The Immediate Need for Poetry

This great essay by American poet and critic Eli Siegel (1902-1978) describes how the study of poetry meets the need in every person to feel that the conflicting qualities in us, which are also in reality itself, can make sense. This is because poetry, in its technique and emotion, composes these opposites beautifully, and in a way that makes for aesthetic emotion in us.
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The Immediate Need for Poetry
By Eli Siegel

What is forgot these days — and it was forgot in other days, too — is the need to be affected by poetry. There has been much said about the writing of poetry, and much said about the appreciation of poetry; but not enough has been said about the possible effect of poetry. Poetry is a thing and does something. What it does, can do, should be looked at.
According to Aesthetic Realism, poetry is a picture of reality at its truest, most useful. We look at reality, we look at it mostly in a contradictory way. We are for it, and we retreat from it. It is, sometimes, most sweet concord; but how much discord do we feel in it! Reality hurts and pleases. It frightens and allures. It surprises and soothes. It shrieks and coos.

It happens that our deepest desire is to make sense of the contrarieties in this world. We cannot, safely, prefer the blandishing in reality, or what seems so, to the forbidding. Our purpose, when sound, is to see what's real entirely. We need to see reality as one thing, with discord present. We need this very much. Poetry meets this need.

However, in order to meet our need to see the world as one thing, through poetry, we must see poetry as what it is, not something else — not something occasionally imposed by a timid and arrogant personality. We need poetry, and so we need to see it; not something else.

When we are born we hope to make some sense of the forces in us. We want to move, and we want to be quiet; we want to assail and we want to be secluded; we want to be delighted, and we want to be self-satisfied; we want excitement and we want repose. All through life, really, we are trying to make jarring, separating propensities to act as one; we are trying to have forces coalesce in an other than languid oneness. And it is poetry that makes jarring, separating propensities to act as one; it is poetry that coalesces forces in a oneness that is not languid.

From this one may properly gather that the immediate need for poetry (also the permanent one) is to see it as a means of our own organization, strengthening, instigating. Poetry represents the good sense we desire. Poetry is the exacting shepherd of our emotions.

Poetry, though, means something to us the more it, as such, affects us. Within a poem are possibilities of being affected non-poetically, that is, wrongly. It is so easy, in some hidden way, to use a poem to soothe a darkly exacerbated personality, or to allay a discontent of ego, without organizing that personality or strengthening it.

We should find excitement and repose in a poem; from the poem itself. However, there can be a bad exchange in one's reading of a poem. A certain excitement is found in a poem because the reader's fears are stirred, but not so clearly as to mean much; in this way a spurious repose ensues. All this is difficult; but it is true that the activities taking place in a mind during the reading of a poem may be intricately soothing and subterranean.

Admitting then, asserting then, that there can be false effects got from poetry, we should consider the possible true effect. The words in a poem are composed; and we want composition. Composition is the friendly presence of oneness and diversity. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to be composed.

A poem is excitement and repose. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use it as an encouragement to have excitement and repose in ourselves. There are quietude and mobility in a poem. Our immediate need for poetry is our need to use an example of quietude and mobility.

This means that there are qualities in Coleridge's "Christabel" that we want for ourselves. There are dreaminess and precision in the poem of Coleridge. We need these. If we honor them in "Christabel," we call for them in ourselves. There are firmness and flexibility in the lines of Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Firmness and flexibility are of the very poetry in this eighteenth-century work. If we see the poem, therefore, we advocate firmness and flexibility in ourselves. There are wonder and exactness in Rimbaud's "O saisons, O chateaux." If we see the poem rightly, we befriend wonder and exactness in ourselves.

Poetry, then, is a beautiful necessity; a beautiful heightener, organizer, impetus, example. Poetry enables us to see reality where it starts; it enables us, also, to see reality as a process, and reality as purpose. The way beginning, process, and conclusion cohere in a poem is a picture of how we want to see reality and ourselves.

The agonies of the person are present in the technique of the poem. The swiftness and slowness of the poetic line; the smoothness and surprise of the poetic phrase; the rightness and wonder of the word used poetically, are answers to the desires of men and women. And they are the reason for poetry; they are the qualities that are immediately and permanently needed.

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Permission to publish this essay is given by the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. It is reprinted from issue 758 of the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, titled "Poetry and Ourselves: Truly".