Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize Eli Siegel’s 1970 lecture The Poetic Trinity; or, Poetry—Whence, How, Whither? There is in it his might as literary critic and also his beautiful ease and sense of everydayness—his feeling for the very real lives of people.

As to the title: The Whence, he explained, is what poetry comes from, its source. How is the way poetry shows itself. And Whither is poetry’s purpose, what it’s going for.

As I described in our previous issue, Mr. Siegel is using, as a beginning text, essays by George Moir (1800–70). Moir wrote them for the 7th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and they were also published in a book of 1839 titled Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric.

What Is Here

There is so much in this third section of the lecture. As it begins, we are in the 6th century bce or so, with Greek lyric poetry, including Sappho. Then there’s a looking back to some 300 years earlier, and Homer. And there is Virgil, about eight centuries after Homer. There is a discussion of how love was seen, and how the feeling about love, the writing about love, changed. Then, there is the writing in France at the time of Moir himself, and Moir’s huge mistakenness about it—illustrating how wrong one may be as one criticizes one’s contemporaries. With all the territory this section traverses, so great is Eli Siegel as literary critic that we feel each instance as itself and alive, and immediate for us.

All that’s present here has to do with the three adverbs in the lecture’s title, and particularly it has to do with Whence. That is: with all the differences there can be among the places and times poetry is written, is the fundamental, decisive thing that impels every true poem the same? Yes! And does that impelling thing have tremendous meaning, urgent meaning, for our lives now and every day? Yes again.

Poetry, Eli Siegel explained, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” Whenever and wherever real poetry has come to be, a person was so just to the material dealt with that he or she felt the structure of the world itself in it, and this structure is present in the poetic lines that arose. The structure of the world, alive in every good poem, is the oneness of such opposites as order and stir, clearness and mystery, ordinariness and grandeur, continuity and surprise, power and gentleness. These opposites-as-one, and others, are heard in the poetic lines of any time, place, or language. They constitute that decisive thing in poetry: poetic music.

Here, because the matter is vital, I reiterate something I described more lengthily in our previous issue: the opponent of war, and of all cruelty, is the way of seeing that is in art. The source of art (though artists themselves haven’t known it) is the respect which says to a thing or person, “I am more myself through being fair to you. In fact, I see you as having to do with everything—with the whole world.” Aesthetic Realism can teach us how to have this authentic way of seeing—this justice as real self-enhancement—in our lives.

Art comes from respect. War, Aesthetic Realism shows—indeed, all injustice—comes from contempt. The reason is in these words by Mr. Siegel: “As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person” (James and the Children, p. 55).

Two Translations

I have included, after the present section of his lecture, two translations by Eli Siegel. There is the one he refers to in the lecture: his translation, in Hail, American Development, of Simonides of Ceos’s two famous lines. And this quiet, stirring translation is a work of grandeur.

The other translation is of a Victor Hugo poem. One reason I include it is that Hugo is eminent in that French Romanticism which Moir condemns so wrongly. Another reason is that the Hugo poem has a rich, deep respect for a person who could be seen as ordinary, who is poor, not grandly placed in society. This seeing of meaning and wonder in someone without wealth and advantage was new with Romanticism.

And there is this large reason for including the translation of the Hugo lines: not only is the poem itself beautiful—the translation is beautiful. It brings to us—in the sound of the English lines—the firm and reverberating respect that is in Hugo’s French: for this man in rags whom Hugo sees as “noble.”

There is a music of wide quietude and vividness as Victor Hugo gets within this French sower of seeds—and as Eli Siegel gets within the architecture and meaning of Hugo’s feeling and what he saw.

This poem and translation have the way of seeing that can end war—which, through Aesthetic Realism, is now learnable.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Enthusiasm & Meditativeness

By Eli Siegel

Moir also writes about Greek lyric poetry. And since the word lyric comes from a musical instrument, it’s not surprising that the lyric was associated with music. Moir says:

The perfection of the Greek lyric had grown out of the intimate connection of poetry with music, fusing the finest results of both into a whole, which, charming the senses and the soul at once, hurried away the listener with an irresistible sweep of enthusiasm.

