From The Critical Muse

Eli Siegel comments on poems by William Blake, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, John Clare, William Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti.

Poetry can make it possible for us to like ourselves and the world in ways we could not before. While people have cared for poetry, carried poems in their wallets, framed poems like Kipling’s If for their walls, people haven’t known that poetry could be the true means of their liking the world they meet every day. Through the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel poetry is able to be, in a new way, the “utile dulce”—the sweet usefulness—Horace said it was…. Every poem ever written has been about the self—even if it deals with an army, as Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade does, or with farming, as does Virgil’s Georgics. But some poems are clearly about the self, and [some of these are included here]. These poems… are imperative Aesthetic Realism illustrations.

—Margot Carpenter & Karen Van Outryve, Eds.
from Preface to The Critical Muse