Eli Siegel (1902-1978), great American poet, critic, and founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, is the author of Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic RealismHot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: PoemsHail, American Development (Poems); Modern Quarterly Beginnings of Aesthetic Realism, 1922-1923; and James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

In 1925 his groundbreaking poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” won the highly esteemed Nation Poetry Prize and swept America. In 1958 his book of poems with that title was nominated for the National Book Award and he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. For his centenary in 2002, the city where he grew up, Baltimore, Maryland, celebrated Eli Siegel Day, with proclamations by the mayor and governor and a celebration in Druid Hill Park.

Teaching in New York City for four decades, Eli Siegel gave thousands of thrilling lectures and classes on the arts and sciences, including many on the relation of science and art. Based on the principles he taught, the Aesthetic Realism Foundation provides a variety of classes, currently via video conferencing.

The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

Many of Eli Siegel’s groundbreaking works are published in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (TRO), the international periodical he began in 1973. It explains what is happening in the world, and in people—in you. The Right Of contains immensely valuable and timely essays, poems, and lectures by Mr. Siegel and articles by Aesthetic Realism teachers and students. In every issue there is an editorial commentary by Ellen Reiss, who Mr. Siegel appointed the Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education. With scholarship and humanity, she has continued his work, together with many others.

Current issues of The Right Of:

A Person, and the Wide World

(Issue #2131, March 13, 2024) What is it that makes a book be rightly called “great” and seen as a “classic”? And does that have anything to do with your own hour-to-hour life—including personal hopes and confusions and daily concerns? As the new issue of The Right Of shows, Aesthetic Realism answers those questions as nothing else ever has and in a way that can bring people clarity and great happiness. You’ll see new meaning in reality and your own life as you read this richly informative issue. read

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour

How Do We Want to See?

(Issue #2130, February 28, 2024). This issue does thrilling new justice to the understanding of people and the value of books. What makes a written work so good it becomes a “classic”? Is there a way of seeing the world and people in these works that we need to learn from, and can learn from? Yes! This TRO gives an example of how one person can see another person more truly, more accurately—and it’s the way of seeing that can really end the cruelty between people and nations. The most exciting, urgent knowledge there is, needed everywhere, is in “How Do We Want to See?” read

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (detail), by Rembrandt van Rijn

Economics—It Wants to Be Ethical

(Issue #2129, February 14, 2024). This new issue, with its surprising title, is deep, thrilling, and ever so encouraging! You’re going to have a great good time—and new perception—as you read it. In previous issues serializing Eli Siegel’s lecture Economics Is Diverse, we’ve seen how people in history wanted there to be fairness in the exchange of goods; we’ve learned about the importance of unions’ demands for justice to labor, and much more. And this issue is about right now: are people in 2024 showing they object to an economy that is unjust to them? Yes! Then, as you read you’ll see that there’s much humor in this TRO too—including some laugh-out-loud humor.  read

Lettuce, an illustration from a vintage seed packet
Lettuce, illustrated on seed packet

Always—Ethics & Aesthetics

(Issue #2128. January 31, 2024). This issue is about a most necessary and hopeful question to ask: how central a role is ethics playing in what is happening in America right now? Further: does ethics have to do with every economic decision (right or wrong) that is made, how much an item will cost, how much a worker will get paid? And how are these economic matters related to the way ethics works in each one of us? You will find logical, satisfying, surprising answers to these questions—and more—in the mighty and moving new issue. read

Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Feild, 1865 (detail) NMAH
Winslow Homer, 1865 (detail)

Selected issues from the TRO Archives:

Like of the World versus Racism

(Issue #2034, June 24, 2020) This issue explains three hugely important things: 1) the cause of all prejudice and racism; 2) the state of mind we need to have as we think about other people if we’re going to be just to them—including, very much, people who look different from us; 3) how the way of seeing in all true art is utterly opposed to racism. The means by which people’s minds and feelings can really change from prejudice to justice is in “Like of the World versus Racism.” read

Demonstration with hundred of people asking for justice in the killing of George Floyd. Sign says: "Justice -- 'I Can't Breath' -- George Floyd."

What Opposes Love?

