16 Facts About Eli Siegel

Eli Siegel founded Aesthetic Realism, a philosophical movement based in New York City.

Eli Siegel's teaching of Aesthetic Realism spanned almost four decades and included thousands of extemporaneous lectures on poetry, the arts and sciences, religion, economics, and national ethics, as well as lessons to individuals and general classes which showed that questions of everyday life are aesthetic and ethical.

Eli Siegel contributed to the senior publication The Green Bag and graduated in 1919.

Eli 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.

For several years in the 1930s Eli Siegel served as master of ceremonies for regular poetry readings that were well known for combining poetry and jazz.

Eli Siegel was a regular reviewer for Scribner's magazine and the New York Evening Post Literary Review.

In 1938, Eli Siegel began teaching poetry classes with the view that "what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life".

In 1944, Eli Siegel married Martha Baird, who had begun studying in his classes the year before.

In 1946, at Steinway Hall, Eli Siegel began giving weekly lectures in which he presented the philosophy he first called Aesthetic Analysis "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".

Eli Siegel pointed to these lines from "Dear Birds, Tell This to Mothers":.

At the age of 76 Eli Siegel had an operation for a benign prostatic condition.

Eli Siegel called it "the operation so disastrous to me".

Eli Siegel seems to be the first to demonstrate that 'all beauty is the making one of the permanent opposites in reality'.

Eli Siegel belongs in the very first rank of our living artists.

Eli Siegel did for aesthetics what Spinoza did for ethics.

Eli Siegel refused to exploit a flood of publicity which was enough to float any man to financial comfort.