We are serializing, in three parts, the 1965 lecture by Eli Siegel titled Poetry Is Concerned, and the final part is in the present issue. I’ve said much about this lecture in our past two issues. What shall I say about it here?

Well, I’ll mention afresh that Mr. Siegel uses as his text the fourth book in the Heart of Oak series, books of literary selections compiled toward the end of the 19th century by Charles Eliot Norton. Mr. Siegel speaks in the lecture about works that are very different from each other. And as he does, this Aesthetic Realism principle (without his quoting it) is alive, kind, explanatory of the beauty of the literature, the feeling of the writers, and the hope of the persons reading or hearing each passage: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Two Writers and What Art Is

The last two poems Mr. Siegel discusses have, he points out, a certain apparent similarity in their construction: each is a series of four-line stanzas. And yet, he shows, one of the writers is truly poetic, while the other is not. He is very technical in his showing of what’s amiss with the Felicia Hemans poem, and what is right—organically and grandly right—in the other, by Thomas Campbell. But Mr. Siegel’s being technical is not a bit dry or “specialized”: it is thrilling. And you will meet it soon.

That beautiful technical discussion also, I have felt, gives a chance to say something about a subject that people have usually treated as unknowable: what is the way of mind that makes for art?… more