Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems is a book of poems written by Eli Siegel

Eli Siegel

Eli Siegel was the poet and critic who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism in 1941. He wrote the award-winning poem, "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana", two highly acclaimed volumes of poetry, a critical consideration of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw titled James and the Children,...

, founder of the philosophy of aesthetic realism

Aesthetic Realism

Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy founded by Eli Siegel in 1941. It is based on three core principles. First, according to Siegel, the deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis...

. Definition Press, who printed it, is the publishing arm of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. The book was one of 13 finalists in the poetry category of the National Book Award

National Book Award

The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

 in 1958.

The title poem begins this way:

Quiet and green was the grass of the field,

The sky was whole in brightness,

And O, a bird was flying, high, there in the sky,

So gently, so carelessly and fairly.

Here, once, Indians shouted in battle,

And moaned after it.

Here were cries, yells, night, and the moon over these men,

And the men making the cries and yells; it was

Hundreds of years ago, when monks were in Europe,

Monks in cool, black monasteries, thinking of God, studying Virgil...

For the full text of this poem see aestheticrealism.net.

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

wrote of the poetry soon to be published in this volume, "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." See full text of Williams' 1951 letter.

In the Saturday Review Selden Rodman wrote, "He comes up with poems like 'Dear Birds, Tell This to Mothers,' 'She's Crazy and It Means Something,' and 'The World of the Unwashed Dish' which say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read." See full text of Rodman's 1957 review.

• Eli Siegel. Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. Definition Press: New York, 1958.