Ellen Reiss, Editor of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

Ellen Reiss is the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, appointed by Eli Siegel. The editor of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, she also teaches the professional classes for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates.

A poet and critic herself, prior to becoming Class Chairman in 1977 Ms. Reiss taught in the English departments of Hunter College and Queens College of the City University of New York. As editor of the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, her commentaries on world events, literature, history, and the human self have been educating people worldwide. She is considered by many people the foremost educator in the world today.

Here are links to several issues of The Right Of, each with her editorial commentary on a different subject. There are many 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

What Is Loyalty to America? Aesthetic Realism explains that love for country is a matter of ethics and aesthetics .... I am going to comment on a statement which has been felt to stand for American patriotism: the Pledge of Allegiance, recited in the classrooms of the land and at other gatherings of Americans....>> More

Racism Can End. The big thing people have not known about racial prejudice is that it does not begin with race. It begins with the world itself, and how one sees the world..." >> 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

Nature, Romanticism, & Harry Potter. 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.... >> More

Attention: An Aesthetic Matter. In recent years, difficulty with attention has been talked of mainly as a clinical matter. Many children are said to have "attention deficit disorder"; and they have been given, abundantly, the drug Ritalin as the supposed mighty pharmaceutical bringer of attentiveness. Ritalin is now being questioned....>> 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

The Persistence of Fabric. 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

On Robert Burns;Jobs, Discontent, and Beauty. I will 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

• Ellen Reiss: Biographical Information

Ellen Reiss as teacher: Descriptions of classes

• "Architecture Is Ourselves" by architect David Salmon
• "How Should a Child Be Seen?" by teachers Barbara McClung and Lauren Phillips
• “The World As Idioms” by English teacher Leila Rosen

	Current: The most recent issues of TRO: the current news and happenings in people's lives join events in history, and moving works of literature.	National Ethics: What honest criteria can we use to be good critics of ethics on the national and international levels?
	Aesthetic Realism Itself: Eli Siegel's explanation of Aesthetic Realism as a study in three parts:1. Liking the World; 2. The Opposites; and 3. The Meaning of Contempt.	Mind: The way Aesthetic Realism sees mind differs from every other approach in the importance it gives to how an individual sees the world.
	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.
	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
	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.
	Contents: All Issues Online. This table of contents (site map) lists all issues of TRO online.