Eli Siegel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eli Siegel (August 16, 1902–November 8, 1978), poet and critic, founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism in 1941. Born in Latvia, his family came to the United States when he was an infant. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he graduated from the Baltimore City College high school, and lived most of his life in New York City, where he took his life in 1978.

Contents

[edit] Life

In 1925, his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" won the Nation Poetry Prize. (It would later be published in Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, nominated for a National Book Award in 1958.) Mark Van Doren, head of the Nation prize committee, wrote that it is: "a poem recording through magnificent rhythms a profound and important and beautiful vision of the earth on which afternoons and men have always existed." [Vol. 120, no. 3110, p.136] The poem propelled him to fame, and he was both praised and attacked for it. Siegel became a member of the Greenwich Village poets, famous for his dramatic readings of Hot Afternoons and other poems. His three-word poem, One Question, won recognition as the shortest poem in the English language. It appeared in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post in 1925:

One Question
I —
Why?

For several years in the 1930s he served as master of ceremonies for regular poetry readings that were well-known for combining poetry and jazz. Also in the 1930s Siegel was a regular reviewer for Scribner's magazine and the New York Evening Post Literary Review.

In 1944 he married Martha Baird (University of Iowa), who had started taking classes with him the year before. Baird would later be Secretary of the Society for Aesthetic Realism. [1]

From 1941 to 1978, Siegel 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.

Siegel gave Aesthetic Realism lessons from 1941–1978 with the purpose of encouraging good will to the world and to people.

At the age of 76, Siegel had an operation for a benign prostatic condition. As a result, he lost the use of his feet. He called it "the operation so disastrous to me." November 8, 1978, With his health continuing to deteriorate, five months after his surgery, Siegel chose to end his own life. He died peacefully in the presence of his wife, Martha Baird. His suicide was described by Ellen Reiss in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. In "Always: Love of Reality" she writes, in part, "Mr. Siegel, as he lived, and also in dying, was true to the philosophy he founded: his purpose was to be fair to the world".

[edit] Aesthetic Realism

The basis of Aesthetic Realism is the principle, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites".[2] In the book, Aesthetic Realism: We Have Been There, six working artists explain this principle in life and their own craft. Reviewing them, the Library Journal tells us: "Heraclitus, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and even Martin Buber have posited contraries and polarities in their philosophies. Siegel, however, seems to be the first to demonstrate that 'all beauty is the making one of the permanent opposites in reality'." (1 September 1969) [3]

The ethics Siegel taught—"the art of enjoying justice"—includes this definition of good will: "The desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful". Good will is necessary, he stated, for a person to like him– or herself: "This desire is the fundamental thing in human consciousness". (The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue no. 121)

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation continues to teach the philosophy that Siegel founded. The Foundation gives consultations in New York and by telephone internationally.

[edit] Works

Among Siegel's many published works are:

  • Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism. About Self and World, Smithsonian magazine wrote: "Whether child or adult is spoken of, this book [Self and World] sees a person's concerns with dignity and compassion". (February, 1982) [4]
  • Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, a collection of poems nominated for a National Book Award in 1958. Regarding the title poem, poet William Carlos Williams wrote, "I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world".[5] John Henry Faulk, speaking of the poems in this book, said on CBS radio, "Eli Siegel makes a man glad he's alive".
  • Hail, American Development, containing 178 poems, including 32 translations—"all with the same incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say", wrote Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times Book Review,; adding, "[Eli Siegel's] translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language". (23 March 1969) [6]
  • James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw" and Goodbye Profit System: Update.

[edit] Comments on Siegel's work

William Carlos Williams was an early supporter of Siegel's poetry and defender of his views. Williams wrote:

I can't tell you how important Siegel's work is in the light of my present understanding of the modern poem. He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists.

And Williams continued:

The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the "authorities" whom I shall not dignify by naming and after that by neglect ("Something to Say", ed. by J.E.B. Breslin, New Directions).

