Editing Eli Siegel (section)

===Comments on Siegel's work===
[[William Carlos Williams]] wrote of the poem ''Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana'', "I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world."[https://web.archive.org/web/20050414090805/http://www.elisiegel.net/poetry/WilliamsLetter1951.htm] Williams was an early supporter of Siegel's poetry and defender of his views. He wrote:
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
And Williams added:
<blockquote>The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the "authorities" whom I shall not dignify by naming and after that by neglect. ...<ref>{{Cite web |date=2005-04-14 |title=A Letter by William Carlos Williams about Eli Siegel's Poetry |url=http://www.elisiegel.net/poetry/WilliamsLetter1951.htm |access-date=2023-03-31 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050414090805/http://www.elisiegel.net/poetry/WilliamsLetter1951.htm |archive-date=April 14, 2005 }}</ref></blockquote>
[[John Henry Faulk]], speaking of the poems in ''Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana'', said on [[CBS]] radio, "Eli Siegel makes a man glad he's alive."<br>

[[Kenneth Rexroth]] wrote in the ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20050414121710/http://www.elisiegel.net/poetry/Review-Rexroth-NYT.htm New York Times Book Review]'' of ''Hail, American Development'' that Siegel's poems contained "...incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say and in the long ones the rhythms are as new inventions as once were Blake's or Whitman's or Apollinaire's", adding, "...all through ''Hail, American Development'' are Translations, mostly from the French, that show a penetration both original and extraordinary. His Translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language." (March 23, 1969) [https://web.archive.org/web/20050414121710/http://www.elisiegel.net/poetry/Review-Rexroth-NYT.htm]<br>

In ''[[Contemporary Authors]]'' Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, stated (in a book published by Definition Press, said Foundation's publishing arm):
<blockquote>Eli Siegel's work, which in time became Aesthetic Realism, was the cause of some of the largest praise, the largest love in persons, and also the largest resentment …<br>

In writing an entry about [him] for ''Contemporary Authors'', you are somewhat in the position you would be writing an entry on the poet John Keats in 1821. That is, if you were to rely on what was said of Keats by most established critics (critics now remembered principally for their injustice to one of the greatest English writers), you would present the author of `Ode to a Nightingale' as a presumptuous `Cockney poet' whose works were `driveling idiocy.' In writing about Eli Siegel [now], you are writing about a contemporary who is great; who all his life met what William Carlos Williams described him as meeting, `the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new'; who now, after his death, is beginning, just barely beginning, to be seen with something like fairness.</blockquote>
Huntington Cairns, Secretary of the [[National Gallery of Art]] in Washington, D.C., described Siegel's place in the understanding of aesthetics—the branch of philosophy which studies beauty—as follows:
<blockquote>I believe that Eli Siegel was a genius. He did for aesthetics what [[Ethics (Spinoza)|Spinoza]] did for ethics. [http://www.aestheticrealism.org/Press-Articles-on-Aesthetic-Realism/Balt-Evening-Sun-Bready.htm]</blockquote>
Donald Kirkley wrote in ''[[The Baltimore Sun]]'' (1944) reporting on Siegel's reaction to his 1925 national fame,
<blockquote>Baltimore friends close to him at the time will testify to a certain integrity and steadfastness of purpose which distinguished Mr. Siegel ... He refused to exploit a flood of publicity which was enough to float any man to financial comfort ...[https://web.archive.org/web/20041215210935/http://www.elisiegelcollection.net/Lectures-in-TRO/Tro1335.htm]</blockquote>
And William Carlos Williams also wrote,
<blockquote>Only today do I realize how important that poem [''Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana''] is in the history of our development as a cultural entity. [https://web.archive.org/web/20050414090805/http://www.elisiegel.net/poetry/WilliamsLetter1951.htm]</blockquote>

In 2002 the city of Baltimore placed a plaque in [[Druid Hill Park]] to commemorate the centennial of Eli Siegel's birth.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Eli Siegel Historical Marker|url=https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=7595}}</ref> That same year, on July 26, 2002, Representative [[Elijah E. Cummings]] read a tribute to Siegel in the [[United States House of Representatives]]. [https://www.congress.gov/crec/2002/07/29/CREC-2002-07-29-pt1-PgE1445-2.pdf]