 Literature and Poetry
 Woman Always and Now / June 26, 2002
We begin to serialize the historic lecture Poetry and Women, which Eli Siegel gave in 1949. So much in women’s lives has changed since then. Women now do just about everything men do. Yet though it is expected that girls play soccer, and female doctors and lawyers abound, and no one is surprised to see a woman wield a hammer, there is still a difference between woman and man. The question What is a woman? remains.
This issue of TRO continues the 1966 lecture Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things, in which Eli Siegel looks at terms put out by the American Psychiatric Association. This issue discusses compulsion, phobia, and more. Writes Ellen Reiss in the editor's commentary: "The psychiatry of today consists, to a large degree, of medication. Yet the crucial questions still are: What interferes with mind—what makes it fare ill? Also, what does it mean for mind, including one’s own, to fare well?"
To illustrate the great answer Aesthetic Realism gives—and the place of aesthetics in that answer—she writes, "I’m going to look...at something in literature that has been popular for more than a century, as a means of asking: When anything in art continues to please people, is it because it makes a one of opposites—opposites that we are trying to put together and that may fight in us? So let us consider Sherlock Holmes, the world-famous detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). ... more
We approach the 26th anniversary of the death of Eli Siegel. And it is an honor to publish in this issue writing that, though brief, stands for the grandeur and kindness of his mind and the philosophy he founded.
First there is a poem of 1960, “Balzac and People Living Nonetheless.” The poem is a sonnet. And bounding in the strictness of that 14-line form is Mr. Siegel's warm, exact, musical honoring of a writer: we feel the quality of Balzac as Mr. Siegel writes of him.
We also print part of a paper that Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner presented at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “What Gets in a Man's Way—the World or His Own Ego?” We see instances of how Mr. Siegel, teaching Aesthetic Realism, spoke to a person (here Jeffrey Carduner). And we see an instance of the Aesthetic Realism consultations that are taking place now. They continue the new, aesthetic understanding of self that Mr. Siegel made possible. ... more
Justice and Punctuation / June 16, 2004
We’re very glad to publish in this issue “What Is the Best Punctuation for the Self?” It is one of the many, wonderful “bulletins” Eli Siegel wrote for Aesthetic Realism Dramatic Presentations during the 1960s and ’70s. The impetus to our printing this bulletin now is the fact that 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. ... more
Poetry, Self, and Love / January 14, 2004
Eli Siegel explained that what makes for a true poem is the very thing that will make a person’s life happy, intelligent, proud. What takes place in the technique of a good poem is what we need, and we suffer because we do not have it: "All beauty," he showed, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." We publish his 1960 essay "What Aesthetic Realism Adds to Poetry; or, If One Wishes, Just Says about It."
The title is very modest—because what Aesthetic Realism adds to poetry is the biggest thing in the centuries-long history of poetic criticism. It is what such critics as Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Boileau, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold thirsted to see: the thing that makes one arrangement of words poetry and another not .... more
The Purpose a Woman Wants / July 10, 2002
We have come to Eli Siegel’s discussion of poems by Caroline Norton (1808-77). We see his beautiful deep comprehension of her, and of women. We see the question which torments women now, even though a woman most often does not articulate it: How can I love a man and be loved, and yet be fully myself?....more
Against Coldness in Ourselves / November 11, 1981
If there is any one work, it seems to me, where Hawthorne has presented concisely and richly his attitude to the world and the heart of man, that work is the short story "The Man of Adamant." All through Hawthorne's work, there is the admonition: "Do not be alone in concealed glory. Do not separate yourself from the rest of things, so that, darkly, you can establish yourself in another world." We know that Hawthorne himself had to meet this temptation. Often he was described as seclusive, remote, Olympian in the shades ... more
The Sanity of Poetry; or, H.D. / June 24, 1998
Why the study of poetry, as understood by Aesthetic Realism, is urgent for a person, a nation, to be wholly sane. On H.D, or, Hilda Doolittle: "Her life is a means of seeing Aesthetic Realism’s greatness in explaining something not understood elsewhere, something still looked at in a barbaric fashion: the relation between art and mental difficulty or depression." ... more
Nature, Romanticism, & Harry Potter / June 21, 2000
"Eli Siegel is the critic who showed that romanticism did not stop by the second half of the 19th century, as is generally thought - and it has never stopped...."All romanticists," he wrote, "have tended to make reality and wonder akin, the fact and strangeness like each other." ...Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is, I believe, true literature....the ordinariness and strangeness of reality are more deeply one in it, more sincerely joined, than in many contemporary presentations." —Ellen Reiss ... more
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The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known online |
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Current Issues: The most recent issues in which Aesthetic Realism explains the news, happenings in people's lives, events in history, and some of the most moving works in literature. |
National Ethics: What honest criteria can we use to be good critics of ethics on the national and international levels? Aesthetic Realism looks at ethics as to loyalty, international affairs, & more. |
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Literature / Poetry: Discussing many great works of poetry and prose. Criticism, wrote Eli Siegel compactly, is showing "a good thing as good, a bad thing as bad, and a middling thing as middling." |
Love: How Aesthetic Realism describes the purpose of love--"to like the world honestly through another person." Discussion of what interferes with having real love--today and in history. |
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Racism—the Cause & Solution: The Aesthetic Realism understanding of contempt as the cause of racism, and the place of aesthetics in respecting, pleasurably, people different from oneself. |
The Economy: Why our economic system has failed to meet the needs of the American people, and the Aesthetic Realism understanding of good will as the basis for successful and fair economics |
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Education: The success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method in having students learn to read and write--learn science, social studies, art, every subject--and be kinder, less angry, less prejudiced. |
Eli Siegel Day in Baltimore: Talks given on August 16, 2002, Eli Siegel's Centenary, placing Mr. Siegel and Aesthetic Realism, his work, in terms of world culture and history. |
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Archives: The rich education provided by Aesthetic Realism in issues of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known which are online. |
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