Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

What makes a work of literature stand the test of time? And what does this have to do with our lives every day? Are we looking to have, in the way we see the world, the justice that is in art? Read “The History of Feelings,” the beautiful new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by editor Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue of TRO we reprint a quite early article by Eli Siegel. It is a review, published in the New York Evening Post Literary Review in April 1926. He was 23 years old. He had won the Nation poetry prize for his “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” the year before. And here, he is reviewing three anthologies of poetry and prose.

This article contains a new and great way of seeing literature and the human mind: that of Eli Siegel. And we see something of who he himself was. His tremendous scholarship and knowledge were there even then, at that early time in his life, and they would grow and grow. In the article we see that this knowledge, this scholarship, learning, erudition, were inseparable from great feeling in him, and from a down-to-earth care for immediate life.

There Is Literary Style

He speaks here, with loving discernment, about the style of various authors. And I love his writing style as he does so. In the quality of the words chosen, in the way words meet words as sound and meaning, in the rhythms of the sentences, his style has what Mr. Siegel as person had always in the years when I was honored to know him: a oneness of intellectual might and warmth, of the fullest justice and the deepest pleasure in being just. That relation of opposites, which I saw in him always and which is in all his writing, is the most beautiful thing I have ever met in any human being, past or present. And we see it here, when he was a very young man.

We are looking at the early work of one of the best literary critics. (In my opinion, he is the greatest critic.) There is a placing, in the article, of the value of very much in American literature. And—central to this review—Eli Siegel shows why those books which are anthologies are so important, and what their meaning is. That is something he is the critic to see; it has been said by no one else before or since.

I love also what he says here about the physical book: what makes a book as a thing of matter and design, beautiful. >> Read more