(Issue #150) “The history of the world and the history of literature tell us that love has been opposed by hate and contempt….The play in French literature that stands for the discomfort of love, the unsettlement of passion, is the Phèdre of Racine…” read more

Sarah Bernhardt in the Phèdre of Racine
Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre

The Greatest Gift: Authentic Criticism

(Issue #820) “We publish here the great essay ‘Art as Criticism,’ by Eli Siegel….Aesthetic Realism shows…that no amount of praise or ‘acceptance’ will ever have us like ourselves. We want authentic criticism, criticism with enough knowledge in it.” read more

Painting of a bull on Lascaux Paleolithic cave wall--art that can be shown to criticize how we see in daily life.
Lascaux cave painting

What Is Art For?

(Issue #226) “Aesthetic Realism sees the purpose of art as, from the beginning, the liking of the world more…. [Helen] Gardner’s mighty work, Art Through the Ages… tells carefully of Etruscan art, medieval Russian art, and certainly the art of Renaissance Italy; tells of the art of the American Indian and of United States art.” read more

Vivid early work of art with wide black lines across and zig-zag figures on a red background
Navajo blanket

The Suppression of Good Will

(Issue #160) “One of these days, it will be seen that the chief thing man has suppressed so far is his good will. This, perhaps, is the largest matter in human history….The reason Edgar Allan Poe is so valuable as artist is his dealing so much with the consequences of suppressed good will.” read more

Edouard Manet's illustration for Poe's important poem "The Raven"

As We Were Saying

(Issue #85) “We have with us the structure of the world as it has been for a long time; and there is the structure of man. What is true about these? Aesthetic Realism has said that the oneness of opposites is the decisive explanatory thing…. Look at the fact that scientists, busy with space and time, have not been able to say whether the world or universe is infinite or finite; that is, unlimited or limited.” read more

night sky with trees

The Shakespearean Awareness

(Issue #156) “Every dramatist has to be aware of the three great emotions which, when used not in behalf of a more just world but in behalf of a superior self, can do such harm….Shakespeare says much of fear, anger, contempt. Some of the highest points in the world’s literature have Shakespeare’s awareness of these three emotions.” read more

Shakespeare portrait

What Caused the Wars

(Issue #165) “It is necessary to see that while the contempt which is in every one of us may make ordinary life more painful than it should be, this contempt is also the main cause of wars. It was contempt that made for the trenches of France in 1915; it was contempt which made for the labor camps of the Second World War. It was contempt which made for that awful mode of retaliation called Nazism.” read more

The Two Pleasures

(Issue #162) “One thing that is clear in the history of man is that he has had pleasure of two kinds. Man has had pleasure from seeing a sunset; from Handel’s Messiah; from seeing courage in someone; from a great rhythm in words. He has also had pleasure from making everything he can meaningless….Man, then, praises; he also diminishes.” read more

J M W Turner, "The Fighting Temeraire"

Aesthetic Realism Is Education

(Issue #12) “Aesthetic Realism believes that a person who doesn’t like the world on an honest basis is not educated. The purpose of all education is, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, to find sense in the world; also honestly to hope to find sense in the world when that finding, as it often is, is difficult.” read more

Georges Seurat, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"

Knowing Oneself

(Issue #200) “Geoffrey Chaucer, the first unquestionably eminent English poet, said about six hundred years ago in his ‘The Monk’s Tale,’ this: ‘Ful wys is he that kan hymselven knowe!’ Well, even now, Chaucer is not agreed with, though certainly people often act as if they felt it was wise to know oneself.” read more

Geoffrey Chaucer depiction

America Has Literature

(Issue #284) “The first American novel that impressed Europe was The Spy of 1821 by James Fenimore Cooper….It is important to relate a writer like Cooper to the young people in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. Miles and Flora represent wickedness in a field of engaging innocence. Innocence and wickedness meet more deeply in the novels of Cooper than is recognized.” read more

The Spy by James Fenimore Cooper, cover image

The Fight

(Issue #151) “The greatest fight man is concerned with, is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality that has taken place in all minds of the past and is taking place now. There are three places in literature which make the fight between respect and contempt clearer….Sonnet 66 of Shakespeare; Baudelaire’s ‘O Mort, vieux capitaine’; and Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ read more

Percy Bysshe Shelley portait by Alfred Clint, 1819

Our Dear Minds

(Issue #239) “Perhaps the person who was most successful in philosophic history was John Locke, 1632-1704…. Locke meant a good deal to the plain, money-getting person; and still means a good deal….Today, I deal chiefly with John Locke; but I hope to show that all the philosophers…present a world we can see as usable for our lives, deeply on our side.” read more

John Locke, philosopher
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