Eli Siegel was an American poet, critic, educator, and philosopher who won The Nation's Poetry Prize in 1925 and founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941. His poetry, literary criticism, lectures, and teaching explored the relation of art, self, and world through the principle that beauty is a oneness of opposites.
Background
Eli Siegel was born on August 16, 1902, in Dvinsk, Latvia, to Mendel Siegel and Sarah Einhorn Siegel. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1905, was naturalized in 1912, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where the family became part of the city's immigrant and Jewish cultural environment.
Siegel attended Baltimore City College from 1916 to 1919. His early literary development took place in Baltimore, where he wrote poetry and became involved in debate and literary activities before moving permanently to New York City in 1926.
Education
Siegel attended Baltimore City College from 1916 to 1919 and graduated in 1919. Founded in 1839, the school was one of the United States' earliest public high schools and had developed a strong tradition in classical, literary, scientific, and civic education. Siegel's membership in its Carrollton-Wight literary society connected his secondary education with the public-speaking and literary culture of the institution.
He pursued no documented university education. In Baltimore and New York, his intellectual development proceeded through independent study, literary journalism, poetry, and sustained examination of the arts, sciences, and philosophy.
Career
Siegel began his public literary career in Baltimore. In 1922 and 1923 he helped establish The Modern Quarterly with V. F. Calverton, and his early essays, including “The Scientific Criticism,” appeared in the journal. In 1925 he became a columnist for the Baltimore American, the same year that his poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” won The Nation's Poetry Prize.
Siegel moved permanently to New York City in 1926 and worked as a literary reviewer for the New York Evening Post Literary Review and Scribner's Magazine. During the 1930s he chaired poetry and jazz programs at the Village Vanguard and conducted poetry readings at venues including the Troubadour and the Village Mill. His criticism treated jazz as an art with philosophical significance, while his poetry appeared in publications including The New Republic, Free Verse, Hound & Horn, Modern Quarterly, Blues, and Poetry Folio.
In 1938 Siegel began teaching The Poetry Group for New York writers and artists. In 1941 he founded Aesthetic Realism, first called Aesthetic Analysis, and began giving individual lessons and lectures on poetry, literature, history, the arts, sciences, and the human mind. For nearly four decades he taught in his library at 67 Jane Street, New York, giving thousands of lectures and lessons.
His later work joined poetry, literary criticism, philosophy, and public education. He helped establish the Terrain Gallery's philosophical program in 1955, wrote and lectured on visual art and literature, and in 1963 presented Shakespeare's “Hamlet”: Revisited as a thirteen-part work combining drama and criticism. The Aesthetic Realism Foundation was established in 1973 to teach the philosophy he developed. Siegel continued writing and teaching until serious medical problems led him to suspend regular teaching in 1977; he died in New York on November 8, 1978.
Achievements
Siegel's poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” won The Nation's Poetry Prize in 1925 from thousands of submitted poems and became the central work of his first poetry collection.
He founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941, developing a philosophical and educational system that connected aesthetics with ethics, literature, psychology, education, and everyday life.
He gave thousands of lectures and individual lessons in New York City on poetry, literature, history, the arts, sciences, and the human mind over nearly four decades.
He developed “Hamlet”: Revisited, a thirteen-part stage work that combined Shakespearean drama with extended literary criticism.
He helped establish a philosophical program for the Terrain Gallery in 1955, centered on the principle that art makes opposites one.
Works
anthology contribution
And Spain Sings
(A contribution by Siegel to a 1937 collection of writing ...)
1937
aphorisms
Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims
(A collection of Siegel's concise statements on Aesthetic ...)
(Siegel's first book of poetry, nominated for the National...)
1957
Hail, American Development
(Siegel's second volume of poetry, containing original poe...)
1968
social criticism
Goodbye Profit System
(A work in which Siegel addressed economic life and the so...)
1970
Views
Siegel's philosophy of Aesthetic Realism held that the world, art, and self explain one another through an aesthetic oneness of opposites. He argued that the deepest human desire is to like the world honestly and that the central danger to human development is contempt, understood as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase.
His writings connected aesthetics with ethics, education, literature, psychology, history, science, and everyday relationships. He maintained that the resolution of conflict in a person's life could be understood through the way art makes opposites one, joining such qualities as freedom and exactitude, intensity and ease, and individuality and relation to the world.
Quotations:
“The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”
“The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it.”
Personality
Contemporary accounts described Siegel as intellectually independent, purposeful, and unwilling to subordinate his literary judgment to publicity or institutional approval. His teaching and writing consistently emphasized fairness to reality, attention to other people, and opposition to contempt.
Quotes from others about the person
William Carlos Williams praised the originality and technical force of Siegel's poetry in a 1951 letter to Martha Baird, describing it as evidence of a new poetic direction. Kenneth Rexroth later argued that Siegel belonged among the leading poets of his time. Hugh Kenner praised James and the Children for its careful and candid reading of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.
Interests
Siegel had sustained interests in poetry, literary criticism, visual art, music, jazz, philosophy, education, history, science, and the ethical questions of everyday life.
Philosophers & Thinkers
Siegel lectured extensively on major philosophers including Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and William James, treating their ideas in relation to aesthetics, ethics, and the human mind.
Writers
Henry James, William Shakespeare, William Carlos Williams, Charles Baudelaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pearl Buck, and Mark Twain were among the writers whom Siegel studied, reviewed, translated, or discussed.
Music & Bands
Siegel wrote about music and jazz as arts with philosophical significance. He chaired poetry and jazz evenings at the Village Vanguard during the 1930s and gave lectures connecting musical form with the relation of opposites.
Connections
Siegel was the son of Mendel Siegel and Sarah Einhorn Siegel. He married Martha Baird on October 7, 1944. Baird was a poet and writer on music who edited several of Siegel's posthumously published or collected works and continued work associated with Aesthetic Realism after his death.
Father:
Mendel Siegel
Mother:
Sarah (Einhorn) Siegel
Wife:
Martha Baird
Poet and writer on music who edited and helped preserve several works associated with Siegel and Aesthetic Realism.
Eli Siegel: A Google Knol
Extended biographical and bibliographical account of Siegel's education, early essays, poetry, literary criticism, lectures, philosophy, marriage, and major works.
JMM Biographical Vertical Files—Summaries
Jewish Museum of Maryland archival summary identifying Siegel as a Baltimore-born poet, critic, philosopher, and educator who won The Nation Poetry Prize in 1925 and founded Aesthetic Realism in 1941.
