"The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."—Eli Siegel

Poetry Classes at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation

THE AESTHETIC REALISM EXPLANATION OF POETRY
Taught by Ellen Reiss

Aesthetic Realism itself, with its unprecedented comprehension of people, arose from Eli Siegel's explanation and teaching of poetry.  Eli Siegel is the critic who showed truly what poetry is.  He showed that poetry — because it is fair to the whole world and oneself at the same time, because it is logic and feeling as one thing, because it puts opposites together — answers the questions of every person's life.  This class, taught by the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, continues what Eli Siegel began to teach in 1938: "Poetry ... is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual." 

A prerequisite for attending this class is some previous study of Aesthetic Realism: either in Aesthetic Realism consultations, or through at least one semester of another Aesthetic Realism class. 

Ellen Reiss is the editor of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, where her commentaries can be read online.

Alternate Mondays, 6:00 - 7:30 PM

Writing by Ellen Reiss Includes, for example,

"Nature, Romanticism, & Harry Potter" in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known: "As we continue to serialize the great lecture Aesthetic Realism and Nature, which Eli Siegel gave in 1950, I'll comment here on a work that, 50 years later, has been affecting men, women, and children throughout the English-speaking world. I refer to the first of the Harry Potter novels, by J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, originally published in England in 1997. What does its enormous popularity say about people and what they are looking for?" >> More

"Jobs, Discontent, and Beauty" ... "I comment on two poems of Robert Burns that are a means of asking, How should jobs and work be in this land? "Man Was Made to Mourn" has the famous great and aching statement 'Man's inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!'" >> More

"Clothing and Emotion" ... "In 1953 Eli Siegel brought together, under the title 'The Persistence of Fabric,' eight of his poems, all on the tremendous and deep subject of fabric and emotion, clothing and human feeling. We are honored to publish them here. He wrote six of these poems that year, the other two in 1926. They are beautiful. They have the factual immediacy of cloth one can touch—and also the mystery that can be in the feelings of people: the emotions that whirl within us, or rustle in us, even as we put on a well-fitting garment..." >> More

"Justice and Punctuation"... "A book about punctuation has been high on the bestseller lists, in both America and Britain. The book is Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss, and its popularity was a huge surprise, including to its author...." >> More

"The Sanity of Poetry; or, H.D" ... " Hilda Doolittle, from 1920 on, was intensely troubled and suffered nervous breakdowns. In the 1930s her analyst was Sigmund Freud, and the 1982 biography H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet, by Janice Robinson (Houghton Mifflin), is written from the Freudian point of view ...." >> More

"Unions and Beauty" ... "Aesthetic Realism is that which shows that a union, a true union, is aesthetic: like a concerto, a novel, a painting, it is a oneness of opposites. And its aesthetics is its power..." >> More

AESTHETIC REALISM FOUNDATION
Line ornament for website about the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel
141 Greene Street, New York, NY 10012
(212) 777-4490
 

Aesthetic Realism was founded by Eli Siegel in 1941.  The Aesthetic Realism Foundation is a not-for-profit educational foundation.