Excerpts from the Preface by Eli Siegel—& Poems by Sheldon Kranz, from Personal & Impersonal: 6 Aesthetic Realists
Read what Eli Siegel writes in his Preface about Sheldon Kranz’s poems. A link to each of these poems is provided here.
From the Preface by Eli Siegel —
1. The Ever-Living Question
The question, What is poetry?—is as alive today as ever; it is likely more alive, for it is felt increasingly that what poetry is deeply and immediately concerns what our lives are….Do poems of all languages, times, localities have something in common? I have said—and called it elementary—that poems as happenings have a cause in common….Most persons would say that an emotion is necessary for a poem to happen. It is so.
. . . .
2. Personal and Impersonal
What distinguishes a poetic emotion or, generally, an art emotion from the customary kind is that while a poetic emotion is personal and impersonal at once, the customary kind can be seen as just personal.
Burns suffered from love, and saw his suffering with impersonality, too. So there were poems. Many other Scotch young men in the 1770’s and 1780’s suffered from love, but the way they saw what happened to them was not the way Robert Burns saw what happened to him. Burns made a poetic happening out of what happened to him with Mary or Jean or Nancy. In so doing, he was impersonal, too; abstract, universal, all-things, all-persons. Clearly, if Burns’ songs were just personal, they would be like Donald or Jamie or Gilbert complaining, of an evening, bitterly, in some Ayr hostelry. Donald’s, Jamie’s, Gilbert’s complaints we can surmise; they have not come to us; Robert Burns’ complaints, yearnings, contemplations, ardors have come to us; they were impersonal-and-personal; they had and have what is called form.
. . . .
5. Sheldon Kranz: Primal Finesse
In poetry, there is something primal that shows itself, in the resulting words, as finesse. In the work of Sheldon Kranz, this primal finesse can be seen.
For example, “Sonnet for an Enemy” is a successful sonnet in the Shakespearean form, because a battle in self is dealt with as if the writer were in the midst of it, while he was looking at it, as a hilltop observer might. The syllables fall rightly, but the source, the primary thing, is working in the syllables and the pauses between the syllables.
Lines like:
If individuality pursues
and:
Who smile and chop away at what is kind,
while elegant—in the the eighteenth-century sense—convey the uproar of life, and the unseen force behind the unheard uproar.
There is something primal about Mr. Kranz’s poem, “The Blue Coat,” though its form is clearly other than that of “Sonnet for an Enemy.” The primal in the world makes for the uncertain, the seemingly unshaped, the rough—and it does likewise for the filament, the accurate web, the neat, flexible blade and petal. “The Blue Coat” is about where individuality finds warmth; and the poem deals well with the two contenders for the individual’s warm acceptance of himself—the intimate forces in one, and what one owns, or seems to; as against the unbounded, subtly immense universe. Accuracy and music are in the lines of “The Blue Coat.” They are there, though otherwise than in the lines of a successful sonnet; for music in poetry comes variously, in truth.
The hiddenness between two people is swirlingly presented in “Problem in Space.” The tightness in mankind is entertainingly and valuably related to the flying tightness of pigeons in “Pigeons and Men in Tight Blue Suits.” —How much are we for beauty—particularly the beauty that can unconsciously disarrange the hugged routine of self—that is to be seen, with poetic consequence, in “On Meeting Beauty.” —Ornateness, yes—and a touch of reprovable ornateness—is in “Becoming Morning,” but the radiance of the universe, as—somewhat in the Kantian manner—it is to be found in the, at times, dim enclosures of self, is effectively got into “Becoming Morning.” The lines tremble in measured correctness. —An occurrence of lasting somberness is in “The Funeral,” metrically well described.
Character can be in poetry, and the crisis of character. The poem “Rhoda” exemplifies this. —The breathlessness and exactitude of existence are well transmitted in “In Time.”
Is there that in us desiring coldness? “Antagonism with Landscape” says there is. Cold is primal; it is that in this poem of Kranz, with beginning selectivity and fear.
It is the world that enables us to see, say the transcendental philosophers, notably the aforementioned Kant. The poet in “Pale but Piercing Sky” says that when the sky for him has that powerful aesthetic junction of paleness and piercingness, reluctance, limitation, superfluous snugness in him are defeated; and he sees with untrammeled willingness and effect. What seems and what is are, through the sky, in mighty inseparableness. —The poem “No Tickets” is an allegory about whether we have met our own demands. An allegorical locomotive may not agree with our complacency.
Is any moment in existence interesting? That is a philosophic, poetic, immediate and primal question. It is answered, neatly and keenly, in “The Moments Between the Moments.”
The primal, then, becomes pointed in representative work of Sheldon Kranz. Some of the roll and tumult of poetic lines is not with us as yet; poetry has more motions; and yet more motions; but the grass blade in its sharpness, and the clearness of a print, along with the primal, are in the poems I have mentioned. The meaning of the fact that these are in the poems, will linger and make for increasing critical awareness and thankfulness. ♦ ♦ ♦
♦ We add another poem by Sheldon Kranz, much cared for but not found in Personal & Impersonal: Homer, Sappho, and Everything
