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Definitions, and Comment:
Being a Description of the World
By Eli Siegel

58. Poetry

Poetry is the showing of reality as finite and infinite in terms of a self making picture and sound one: because this self is both what it is and what is outside of it.

Poetry, like all art, is personal and impersonal. But poetry shows this personality and impersonality in terms of words. A word is logical and illogical, something standing for something else, and itself.

© 1945 by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism
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