bird was flying, high, there in the sky, So gently, so carelessly and fairly. "Hot Afternoons" met violent opposition, according to William Carlos Williams, who wrote, years later: "Only today do I realize how important that poem is in the history of our development as a cultural entity." "In Hot Afternoons", Siegel later explained, "I tried to take many things that are thought of usually as being far apart and foreign and to show, in a beautiful way, that they aren't so separate and that they do have a great deal to do with one another." Siegel continued writing poetry throughout his life but devoted the majority of his time over the next decades to developing the philosophy he later called Aesthetic Realism. After moving to New York City, he became a member of the Greenwich Village poets, famous for his dramatic readings of "Hot Afternoons" and other poems. His two-word poem, One Question, won recognition in 1925 as the shortest poem in the English language. It appeared in the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post: This poem was later reprinted without the author's name in an anthology edited by Louis Untermeyer and an anthology edited by Max J. Herzberg. For several years in the 1930s Siegel served as master of ceremonies for regular poetry readings that were well known for combining poetry and jazz. He was also a regular reviewer for Scribner's magazine and the New York Evening Post Literary Review. In 1938, Siegel began teaching poetry classes with the view that "what makes a good poem is like what can make a good life". In 1941, students in these classes asked him to give individual lessons in which they might learn about their own lives. These were the first Aesthetic Realism lessons. In 1944, Siegel married Martha Baird (University of Iowa), who had begun studying in his classes the year before. Baird would later become Secretary of the Society for Aesthetic Realism, and also a musicologist and poet in her own right. In 1946, at Steinway Hall, Siegel began giving weekly lectures in which he presented the philosophy he first called Aesthetic Analysis (later, Aesthetic Realism) "a philosophic way of seeing conflict in self and making this conflict clear to a person so that a person becomes more integrated and happier". From 1941 to 1978, he gave many thousand lectures on poetry, history, economics—a wide variety