Yvor Winters: The American Literary Rhadamanthus: A Beginning

Sep 14, 2006

A Beginning

The time has come to try to create some conversation among those interested in the poetry and criticism of Yvor Winters. I have long been contemplating a blog on the art and thought of Winters to discuss ideas and report on writings that could bear on his work. My chief objective is to increase awareness of Winters's art and criticism, but also to see how his thought can be developed and extended to other areas of inquiry.

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Arthur Yvor Winters

Dr. Winters was a poet and literary critic who lived from 1900 to 1968. He spent most of his professional career at Stanford University in California and lived in a small house in nearby Palo Alto with his wife, the accomplished but now obscure novelist Janet Lewis Winters. Winters's demanding classicial poetry, dense, highly formal, and committed to the importance of human reason in the making of art and the conduct of life, has found few readers in the 40 years since he died, though editions of his obscure work have recently been published, one of which is a slim volume in the Library of America. In the field of criticism, Winters has, evidently, persuaded few writers that his modern classical ideas and judgments are sound. In fact, critics and writers have widely rejected or outright dismissed his controversial, seemingly "crackpot" views because of his stern declarations that certain poems, certain works of fiction, and certain literary styles, particularly those stemming generally from Romanticism, are substandard. Indeed, the kinds of writing he rejected and sometimes decried, which might be called anti-classical, he thought to be highly damaging to the ability of writers to communicate properly with their readers and perhaps even dangerous to the future of literature and all literary culture. In the 40 years since Winters's death, a couple dozen writers and scholars have continued to take his ideas and judgments seriously, though his critical system has yet to create any sort "school" of literary thought or practice. The time for that school to be called into session might have arrived.

Yvor Winters: The American Literary Rhadamanthus

Sep 14, 2006

A Beginning

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