Eli Siegel - Life

Life

Born in Latvia, Siegel's 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.

In 1925, his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" was selected from four thousand anonymously submitted poems as the winner of The Nation's esteemed poetry prize. The magazine's editors described it as "the most passionate and interesting poem which came in—a poem recording through magnificent rhythms a profound and important and beautiful vision of the earth on which afternoons and men have always existed." The poem begins:

Quiet and green was the grass of the field,

The sky was whole in brightness,

And O, a bird was flying, high, there in the sky,

So gently, so carelessly and fairly.

"Hot Afternoons" was controversial; the author's innovative technique in this long, free-verse poem tended to polarize commentators, with much of the criticism taking the form of parody. "In Hot Afternoons," Siegel later explained, "I tried to take many things that are thought of usually as being far apart and foreign and to show, in a beautiful way, that they aren’t so separate and that they do have a great deal to do with one another."

Siegel continued writing poetry throughout his life, but devoted the majority of his time over the next decades to developing the philosophy he later called Aesthetic Realism. After moving to New York City, he became a member of the Greenwich Village poets, famous for his dramatic readings of Hot Afternoons and other poems. His two-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, Siegel served as master of ceremonies for regular poetry readings that were well known for combining poetry and jazz. He was also a regular reviewer for Scribner's magazine and the New York Evening Post Literary Review. In 1938, Siegel began teaching poetry classes with the view that "what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life." In 1941, students in these classes asked him to give individual lessons in which they might learn about their own lives. These were the first Aesthetic Realism lessons.

In 1944, Siegel married Martha Baird (University of Iowa), who had begun studying in his classes the year before. Baird would later become Secretary of the Society for Aesthetic Realism.

In 1946, at Steinway Hall in New York City, Siegel began giving weekly lectures in which he presented the philosophy he first called Aesthetic Analysis (later, Aesthetic Realism) "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 to 1978, he 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.

In 1951, William Carlos Williams read Siegel's "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" again, and wrote to Martha Baird: "Everything we most are compelled to do is in that one poem." Siegel, he wrote, "belongs in the very first rank of our living artists." The prize poem became the title poem of Siegel's first volume, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, nominated for a National Book Award in 1958. A decade later, his second volume, Hail, American Development, also met with critical acclaim. "I think it's about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets," wrote Kenneth Rexroth, in the New York Times. Walter Leuba described Siegel's poems as "alive in a burning honesty and directness" and yet, having "exquisite emotional tact." He pointed to these lines, from "Dear Birds, Tell This to Mothers":

Find the lost lines in

The writing that is your child, mothers. . .

At the age of 76, Siegel had an operation for a benign prostatic condition. He called it "the operation so disastrous to me." As a result, he lost the use of his feet, and was unable to sleep. Five months after the surgery, with his health continuing to deteriorate, followers of his philosophy of Aesthetic Realism say that Siegel took his life. His suicide was described by Ellen Reiss in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known wrote: "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".