Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

This new issue of The Right Of does something great—and urgently needed. It shows how the study of what poetry really is can teach us to see the world and ourselves truly! How can poetry, the real thing, have us see the ordinary moments of our lives with more vividness, meaning, wonder? And can it also have us see what might seem very different from us as friendly, and even as close to us? Read “Opposites in Poetry–& Our Own Lives,” the thrilling new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Eli Siegel’s historic lecture A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, of August 1970. In it he discusses statements made by critics over the centuries, statements that point to opposites as one in poetry.

Over the years, Mr. Siegel spoke on many more critics, and at much greater length, than he is able to in the present single talk. Yet here, he says, he is trying to be both casual and representative—and he is. He is swift (though never hurried), clear, and deep. He has us feel the writers as real human beings affected deeply by the opposites in poems. Meanwhile, as I have said in relation to this talk: Eli Siegel himself saw so very much about the opposites that his predecessors did not see. He saw, for instance, this immense thing: that poetry has what we as individuals long for, because “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The Everyday & the Extraordinary

In the previous section of this talk, Mr. Siegel spoke about William Wordsworth. There were passages from Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to the book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and himself, the Lyrical Ballads. In the present section, Mr. Siegel quotes statements by Coleridge, some of which are very famous. Critics have seen the Lyrical Ballads and the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge in relation to it as central to that huge thing in the history of art, Romanticism. But only Eli Siegel saw that these two were dealing with something every human being thirsts for and suffers from not having: opposites—including the everyday and the extraordinary—as one….Read more