Literature & the Self

SHELDON KRANZ is one of America’s true poets and important writers, and was, early, a student of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism with its founder, the great poet and critic Eli Siegel. He became an Aesthetic Realism consultant in 1971. In classes with Eli Siegel, Sheldon Kranz learned to write authentic poetry. He also came to see new meaning in his chosen field of literature. He was an editor at Macmillan for many years, and taught the course “Literature and the Self “at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

In these classes Sheldon Kranz showed how the principles of Aesthetic Realism were true about many important works of literature and enabled a deeper understanding of their characters. A central principle of Aesthetic Reaism stated by Eli Siegel is:

“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Kranz attended and studied groundbreaking 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 described in his book Self and World explains people, our hopes, our questions, our conflicts, including the characters in these works, making for thrilling new comprehension—for instance:

“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….” —Eli Siegel, from “The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict,” a chapter of Self and World.

CONTENTS of this website:

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.” The talk is in four parts: 

Part 1: Freedom and Order in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Feeling Good and Feeling Bad:  Emily Dickinson & Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Part 2:  The Ordinary Is Wonderful, Too: Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt; The Strange and the Everyday: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Part 3:  People and Novels: Sheldon Kranz’s Lessons; Aesthetic Realism consultations on Love; The Most Difficult Subject—& Style: Hemingway and Addison.

Part 4:  Excitement and Calm, Energy and Repose: Henry James, Charles Dickens, and others.

Short Stories 

“My Mother Was a Girl“

Reports of Aesthetic Realism Classes taught by Eli Siegel (in process)

The Self & Aesthetics, Class of March 8, 1948
Play & Work, Class of March 29, 1948
Satire, Class of May 24, 1948
Languages, Class of September 13, 1948
The 1860s, Class of January 31, 1949
Tao Yuan-ming & Lafcadio Hearn, Class of July 10, 1968

Poetry, Literature, Education Links
A Magnificent Self-Dissatisfaction;  Missed by Edgar Allan Poe;  Eli Siegel’s Poetry;  Leila Rosen, Life, Love, & Learning;  Kevin Fennell’s Rock and Roll—and Life ;  Edward Green, Composer; Nancy Huntting, writer, educator; Terrain Gallery NYC; Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman Foundation; Anne Fielding, Actor (1933-2023).

Colleagues & friends of Sheldon Kranz proudly bring you this website.