Yvor Winters: The American Literary Rhadamanthus: The "Fray" Puts Us in a Fray

Sep 19, 2008

The "Fray" Puts Us in a Fray

I wrote a response to Ron Rosenbaum's post on Slate (in their so-called "Fray") about the poem Rosenbaum considers the best ever written in English, John Keats's "To Autumn." My response, which merely pointed out some of Winters's judgments on the issue, gave rise to a mild attack on Yvor Winters's critical ideas that was, to be kind, quite poorly reasoned and filled with those common misconceptions of Winters that -- I have no illusions -- will not go away any time soon. I will respond to the attack, but I am hoping that someone who is interested in Winters's theories will chime in. See the posts in the "Fray" appended to the original artricle on Keats at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2199466/

My title says "us," but I have no idea whether there is any "us" to speak of. It appears to be "me." But I will soldier on, nonetheless, in the hopes of some day seeing that "us" make itself known or come to pass.

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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 19, 2008

The "Fray" Puts Us in a Fray

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