We find in the lyric two things right from the beginning: “irresistible sweep of enthusiasm” and great meditativeness. About the shortest lyric in Greek poetry is the one I translate in Hail, American Development: the lines by Simonides of Ceos on those who died at Thermopylae. That is meditative. And Sappho’s lyric about Hesperus—about the evening star’s taking care of everything—is very short, but ever so meditative. You think it’s a wide landscape even as it is just two lines. The lyric, then, has enthusiasm and is meditative.

A person who has never really gotten to people—he’s still looking to affect people—is Pindar. Every time there were Olympic games, he was around to see them. And he wrote about them. He is supposed to be ever so enthusiastic and to have passion; and if he ever mentions a god, the god is in luck. At the same time, he hasn’t become very popular.

Moir, though, is aware that nature stirred or excited can get to deep truth. Quoting Sir Daniel Sandford about Pindar, he includes this statement:

Nature is often hurried, in moments of excitement, into the innermost shrines of truth.

How does excitement further truth? When does it? That’s part of the whence of poetry.

About the two Sappho lines on Hesperus—Moir gives that protracted translation of Byron. It’s fairly good, but it sure puts eight sacks over the lines of Sappho. Still, since it’s here, and to show the meditativeness of Sappho, I’ll read the poem in Byron’s translation:

The first line and the last are the best here. But the succinct mystery of the Sapphic two lines remains.

[Editor’s note. I give here my translation of those Sappho lines. I hope something of their tenderness and “succinct mystery” can be felt in it:

A New Way of Seeing Love—& More

Occasionally Moir is excessive. And that is rather so when he says that Dido, in Virgil’s Aeneid, represents “the passion of love” in a way much closer to that of recent centuries than Greek literature had done. It’s true that Homer doesn’t have any real love scenes. The Odyssey doesn’t have Ulysses expressing love for Nausicaä. You can presume it. And Circe’s kind of love—that’s not what was looked for. After all, for a lady to have a purpose of changing men into swine—that cannot be praised. And the relation of Ulysses and Penelope cannot be called completely romantic.

So Moir and many others are right in questioning the love feeling in Greek epic poetry, and you can say also in other Greek poetry. There’s nothing like Romeo and Juliet in the larger Greek poetry. What Moir says is that there’s nothing like Dido either. A moral of the Aeneid is that the Carthaginian lady, no matter how attractive, cannot stop Rome from coming to exist. Dido thought for a while that she was powerful enough to prevent Rome from coming to be the Eternal City, and she sadly found she couldn’t do it. —This is Moir:

In the character of the Carthaginian princess, we perceive the infinite advance which the delineation of the passion of love has made since the time of Homer. Virgil has begun to comprehend that feeling, with the world of emotions to which it gives birth. And if he has not painted it with all that purity and depth which was imparted to it by Christianity, he has exhibited its leading traits with a warmth and sensibility which make all other classical delineations of passion both cold and lifeless beside that of Dido.

Sappho can be adduced to question that—but Sappho’s lines are so few.

The change from classical poetry into the poetry of now went along with the change in the world. Just what happened sometime between Christ and the French Revolution, or Christ and the invention of printing, or Christ and Rabelais, or Christ and the taking of Constantinople by the Turks—there is some big change, and there is a change in feeling. Love was seen differently. There is something in Aucassin and Nicolette—which is of the 12th or 13th century—that is not present in the Aeneid.

Moir says literature had to be reanimated. And he writes:

That could only be effected by sweeping away entirely the old landmarks, making a new heaven and a new earth,…giving [people] new hopes,…and thus restoring that elastic principle of moral and mental vigour, of faith and enthusiastic feeling, out of which all high poetry must spring.

