Aesthetic Realism - Poetry

Poetry

Eli Siegel stated that ideas central to the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism were implicitly present in “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” the poem that brought him widespread fame when it was awarded The Nation's esteemed poetry prize in 1925. The philosophic principle that individuality is relation, “that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things,” is in this poem. It begins with a hot, quiet afternoon in Montana and travels through time and space, showing that things usually thought of as separate and unrelated “have a great deal to do with each other.” These are lines near the end of the poem:

Hot afternoons are real; afternoons are; places, things, thoughts, feelings are; poetry is;

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….

The search for that which connects all branches of knowledge led Siegel to discover a key concept of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Aesthetic Realism classes were scholarly and demonstrated that poetry was related to the problems of everyday life. The viewpoint of Aesthetic Realism is that “what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life.” contradicts the Freudian view of art as sublimation.

Siegel defined poetry as “the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” In Aesthetic Realism classes he explained that the greatest desire of a person is to put together opposites, as, in a good poem, “emotion changes into logic: there is no rift between the two.” He maintained that music distinguishes true poetry, whatever the language, period or style; the music of a poem shows the poet has honestly perceived opposites as one, and sincerely united personal feelings with the impersonal structure of the world. “Poetry,” he wrote, “arises out of a like of the world so intense and wide that of itself, it is musical.” Therefore, Aesthetic Realism teaches, even a poem that in substance seems to condemn the world, in its technique and music is praising the world, seeing it truly.

In thousands of Aesthetic Realism lectures, Siegel demonstrated the centrality of poetry to every aspect of life, including "Poetry and Anger," "Poetry and Love," "Educational Method Is Poetic,” "Poetry and Time," "Poetry, Money, and Good Will," “A Poetic Technique of Parenthood,” “Poetry and History,” and “Hamlet Revisited; or, The Family Should Be Poetry.” His students affirm that an important aspect of the philosophy continues to be the study of how a good poem has within it “the composition, beauty, sanity we want in ourselves." This education, they assert, “makes it possible for poetry to be, as Matthew Arnold said, a criticism of life.”