Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we begin to serialize A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, a lecture Eli Siegel gave in August 1970. It is, like Aesthetic Realism itself, great as scholarship, new in its understanding of what art and beauty are. And it is, vitally and kindly, about the life and confusion of everyone. I may as well say at once: this lecture is about what I love most in the world, the Aesthetic Realism explanation of poetry.

Eli Siegel is the critic who showed, after all the centuries of literary criticism, what poetry truly is, and why what it is matters—matters to all of us. “All beauty,” he explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” This certainly includes the beauty, in words, which is poetry. He is the critic who showed that the difference between a true poem and something that’s not, has fundamentally to do with whether we will like ourselves or dislike ourselves.

As a Prelude

As a prelude to this 1970 lecture, I’ll quote from Mr. Siegel’s 1964 essay “The Immediate Need for Poetry” the following definitive, warm passages:

According to Aesthetic Realism, poetry is a picture of reality at its truest, most useful….

When we are born we hope to make some sense of the forces in us. We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose. All through life, really, we are trying to make jarring, separating propensities to act as one; we are trying to have forces coalesce in an other than languid oneness. —And it is poetry that makes jarring, separating propensities to act as one; it is poetry that coalesces forces in a oneness that is not languid….

A poem is excitement and repose. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use it as an encouragement to have excitement and repose in ourselves. There are quietude and mobility in a poem. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use an example of quietude and mobility….Poetry represents the good sense we desire. Poetry is the exacting shepherd of our emotions. [TRO 758]

Opposites Are There

In the lecture we’re serializing, in keeping with its title, Mr. Siegel quotes statements by many critics about poetry. And he shows that when a writer who has knowledge, depth, and carefulness makes a statement about what poetry is, the opposites will be present in some fashion. The critical statements he speaks about in this talk are by (among others) Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Boileau, Goethe, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Gautier, Verlaine, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, and Ki no Tsurayuki. Certainly, in his teaching of Aesthetic Realism, he discussed critical statements by many others. But “I am trying,” he says of the present talk, “to have this casual and representative.” He succeeds. And he speaks of the critical passages and their authors with clarity, exactitude, and even, one can say, with love.

Meanwhile, though the statements he quotes point to opposites, no other critic saw what Eli Siegel did. For example: no one else saw that the oneness of opposites is present as beauty in a poem of any time, style, place, language, as long as it is a true poem. No one else saw that the opposites in a true poem are present in every aspect of it: they’re one in each individual line; they’re in a stanza; a couplet; in the poem as a whole. No other critic saw that these opposites—for instance, freedom and order, logic and emotion, junction and separation, the strange and the everyday—are in us, in our confusions, angers, yearnings; and that we want to do with them what poetry does. And he is the only critic who showed that when the way words are used makes opposites one, there is music. And further, he showed that as we hear this verbal music, which comes from the writer’s deep sincerity, we have evidence that the world is friendlier than we knew—because the opposites as one constitute reality itself.

I see the critics of all time who themselves say things that matter, as also reaching toward Aesthetic Realism. I see them as hoping for, looking for, what Eli Siegel explained.

A Poem of Robert Herrick

In this first section of his lecture, Mr. Siegel does not speak about a particular poem or line. So by way of example, I’ll comment briefly on a poem by Robert Herrick, published in 1648, “Upon Julia’s Clothes”:

This could be said in ever so many other ways. But it is said this way by Herrick, and therefore it is immortal. In the first line we feel—we hear—the slithering of a fabric, with the z and s sounds of whenas, silks, goes, and the liquid ls in silks and Julia: “Whenas in silks my Julia goes.” So there is motion—delicate motion—in the sound of the line. And yet, there are those definite four beats, which make this line, this sense of Julia and silks, be firm too, stay put too, even as it moves and glows. People for 3¾ centuries have felt in this line the world’s motion and fixity as one thing. They, we, have heard that, as music.

There is the third line, with its “intellectual” word liquefaction. Yet, though the word is scientific, as it is placed here it has mystery; its four syllables move about with a slow hubbub—a hubbub that also glides: “The liquefaction of her clothes.” Then, the every-which-way manyness-in-sound of liquefaction is with the long, deep sound of the monosyllabic clothes. Clothes has a continuous slow motion and a feeling of the tactual, with its rich vowel, o, and its consonants that clasp and caress. In “The liquefaction of her clothes” we hear, as one, opposites that people have thought could not be together, opposites about which they’ve felt tormented: the line is intellect and body, science and caress, as grandly and sincerely inseparable.

