 Literature and Poetry
 The Comprehension Men & Women Desire / February 20, 2008
We are in the midst of serializing the lecture Some Women Looked At, which Eli Siegel gave in 1952. With clarity, depth, often humor, always kindness and style, he comments on various descriptions, literary and historical, of women. The basis is this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” We see opposites in women—in the same woman: such opposites as sweetness and fierceness, yielding and assertion, humility and pride. And we see both men's and women's confusion about the opposites.
In this issue there appears only a brief section of Some Women Looked At, because I want to join with that 1952 talk another instance—20 years later—of Eli Siegel's beautiful comprehension of women. In 1972 he lectured on the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). At the time, I wrote a report of the lecture, and it is this report which is printed here. more
The Human Self: Confusion & Grandeur / December 12, 2007
"We are honored to publish a poem by Eli Siegel about the novelist Norman Mailer, who died last month. With it, we print part of a paper that Aesthetic Realism consultant Nancy Huntting presented this fall at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar. The subject was: 'Can a Woman Be Both Serious and Lighthearted?'”
Mr. Siegel wrote the poem about Mailer in 1956, when that author was quite controversial. Meanwhile, years later, when he came to be treated as a literary elder statesman, Mailer was still, like every person, controversial to himself. We don't know how to see ourselves; how to be for and against ourselves; how, as this poem says, to make sense of our mind and body, modesty and boldness, our desire to be exact and our desire to be completely free." ...more
All the Arts by Eli Siegel / April 20, 1977
"Aesthetic Realism has tried to make two things clear, both of value to the life of man. The first of these is that all the arts, at their beginning, have something in common; and that this common thing in all the arts is the oneness of opposites, felt and worked with by an individual mind." ...more
Includes discussion of Byron, Beethoven, Delacroix, and Michelangelo.
The Great Barbarity—& What Can Oppose It / August 9, 2006
"The great barbarity of human beings, in history and now, is not to want to see the feelings of people other than oneself. This lack of desire to see others as having feelings as real as one's own is fundamental contempt. That is, it's central to the way of mind Eli Siegel described as 'the addition to self through the lessening of something else.'
"...An early work of Ernest Hemingway is a means of looking at what I've called here the great barbarity. Mr. Siegel considered Hemingway's 1924 collection of short stories, In Our Time, his best writing. And I think those stories are, in different ways, about the fact that people don't want to see another person's feelings." —Ellen Reiss ... more
The Shakespearean Awareness / March 24, 1976
"Every dramatist has to be aware of the three great emotions which, when used not in behalf of a more just world but in behalf of a superior self, can do such harm. These three great emotions which may be used in behalf of a falsely advanced self are: Fear, Anger, Contempt.
"Shakespeare says much of fear, anger, contempt. Some of the highest points in the world's literature have Shakespeare's awareness of these three emotions. And Shakespeare has hardly neglected contempt. Sometimes this contempt is readily seen-as when Hamlet satirically and poetically describes his usurping stepfather, Claudius. Everyone, then, would agree that Hamlet had contempt for King Claudius; also for Polonius. However, that he had contempt for Ophelia is a more difficult matter. And, changing plays, it is even more difficult to see that Othello had contempt for Desdemona." —Eli Siegel ...more
America Has Literature / September 6, 1978
"The first American novel that impressed Europe was The Spy of 1821 by James Fenimore Cooper. This book is deeply ingenious; but one aspect of it has not been dealt with by the critics. Harvey Birch, who seems to spy both for the British and Americans, is an example of double personality that has taken an external form. Cooper himself was a mingling of naiveté and caution. He was gentle and irascible. Nevertheless, he had one of the greatest imaginations the world has seen."—Eli Siegel... more
The Two Pleasures / May 5, 1976
"One thing that is clear in the history of man is that he has had pleasure of two kinds. Man has had pleasure from seeing a sunset; from Handel's Messiah; from seeing courage in someone; from a great rhythm in words. He has also had pleasure from making everything he can meaningless; from changing architecture into broken eggshells; from making the mighty malodorous; from trivializing. Man, then, praises; he also diminishes. The same lips that can curve and droop into a sneer can be apart in astonishment. Seeing meaning, then, has given pleasure; taking it away has also given pleasure." —Eli Siegel
This issue includes discussion of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Ludwig von Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare—and others. ... more
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." —Ellen Reiss....more
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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Art: "Aesthetic Realism sees the purpose of art as, from the beginning, the liking of the world more..." |
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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Selected Resources online |
The most comprehensive source of information about Aesthetic Realism is the website of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation—and the sites connected to it, including this one. You can start, for instance, at the Foundation's home page. Then, go on to biographical information about Eli Siegel, who founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941. You will see how the education he began teaching in those years continues now in Aesthetic Realism consultations and in public dramatic presentations and seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation—as well as in the Foundation's Outreach Programs for seniors, young people, libraries, teachers. Meanwhile in the schools of New York, the dramatically effective Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method has enabled students to learn, to love learning, and to pass standardized examinations for three decades. And artists since 1955 have exhibited at the Terrain Gallery for which many have written commentaries (including on their own works), based on the philosophic principles of Aesthetic Realism.
You can read about Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism online, as well as about every person on the faculty of the Foundation. As editor of TRO her commentaries are in every issue (see, e.g., " Nature, Romanticism, & Harry Potter"; "Clothing and Emotion"; and "Jobs, Discontent, and Beauty"). In the Aesthetic Realism Online Library, you'll find the largest single repositary of reviews, articles in the press, lectures, poetry; and The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.
In 2002, Eli Siegel's centenary, the Governor of Maryland and the Mayor of Baltimore, the city where he grew up, wrote on the meaning to America of Aesthetic Realism and its founder. So did the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, in the U.S. Congressional Record.
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People in America's diverse professions—the humanities, the arts, education, the social sciences, medicine, labor—have written on the value of Aesthetic Realism. They describe the way Aesthetic Realism teaches people how to understand themselves more accurately; how the ability to be just to other people is enhanced; how one's professional attainments are augmented. Language arts teacher Leila Rosen, for example, writes on the Aesthetic Realism teaching method. Anthropologist Arnold Perey writes on the way Aesthetic Realism opposes prejudice and improves international understanding. And there are many others.
Historically, new knowledge has often been met unjustly. This was true about the new, innovative thought of Louis Pasteur and John Keats, Beethoven and William Lloyd Garrison, Jonas Salk and Isaac Newton. And it has been true about Aesthetic Realism. Documenting and opposing this, the website "Friends of Aesthetic Realism — Countering the Lies," written by more than 60 individuals, refutes the falsehoods of the few persons who have attacked Aesthetic Realism and lets the facts speak for themselves.
People who want to express their opinion of Aesthetic Realism, and have the knowledge to back it up, have created blogs and websites and have written numerous articles. See, for example, composer and educator Edward Green; essayist Lynette Abel; photographer Len Bernstein; teachers Anne Richards, Christopher Balchin, and Alan Shapiro. Others are listed in "What People Are Saying."
The education of Aesthetic Realism enables a person to understand oneself more exactly than has been possible before, and to like the world honestly, authentically.
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