Here is part 3 of Poetry and Excitement, the magnificent 1949 lecture by Eli Siegel that we are serializing. Aesthetic Realism is based on the following principle, stated by him - which is the means, at last, of knowing what beauty is and what our own life is about: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." In this lecture, Mr. Siegel explains what excitement is - that thing everyone desires, is mixed up about, and also fears. He describes how reality's opposites come together in it.

     In the present section, he looks at stanzas of Byron. And I can say as a person who knows the field: Eli Siegel is the critic who understood Byron, both the man and the poet, supremely - as Byron thirsted to be understood. It moves me very much to comment on some of that understanding as expressed in another lecture: Lord Byron May Yet Be Known, of September 14, 1969. What Mr. Siegel explained in it concerns excitement, and something which millions of people feel is the most exciting thing in the world: sex. I am quoting from the report I wrote of that lecture at the time - 30 years ago. 

     Early in it, after reading a passage by William Hazlitt about Byron's intensity and his desire to escape ennui, Mr. Siegel said:

That hints at Byron's suffering. He wanted not to fall into himself in some dull and lessening way .... Byron opposed dullness in himself in two ways: through writing and through women. His big complaint is: after the ecstasy of love he was more in himself than before.

     In the 1969 lecture, Mr. Siegel read stanzas 120-127 of Canto 4 of Byron's Childe Harold, and said that some of the greatest questioning of love is in them. For example, Byron writes:

     Eli Siegel was the greatest, kindest of critics. And Byron would have loved him and Aesthetic Realism as I do for explaining, not only what poetry is, and what the self is - but what can make the excitement of sex respectful and proud. Mr. Siegel explained that the purpose of poetry and the purpose of sex have to be the same: to like the world. It is possible to feel that in being close to a person we respect immensely, we are close to the world, which this person stands for. It is possible to feel, in love at its most corporeal, that we are delighted wanting the world to affect us fully; wanting not to hide from the world; wanting to welcome it with all of ourselves; wanting to strengthen it and this person who dearly stands for it. The excitement then is sweeping and real!

     Aesthetic Realism explains that the excitement of sex should be a means of seeing other things as exciting - a fact, a friend, an ordinary object - not of getting away from them. Humanity will thank Mr. Siegel for explaining this - and for giving the world the most exciting study there has ever been: Aesthetic Realism.

- Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

There is the excitement in poetry which is pretty much that of the western. When people are all agog in a cinema, counting each hoofbeat as the good cowboys rush toward the bad cowboys, and the horses curve, and their tails wave, and there is some very careful yelling - all that is part of what I have described as making for excitement: the base of a pyramid coming to a point.

     Suspense is managed excitement. And the preliminaries are important, because in the preliminaries you can feel the outcome. For example, in a gambling house people are excited by the wheel, because what the wheel is doing now is going to be in a moment what the wheel has done. The seeing of culmination in process is a mighty exciting thing. And the sense of uncertainty, of surprise, with the feeling that things are going on, can make for that more than customary agitation of the human frame, that more than customary stirring of the self, that more than customary perturbation of a single life, which are in the subject of this evening.

     The poetry of Byron brought a new excitement. All art brings a new excitement; and Byron, though he was so introspective, brought melodramatic qualities into his verse. In Don Juan we have it; we have a shipwreck there which is a very fine thing. In Childe Harold we have it. And his Corsairs and Laras, and the people in Parisina, The Island, "The Prisoner of Chillon" are all pretty exciting people. They are melodramatic. They've got personality. They have style. They are twirling the moustache of their unconscious, in a sense: they are in a perpetual situation of bravado. Also, they are not saying all they could say - and that brings about a quality of suspense too.

     Childe Harold was popular. And in it we have poetry that is like the cinema, with suspense. I read now the Waterloo stanzas, from Canto 3, of 1816. This is the Spenserian stanza. Byron wasn't such an elegant master of that stanza, but it is a well-mastered stanza on the whole when he deals with it; and it gets that feeling of uncertainty and motion which he wanted.

     He is describing the scene in Brussels, before the Battle of Waterloo. The English officers and their lady friends are dancing. Then Napoleon's cannon are heard - the war is on again. And those who are dancing go off to death and wounds, perhaps.

     In these stanzas, the contrast of the dance and possible death is clear. Byron didn't have any predecessor in melodramatizing this contrast. Of course, the contrast had been, but Byron is using some of the cinema technique of later. He is putting a quality of showmanship into verse, where it hadn't been before. Scott was nearest to it; Scott could get quarrels into his poems. One would think, really, the ground was shaking when he wrote Marmion. But Byron went even further. 

     "The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men": these two things have always been primal causes of excitement - love or sex, and fights. "But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!" Of course, the most exciting part of speech is the interjection, and if you want to get people excited in an easy way, just say Hush! or Hark! or Hear! or Oh! It can be made fun of; but Byron knows how to use his hushes and his harks.

     "And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before! / Arm! Arm! it is - it is - the cannon's opening roar!" When you have a dance interrupted by cannon, that is something. Some of this effect was later worked for by Thackeray in Vanity Fair. It does have people personally torn apart by the clatter of war; and it can get anybody, and should. Then, the speediest stanza: 

     "And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves, / Dewy with Nature's tear drops, as they pass." The quality of spaciousness, which is in Byron, made for excitement too. To see much space, to see much territory suddenly, is something which, because it enables the person to be quickly expansive, is akin to excitement.