Siegel, Eli

ELI SIEGEL (1902-1978), poet, critic, philosopher, educator, founder of Aesthetic Realism, was born August 16, 1902 and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. In August 2002, his centenary, Baltimore celebrated Eli Siegel Day with proclamations by the mayor and governor, and a memorial to him was erected in Druid Hill Park.

Several of Eli Siegel’s earliest essays appeared in the <i>Modern Quarterly</i>, which he founded with V.F. Calverton in 1923. They include “The Scientific Criticism,” “The Equality of Man,” and “The Middle Ages, Say.” The essays are now collected in <i>The Modern Quarterly Beginnings of Aesthetic Realism</i> (Definition Press, 1997).

In 1925 his “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” won the esteemed Nation Poetry Prize. [Baltimore American, February 6, 1925]

“I say definitely,” William Carlos Williams was to write of it, “that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world.” Implicit in that poem, Mr. Siegel later explained, were the philosophic principles that would become the basis of Aesthetic Realism. The same year, 1925, Mr. Siegel became a columnist for the Baltimore American....--<i>continue reading at http://aestheticrealism.org/about-us/eli-siegel-founder/ </i>