Definition Press is the publisher, since 1955, of books about Aesthetic Realism, the education founded in 1941 by the American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel. The works we list include the subjects of ethics, art, education, poetry, economics, and criticism.

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Libraries, booksellers, and international inquiries, click here.

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Books by Eli Siegel

SELF AND WORLD: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism.

Paper $20.00.

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"It calls for more fairness to all reality than has been demanded before....The prose is fresh and clear....a book that is new — revolutionary — on every one of its 400 pages....Whether child or adult is spoken of, this book sees a person's concerns with dignity and compassion." — Smithsonian Magazine

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For more information about Eli Siegel's Self and World, click here, including entire Smithsonian review and other reviews, excerpts from the Preface and the chapter "Love and Reality."

SELF AND WORLD: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism.

NEW ENLARGED EDITION
CHILDREN'S GUIDE TO PARENTS & OTHER MATTERS:
Little Essays for Children and Others.
Hardcover $16.00

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Review of the Children's Guide in the Harlem Times

"The ideal way to better understand your kids and prepare them for the world around them....Build a stronger bond between you and your child starting right now." ParentGuide (August 2003)

With a New Introduction by Ellen Reiss
& More Drawings by Dorothy Koppelman

HOT AFTERNOONS HAVE BEEN IN MONTANA: POEMS.

With a Letter by William Carlos Williams.

Paper $15.00. Order Form

About Eli Siegel's poems in this book, Selden Rodman said in the Saturday Review:

"He comes up with poems...which say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read"... >> more

Read the poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana"
Selden Rodman's review (Saturday Review)
Walter Leuba's review (New Mexico Quarterly)
More poetry by Eli Siegel online.

JAMES AND THE CHILDREN:
A Consideration of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
Edited by Martha Baird.

Cloth $14.00; Paper $ 12.00. Order Form

Hugh Kenner wrote in Poetry magazine:

"It is a reading so careful and candid it reduces most previous discussion to wilful evasiveness. The oddness of a literary critic constantly asking us to think about real children can suggest how odd is the criticism we're accustomed to. "

Robert B. Heilman, Chair of the English Department of the University of Washington wrote this:

"It is an immense relief to find someone as good a Siegel is, refusing the fashionable explanation of the story, and looking at what it actually says. I like the way in which he constantly points out how the governess goofs or the tone goes awry, something which in my own treatment I failed to do."

[Robert Heilman, author of The Turn of the Screw as Poem, was a founder of the New Criticism.]

Noah Gordon, publisher of the journal Psychiatric Opinion, wrote:

"I believe it will be of particular interest to child psychiatrists. It enabled me to reread The Turn of the Screw with new shocks of recognition …. Siegel is a critic who assesses style with a poet’s ear and characterization with a philosopher’s eye."

[Noah Gordon was also publisher of the Journal of Human Stress, science editor of the Boston Herald, and a noted novelist (http://www.noahgordonbooks.com/noahstory.htm).]

HAIL, AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT. Poems.

Cloth $18.00; Paper $15.00

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The poems in HAIL, AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT, writes Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times Book Review, have Eli Siegel's

"incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say."

And he states:

"I think it's about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets."

Rexroth continues:

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

See Kenneth Rexroth's review in New York Times Book Review
Read poems from Hail, American Development

Eli Siegel "can be hilariously funny, but he can also be uncannily profound."

—Kenneth Rexroth
NY Times Book Review

DAMNED WELCOME:
AESTHETIC REALISM MAXIMS.
Drawings by Chaim Koppelman.

Paper $12.00
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Just Republished!

With a New Foreword by
Dorothy Koppelman

"To sit in the sun
is sometimes our
destiny."
—Eli Siegel

THE MODERN QUARTERLY BEGINNINGS OF AESTHETIC REALISM, 1922-1923. The Equality of Man. The Scientific Criticism & more.

Paper $10.00

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Landmark essays by Eli Siegel on literary and art criticism, ethics, economics, human equality, history — having, writes Ellen Reiss in a new introduction,

"that great, kind, true way of seeing art, the past, earth, and the self of every human being which would become the philosophy Aesthetic Realism."

THE MODERN QUARTERLY BEGINNINGS OF AESTHETIC REALISM, 1922-1923. The Equality of Man. The Scientific Criticism & more.

THE FRANCES SANDERS LESSON AND TWO RELATED WORKS.
1. The Ordinary Doom; 2. Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?

Paper $9.00
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From the book: " The main thing in the life of Frances Sanders was how she saw the world. The definition Aesthetic Realism has of the world is: All that different from ourselves by which we can be affected .... All literature, all painting, all music is about the effort of man to see the world in a way that pleases him, in a way that is valid, and in a way of which he can be proud .... Frances Sanders...found the world not much good; but in finding the world not much good, she endowed herself with disaster."

Books about Aesthetic Realism by Other Authors

Ellen Reiss and Martha Baird (eds.)
THE WILLIAMS-SIEGEL DOCUMENTARY.
Including "Williams' Poetry Talked about by Eli Siegel, and William Carlos Williams Present and Talking: 1952."

Read Eli Siegel's discussion of the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" by Williams

Cloth $14.00; Paper $12.00.
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Martha Baird * NICE DEITY; Poems, with a Preface by Eli Siegel. Cloth $18.00
	TWO AESTHETIC REALISM PAPERS: 1. Opposites in the Drama; 2. Opposites in Myself. Paper $10.00 Order Form

Chaim Koppelman, Anne Fielding, et al.

AESTHETIC REALISM: WE HAVE BEEN THERE — Six Artists on the Siegel Theory of Opposites.
Essays on art, acting, photography. Illus.

Cloth $12.95; Paper $10.95.

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For more information,including reviews
from Popular Photography & Library Journal

AESTHETIC REALISM: WE HAVE BEEN THERE -- Six Artists on the Siegel Theory of Opposites

Sheldon Kranz, et al.
PERSONAL & IMPERSONAL: SIX AESTHETIC REALISTS. *

Poems by Sheldon Kranz, Louis Dienes, Nancy Starrels,
Nat Herz, Martha Baird, Rebecca Fein; with a Critical
Preface by Eli Siegel.

Paper $12.95

* This title is temporarily out of print

Make checks payable to Definition Press. In U.S., please add $4.50 shipping for one book, $1.00 for each additional book. In NYC add 8.875% sales tax; elsewhere in NY State add state plus county tax.

To print out order form click here.
Libraries, booksellers, and international inquiries click here.

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New York, NY 10012

Tel: (212) 777-4490