Home: Leila Rosen—English Teacher and Aesthetic Realism
Associate
Poetry As Justice: Through The
Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method,
Aesthetics Defeats Contempt
Leila
Rosen
Published in The English Record of
the
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n the fall of 2002, the
landscape of American education looks very different than it did five or 10
years ago. Increasingly, the young
people we meet in our classrooms feel that what they're supposed to learn in
school is miles away from what they are most concerned about — including their
parents’ worry about money, uncertainty about their own future, and, more
keenly than ever, the injustice and terror around the world and in our own
nation. All too often, young people use
this confusion to decide, even if unconsciously, that they are living in a
messy, inimical world, and to mock the very idea of justice.
As
an educator who has proudly used the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method in my
high school English classes for 21 years, I see it as my happy, insistent
obligation to show students not only that justice does exist, but that the very subjects we study in school can teach
us how to see the world and other people justly. That way of seeing, I am grateful to be able
to show them, is in art. All art,
including that of poetry, arises from the just, ethical way of seeing the world
and people we all need to have.
The
Aesthetic Realism Method, which teachers at all levels have used with
tremendous success for over 25 years, is based on the philosophy founded by the
great American poet, critic and educator Eli Siegel (1902-1978). It teaches: The purpose of education is to like the world through knowing it. Further, Aesthetic Realism teaches that
reality can honestly be liked because it has a sensible, beautiful structure,
described in the following principle: “The world, art, and self explain each
other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” This aesthetic structure is
present in every aspect of the English curriculum — from the study of word
origins to the understanding of a Shakespearean sonnet.
Mr.
Siegel also described the way of mind in every person that is most against
justice: contempt — “the lessening of
what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees
it.” When a person has contempt, he or
she is cold to the feelings of other people, and this is the beginning of all
injustice, in personal life and on a massive international scale.
I
am grateful for what I have learned about my own desire to have contempt,
beginning in Aesthetic Realism consultations, which are education about the
relation of a person’s life to the history and culture of the world. I heard kind, needed criticism of the
scornful way I thought about other people.
I was asked:
As you talk about [people], do you
think you sound kind or unkind?
[Unkindness] has to be the result if we're not really interested in how
another person sees himself, and how that person is affected by the world. Aesthetic Realism explains that evil is not
wanting to see the feelings of another person with as much depth as our
own. Do you take the life out of people?
I did, and I learned that
this was why I felt so hard and lonely, and why I couldn't be useful as I hoped
to be. As I came to see that other
people had the same depth I gave myself, I felt for the first time that I could
be kind, and It was this feeling that made me want to become a teacher. Everyone should be able to learn what stops
them from being the people they want to be.
One
of the ugliest forms of contempt is racial prejudice. The need to understand it impelled the lesson
I’ll be describing, which I gave as part of the workshop “Comedy, Poetry, and
Justice to People” at the 2001 NYSEC conference. There had been a violent racial attack near
the high school where I was teaching; several African-American young men were
viciously beaten by white teens. My
students, mostly African-American and Latino, were understandably very angry,
and I felt that, as a teacher and a person who is white, I had to talk about
this subject honestly, in a way they could respect. I told them what I have learned: that in
poetry, sameness and difference, opposites that fight so horribly in racial prejudice,
don’t work against each other, don’t
lessen each other, but rather, they add
to each other and make for beauty.
Art is the greatest opponent of contempt.
Eli
Siegel showed that the study of poetry is not a luxury, but an urgent necessity
for every person's life — because both in what it says, and in its very
technique, true poetry is fair to the world in a way we need to be as we think
about other people. In his essay,
"The Immediate Need for Poetry," he writes:
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. It happens that our
deepest desire is to make sense of the contrarieties in this world...We need to
see reality as one thing, with discord present.
We need this very much. Poetry
meets this need.
My students saw how this is
true as we studied Wilfred Owen’s great poem of World War I, “Strange
Meeting.” It has terror and beauty, and
a large reason it is beautiful is the way it puts together sameness and
difference, both in its literal meaning and in its structure and poetic music.
Strange
Meeting
By Wilfred Owen
(1918)
It seemed that out
of battle I escaped
Down some profound
dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which
Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there
encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought
or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed
them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous
recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful
hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I
knew that sullen hall;
By his dead smile I
knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand
pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood
reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns
thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I
said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said the
other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness.
Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I
went hunting wild
After the wildest
beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm
in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the
steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves,
grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee
might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping
something has been left,
Which must die now.
I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war,
the pity war distilled.
Now men will go
content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent,
boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift
with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break
ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine,
and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine,
and I had mastery:
To miss the march
of this retreating world
Into vain citadels
that are not walled.
Then, when much
blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and
wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths
that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured
my spirit without stint
But not through
wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men
have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you
killed, my friend.
I knew you in this
dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through
me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my
hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now…”
In "Strange Meeting," Wilfred Owen is critical of
war, saying it is against what man is after, against beauty itself. While racism and war are different, both come
from unjust contempt for what some persons see as different from
themselves. In this poem, a soldier
killed in battle speaks, in Hell, to another, whom he had killed. The second soldier responds with kindness,
showing how the two of them, though on different sides in the war, are deeply
the same — with the same hopes, the same desire to live and to know. In what he says, he is showing there is
sameness within difference. We can hear
this in the following lines:
...Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went
hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in
the world…
And in one of the most the
moving lines in 20th century poetry, Owen musically merges sameness and
difference, as he presents the horrible consequences of their being seen as
against each other: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." Yet it is important to see that it is not
only what this poem says that matters.
