Dear Unknown Friends:

We begin here to serialize The Poetic Trinity; or, Poetry—Whence, How, Whither?, a 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel. This talk is about poetry and art as such—definitively and delightfully. But it is also about the most intimate and urgent matter in everyone’s life: what our minds are for. As you will soon see, in this first part of the lecture there is a very stirring, important discussion about the mind of Shakespeare, and mind as such.

We are using our minds all the time. Whether we’re angry, ecstatic, disgusted, uncertain, planning, arguing, our minds are being used. In each of those ways of being and all others, our minds are at work. But how, and with what purpose?

What We Want

Aesthetic Realism explains that the way an artist’s mind is used in coming to something that is authentic art, is how we most deeply want to use our own minds about the things we meet. “All beauty,” Aesthetic Realism explains, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” For example, every instance of art is a oneness of self and world: an individual expressing him- or herself through being just to the world other than oneself. And in this grand, just oneness of self and world, other opposites also are one. Whether the art is poetry, or music, painting, dance, sculpture—there is big feeling inseparable from exactitude, logic. There is surprise at one with continuity. There is vividness at one with nuance; and power that is also delicate.

We long to have our own minds be this way. We want, for instance, to have at once logic and feeling—as a good poem or novel has. We want our minds to be clear and simultaneously honor nuance, the subtleties of things—as good music does. And we want to feel we’ll take care of ourselves through being resplendently just to the outside world. How fervently we want this—and how little we know we want it!

Certainly, people have worried about their minds. We can be sure that in the last hour a person said something like, I’m not thinking in the best way. The way I’ve been thinking isn’t good for me—but I don’t seem to be able to change. Yet even as people have been distressed by their thoughts there has been the assumption that How I use my mind must be right—because it’s MY mind, and my thoughts come from ME.

Any time is a good time, a necessary time, to ask what our minds should be used for. But now in America, when people are worried about our very democracy, when persons with power have been using their minds to lie massively and have their lies spread and get into other minds, it is urgent to see what mind is really for—and what we want to use our own minds for.

There are these two fundamental possibilities: 1) Is the purpose of mind to be ourselves through welcoming the world; trying to know it, with a desire to like it honestly; trying to see it justly and have feeling about it that is just? 2) Or is the purpose of mind to have the world on our terms through looking down on very much of it, conquering various aspects of it, fooling it, owning it, manipulating it?

The first of those possibilities is respect—and it is what mind is for. The second is contempt. And the fight between respect for the world and contempt for it is the central fight in every person’s life. Meanwhile, in using our minds to have contempt, we are going against what the human mind is made for. And that much, no matter how seemingly successful we may be, we will not be at ease; we will feel hunted, agitated, empty.

We can have a fictitious child, Leo, represent the fight about mind. He’s seven years old. And the owner of a garden has just handed him a daisy cut from among a number of daisies growing there. As Leo looks at it, he is affected by the bright yellow circular center surrounded by many white petals. He touches both the center and the petals gently. They’re so different, those slim petals and the round yellow center, but they make one flower. He feels wonder and pleasure as his mind tries to see what the flower is. But then Leo becomes uncomfortable: “What am I getting so happy about some old flower for—stupid flower!” And he tears off the petals and throws the flower on the ground.

That story is about mind being used in behalf of its true purpose—to know respectfully—followed by mind used for contempt. Both ways of using of mind have many forms.

For example, if Leo were a certain kind of child, he might think this way: “Hhmm, I see that a lot of people walking by this garden are looking at these daisies and seem to like them. Wouldn’t it be great if I could own all the daisies?—I’d make anyone who wanted to look at them pay me money to get close enough to really see them.” That is a way of mind too, a contemptuous way of mind. The particular idea as Leo has it is not so feasible. But the way of thinking that’s behind it is the profit motive—something Leo has heard his father praise strenuously.

The Distinguishing Thing

In this first part of his lecture, Eli Siegel states and explains a fact of vast importance in art, not understood by any other critic. He describes the decisive thing in poetry, that which distinguishes authentic poetry from something else. Certainly what he describes is tremendous as literary criticism—but it is tremendous also for every person’s life, and in a moment I’ll say why. This decisive thing, this sign that the poetry is real, is poetic music. And it comes to be because a writer, from the very depth of oneself, has been fair—not only to the poem’s immediate subject, but to the world of rest and motion, freedom and order, wonder and everydayness, power and delicacy, which the immediate subject represents. Mr. Siegel says:

As soon as both the self and the world of space and time are honored in terms of intensity and wideness, the expression has to be musical. And the one sign that is constant as to whether a thing is a poem or not, is the music.

