“Roundness Bodes Well” —report of 1975 lecture by Eli Siegel

In a talk given on September 7, 1975, titled “Roundness Bodes Well,” which was studied via tape recording in an Aesthetic Realism class for consultants and associates taught by the Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss, Eli Siegel said that he wanted to show the importance of roundness as “having to do with both reality and emotion.” With thrilling comprehensiveness, he discussed how roundness-as both shape and meaning-was inherent in the structure of reality and was a central idea in the work of the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman and the Metaphysical poets of 17th century England.

“Every person,” he began, “has been affected by shapes. The word roundness means “something complete” which, he noted, is in the meaning of “a well-rounded person.” “The idea of roundness, he explained, is in “the idea of composed.” There is the “square, oblong, triangle” yet the circle, he said, is the “most composed,” “symmetrical thing.”

Eli Siegel said that one reason for the greatness of Walt Whitman as artist, was that roundness was felt by him “in a way that was alive,” not dull, in a way that “that honored the world.” The first of eight poems by Whitman that he took up was “Come Up from the Fields, Father” which he called “one of the truly composed poems.” “The large thing to see,” he explained, is that all composition goes for a certain roundedness. If a story… is complete it is rounded out.”

Whitman’s poem tells about a family living in rural Ohio during the Civil War who receive devastating news, their son has been injured in battle. Mr. Siegel read and discussed almost every line of this moving poem, showing how roundness was in its technique, and deeply seen and felt by the self of Walt Whitman. The poem begins:

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Mr. Siegel commented on the use of repeated phrases in these lines. He noted that in life, “going round in circles” as I and many people have confusingly done, is not so good. But in art, he said repetition is “used a good deal,” and it has “to do with the circle.” While these beginning lines point directly to the mother and father, he next described how, as the story proceeds, its circumference widens out to include “the sky and land of Ohio.” The poem continues:

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, …

Mr. Siegel discussed many ways that Whitman was affected by roundness in these lines. “Apples ripe” are “in the field of roundness,” he said, adding with humor that the oval shape of the grape is a “traitor to roundness.” Bees, he said, “love going around in a circle to do their job;” and a calm sky has “a quality of roundness.” The focus of the story goes to the son, then to the mother, and includes the unbearable news, that her son, her only son, has been shot. In achingly beautiful lines, Whitman describes this mother’s pain and grief:

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.

Hearing Mr. Siegel read these lines made for tremendous emotion. And, as he commented on them, he was explaining how crucial roundness is in our need to know the feelings of another person—to see them in all their 360 degrees—with good will. Whitman as artist, he said, is showing a “person as the center of the world for the while.” Whitman saw this grieving mother “as the center of Ohio” “with one radii [going]out to the battlefield.” “Center, area and circumference,” he explained “all mean something.”

Next, Mr. Siegel related Walt Whitman to the Metaphysical Poets which included John Donne, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvel and others. He explained that these poets of 17th century England had “some of the deep purposes” of Whitman. In a discussion following the lecture, Ellen Reiss, who teaches the Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry Class, explained how Whitman and the Metaphysical poets have been seen “as apart” in time and style. And she placed Mr. Siegel’s seeing of them as “leading in a feeling about roundness” as a large thing in literary criticism.

Mr. Siegel read lines from Section 8 of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” which he said is great in American literature and the greatest poem of Whitman. It begins: “O western orb sailing the heaven.” This, he said is related to the beginning lines of Henry Vaughan’s poem “I Saw Eternity the Other Night,” which he said “honors the circle as much as anything in literature.” The Vaughan poem begins:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

The large thing in these two poems, he explained, is that the circle is “representing reality.”

Mr. Siegel read the beginning lines of John Donne’s “4th Holy Sonnet,” which he called “some of the best in English poetry” and explained how they too were about the circle. The first line of the sonnet is:

 At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow

He took up Andrew Marvel’s poem “On a Drop of Dew,” a “very good poem,” he said, about the “tremendous delicate tendency” in a drop of dew “to be a circle.” Mr. Siegel also read and discussed poems by George Herbert, Richard Lovelace, Sir Richard Crashaw and others, showing how in each, roundness was present in feeling, subject and composition.

Through this lecture, the diverse things of the world took on a composition. Mr. Siegel discussed how roundness is of the sun, of the motion of a bird’s wings in flight, and in the loops and curves of our handwriting. Every face, he said, goes toward circularity, even a rhino with its tusk. He described how the inhalation and exhalation of a sigh has circularity, as does an embrace, the structure of flowers, a musical round, the circulation of our blood, the spherical structure of the human eye, and roundness has to do with how we see. He showed that roundness does bode well because it is so richly of reality and our own human selves.

Studying this lecture, I came to see how much the curved shapes I have loved as a visual artist are related to the composure I’ve yearned to have in life. Following the lecture Ellen Reiss said, “People have thought there was nothing that brought together themselves and the world.” The education of Aesthetic Realism, she said is “grandly round” in teaching the world is the other half of ourselves which we are born to know and like. I am grateful to be in the midst of this great education which can enable every person to feel that there is a roundness, a composition between one’s life and the world as never before.