Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin, here, to serialize a lecture Eli Siegel gave in 1973. It is about poetry, and art itself. And it’s about this world we’re in, which can confuse one so much, also please one, also make for anger and distress. What kind of world is it? People ask that usually with a growl or a sneer. But it’s a question humanity does need to try to answer truly. And Aesthetic Realism answers it—with might, and accuracy, and beauty, and logic, and kindness.

Why Does It Matter?

Mr. Siegel titled the lecture we’re serializing These Speak of Poetry. It is about the difference between poetry that is authentic and something that may look like poetry but is not the real thing. Why does that distinction matter, if it can be made at all? Well, it can be made. And it matters, mightily and dearly, for this reason: Aesthetic Realism explains that it’s authentic art in every field which shows what the world itself is. Indeed, real poetry and all real art show that the world itself can be valued without end—even as we’re very much against things in the world. The basis of this lecture—and, really, of our deepest, most intense hope—is in the following principle stated by Eli Siegel: “Poetry, like Art, is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.”

Let’s take, for example, fundamental opposites in reality: order and freedom. These are present as one in every instance of good art. In a print by Hokusai of a wave, they are there, as we feel neatness inseparable from wildness. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, we find in the title character a deep desire to be exact—and also a tremendous stir of emotion. In a loved form of dance, the waltz, we feel the orderliness of our steps and at the same time how thrillingly free we are!

Yes, all art is a oneness of reality’s opposites—not only order and freedom, but depth and surface, expansion and contraction, individuality and relation, sameness and difference, and more. In all true art, therefore, the nature of the world has been got to, and has been presented with a living honesty. And the upshot is not that this nature of the world is sleazy or miserable: the upshot is beauty.

Poetic Music

Poetry, Mr. Siegel has explained, does what all the arts do—it shows what the world is truly like. But in a poem, the honest presence of the world takes the form of music: music that we hear through words. In his preface to Personal and Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists, Mr. Siegel writes that in a good line of poetry the words “are heard musically as they fall logically….Logic trembles euphoniously, surprisingly” (p. xiv). This is what he speaks of in the lecture we’re serializing.

He describes that central thing in poetry—music—and what it has in it. He asks questions, and invites others to look and be critical. Toward the end of the section included here, he points out that a seemingly impressive poem, one he’s showing to be not true poetry, is written in the unusual stanza structure of another work—a work that is the real thing. This authentic but seemingly less impressive work is Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” So as a means of placing further what Mr. Siegel is describing, I’ll comment on the first of the 18 stanzas that comprise “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” That opening stanza is:

The first line is simple. But the n sounds in sun, shining, and on make for a staying put—even as, simultaneously, the line also expands with the long vowel sounds in shining and sea. And so: the staying put and going forth of things are felt in English words that are saying something.

Then we have “Shining with all his might.” In this taut 3-beat line, beginning with an accented syllable, there’s effort, even as the line seems to come in naturally. There’s effort in those two long i sounds that begin and end the short line (shíning and míght). And one can feel something to question: what’s the sun knocking itself out for—working “with all his might”? If the sun wants to be fair to the sea, usually it doesn’t need to do such striving: it acts in keeping with its nature, and the waves like it.

But already in the first stanza there’s a musical hinting at what will be told of in the whole poem: the desire to exert a contemptuous power over things. A Walrus and Carpenter trick young oysters into seeing them as friendly, though the Walrus and Carpenter really plan to eat them all—and do. Here, the sun is not eating anything, but he is being grabby and conquistadoreal, trying to take over the night too.

“He did his very best to make / The billows smooth and bright.” The b sounds in these lines, and the assertive ehs in very best, make the sun sound like a pouting child: look at how eager I am and how hard I try! Yet the lines have a factual sound too, and a gentleness. What comes to us is a oneness of the innocent and the quietly suspect. That relation—of the suspicious and naïveté—is present also in: “And this was odd, because it was / The middle of the night.”

The structure of the world, then, is present and heard, as Mr. Siegel showed it is in all true poetry. And in hearing poetic music we always hear too, as he describes: the unknown, the wondrous, even as we feel that the world in its largeness is ever so close to us. I love Eli Siegel’s showing of what poetry is. And humanity needs and deserves it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

These Speak of Poetry

By Eli Siegel

It isn’t yet realized that what poetry is is the same as one’s very self and one’s purpose in life. I shall try to have it more realized, and one way is to deal with poems closely and variously. In fact, if I should ever forsake the talking of poetry at some length, I shall have given up Aesthetic Realism.

In the same way as a person who is very well or strong says something of humanity, and a person who feels so-so says something of humanity, and a person who feels quite bad also says something of humanity, so the greatest poetry says something of what poetry is, and middling poetry does, and bad poetry does.

It is well to ask what the objective of poetry is. The purpose of poetry (as Wordsworth and Coleridge implied) is to make the unseen, the strange, also acceptable and sensible. This is another way of saying that the unknown in the world should be presented in such a way that it seems reasonable, logical, and inevitable.

The Unknown—& Poetic Music

The unknown is a part of all poetry. A poem should make you feel that the unknown is nearer to you than before—and music is the one way this happens. Music is that which doesn’t make statements. Music as such is without words. But words can be without music—and that poetry cannot stand. The purpose of music in poetry is to honor the unknown in words, just as the purpose of music as music is to honor the unstated. Beethoven did not state propositions. But there is still something true in what he is saying because that which can be given a certain kind of form as sound has truth.

This honoring of known and unknown is exceedingly necessary, because at any moment in life we are what we know and we’re also what we don’t know. No person has died wholly knowing him- or herself. One reason why poetry is necessary is: it’s a way of honoring the known and unknown in everything, including in oneself.