So high poetry must spring from something you care for, which is “faith and enthusiastic feeling,” and also lingering and wide feeling. Much could be said about that which isn’t dealt with in this essay. But there was an emotion about Christianity—that is undoubted. The Greeks dallied with time as eternal and life as eternal; they had their Hades, and Ulysses went to Hades. So, later, did Aeneas. But the Greeks and Romans seemed to do it half-heartedly—they’re there and they aren’t there. Hades seems to be a lease, not an existence. But Moir says:

The Christian poet, before whom, instead of a natural and visible Olympus and Acheron, there stretched out in dim but awful vision the conception of heaven and hell, encompassed by an eternity on this side and on that,…could not but carry into the literature…some shadow of that solemnity and mystery with which human life was now surrounded.

Moir can say things with intensity in a way that is good in itself.

Romanticism—& Wrongness

As Moir gets to writings by his contemporaries, I almost have to beg his pardon for reading what he wrote, because he didn’t know that he would be so exposed. But that’s a danger you take when you write about a living art. You may be so wrong that you become a laughingstock eight centuries later, and who wants to be that?

For example, Moir says that the almost contemporary Romanticism of France has really hurt—not helped—the literature of France. He doesn’t seem to know too much about it. But hardly anybody in England did, so he got by with having this in the Encyclopedia Britannica. There were two authors at that time who had crossed the channel with no good to themselves: one was Balzac, and the other was George Sand. —Well, this is contemporary criticism. Moir says about the revolution in French literary taste of the time:

Whether much or anything has been gained by the change, is in the highest degree questionable. Calm observers think the French have injudiciously sacrificed their reputation for correct and classic execution, for wit and good sense, in the search after those higher qualities of lyrical inspiration or epic grandeur which nature appears to have denied to them.

That is provincialism. Moir writes like a person living in the British Isles who loved to think the French were not capable of real poetry.

We do not speak of the revolting extravagances in which the leaders of the romantic school, at the head of whom stands Victor Hugo, have indulged. The public taste of Europe, and latterly of France, has so strongly revolted against this convulsionary school that it cannot long maintain any hold over the national mind; but we fear that, even when the worst extravagances of the new school are retrenched, there will remain a permanent injury to the national taste, in the loose, disjointed, and barbarous style, with the total want of all logical plan in composition, which these innovators have introduced.

Hardly anybody could more successfully court the goddess of error than this person has, because he IS wrong. Romanticism was not always at its height of national favor or deep approval; however, Romanticism is immortal. It’s immortal in France.

It was felt that after the 1830s Romanticism was about over and there was a desire to get more sensible. Then there was Parnassianism, there were Baudelaire and all, then Symbolism and all. However, the Romantic poets and novelists are still ever so mighty. Hugo remains, de Musset remains, Balzac remains, Gautier largely remains. And Hugo—he comes in through all the windows, up from the cellar, down from the chimneys, and then occasionally you see eight people called Hugo on the boulevards. Verlaine wrote poetry differently, and Rimbaud did, but the poems of the Romantic writers have not been put aside. So Moir is quite wrong. And the way that Moir would see his statement now, I feel would make for a continental blush.

Moir gets to German poetry, about which he is valuably inadequate—because when you study the mistakes of the past, you know yourself better. For instance, his statements about Heine could hardly be wronger. But those statements are important, because when a way of seeing is wrong and is about something deep in history, it should be known.

Two Translations by Eli Siegel

From the note by Eli Siegel. The two lines of Simonides of Ceos, translated here, have been translated often. I felt that free verse, casual and falling carefully, might do something useful with the Greek. There is a high, sharp sadness in “O stranger,” followed by an inevitable request in the Greek; and this I aim for, in the first line. In the second line there is the lasting submission of “That we lie here,” followed by the large pride of “true to their laws.” Government and pathos merge delicately and mightily in the second line. And as the Lacedaemonians are told, the telling goes on to and for everyone—for the everyone of now, the person of now.