Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

From a question we ask each other every day, to questions asked in some of the important poetry of the world—this issue of TRO sees the meaning of questions in a way that’s fresh, new, and needed. Here, through poems by Byron, Keats, D.G. Rossetti, and Eli Siegel, you’ll see that a question in a poem can have the intense feelings of people of long ago—and of right now. And you’ll learn what in the human self is against honest questions, and can use questions to be unjust and unkind. Understanding is here, so surprising and deeply affecting, for everyone who reads “There Are Questions—& Trouble—& Beauty,” the latest issue of the Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. 

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 in our serialization of Hamlet and Questions, an extraordinary and richly kind 1976 lecture by Eli Siegel. It is about questions as asked in poems, and questions in our lives. Present are everyday questions, and also big and subtle ones.

What is the difference between the way questions are in a poem and the way they’re in our lives? In a poem, Aesthetic Realism explains, things—including questions—are present in such a way that we feel in them the structure of reality itself. Poetry, Eli Siegel wrote, “is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual.” That is true whether the poem’s lines are asking or stating—or hinting, or exclaiming. The writer sees the subject with such fullness of justice that the lines are a oneness of strength and delicacy, of order and freedom, lingering and speed, tautness and grand flexibility. As we hear these opposites as one—this world structure—we are hearing the distinguishing thing in poetry: poetic music.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the way of seeing that’s in art is the way we want to have in our own lives. This includes how we want to meet and ask questions.

The Inner Fight about Questions

As I wrote in a recent issue of TRO: the fact that human beings are able to formulate and ask questions at all, and take into ourselves questions asked by others, is a great thing in evolution and ethics. It’s a tribute to the desire to know. And that desire, had with sincerity and largeness, is the propulsion behind all art and science….Read more