Sheldon
Kranz
Poet, Writer,
Aesthetic Realism
Consultant (1919-1980)
Photo by Lou
Bernstein
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"My purpose in this
talk is to express my gratitude for the Aesthetic Realism way of seeing
literature, a way which I have tested over many years as a college
instructor, and as an editor, and which I have found to be true....I learned two things
in my studies with Eli Siegel that I had learned nowhere else: 1) It
is the opposites in all their flexibility and subtlety that explain the
beauty of such diverse works as Homer's Iliad, Shakespeare's Othello, Rimbaud's "O Seasons, O
Castles," Dostoievsky's Crime and
Punishment, and Mark Twain's story about the jumping frog...." read more
SHELDON KRANZ is
one of America's true poets and important writers, and was, early, a
student of Aesthetic Realism with Eli
Siegel; he became a consultant, teaching Aesthetic Realism, in
1971. In classes with Mr. Siegel, Sheldon Kranz learned to write
authentic poetry, and came to see new meaning in his chosen
field of literature [he was an editor at Macmillan for many years]. He
taught the course "Literature and the Self "at the Aesthetic Realism
Foundation.
CONTENTS:
Poems
by Sheldon Kranz from Personal
and Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists, with an excerpt from
its preface by Eli Siegel: "The question, What is poetry?--is as alive
today as ever...for it is felt increasingly that what poetry is deeply
and immediately concerns what our lives are....."
Turning
Over a New Leaf; or, What Is Literature? Talk of 1974
"I
believe that all literature is the making one of opposites; and that
when a poem or prose work stirs us, it is because the permanent
opposites in reality have been made one by the poet or prose
writer....I should like to show the large cultural meaning this way of
seeing
literature has for the world and for every self. "—more
Short Stories
"My Mother Was a Girl"
"The
Betrayal" from New Short Stories of 1944
Reports of Aesthetic
Realism Classes taught by Eli Siegel
Class
of March 8, 1948, The Self & Aesthetics
Class
of March 29, 1948,
Play & Work
Class
of May 24, 1948,
Satire
Class
of September 13, 1948, Languages
Class
of January 31, 1949, The 1860s
Class
of July 10, 1968, Tao Yuan-ming & Lafcadio Hearn
Sheldon Kranz & his wife, actress Anne Fielding
World Literature
Understood
Truly
Sheldon
Kranz showed in his classes "Literature & the Self" that the
principles of Aesthetic
Realism were central in understanding many famous works. He heard and
studied thrilling, ground-breaking lectures Eli Siegel gave on novels
and
stories by Henry James, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott,
Stendhal, Thackeray, Dostoevsky, and more. What Mr. Siegel explained in
his book Self and World was central
about the characters in them —as it is about all
humanity:
"The basic conflict in
the human mind—present, I believe, in all particular conflicts—is that
between a person warmly existing to his finger tips, and that person as
related to indefinite outsideness: this is the subject and object
conflict, the personal and impersonal conflict, the Self and World
conflict....
"A novel is one thing
and many things, that is, it is a whole and parts. And whole and parts
are working together. In a good novel you see a certain precision,
'has-to-be-ness,' or inevitability—that is, there is order in a good
novel. And in a novel, too, you feel the characters act freely, the
writer is not constrained; there is growth and there is strangeness in
the novel: what this means is, the novel has
freedom." - Eli
Siegel, from "The
Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict,"
a chapter of Self
and World
Colleagues & friends of Sheldon Kranz
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