Eli Segal

SIEGEL, Eli (1902-1978), poet, critic, philosopher, educator, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1925 his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" won the esteemed Nation Poetry Prize. "I say definitely," William Carlos Williams was to write of it, "that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world."   

Beginning in  1941, the year he founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel gave  thousands of lectures on poetry, history, economics — all the arts and sciences.  And he gave thousands of individual lessons to men, women, and children, which taught a new way of seeing the world based on this principle: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."   

These lessons are the basis of Aesthetic Realism consultations now given at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York and by telephone worldwide. There are also public seminars and dramatic presentations, and classes, including a workshop in the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method — the educational method used with historic success for over 25 years in classrooms from elementary school through college.  

Among Mr. Siegel's many published works are Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism; Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, which was

nominated for a National Book Award in 1958 (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; James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James's "Turn  of the Screw"; and Goodbye Profit System:  Update.   

Eli Siegel taught how crucial it is for people, in order to like themselves, to want to know and respect other people and the world. The following passionate, logical,  musical lines from "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" stand for that just way  of seeing †which he had all the time:  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!   -  biography  is reprinted with the permission of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation

The Rise Of The U.S. Presidency
& The Forgotten Capitols
Click Here

Keynote Address on the 2003 Re-Internment of Samuel and Martha Huntington

Copyright© 2000 by Evisum Inc.^TM. All rights reserved.
Evisum Inc.^TM Privacy Policy