Louis Dienes, poet and photographer, began to study Aesthetic Realism in 1943. He recommends Eli Siegel’s poem “Ralph Isham, 1753 and Later” and says:
Human beings of all ages–including me–have puzzled over, wrestled with, and tried to make sense out of two mighty opposites, life and death. In a great free verse poem of 1925, “Ralph Isham, 1753 and Later,” Eli Siegel imagines a man of the past, bringing him to life on the page, while maintaining our sense that he is long gone. Life and death, which seem so separate in people’s minds, are brought together into a lively, friendly composition. And the poem has too Mr. Siegel’s beautiful way of seeing people. It is, for example, in these great lines: “What was he to himself? / There, there is something.” The wide, deep way of seeing that is in this poem is what I met beginning in l943, in Aesthetic Realism lessons and classes taught by Eli Siegel. The poem begins:
Know you him, O, him,
Who lived in those days?
He wore a gay coat,
And he stepped along, jauntily, jauntily,
The streets of London town;
In 1753.
Where he is buried, who knows?
Who was his father, who knows?
Who are his children, who knows?
But, oh! on sunny mornings
How gayly he tripped along
The bright streets of London.
A trim cane he had,
And he gracefully took snuff from a very
——neat snuff-box.
My, but he was courtly.
He saluted walking, smiling, pretty ladies,
And they curtsied sweetly before him.