With this TRO we conclude our serialization of Poetry i: Imagina­tion Is All This, a 1971 lecture by Eli Siegel. It is definitive and also delightful. It is urgent, and composing. Mr. Siegel uses works of much variety to show—and he was the critic who truly showed this—what imagination is. Always, he explained, imagination is a joining of two great opposites: a particular self and the outside world. “Imagination,” he said, “can be described essentially as what we add to the world through our minds.” But how we imagine, how we deal with the world through our thought, can be either just or unjust.

In this final section Mr. Siegel continues showing imagination’s variety. There’s a passage by Tennyson telling of something he imagined, which troubled him and which he didn’t understand. (Meanwhile, in Mr. Siegel’s brief comments about it there is an understanding, which Tennyson would have been immensely thankful to meet.) In this same last section there is too something so different: passages from a 1948 book dealing toughly and wittily with aspects of New York. And also present in this section, along with New York streets and Tennyson’s depth, is something very different from both: an 1880 poem by Andrew Lang, which uses an exceedingly intricate French poetic form of the 14th and 15th centuries. That form is the ballade. (It should not be confused with the ballad, an ever so much simpler form.)

Since the Lang poem is here, I’m going to quote, as a means of celebrating Aesthetic Realism’s magnificent understanding of humanity, a poem by Eli Siegel that is also in this difficult, rarely used structure. It is his “Ballade Concerning Our Mistake and Knowledge of It.” And it is included in his book Hail, American Development…more