Eli Siegel

Eli Siegel (August 16, 1902 – November 8, 1978) was a poet, critic, educator, philosopher, and Broadway performer born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire. He emigrated to the United States in 1905 with his parents, Mendel and Sarah (Einhorn) Siegel, and the family settled in Baltimore, Maryland. There he attended Baltimore City College, participated in the speech and debate societies known as the Bancroft/Carrollton-Wight Literary Societies, contributed to the senior publication The Green Bag, and graduated in 1919.

In 1922, Siegel co-founded The Modern Quarterly alongside V.F. Calverton (George Goetz), a magazine in which his early essays appeared, including "The Scientific Criticism" (Vol. I, No. 1, March 1923) and "The Equality of Man" (Vol. I, No. 3, December 1923). Three years later, in 1925, his poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" was chosen as the winner of The Nation's poetry prize from a pool of four thousand anonymously submitted works. That same year, his two-word poem One Question received recognition as the shortest poem in the English language, appearing in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post. It was subsequently reprinted, without attribution, in anthologies edited by Louis Untermeyer and Max J. Herzberg.

After relocating to New York City, Siegel became part of the Greenwich Village poets and was known for his dramatic readings of "Hot Afternoons" and other works. During the 1930s he served for several years as master of ceremonies for regular poetry-and-jazz readings and contributed reviews to Scribner's magazine and the New York Evening Post Literary Review. In 1938 he began teaching poetry classes, and by 1941 students in those classes requested individual lessons examining their own lives — sessions that marked the beginning of Aesthetic Realism instruction. That same year, Siegel appeared on Broadway, with credits including Adelante and the drama Brooklyn, U.S.A. He was also active as a composer during this period.

In 1944, Siegel married Martha Baird, a graduate of the University of Iowa who had begun studying in his classes the previous year. Baird later became Secretary of the Society for Aesthetic Realism and established herself as a musicologist and poet. Beginning in 1946, Siegel delivered weekly lectures at Steinway Hall presenting the philosophy he initially called Aesthetic Analysis and later named Aesthetic Realism, describing it as "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." From 1941 through 1978 he gave thousands of lectures spanning poetry, history, economics, and a broad range of arts and sciences, as well as thousands of individual lessons to men, women, and children.

The central principle of Aesthetic Realism — "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites" — informed Siegel's teaching across nearly four decades. His philosophic writings 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 lecture on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, which Williams himself attended, was published in The Williams-Siegel Documentary. His lectures on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw were edited into the critical work James and the Children. In 1951, Williams wrote that Siegel "belongs in the very first rank of our living artists."

The poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" became the title work of Siegel's first poetry collection, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, nominated for a National Book Award in 1958. His second volume, Hail, American Development, also received critical attention; Kenneth Rexroth wrote in the New York Times that it was "about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets." At age 76, Siegel underwent an operation for a benign prostatic condition, which, according to Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss, was the cause of his death five and a half months later. He died on November 8, 1978.