Wilfred Owen had a powerful emotion about the horror of WWI, but so did
many, many other people. It is the form
he gave that emotion that makes this poem so musical. In the structure of the poem itself, Owen has
sameness and difference meet, join, and complete each other in a way that makes
for beauty. We discussed one of the main
ways he does this — through the use of assonance.
Where Prejudice Begins
In preparation for the
study of this poem, my classes spoke about the cause of prejudice. “Does it begin with race?" I asked. Some thought it did, while many others, thinking
about it further, said they didn't think so.
We spoke about how, in all forms of prejudice, there is contempt for
what is different from oneself. This
means there can be prejudice about anything, and my students gave many
examples of how they saw this. One young
man I’ll call Andre (the names of the students have been changed throughout the
article) said that as a child he was prejudiced against certain foods, like
spinach — and everyone in the class laughed with recognition of their own
childhood food biases; Sean said teenagers are often prejudiced against their
parents, because they're older, and seem to have nothing in common with
them. Silvia pointed out that people in
different countries are often prejudiced against one another, because they
don’t have the same kind of government or customs.
We
saw that it is the same feeling — contempt for what seems different from
oneself — that makes people with different color skin, or who speak a different
language, look at each other with superiority and suspicion on a
Earlier, my students had been excited to see how sameness and
difference are crucial in understanding every one of the technical aspects of
poetry we had studied — including alliteration, simile, metaphor, rhyme,
symbolism and others. As we spoke about
“Strange Meeting,” we saw that assonance is a beautiful way sameness and
difference are one in poetry. In his
essay "Assonance Is Like This," Eli Siegel gives this beginning
description of assonance: "the using of the sameness and difference of
sound in syllables for poetic music and, therefore, poetic effect." Assonance is related to rhyme, because in both,
there is a sameness of sound in words that are different. People have loved rhymes, such as
"sleep" and "keep", or "bright" and
"night"; we talked about why.
"Do you think rhyme does what we need to do," I asked,
"to see sameness in what is clearly different?" They felt it did.
Assonance is a very rich subject, and it has many
aspects. It is usually defined as a
similarity of vowel sounds, as in "same" and "great". Another aspect — sometimes called “half-rhyme”
or “para-rhyme” — is the one used in "Strange Meeting;" here, it is
the consonants that are the same, and occasionally, the vowels are close,
though not identical. The syllable as a
unit has a rich drama of sameness and difference. Wilfred Owen has words with the same
consonant sounds end each pair of lines.
I asked my students to listen for this as I read the first lines, in
which the speaker describes his journey to Hell after being killed:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared…
Reading aloud the final
words in each line — "escaped” / “scooped”; “groined” / “groaned;
“bestirred” / “stared" — I asked, "Which do you hear first, the
similarity or the difference?" They
felt they heard the difference first.
It
is harder to hear the sameness between words in assonance than it is in rhyme,
and a reader might almost miss it. There
is something more subtle, less neat, than in rhyme — something like struggle,
friction, in assonance. "Isn't this
something like what goes on among people?" I asked. "We may not see the sameness at first,
but if we keep on looking, we will see that there is a great deal of sameness."
Rhymes
can be very beautiful, and some of the most enduringly grand poetry of the
world has them, but I asked my students why they thought assonance was more
fitting for this particular poem. Did
they think it would have been more or less beautiful if Owen had used rhymes
instead of assonance? They felt it would
have been less beautiful, because the subject of the poem grapples, struggles
with how people see each other. Further,
because of the difference in vowels, the sound in the two words ending the two
lines of each couplet also have opposite qualities, and this has us see even
more meaning in the poem. “Groined,” for
instance, has something sharp, in both its sound and its meaning, while
“groaned” seems to spread inwardly with dull agony.
Throughout the class, I was struck by how deeply the students
listened to the poem, which is fairly difficult, and to each other. Charlene Carter described how her way of
seeing difference changed when she met a relative who had grown up in the
As they were learning about poetry, these 16- and 17-year-old
students in
In the final line of “Strange Meeting,” after having one man
describe how he was killed by the other, Owen joins them for the first time,
with the pronoun 'us': "Let us sleep now." I was moved to see the deep attention and
respect in these students — including several who had sometimes acted sleepy or
disinterested. I respect them very much
for the way they wanted to speak about and understand this poem, and the
strikingly beautiful way it makes of one of sameness and difference.
Darren Williams is one person who changed dramatically after
this lesson. He was in my first period
class and usually came late. Darren had
difficulty reading and writing, and rarely finished any of the required class
work or homework. I knew he was very
ashamed of this. He had a far-away look,
and rarely said anything in class. He
sat in the back, sometimes dozing off.
But in this class, Darren came alive.
When he heard Eli Siegel's description of contempt, and Aesthetic
Realism's seeing it as the cause of prejudice, he sat up and was alert in a way
I had never seen him be. When I asked
questions of the whole class, he responded.
He even raised his hand to answer a question, something he hadn't done
before.
Later
that week, Darren did something that affected me very much. I had assigned an essay about a character in
the novel we had been studying. For the
first time, Darren handed in a complete paper.
He wrote thoughtfully and seriously about the character, including where
he had contempt for people. Usually,
Darren would slip his incomplete paper under the others on his way out; this
time, he handed it to me, clearly proud of what he had written.
As an English teacher, I am enormously grateful for Aesthetic
Realism’s explanation of poetry and its understanding of the feelings of
people. Teachers and students need to be
able to study this glorious and needed fact: art has the justice we are looking
for.
Resources:
© 2004 Leila Rosen