The poem’s fifth line is a triumph of unboundedness and structure: “That brave vibration, each way free.” It has a bravura freedom, a letting go. Yet how tidy this 4-beat iambic arrangement also is: “That bráve | vibrá | tion éach | way frée.” And there’s struggle in it too (a glowing struggle), as sounds seem to bang against each other. The line is freedom and interference at once; it is letting go and order. These opposites are the world’s. And they are ours. We long to make them one.

The philosophy Eli Siegel founded and magnificently taught shows that the questions of our lives are aesthetic questions. Aesthetic Realism is true about those big things, art and life, and is therefore grandly successful in meeting one’s hopes.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

A Statement about Poetry:
Some Instances
By Eli Siegel

The question of what poetry is, is the same question as What will make my life look good to me? And for a long time people have asked that. In what has been called the Western world, the earliest person who was supposed to have dealt with poetry directly, the first person who seemed to have seen poetry as some kind of job, is Aristotle.

Plato, earlier than Aristotle, in dealing with the Forms and the idea of beauty, said things about poetry. But when he dealt with poetry as something actually done by actual people, he seemed to have felt ill at ease. Saintsbury, in A History of Criticism, while praising Plato for his impassioned idea of beauty in poetry, doesn’t see him much as a working critic. And that he isn’t one is quite true. You won’t find anything in Plato about poetry as something that can be done better or worse. The first statement in the field—and even that is not too practical—is to be found in Aristotle’s Poetics, and many things are in the Rhetoric.

Today I’m going to try to show something of the diversity of statements made about poetry, while saying there is still much more that should be known.

Here Is Aristotle

The most important statement of Aristotle about poetry is a summary that has remained. It is early in the Poetics. In the following passage, which I’m reading from the translation by Thomas Twining, Aristotle says there are two things necessary for poetry. They are opposites, and they are immortal. They are of this moment. Aristotle says:

Poetry, in general, seems to have derived its origin from two causes, each of them natural.

To imitate is instinctive in man from his infancy. By this he is distinguished from other animals, that he is, of all, the most imitative, and through this instinct receives his earliest education. All men, likewise, naturally receive pleasure from imitation.

That’s the first part of the statement. The next, a little later, is more on the technical side, and has to do with music, rhythm:

Imitation, then, being thus natural to us, and, secondly, melody and rhythm being also natural (for as to metre, it is plainly a species of rhythm), those persons in whom originally these propensities were the strongest, were naturally led to rude and extemporaneous attempts, which, gradually improved, gave birth to Poetry.

This is meaningful. It’s about the opposites. First, there is what Aristotle called imitation, which has the opposites of self and world. In imitation is the fact that the human being wants to have in his or her mind a picture of the world.

The commentary on those sentences of Aristotle is tremendous. There’s a work, famous by itself—Castelvetro on Aristotle’s Poetics. Then, there’s also Minturno, and Scaliger, and many, many others, including Butcher.

What did Aristotle mean by imitation? It’s a little like what I was talking about yesterday when I said every person has a picture of the world, and that as soon as we remember anything, we are imitating that thing in our mind. Imitation, then, is the likelihood and ability of the human self to have a picture of the world in one’s own mind and, in certain instances, to present that picture. Every artist has presented a picture of the world, even if it isn’t sound.

But what has been written about the meaning of imitation as Aristotle used the word, is so large that the person who meets it for the first time will get a new idea of what has been important to various people in human history. Imitation has been seen as a lesser word than imagination. Yet we do begin with the world, and no matter how we caricature something of the world or make it nobler than it is, there is some picture of it. You can’t go so crazy that you don’t have something of the original reality. So we’ll get back to the word imitation, because in one fashion or another what is in it is with the most contemporary criticism too.

Aristotle Is Dealing with Rest & Motion

The second idea in the passages I read has to do with music. Since the idea of imitation had to do with something quiet—sight or simple perception, which are more at rest than music is—we have the opposites here:

…Melody and rhythm being also natural…, those persons in whom originally these propensities were the strongest—

This is something that would send out of the room about nineteen twentieths of the practicing verse makers of the country. That is, Aristotle says there should be a propensity to music.

