Eli Siegel, Founder of Aesthetic Realism

     Mr. Siegel graduated from Baltimore City College (1916-1919), where he was a member of the Carrollton-Wight literary society, the oldest speech and debate team in the country.

     Several of Eli Siegel's earliest essays appeared in the Modern Quarterly, which he founded with V.F. Calverton in 1923. They include “The Scientific Criticism” (Vol. I, No. 1, March 1923); “The Equality of Man” (Vol. I, No. 3, December 1923); “The Middle Ages, Say” (Vol. I, No. 3, December 1923). The essays are now collected in The “Modern Quarterly” Beginnings of Aesthetic Realism (Definition Press, 1997).  

     In 1925 his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana " won the esteemed Nation Poetry Prize. "I say definitely," William Carlos Williams was to write of it, "that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world." Implicit in that poem, Mr. Siegel later explained, were the philosophic principles that would become the basis of Aesthetic Realism. The same year, 1925, Mr. Siegel became a columnist for the Baltimore American.

     In a 1944 article in the Baltimore Sun, Donald Kirkley, who knew Mr. Siegel in the 1920s, wrote:

Baltimore friends close to him at the time [he won the Nation prize] will testify to a certain integrity and steadfastness of purpose that distinguished Mr. Siegel. . . . He refused to exploit a flood of publicity which was enough to float any man to financial comfort. . . . He took a job as a newspaper columnist at a respectable salary, and quit it when he found that he would not be allowed to say what he wanted at all times.

     In 1926, Mr. Siegel settled permanently in New York City. He became a reviewer for the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, and Scribner's Magazine, writing about, for example, The First Wife and Other Stories, by Pearl Buck; The Life of Emerson, by Van Wyck Brooks; Mark Twain's America, by Bernard DeVoto.  

     In 1938, Mr. Siegel began teaching The Poetry Group, attended by New York City writers and artists. At the same time, he was developing the philosophy that in 1941 became Aesthetic Realism (first called Aesthetic Analysis). Beginning in 1941, Mr. Siegel gave, in his library at 67 Jane Street, thousands of lectures—on literature, poetry, history, economics, all the arts and sciences—and individual lessons to men, women, and children. Lectures and lessons taught a new way of seeing the world and other people based on the following principles:

     1.  The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.

     2.  The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it .... Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.

     3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

     In 1944, Mr. Siegel married Martha Baird, poet and writer on music.  

     The letter to Ms. Baird from poet William Carlos Williams, November 1951, places authoritatively the importance of Eli Siegel's poetry in American literature and describes clearly the opposition Mr. Siegel met:

     He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists….                             

     I say definitely that that single poem [“Hot Afternoons”], out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world….We are compelled to pursue his lead. Everything we most are compelled to do is in that one poem.  

     …As I read his pieces I am never prepared for what will come next, either the timing or the imagery….This is powerful evidence of a new track….The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new. The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the “authorities” whom I shall not dignify by naming.  

     Mr. Siegel's 1952 lecture on the poetry of Williams, is included in The Williams-Siegel Documentary (eds. Martha Baird and Ellen Reiss, Definition Press, 1970), under the title “Williams' Poetry Talked about by Eli Siegel, and William Carlos Williams Present and Talking.”

     In 1955, artists and writers opened the Terrain Gallery, with this statement by Eli Siegel as its basis: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” In that year, the Terrain Gallery published the broadside “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?,” 15 Questions by Eli Siegel, defining beauty in the visual arts; and the Terrain began holding exhibitions, lectures, poetry readings, and art talks presenting this new relation of the world, art, and life.  

     In 1973, the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation, was established to teach Aesthetic Realism and have it known.  

     On November 8, 1978, Eli Siegel died, as a result of an operation performed on him in May of that year.  

     Stated Maryland Congressman Elijah E. Cummings, formerly Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, in his congressional tribute to Mr. Siegel:  

Eli Siegel died in 1978, but his poetry and the education of Aesthetic Realism will be studied in every English, literature, and art classroom across the nation for years to come. [US Congressional Record, July 29, 2002]

     Among Mr. Siegel's published works are Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism (1981); Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems (1957), nominated for the National Book Award; Hail, American Development, containing 178 poems, including 32 translations (1968); James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (1968); and Children's Guide to Parents & Other Matters (1971, 2003). Numerous essays and poems are published in the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (1973 to present), edited by the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss. To-be-published works include The Aesthetic Nature of the World ; a third volume of poetry, Dear Time; Shakespeare's Hamlet: Revisited; hundreds of additional poems, lectures, and essays.

     Eli Siegel taught that it is crucial for people, in order to like themselves, to want to know and respect other people and the world. The following lines from "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" stand for that just way of seeing: