In this issue of TRO and (I estimate) five more, we will be serializing a lecture that Eli Siegel gave in two parts: on November 28 and December 5, 1951. He called the talk Technique and My Poems. And it is a masterpiece in many ways.

For example, it is a masterpiece of the Personal and Impersonal, opposites that are in the title itself. Technique: offhand, that’s impersonal. Technique in poetry concerns what must exist in the makeup, the facture, the construction of a poem of any time and place, for the poem to be truly that—real poetry. Eli Siegel is the critic who has explained poetic technique, with depth and fullness. And he has explained why the technique of an authentic poem matters—and does it ever matter! (It matters terrifically, and for our time, as well as all time.)

So Technique can seem the impersonal aspect of the lecture’s title. Then there is the title’s second aspect: and My Poems. People at that Aesthetic Realism class of 75 years ago heard Mr. Siegel speak about his own poems, which contain his own seeing and emotions. That can seem personal, and from one point of view it is. But Eli Siegel always had largeness, exactitude, love for reality itself and for truth, no matter what he spoke about—even if he was speaking about his own seeing and feeling. I consider this fact infinitely beautiful…more