So I go to the book I’ve been discussing, Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry. The person we’ve reached is Edwin Arlington Robinson. Unless I’m definitely wrong, in recent years there have been, in a major way, two persons accepted as poets who have not been that. There are quite a few others who are seen as poets and who are not. But there are two major persons who seemed poetic to people though they weren’t. One is Robinson, whose fame was at its height when “The Wasteland” of T.S. Eliot appeared. The two great misleaders—both of whom have a certain quality that has to do with poetry—are Edwin Arlington Robinson and Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Since I’ve come, in this book, to Robinson, I shall talk of him. And, as usual, I ask persons to be critical of what I say. The large question is this: is music, however unknown it is, the very heart of poetry, the blood circulation of it—or not?

Concision, Largeness—& Music

First, a statement about Robinson by Louis Untermeyer. Untermeyer was about the most popular anthologist in the 1920s and ’30s. Then, for a while, he was succeeded by Oscar Williams. Being exceedingly acerb, I have to say that both Untermeyer and Williams as anthologists were not just to poetry: both accepted falsifications. —We have this sentence of Untermeyer in 1936 or so, about the sonnets of Robinson:

He packs huge scenes into fourteen lines; if sonnets can assume the proportion of dramatic narratives, Robinson’s have achieved the almost impossible feat.

That brings up the problem of economy or concision in poetry. I can mention that a famous commercial phrase is concise and is poetic too. It’s the phrase used by First National City Bank with almost mortifying insistence: “The only bank your family ever needs.” That is a poetic line. If you look at it you’ll see that it’s mainly iambic (there’s one anapest): “The ón | ly bánk | your fá | mily év | er néeds.” With the words ever and needs there’s a certain unknownness—one doesn’t know just when a bank will be needed or how. There’s mystery.

The phrase does have concision. Concision has much to do with poetry—but it must be concision with largeness. The question is whether all poetry, and, in fact, all music, is a oneness of smallness and largeness, or concision and expansion, or concision and inclusiveness. The answer is yes.

You can talk of the opposites, but you never can feel what they are until instances of their power as they are in art or in poetry are truly yours.

Untermeyer is referring to the concision of the sonnet form, with its 14 lines, as he praises Robinson’s sonnets. But concision at one with largeness can best be shown in the sonnet of Keats “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” I’ll read it because it is well to see concision truly, where it does expand into largeness. —At one time, after reading some of Chapman’s translation of Homer, Keats wrote this:

That phrase “He star’d at the Pacific” stands for looking at the world. We are small, but we can stare at the beginning of an ocean. Most of the lines in this poem have to do with something small and something large. But it’s not a matter simply of conciseness and largeness. It’s a matter of: what do the conciseness and the largeness come from? Are the conciseness and largeness really one?

So, the sonnets of Robinson are praised by Untermeyer, and we go to one he includes in this book: “Reuben Bright.” It has a very good story in it. Were a short story made of it, it would be pretty nice. It tells of a butcher, who had to deal with many killed animals and get people interested in them. Then, when his wife dies, he gives up his business:

The problem is: what kind of music is here? When we have music in poetry we have two things: precision and resonance. Those two things—being compact in itself, and going out, vibrating—can occur in many ways in words. How is the large thing to see.

All music is center and a flowing out. The way each thing can flow is different. A drum, for instance, is resonant; an old lute is resonant; a piano is resonant. The instruments themselves provide that. But the new form of compactness and resonance arises from how the sounds are chosen.

“Because he was a butcher and thereby”—I would say, even, that that is not perfect English. The thereby should refer to a verb, and butcher is a noun. (I admit this is a little exacting.) “Did earn an honest living (and did right)”: that’s kind of awkward.

“I would not have you think that Reuben Bright”—there was a tendency on the part of Robinson to be very conversational. But the conversational can be either musical or not. A person whom I’d relate to Robinson and Eliot as a great deceiver of the American people is Robert Frost: because he made the blank verse line conversational, he thought that poetry had been reached.

“For when they told him that his wife must die, / He stared at them and shook with grief and fright.” The way Robinson uses words—“shook with grief and fright”—makes for a huddle. You don’t shake “with grief and fright” in just that way. If you’re going to shake, it may be with fright, but not with grief: grief makes you more inert.

“And cried like a great baby half that night.” The language is vivid, but it’s not good enough. As Coleridge said, prose is “words in their best order,” but poetry is “the best words in the best order.” “And made the women cry to see him cry.” I think there’s something false about that.

“He packed a lot of things that she had made / Most mournfully away in an old chest.” This use of the word made—what are the things that the wife made? It’s very vague. The women of that period did make dresses sometimes, did sew things. But I don’t think that’s the only thing implied here.

The decisive question is whether this poem has music of a certain kind. It has “music” of an obvious kind: that is, the rhymes are there, and there is no fault in the scansion. But is there something else that poetry requires?

Unsureness Was There

A further statement by Untermeyer about Robinson:

It was this undeviating integrity which carried him through his difficulties,…and won him the admiration of all his contemporaries, irrespective of their preferences or poetic affiliations.

Meanwhile, with all his Pulitzer Prizes and his academic standing in time, E.A. Robinson still was not sure about his life. One can see that in his poems. We can feel it in the poem about the rich man who invests unfortunately in stocks. The language of Robinson should be looked at, because it seems so concise and so adroit. This is the first stanza of “Bewick Finzer”:

This is the rhythm of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is poetry, and this is not. And one of the great questions of the world is why.

Bewick Finzer has to approach his friends for a loan, which, of course, may not be a loan. The final stanza is:

That there is a kind of craftsmanship here is undeniable. But whether it’s the craftsmanship of poetry—that is a large question. I have been saying for a long time: it isn’t. I should like that statement to be looked into as carefully as can be.