Aesthetic Realism class
report:
"Freedom
and Order in Poetry"
by
Lynette Abel
Learning from Aesthetic
Realism what poetry is, I’ve come to see, is
a means of understanding our
lives and the world. Eli Siegel,
critic and scholar, explained for
the first time, that in every instance of
true poetry, opposites that are
the permanent structure of the world--rest
and motion, oneness and manyness,
freedom and order--are beautifully and
musically made one. And these
are the same opposites we want to put
together in ourselves. This
is what we were studying in the two classes
I am honored to report on now,
taught by Ellen Reiss, in which we heard a
tape recording of a lecture
Eli Siegel gave February 4, 1970, titled
"Freedom and Order in Poetry."
Mr. Siegel began:
It can
be said that the whole history
of poetry is for the purpose of showing
that the utmost freedom is the
utmost order. There have been
revolts in poetry sometimes going for
a new kind of precision, order, lack of
roughness, control. And there
have been [revolts] that say all these
rules are of no use and we should
just go by abandon.
Using many examples,
Mr. Siegel showed that while in the history of
poetry people have gone
back and forth between saying "order is the
thing we should go for" and
saying "freedom is what we need," in all true
poetry--whether of the 17th
century or the 20th--"the music that is
freedom and order at once has to
be there." And he showed too, that
poetry has what people urgently
need. "To see the history of
poetry," Mr. Siegel said, "we
have to see how, as people at night go from
one part of the bed to the
other--there is a feverish going for freedom
and order."
To show what
he called revolt in behalf of order and
precision in poetry, Mr. Siegel
read from the 17th-century French critic
Nicolas Boileau's L'Art Poetique,
The Art of Poetry, translated by Sir
William Soame with the assistance
of the English poet John Dryden.
Boileau said that French verse had
"depended too much on the whims of persons,"
and, Mr. Siegel pointed out,
"he asked for a certain respect for the art
of verse.... a clear control
in poetry." In L'Art Poetique--one
of the most famous writings in
world literature--Boileau criticizes in
poetic verse the excesses and discordance
of earlier writers, and sets down the
literary laws of classical poetry.
This is from Canto I:
Write
what your reader may
be pleas'd to hear;
And for
the measure have a careful
ear.
On easy
numbers fix your happy choice;
Of jarring
sounds avoid the odious
noise:
The
fullest verse and the most labor'd
sense
Displease
us, if the ear once take
offense.
"That is a call
for order," Mr. Siegel
said. "And order," he explained "can
never be suppressed because
it is of reality itself. The
atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons
and positrons all have a little yearning for
order...and they would also
like to be free. These things are not
rules of poetry," he continued.
"Poetry is trying to show the beauty of the
co-presence of freedom and
order." Mr. Siegel then translated
from the French, the lines
where Boileau says it was the late 16th, early
17th century poet Francois
de Malherbe who brought a new and needed order
to French verse. Though
that is not strictly true, Mr. Siegel noted,
Boileau says it very poetically.
He read the first two lines in French and then
his translation of what
he said is the most famous critical passage in
French poetry:
Enfin
Malherbe vint, et, le
premier en France,
Fit sentir
dans les vers une juste
cadence,
Finally
Malherbe came, and
the first in France
Made one
feel in verse a just cadence
Put in its
place, he taught the power
And
reduced the muse to rules (of right)
By this
wise writer the language now
mended
Offered no
longer anything rude to
the purified ear.
Then, to show
poetic revolt of the opposite kind, Mr. Siegel
spoke about the poetic renaissance
in the 20th century, beginning in 1917.
"There was a feeling things
had been too orderly" he explained "and poetry
had fallen into the hands
of the metrists and the academicians. So
there was the free verse
revolt." Mr. Siegel read many instances
from the anthology The
New Poetry, of 1917, which he said is
valuable, a book that was revolutionary
at the time. It contains important
instances of poetry in a new form
free of traditional metrical structure.
This, I learned, came to
be the hallmark of poetry in the 20th
century--free verse. Meanwhile,
Mr. Siegel noted the book also consists of
people hardly known today.
And he first read lines from some of
them--Joseph Warren Beach, and Skipwith
Cannell, and later Florence Kiper Frank.
"Most free verse is like
most rhymed verse," Mr. Siegel said, "not
resplendent. But it is
possible," he continued "to use free verse in
the way Homer used hexameters--it
can be used very well." We heard a
powerful example of it in the
poem Mr. Siegel read next: the "Oriad," by
H.D. or Hilda Doolittle.
"[This]," he said "justifies free
verse." Oriad was a nymph of a
mountain. This is the poem:
Whirl up, sea--
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us--
Cover us with your pools of
fir.
Said Mr. Siegel: "In
the same way as candles
stand out in a dark room and [as Shakespeare
said] "a good deed" stands
out "in a naughty world," so this poem in its
music stood out among the
sheaves, pages, reams of free verse." I
was swept by the sound of
these lines--they are free and yet so
precise--they soar in a careful,
orderly way. And it means so much to me
to know this is how I want
to be--to be able to let go and be
exact! Mr. Siegel described how
the structure of the world is in this poem: it
is freedom and order at
once. He explained:
"Whirl up, sea" is
smooth and regular
with some roundness. Then the
oneness of sea turns into the manyness
of pointed pines: "Whirl your pointed
pines." This is one of the
unquestioned art occurrences of America,
of the world, in this century.
It is a musical picture with concentration
and expansion, control of shape
and quantity, and also a feeling for the
oneness of land and water."
Part
2
of "Freedom and Order in Poetry"
|
