A motto from Shakespeare

"No legacy is so rich as honesty." - All's Well that Ends Well, Act iii, Sc. 5

This weblog proudly wishes to show this. There's new honesty in Aesthetic Realism about poetry, literature, the visual arts, and I want people to know it! 

For instance, I can mention a poem I care for very much is "The Dark that Was Is Here," by Eli Siegel. It begins: 

A girl, in ancient Greece, / Be sure had no more peace / Than one in Idaho 

This poem gets to the honest depths of what's felt by women everywhere. And, I've learned, through trying to see accurately our relation to other people, including those who lived before us, we will be more who we want to be. 

You can read the rest of "The Dark that Was Is Here" at The Poetry of Eli Siegel website, which has a selection of his poems on many diverse subjects, including nature, jazz, New York, history.

Here are some of the critics on Eli Siegel's poetry:


 Kenneth Rexroth, reviewing Hail, American Development (Definition Press, NY) in the New York Times Book Review, wrote of Mr. Siegel's "incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say....I think it's about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets....His translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language."

Selden Rodman reviewed Eli Siegel's Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, writing in the Saturday Review: "He comes up with poems...which say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read."

 And William Carlos Williams in a letter reprinted in Something to Say, ed. J.E.B. Breslin (New Directions), wrote: "[H]e did hit a major chord and from the first with his major poem Hot Afternoons ....Only today do I realize how important that poem is in the history of our development as a cultural entity....I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world. I make such a statement only after a lifetime of thought and experience, I make it deliberately."

 Of Eli Siegel's poems as such, Williams writes: "[He] has outstripped the world of his time....The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the beath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new."