Reviews

• “Hardy’s Four Lines Called Best in Poetry Anthology”

Review of Modern British Lyrics, an Anthology Compiled by Stanton A. Coblent. (New York: Minton, Balch & Co)

• “Dr. Johnson’s Critical Comment as Alive Today as When First Written”

Review of The Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson, arranged and compiled with an introduction by Joseph Epes Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

• “Playing and Singing America”

Review of The American Play-Party Song, with a Collection of Oklahoma Texts and Tunes. By Benjamin Albert Botkin. Lincoln, Nebraska

• Nasty and Important

Review of Notorious Literary Attacks. Edited with an Introduction by Albert Mordell. Boni and Liveright. 1926. New York

• from Something to Say, ed. J.E.B. Breslin, New Directions, NY, 1951

“I can’t tell you how important Siegel’s work is in the light of my present understanding of the modern poem. He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists…”

• Saturday Review, Selden Rodman

“Poems…which say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read.”

• newsART—The Smith, William Packard:

“Extraordinary by any standards.”

• New Mexico Quarterly, Walter Leuba:

“A poet who writes for men and women on subjects close to them and full of meaning for them, in a language they can understand, and who does this naturally, with virtuosity but without condescension, is not readily found.”

• New York Times Book Review, Kenneth Rexroth

“I think it’s about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets…”

“His translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language.”

• Smithsonian Book Reviews, Linda Ann Kunz

“…a book that is new—revolutionary—on every one of its 400 pages, even as it is solidly in the tradition of inquiry begun by the ancient Greeks.”

• Art Students League News, Lawrence Campbell

“As the poet William Carlos Williams said in 1951: ‘We are not up to Siegel even yet.'”

• Dr. Arnold Perey, Anthropologist, 2005

“I have no doubt that the explanation of self that is in this book is the most valuable to be found anywhere. I do not say this to annoy anyone who may not be familiar with the full range of explanation that has been given (whether by Freud, Adler, Horney, Geza Roheim, or many others), but to be exact. To a person making a fair comparison, the author of Self and World, Eli Siegel, has understood, explained, elucidated with immense clarity, that unknown terrain which so many have struggled to map without success: the human self. And he has done so in prose that is great literature.”

• The Harlem Times, Alice Bernstein

In this book American poet Eli Siegel, who founded the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, writes with depth, charm, and clarity about such large subjects as Caring for Somebody, Books, the World, Mothers, Work, Feeling Bad, Money, Being Angry– and more .