Eli Siegel

Eli Siegel (August 16, 1902 – November 8, 1978) was a poet, critic, and educator.

He founded Aesthetic Realism, a philosophical movement based in New York City.

An idea central to Aesthetic Realism—that every person, place or thing in reality has something in common with all other things—was expressed in the title poem of his first volume, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems.

His second volume was Hail, American Development.

Siegel's philosophic works include Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World, and The Aesthetic Nature of the World.

His teaching of Aesthetic Realism spanned almost four decades and included thousands of extemporaneous lectures on poetry, the arts and sciences, religion, economics, and national ethics, as well as lessons to individuals and general classes which showed that questions of everyday life are aesthetic and ethical.

His lecture on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which Williams attended, is published in The Williams-Siegel Documentary and his lectures on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw were edited into a critical consideration titled James and the Children.

Siegel's philosophy, and his statement, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites", has influenced artists, scientists, and educators.

Born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire, Siegel emigrated to the United States in 1905 with his parents, Mendel and Sarah (Einhorn) Siegel.

The family settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where Siegel attended Baltimore City College and joined the speech and debate team now referred to as the Bancroft/Carrollton-Wight Literary Societies.

He contributed to the senior publication The Green Bag and graduated in 1919.

In 1922, together with V.F. Calverton [George Goetz], he co-founded The Modern Quarterly, a magazine in which his earliest essays appeared, including "The Scientific Criticism" (Vol. I, No. 1, March 1923) and "The Equality of Man" (Vol. I, No. 3, December 1923).

In 1925, his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" was selected from four thousand anonymously submitted poems as the winner of The Nation's esteemed poetry prize.

The magazine's editors described it as "the most passionate and interesting poem which came in—a poem recording through magnificent rhythms a profound and important and beautiful vision of the earth on which afternoons and men have always existed."

The poem begins:

"Hot Afternoons" met violent opposition, according to William Carlos Williams, who wrote, years later: "Only today do I realize how important that poem is in the history of our development as a cultural entity."

"In Hot Afternoons", Siegel later explained, "I tried to take many things that are thought of usually as being far apart and foreign and to show, in a beautiful way, that they aren't so separate and that they do have a great deal to do with one another."

Siegel continued writing poetry throughout his life but devoted the majority of his time over the next decades to developing the philosophy he later called Aesthetic Realism.

After moving to New York City, he became a member of the Greenwich Village poets, famous for his dramatic readings of "Hot Afternoons" and other poems.

His two-word poem, One Question, won recognition in 1925 as the shortest poem in the English language.

It appeared in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post:

This poem was later reprinted without the author's name in an anthology edited by Louis Untermeyer and an anthology edited by Max J. Herzberg.

For several years in the 1930s Siegel served as master of ceremonies for regular poetry readings that were well known for combining poetry and jazz.

He was also a regular reviewer for Scribner's magazine and the New York Evening Post Literary Review.

In 1938, Siegel began teaching poetry classes with the view that "what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life".

In 1941, students in these classes asked him to give individual lessons in which they might learn about their own lives.

These were the first Aesthetic Realism lessons.

From 1941 to 1978, he gave many thousand lectures on poetry, history, economics—a wide variety of the arts and sciences.

And he gave thousands of individual Aesthetic Realism lessons to men, women, and children.

In these lessons the way of seeing the world based on aesthetics—which is Aesthetic Realism—was taught.

In 1944, Siegel married Martha Baird (University of Iowa), who had begun studying in his classes the year before.

Baird would later become Secretary of the Society for Aesthetic Realism, and also a musicologist and poet in her own right.

In 1946, at Steinway Hall, Siegel began giving weekly lectures in which he presented the philosophy he first called Aesthetic Analysis (later, Aesthetic Realism) "a philosophic way of seeing conflict in self and making this conflict clear to a person so that a person becomes more integrated and happier".

In 1951, William Carlos Williams read Siegel's "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" again, and wrote to Martha Baird: "Everything we most are compelled to do is in that one poem."

Siegel, he wrote, "belongs in the very first rank of our living artists".

The prize poem became the title poem of Siegel's first volume, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, nominated for a National Book Award in 1958.

A decade later, his second volume, Hail, American Development, also met with critical acclaim.

"I think it's about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets", wrote Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times. Walter Leuba described Siegel's poems as "alive in a burning honesty and directness" and yet, having "exquisite emotional tact".

He pointed to these lines from "Dear Birds, Tell This to Mothers":

At the age of 76 Siegel had an operation for a benign prostatic condition.