in a stir about.

“The enormous diversity of temperature.” I’m sure Whitman felt something like: In Florida now there’s a good deal of basking—there’s warmth by the Keys and elsewhere; Tallahassee is very pleasant; but then, there are Ontario, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories—and all in this world of ours, this western world.

Whitman writes that the “essences” of “agriculture and mines” also enter the poet. Someone could say, Many things are grown, but why do you have to be in a stir about them? It happens that Wordsworth wasn’t too interested in all the things grown in England. He felt there were some farmers given to apples, and others to leeks, others to green peas; there was barley, and, to be sure, there was wheat. —Then “and mines”: why do you have to be interested in mines? But Whitman, though he didn’t write any poem about mines, felt he should be interested.

“The weather-beaten vessels entering new ports or making landings on rocky coasts.” Now, as Whitman mentions “weather-beaten vessels entering new ports,” they enter our minds too. Imagination can be very busy on the subject, because the weather-beaten vessel is nothing but a weather-beaten vessel, yet a weather-beaten vessel stands for many things besides itself and is in relation to many things. And as soon as the exclusiveness of the weather-beaten vessel is at war with and also is friendly to other things, music in poetry has a chance to happen. Also, the paintingness of painting has a chance: through the way Ruisdael presents a storm, you do feel that no matter what the storm is doing to a ship or to land, it’s still a little friendly.

The poet, we’re told, is also affected by “the first settlements north or south.” Whitman was interested in American history, and he liked the idea that, in the first part of the 17th century, people at least seeming different from those already there were settling Plymouth, and also settling Jamestown in Virginia, and some were elsewhere.

“The haughty defiance of ’76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution.” In that phrase, Whitman is trying to get together something threatening, very tough, and something thoughtful. How different (as they used to say) is a “haughty defiance” from “formation of the constitution.”

“The union always surrounded by blatherers and always calm and impregnable.” A big thing in art has been how there’s a lot of disturbance but how, with it all, there is calm. A favorite thought of Whitman about himself was that he could take anything fate offered and go along with a clean shirt and his collar open.

Then, “the perpetual coming of immigrants.” That was something you could see only in America. In 1855 there was a great to-do about immigrants, with the Know-Nothing party. But New York was very busy. And a short while before, what with the Irish famine, the Irish came to America and scared the Episcopalian natives.

The Drama of Restriction & Expansion

Whitman has the phrase “the wharf-hemm’d cities.” A wharf is an example of a tension between opposites: restriction and expansion. In New York, in particular, a wharf can seem to go out into the water but also seem to hem in the land. It’s restricting and expanding.

And there is “the unsurveyed interior.” To think of wharfs by Boston and New York, somewhat Philadelphia and Baltimore, and then think of America’s “unsurveyed interior”—we have that tension.

Some of the best poetic lines of Whitman are embedded in this Preface. (That’s a secret.)

Next: “the loghouses and clearings and wild animals and hunters and trappers.” There is the way Whitman places things. He begins with “the loghouses”; then has something expansive, “clearings”; then “wild animals,” which gets you more afield; then “hunters and trappers,” who seemed to be interested in the wild animals.

We have a phrase, “the free commerce”—meaning that no state had to pay for shipping goods into another state: “the free commerce—the fisheries and whaling and gold-digging.” I’m sure Whitman saw a relation between tightness and expansion in fisheries, whaling, and gold-digging. You have fisheries going after fish in a modest way, then there’s a going after whales, and then suddenly you’re gold-digging. Most whales don’t know there’s any gold-digging in this world.

And: “the convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all climates and the uttermost parts.” The words “duly” and “every December” put restriction with the expansion of “the uttermost parts.” That is one of the things to be seen in an object: every object is restriction and expansion. And if you see an object as restriction and expansion, and see the war of those opposites there and the friendliness, music will be encouraged.

How People Can Be Seen

Then: “the noble character of the young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen.” That’s Whitman doing what was done later in the USSR: every good worker at a collective farm had a touch of divinity. All the proletarians had stars above them. But there are worse things than to ennoble the mechanic: there are various writers who made the American worker more fond of the gin shop than a church.

We have “the perfect equality of the female with the male.” Well, there wasn’t this treating of them with “perfect equality.” Whitman could sometimes let himself go and think that everything was fine.

“The fluid movement of the population.” This is to show that things are in motion, reality is abandon. To see reality as abandon and restriction in an object is to help the melody in words along.

Then the mood changes: “slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease.”

There are lots of moods in this long sentence. Whitman says: I’ve seen lots of things. I have many moods. Let all of it go into your mind. It does go into our minds.

This sentence of Whitman put into line structure becomes a poem. It’s one of the most audacious ragbags of a poem that ever were. And I should mention that in the sentence Whitman has two kinds of punctuation: three dots and the dash. They are used differently, but are part of the music of the sentence.

Criticism Now & Always

What I have been saying in this talk is that the criticism of now or any time will deal with various questions, one being what an object is—which gets us to the problem of specificity and suggestion, or contraction and expansion, and also exclusiveness and relation. The seeing of these in their tremulous warfare and their nervous friendliness makes for music.

Criticism is a kind of response to a response. The poet responds to reality; the critic responds to the poet’s responding to reality. Both should be good, because if you respond to reality badly, reality doesn’t like it, and if you respond badly to another’s response, reality doesn’t like it and you shouldn’t like it. So we get back to the original statement, which, if it’s put in terms of beauty, can go something like this: criticism is the art of responding to beauty and the telling why it was beauty one responded to. It is a responding to value and the telling of why it was value. Here, value is anything you’re better off with.

Criticism, then, is a responding to the value of another person’s responding to value—that is, the artist’s or poet’s. It is a beautiful thing that we can respond to another person’s response. As soon as we’re interested in responding to another person’s response adequately and beautifully, we that much respect the possibility of criticism.