Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Recent issues of TRO have been enabling people to meet Aesthetic Realism’s thrilling comprehension of imagination—new in history. In the latest issue, we’ll meet Eli Siegel’s magnificent understanding of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, through a discussion that can truly have one relish life! And this issue is about ourselves and how we hope to use our own imagination. —You’ll be delighted and educated by “Imagination: Power and Kindness,” the latest number of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of the landmark 1971 lecture that we are serializing, Poetry i: Imagination Is All This, by Eli Siegel. Throughout the talk, Mr. Siegel has been describing, vividly and richly, what imagination is, and has given a sense of the tremendous variousness of it. Now he is looking at what he considered to be one of the greatest works of imagination: Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.

Mr. Siegel wrote, and spoke, much about Pickwick over the years, and certainly about Dickens himself. In this lecture, he speaks about them as part of his showing what imagination can do, the grandeur that can be in it. Imagination came to something new, he explains, when in 1836 and ’7 Dickens wrote Pickwick. To help place what’s included in the present TRO, I’ll quote, from our previous number, these statements by Mr. Siegel:

The effect of The Pickwick Papers on the public of then is one of the mighty things in human history. A work appeared, and then gradually people felt this was different. There was a kind of laughter through this work, different from previous laughter….[That laughter,] everyone should know about. It speaks well for man.

What All Imagination Is

To introduce further what you’ll soon read, I’ll describe again, concisely, these central principles about imagination—which Eli Siegel was THE critic to see: 1) All imagination is a coming together of two opposites: self and world. Imagination always has something of the outside world seen and changed by a particular person’s thought. 2) The chief distinction between good imagination and bad is whether the imagining arises from respect for the world or from contempt. Good imagination (including when it’s satiric) arises from the desire to value reality; to know and feel as justly as we can. In bad imagination we’re impelled by contempt: our purpose is to make ourselves superior, to look down on what’s other than ourselves; and this imagination is always sloppy and cruel….Read more