—those persons in whom originally these propensities were the strongest, were naturally led to rude and extemporaneous attempts, which, gradually improved, gave birth to Poetry.

So, first there was speech, then a desire to make speech better, perfect it. In other words, if you howled, you then tried to improve your howl, or if you yelled or groaned. Why not give rhythm to a groan? It can be.

Again, Rest & Motion

A likeness to the idea of Aristotle is to be found in another way people saw reality. What I’ll read from next is a careful work—I’m sorry the journal has such a silly title, The Shrine of Wisdom. But I can assure one that this is careful and scholarly. The journal presented some of the classic ways of seeing in the history of religion and philosophy, and one such presentation was “The Mythology of the Norsemen.”

Aristotle’s statements about poetry comment on the Aesthetic Realism motto “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” And in the article on Norse mythology we’re going to have the reality aspect: the world seen as a oneness of opposites. Other mythologies or religions go along with that. In this summation of Norse mythology, the cosmos is described:

Hence the Cosmos has two aspects and can be considered from two points of view. The intelligible, noumenal and spiritual Cosmos is above time and is changeless. The sensible, phenomenal and material Cosmos is characterized by time, and everything in it is in a constant process of change.

Which means that the world is rest and motion, sameness and difference. And in that sense—and it’s quite so—the structure of the world is aesthetic or poetic, which is the basis of Aesthetic Realism.

You can find what is in those sentences on Norse mythology in something else than mythology. You can find it in Hegel; in John Dewey, with the matter of structure and function. Function is a little more in motion than structure.

“The intelligible, noumenal and spiritual Cosmos is above time and is changeless.” That is the absolute, which doesn’t change. If a person, for example, makes a mess of cooking supper, there’s still something changeless in the world which is not messy. That is, there is something in the world which is not your messy floor and table. That something is here called “the intelligible, noumenal and spiritual Cosmos.”

On the other hand, “the sensible, phenomenal and material [and I’d add, sometimes messy] Cosmos…is in a constant process of change.”

So the world itself is rest and motion, perfection and imperfection, at once. And every line of poetry is like that.

There’s a structure of the world in Norse mythology. It’s really very taking, with the roots, and wells, and simple places. There’s Asgard, Midgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svart-alfaheim, Jotunheim, Niflheim. Niflheim is pretty sad:

The nethermost realm of cold mist, whence issue the Twelve Rivers by the congealing of whose waters all things are enabled to come into being.

So existence itself is mist and flowing, and also congealing—which has to do with poetry as hardness and softness, flowing and fixity.

There is a god in Norse mythology who seems to have to do with poetry. He is described in this passage:

Mimir, the God of Primeval Memory, Wisdom and Inspiration, is said to drink every morning the waters of the well from the horn Gjoll (resounding) or the Gjallar-horn, which is hidden beside it.

So this god drinks something that is also sound or music—which goes along with the idea of rhythm being the first thing in poetry.

Mimir is the god of memory and also inspiration. The idea that memory had to do with poetry is early. In Greek mythology Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is the mother of the Muses.

Jotunheim may be considered…as symbolizing… the mundane realm…which in its entirety reflects or expresses the Divine Thoughts or Ideas.

Everything touchable yet related to the abstract—here called Jotunheim—has something to say about poetry.

Then we have the music aspect:

The Gjallar-horn…suggests the Creative Sound which brings all objective things into existence.

That is in Greek mythology too—in the story of Amphion, who, through sound, made walls rise. And in the Old Testament there is Joshua—through sound, making walls fall. Everything is covered in those two. But sound did it. That has to do with music, and also the structure of the world.

Music Is in Poetry Too

I’ll read another statement from Aristotle’s Poetics. This sentence about poetry is part of his description of tragedy:

By pleasurable language, I mean a language that has the embellishments of rhythm, melody, and metre.

That is why I do not like Archibald MacLeish—because Archibald MacLeish does not have sufficiently what Aristotle calls rhythm and melody. Neither has Marianne Moore; nor has Robert Lowell, and God knows how many others.