some of the largest praise, the largest love in persons, and also the largest resentment … 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. 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: I believe that Eli Siegel was a genius. He did for aesthetics what Spinoza did for ethics. Donald Kirkley wrote in The Baltimore Sun (1944) reporting on Siegel's reaction to his 1925 national fame, 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 ... And William Carlos Williams also wrote, 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. In 2002 the city of Baltimore placed a plaque in Druid Hill Park to commemorate the centennial of Eli Siegel's birth. That same year, on July 26, 2002, Representative Elijah E. Cummings read a tribute to Siegel in the United States House of Representatives. Epitaph The following are lines from Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana, one of the poems which Selden Rodman commented "say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read". (August 17, 1957 Saturday Review) These lines stand for what Ellen Reiss has described as Siegel's "beautiful, faithful, passionate, critical, loving attention to the world and humanity." References External links Aesthetic Realism Online