In Contemporary Authors Ellen Reiss, academic head of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, stated (in a book published by Definition Press, said Foundation's publishing arm):

Eli Siegel's work, which in time became Aesthetic Realism, was the cause of some of the largest praise, the largest love in persons, and also the largest resentment… In writing an entry about [him] for Contemporary Authors, you are somewhat in the position you would be writing an entry on the poet John Keats in 1821. That is, if you were to rely on what was said of Keats by most established critics (critics now remembered principally for their injustice to one of the greatest English writers), you would present the author of `Ode to a Nightingale' as a presumptuous `Cockney poet' whose works were `driveling idiocy.' In writing about Eli Siegel [now], you are writing about a contemporary who is great; who all his life met what William Carlos Williams described him as meeting, `the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new'; who now, after his death, is beginning, just barely beginning, to be seen with something like fairness.

Huntington Cairns, Secretary of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., described Siegel's place in the understanding of aesthetics—the branch of philosophy which studies beauty—as follows:

I believe that Eli Siegel was a genius. He did for aesthetics what Spinoza did for ethics. [7]

Donald Kirkley wrote in the [Baltimore Sun|Baltimore Sun] (1944) reporting on Siegel's reaction to his 1925 national fame,

Baltimore friends close to him at the time will testify to a certain integrity and steadfastness of purpose which distinguished Mr. Siegel… He refused to exploit a flood of publicity which was enough to float any man to financial comfort…"[8]

And William Carlos Williams also wrote,

Only today do I realize how important that poem ["Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana"] is in the history of our development as a cultural entity." [9]

In 2002 the city of Baltimore placed a plaque in Druid Hill Park to commemorate the centennial of Eli Siegel's birth. That same year Representative Elijah E. Cummings read a tribute to Siegel in the United States House of Representatives.

[edit] Epitaph

The following are lines from Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana, one of the poems which Selden Rodman wrote "say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read". (17 August 1957 Saturday Review) These lines stand for what Ellen Reiss has described as Siegel's "beautiful, faithful, passionate, critical, loving attention to the world and humanity".[10]

The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it!
The past is in it;
All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls,
trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it;
and all are to be known;
Afternoons have to do with the whole world;
And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Baird, Martha and Reiss, Ellen, eds. The Williams-Siegel Documentary. Including Williams' Poetry Talked about by Eli Siegel, and William Carlos Williams Present and Talking: 1952. New York: Definition Press, 1970
  • Breslin, James E. -- William Carlos Williams on Eli Siegel's poetry -- Something to Say New York: New Directions, 1985.
  • Contemporary Authors 24 October 2002, Thomson / Gale.
  • Leila Rosen. Through Aesthetic Realism Interest Wins, Cynicism Loses. The English Record, Journal of the New York State English Council, Vol. 49, no. 1, Fall 1998.
  • New Mexico Quarterly — Walter Leuba's review "Whole in Brightness" (Autumn 1957, Vol. XXVII, No. 3).
  • Williams, William Carlos. Letter to Martha Baird. Breslin, J.E.B., ed. Something to Say. New York: New Directions, 1985.
  • Idaho Senior News, November 1997 by Irene Reiss, an Aesthetic Realism Foundation faculty member.
  • Biographical information about Eli Siegel provided by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company
  • Kenneth Rexroth. Review of Hail, American Development in the New York Times Book Review, 23 March 1969
  • Aesthetic Realism and the Change from Homosexuality, ISBN 0-910492-34-4
  • Janet Whitaker (2002). Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn, 50-51. Google Print. ISBN 0-312-29064-0 (accessed June 16, 2005). Also available in print from St. Martin's Press.
  • See Martha Baird in Love's Witness: Five Centuries of Love Poetry by Women edited by Jill Hollis
  • Siegel, Eli, Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism. New York: Definition Press, 1981
  • Siegel, Eli, Good Will Is Aesthetics. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, issue no. 121, 23 July 1975
  • Siegel, Eli, Hail, American Development. Poems. New York: Definition Press, 1968
  • Siegel, Eli, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. New York: Definition Press, 1958

[edit] External links

Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about: