Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

In “Sameness & Difference—Urgent & Poetic,” you will learn something amazing, great, and tremendously needed. You will see that the very technique of poetry has the answer-in-outline to burning questions in America today—about racism, about economics, about love. Read this thrillingly kind issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Fifty years ago Eli Siegel wrote two essays on assonance in poetry. Assonance is a matter that is part of literary technique, literary history. But Aesthetic Realism shows that this technical matter is also urgently about everyone’s life.

The essays arose from a request that the poetry magazine New York Quarterly made of Mr. Siegel. Editor William Packard asked him to write about assonance for an upcoming issue. Mr. Siegel did so, and sent the journal “Assonance Is Like This”—which appears in its Spring 1970 number. We are grateful to publish now the other essay he wrote at the time: the magnificent “Assonance Is Considered.”

I have said that Eli Siegel is the greatest of literary critics. It is he who explained what beauty is, and made clear that art—far from being an offset to life—has the answers in outline to the life-questions of every person and nation. “All beauty,” he showed, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” In the essay published here, Mr. Siegel shows that assonance is a making one of the tremendous opposites Sameness and Difference.

It has been hard for scholars to get to a satisfactory description of assonance, because assonance seems to have so much variation yet also seems so distinctive. In Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, we have such phrases as: “resemblance of sound in words or syllables” and “used as an alternative to rhyme in verse.” But here is the first sentence of the companion essay to the one we’re now publishing; Eli Siegel gets to the very center of what assonance is as he writes in the Spring 1970 New York Quarterly:

A beginning description of assonance is: the using of the sameness and difference of sound in syllables for poetic music and, therefore, poetic effect.

And he gives, in that companion essay, three specific meanings of assonance as it exists in poetry.

And Why?

As I said, we are with something that can seem very technical, and is. Yet instances of assonance have affected people mightily, and are immortal—and Why? The chief reason is: we need to feel that sameness and difference can be one, can be beautiful. We need this for our happiness—and for people to be decent to each other, and for nations to be sane. That technical thing, assonance, is an answer to the question Can we see our difference from a person, yet feel we are like that person?…Read more