Here is the conclusion of the 1973 lecture that we’ve been serializing: These Speak of Poetry, by the greatest of literary critics, Eli Siegel. He is describing what no other critic has seen clearly: that which distinguishes an authentic poem from something not that. And lest you think this is an esoteric subject—I’m ever so happy to assure you that the Aesthetic Realism way of seeing poetry is also about every person’s daily life, pulsating hope, worries, angers, desires, confusion, pleasures, discontents. The basis is this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Every Good Poem Has This

Every good poem, Aesthetic Realism shows, is justice become music. The poem’s writer has seen his or her subject with such point and depth and scope that the structure of the world itself has been gotten to in it. This structure is the oneness of such opposites as activity and calm, weight and lightness, assertion and yielding, separation and junction, control and freedom. And we hear that structure in the way the words are present—and meet—and do things to each other—in the poem’s lines. In every good poem there are three aspects of justice, inseparable from each other. There is the writer’s justice to the subject dealt with. There is the justice to his or her own feeling. And there is justice to reality itself, for the writer has reached, felt, honored, made hearable reality’s structure.

This matters—personally, to every one of us. It matters for several reasons. But the central reason is this: People mainly don’t think that the world, if it’s looked on accurately, is likable; they think it’s pretty much a displeasing territory, with perhaps some pleasing oases. Therefore they feel that so much of the world is something they should keep away from, or beat out, fool, hide from, cajole, conquer. Authentic poetry gives the needed lie to that view. For a good poem embodies the fact that when a person is deeply and widely honest with words, the world is there—and it’s not only present but shows itself to be musical. The music may even make a one of the joltingness and soothingness of things, the disorder and structure of things—as in the Gerard Manley Hopkins line “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)”… more