"It calls for more fairness to all reality than has been demanded before....Whether child or adult is spoken of, this book sees a person's concerns with dignity and compassion."   — Smithsonian Magazine

"The study of how the self, surmising triumph, abets disaster will be, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, the future study of mind as a means of encouraging persons to be more the way they would like to be." Preface
1. The Frances Sanders Lesson. A transcript of one decidedly important Aesthetic Realism lesson.
2. The Ordinary Doom. "If we judge from history, we are doomed not to show our feelings; not to have them known..." More >>
3. "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" See this work online.

From the chapter "Caring for Somebody"

Let's say that a year ago (you are now eight) you met a little girl who was then six. Cora could tell you things about what everything was, make you feel new things, make you like her smile.

Read chapters online:

Work [Chapter 10]
Books [Chapter 11]

Review of the Children's Guide in the Harlem Times

This traditional story of the Ndowe People of Africa was retold and illustrated by anthropologist Arnold Perey. It's about Tortoise, who shows the big Elephant and Hippopotamus that they should not look down on him because he is small. Prejudice, says Aesthetic Realism, arises from contempt for what's different from yourself, and this makes it wrong.

"He comes up with poems...which say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read"...Selden Rodman, Saturday Review

The poems in HAIL, AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT, writes Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times Book Review, have Eli Siegel's "incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say....His translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language."

New York Times Book Review
Poems from Hail, American Development

Poems by Sheldon Kranz, Louis Dienes, Nancy Starrels, 
Nat Herz, Martha Baird, Rebecca Fein; with a Critical 
Preface by Eli Siegel.

In This Book

From Journal of Martha Baird: "ES gives a magnificent talk, covering all Williams' work, and criss-crossing back and forth so that you have a feeling of a central thing going through it all. He is funny too, and I see Williams is nodding his head and laughing."

Read Online - [Chapter 2] Williams' Poetry Talked about by Eli Siegel, and William Carlos Williams Present and Talking

Read online:

Table of Contents
Careful Hovering [Chapter 1]

Hugh Kenner wrote in Poetry magazine:

"It is a reading so careful and candid it reduces most previous discussion to wilful evasiveness. The oddness of a literary critic constantly asking us to think about real children can suggest how odd is the criticism we're accustomed to. "

Early essays by Eli Siegel on literary and art criticism, the ethics of human equality and of economics — having, writes Ellen Reiss in a new introduction, "that great, kind, true way of seeing art, the past, earth, and the self of every human being which would become the philosophy Aesthetic Realism."

This book is being published with a sense of urgency and hope; urgency, because racism is still rampant in the world; hope, because there is a true, practical, kind, learnable, and yes—even beautiful—answer. It documents how, through study of Aesthetic Realism, contempt changes—not into tolerance, but into true respect for other people. — Alice Bernstein

Martha Baird writes on the opposites in the history of dramatic criticism — how they lead up to what Eli Siegel came to: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

Six artists describe the value of the Aesthetic Realism explanation of beauty in their own fields.

Reviews from Popular Photography & the Library Journal

Chaim Koppelman, an esteemed printmaker, writes of the ethical meaning in the greatest prints of Picasso, Munch, Hogarth and Daumier.

Maxim #1. Don't shake the hand of reality with only one finger.

Maxim #65. On every subject the best thing can be said.

Maxim #413. Any desire of ours should be able to do a solo performance in the Yankee Stadium with the bleachers filled.

In this book you will take a trip to the heart of Papua New Guinea, to the mountains, peaceful and turbulent, where Gwe lives. We invite you to a new understanding of the human self, as you meet Gwe, his relations, his enemies, and Alan, the anthropologist who lived with them. Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the great poet and educator Eli Siegel, is that understanding. It explains: There is a fight in every person between respect for the world and contempt for it.