Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
This new issue of TRO, “The Sincerity We Need,” is urgent, moving, magnificently clarifying. It is about something people have longed to understand: what is sincerity?—and what interferes with one’s own? It is about a matter tremendously important both for individuals and for our nation: what does true poetry, the REAL thing, tell us about how there can be honesty of expression? You will have a thrilling experience reading “The Sincerity We Need,” this latest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is part 5 of the 1970 lecture A Statement about Poetry: Some Instances, by Eli Siegel. It is a work of enormous literary meaning, and human meaning—meaning for everyone’s mind and life.
Mr. Siegel comments on statements of literary criticism spanning two millennia. Beginning with Aristotle, he gives evidence that what people have been affected by in art, and what critics have in various ways called for, is the oneness of opposites. I have said in my commentaries on this lecture that I see those critical statements Mr. Siegel quotes as a reaching toward Aesthetic Realism. They’re certainly important in their own right. Yet Eli Siegel came to see so much more about the opposites than anyone before him had seen. Just one example, huge, is this: he showed that the opposites in poetry are our own opposites. They’re present in us, often so confusingly and troublingly, every day. “All beauty,” he explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Eli Siegel is the philosopher who showed that the self of everyone is an aesthetic matter: we long to put together such opposites as our logic and our feeling, our desires for order and for freedom, our having an effect and our being affected, our care for ourselves—and for what’s not ourselves. To have these opposites make proud sense in us, we need to see how they are one in art…Read more