Why does this matter so much to the personal life of everyone? The reason is: we need to see, have tangible evidence, that a person is truly oneself and big through being just to the outside world. Otherwise we’ll never be convinced that justice warms our bones, gives us importance. Unless we see that our being just is the same as our being our very own important self, the idea of being just will always have a tang of sacrifice in it. And that tang of sacrifice is horrible.

The big opponent to seeing justice as sacrifice is art; very much, it is the music of poetry. That is because along with the need to see justice as care for ourselves, we also need to see it as beautiful, musical. This is what poetry gives us, using that material which is words: the material with which we talk to ourselves and to others. In poetry, the verbal music of words with its oneness of opposites is the hearable, feelable sign that reality itself ratifies the seeing of a particular person.

I love Eli Siegel for showing this, and for enabling the minds of the people he taught to become better and better, truer to the real purpose of mind. There is an exact and very musical phrase about mind near the end of his poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.” The phrase—the poem’s second to last line—is: “And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!”

That stands for the purpose of mind itself. And it stands for Eli Siegel’s own just and great mind.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Poetic Trinity; or,
Poetry—Whence, How, Whither?

By Eli Siegel

In this talk on poetry, having to do with cause, process, and purpose, I use one work chiefly. It is Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric, a book that consists of reprints of articles on those three subjects, from the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The book’s publication date is 1839.

The title of this talk, The Poetic Trinity; or, Poetry—Whence, How, Whither?, has to do with the fact that poetry comes from something, which is the whence; it has a way of showing itself, which is the how, or process; and it also has a purpose, which is the whither. That is a trinity of three questions: Whence? How? Whither?

One doesn’t know poetry until one realizes that there’s been a change as to how it has been seen—with some of how it’s been seen being very sensible, and some seemingly very much put aside. So one could feel it really took nerve for the chief writer in this book, George Moir, to have his opinions of the 1820s put down in print, to be seen 150 years later. That takes a lot of nerve, because you don’t know how you’re going to seem as taste goes on. Taste has a history.

Early in the book, a good deal of the whence is talked about. Under the head of “Imagination,” Shakespeare is dealt with, and Moir asks, How did Shakespeare come to see these women characters of his, these very prepossessing women characters? What enabled him to see them? What enabled him to present them? Moir asks:

Where could a youth, whose chief companions had been deer-stalkers, actors, or play-writers of no high repute, and to whom female society, at least in its most refined form, must have been unknown, have gleaned the materials which enable him to pourtray, with equal mastery, the fierce overbearing spirit of Lady Macbeth and Constance, the tranquil regal dignity of Hermione and Katharine of Aragon, or the totally dissimilar aspect of female character presented in the passion of Juliet, the purity of Miranda, the simplicity of Ophelia, or the tender submission and wife-like confidence of Imogen and Desdemona?

How was Shakespeare able to get the lives of Miranda and Imogen into his own life, within his own mind? And also, how was he able to present them? What was the constructive power, the shaping power, or, as is said today, creative power? Poetry is a power. It is a shaping, constructive, creative power, a fashioning power. And what does it come from?

Mind Has This

One of the things we can say is that within mind is a desire to go deep—because Shakespeare was never Miranda; that’s true. He was never Imogen. So how was he able to present these ladies Moir mentions, regal and ever so sweet ladies most of them? What do we have in our minds? What is the unknown in our minds? If we go deep and honestly enough, what will we find?

We have depth and relation, and these are two things very much present in poetry. Our minds are deeper than our own personal concerns. And our minds are also wider than our own personal concerns. There’s no limit to the depth of a mind and the width of a mind. And if the depth and width are not interfered with, the unknown can get to a lively winsomeness and (though the word is out of fashion) purity. There’s hardly anybody more pure than Miranda.

