Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

What world-significance is in this issue, “What Impels?,” of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known! Present in it are Sappho, Homer, Virgil, Victor Hugo—and you’ll be in the midst of the most important question of our time: What is the thing making for the distress of people and of nations? Is there a fight every minute between the two large forces in humankind: the drive to respect and the drive to have contempt? And what can we learn from true art, true poetry, about how to resolve this fight? You’ll see the world in a fresh, new way as you read “What Impels?,” the latest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize Eli Siegel’s 1970 lecture The Poetic Trinity; or, Poetry—Whence, How, Whither? There is in it his might as literary critic and also his beautiful ease and sense of everydayness—his feeling for the very real lives of people.

As to the title: The Whence, he explained, is what poetry comes from, its source. How is the way poetry shows itself. And Whither is poetry’s purpose, what it’s going for.

As I described in our previous issue, Mr. Siegel is using, as a beginning text, essays by George Moir (1800–70). Moir wrote them for the 7th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and they were also published in a book of 1839 titled Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric.

What Is Here

There is so much in this third section of the lecture. As it begins, we are in the 6th century BCE or so, with Greek lyric poetry, including Sappho. Then there’s a looking back to some 300 years earlier, and Homer. And there is Virgil, about eight centuries after Homer….Read more