Siegel's philosophy, and his statement, "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites", has influenced artists, scientists, and educators.

Calverton [George Goetz], he co-founded The Modern Quarterly, a magazine in which his earliest essays appeared, including "The Scientific Criticism" (Vol.

[6] In 1925, his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" was selected from four thousand anonymously submitted poems[7] as the winner of The Nation's esteemed poetry prize.

"[11] [12][13] "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.

"[14][15] 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.

[23] Walter Leuba described Siegel's poems as "alive in a burning honesty and directness" and yet, having "exquisite emotional tact".

Reviewing them, the Library Journal tells us: "Heraclitus, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and even Martin Buber have posited contraries and polarities in their philosophies.

121) Among Siegel's many published works are: Some of his many essays and broadsides include: 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.

He wrote: 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.And Williams added: The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new.

...[26]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."

Kenneth Rexroth wrote in the 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.

[9]In 2002 the city of Baltimore placed a plaque in Druid Hill Park to commemorate the centennial of Eli Siegel's birth.

(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.