So Shakespeare must have had within his own mind the lives of Miranda and Imogen and Lady Macbeth and Ophelia and Margaret and Hermione and Katharine of Aragon and Constance and Desdemona, and many other people. That is concerned with the whence of poetry. The whence of poetry is the world at its most comely unknown, its most pure and surprising depth—and also the mind of a person, or the mind of self, at its most unknown, most comely depth. Moir says:

The streets and taverns of London might indeed furnish him with Bardolphs and Pistols; his acquaintance with Lord Southampton, or with the other gallants of the court, might afford the outlines of his Prince Henry or Hotspur; but his female creations are obviously drawn from no other sphere but his own breast. They are the offspring of an imagination “all compact.”

What, then, is in mind? And what is the meaning of “imagination all compact”*? We’ll find that Homer—in presenting Andromache, or Juno, or Jupiter, or any of the heroes, whether Achilles, Agamemnon, Patroclus, or Diomede, had a mind with some of the best furnishings to be found in all the Peloponnesus. Homer’s mind was well furnished. Imagination is a furnishing of mind.

So, in asking what poetry comes from—its whence—we’re asking about mind. That is quite clear.

What Poetry Must Have

Moir goes on to ask, What does poetry have to have in it? And he is, as many other people have been, uneasy about music. How much is music necessary in poetry? It is interesting to see the many kinds of hesitation on the subject. The sentence I’ll read has one kind. Moir talks of the beginnings of poetry:

In its first shape it may have been destitute either of rhythm or metre; although so close is the connection between that state of the imagination which gives birth to poetical conceptions, and a tendency to assist the effect of these by certain intonations of the voice approaching to musical sounds, that it is far more probable that even from the first something of measure was imparted to it.

So Moir leans toward what I think is true, but, as persons know, I go much further than that. I am more dogmatic on the subject. There’s a certain kind of emotion which has in it the depths of self and also something of the world of space and time: an emotion that is a mingling of a particular self and what the world is like. And this emotion, of itself, has to be musical. It’s not a matter of possibility, because as soon as both the self and the world of space and time are honored in terms of intensity and wideness, the expression has to be musical. And the one sign that is constant as to whether a thing is a poem or not, is the music. Again and again I see things presented as poems and the thing that isn’t there is that inevitable result of sincerity about oneself and an honoring of the strangeness and good sense of all reality.

Meanwhile, there’s this in common between rough speech and cultivated speech: both can be musical. There’s a relation between the tom-tom and the cello. It is well to think of music with all kinds of prosodic elaborateness, and also the music of the wail and the chant and the well-disposed tom-tom. Music is that which shows that things can go on in time, and change and move with rhythm.

So Moir is right, but he should have been bolder. You cannot have true poetic passion without having music. There is a kind of music that shows that one is not just agitated for oneself: something else is there.

Is Music There?

Moir asks what kind of music is in various “books of the Hebrew Scriptures.” The rhythm of Hebrew poetry in the Old Testament hasn’t been decided on. Is there a rhythm which is like that of verse? The implication of Moir is that there is, and I think he’s right. There’s a certain falling of syllables, and it’s all put in terms of a verse or a sentence, but it could be put in shorter lines. Hebrew poetry is often good prose which, seen from another point of view, with apt and musical division, is also good poetry. Moir says:

Such is the character of those books of the Hebrew Scriptures which are on all hands admitted to be poetical, though we know too little of the laws of Hebrew prosody to be able to say whether they are written in verse, though a species of rhythm, and apparent equality in the divisions of portions of the sentences, appear to indicate that they are.

They are.

A question, then, is, What poetry is in the Bible? Are the Holy Scriptures fair to the Muse? Are the Muses benign to the Holy Scriptures? Yes. The answer is: the Holy Scriptures—the Holy Writ—are very good friends to the Muses, all the Muses, particularly those that have to do with lyric poetry.

Surely, the Bible is uneven in terms of poetic quality. But Moir, quoting from Ezekiel, quotes from a great part. [Editor’s Note: Moir, perhaps quoting from memory, brings together portions of verses 9 and 10 of chapter 37, omitting some phrases. Though certainly aware of this fact, Mr. Siegel reads the passage as Moir presents it. —ER]

Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live; and they stood up on their feet, an exceeding great army.

I put that into short lines:

There is, then—and the history of poetic thought shows it—a certain relation of Homer and the Bible: both are seen as sublime. So the Iliad and Ezekiel are related. The Iliad and Exodus are related; the Odyssey and Exodus.