Yvor Winters: The American Literary Rhadamanthus

The Birds Begin to Sing

2010-10-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Have you taken any interest in Roger Scruton's new book, Beauty, which came out with some fanfare last year? One short essay among several that were published to promote the book drew my attention some time back, the piece on the desecration of the beautiful in the City Journal (spring, 2009). I had wanted to write about this short essay when it came out, but was distracted by other matters. The piece was entitled "Beauty and Desecration: We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness."

It's a hard-nosed look at the desire of artists to "throw dirt" on everything normally considered beautiful in life and thought, past and present. Scruton exagerrates quite a bit about how much dirt is being thrown and how often it's being thrown, but he appears to have at least a somewhat valid point. As we all know, a number of avant-garde artists have taken to desecrating anything and everything they can get their paint on (to mention just one artistic medium getting rather dirty nowadays). Scruton's answer to the problem, since the human desire to sense beauty remains strong, is not to return to the masters of the past who cherished the truly beautiful, however that might be determined, but to look anew for beauty in our lives, at least the kinds of beauty Scruton thinks are truly beautiful.

I have my doubts about Scruton's idea, however, since as laid out in the essay, and the book itself, the idea plays right into the hands of the romanticism that led to the break down in traditional conceptions of beauty in the first place — that led to the desire to make everything new, to break apart every trustworthy and trusted convention, to show that everything people thought was beautiful is dying or dead. Such general topics came up frequently, if obliquely, in the criticism of Yvor Winters. But before we get to Winters, though, here's Scruton on the ordinary beauties that have become commonplace in criticism in our age:

At the same time, philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke, Adam Smith, and Kant recognized that we do not look on the world only with the eyes of science. Another attitude exists — one not of scientific inquiry but of disinterested contemplation — that we direct toward our world in search of its meaning. When we take this attitude, we set our interests aside; we are no longer occupied with the goals and projects that propel us through time; we are no longer engaged in explaining things or enhancing our power. We are letting the world present itself and taking comfort in its presentation. This is the origin of the experience of beauty. There may be no way of accounting for that experience as part of our ordinary search for power and knowledge. It may be impossible to assimilate it to the day-to-day uses of our faculties. But it is an experience that self-evidently exists, and it is of the greatest value to those who receive it.

When does this experience occur, and what does it mean? Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.

Is this not tripe? A band of sunlight "trembles there"? A bird "bursts into song"? Can a man as thoughtful and learned as Roger Scruton be serious? As nice and sweet as all this sounds, I believe that Winters would have thought Scruton's now commonplace distinction between concept and feeling, which arose from romanticism, too wide and sharp. Winters didn't think there is any unbrigeable chasm between sensing something to be beautiful and gaining insight into it, or even putting it to use (putting aside my longstanding puzzlement, which I have oft discussed, at why in our age critics and artists consider the usefulness of art so horrible). Winters seemed to combine thought and feeling nicely in his artworks and criticism, both of which are deeply powerful. Winters believed that the final cause of the literary arts is understanding, in what we now call a holistic sense — that is, embracing both concept and feeling, thought and emotion. (That is a "use," by the way, and I don't think there is anything the least ugly or dirty about being useful in such a manner.) Scruton's defense against dirt, as tremblingly admirable as it might appear on the surface, gives far too much ground to the romanticism that helped breed, in our late decadence, the desire to exalt ugliness, the unending obession with breaking all traditions, which Emerson, Winters's one-time bête noire, did so much to help make, in the early days of American culture, the shibboleth of modern culture.

Incongruously, the ugly dirt-throwing art often seems stronger as art than the trivial, trembling, mostly decorative "thereness" or "thisness" that recent poetry has sought to express. At least the dirt throwing is trying to say something, to help us understand some subject, rather then to wallow in trivial experiences like birds singing in trees and sun-rays falling. Winters was sharp on this point, once again in the long-ignored essay on John Crowe Ransom from In Defense of Reason. (Let me pause to note that this wonderfully insightful essay has occasioned almost no comment at all from other critics, even those directly engaged with or inspired by Winters, in the past 70 years).

At this point I must interrupt again [concerning Ransom's comment that Winters thought the only kind of poetic experience is ethical experience] to comment. I believe, to be sure, that ethical interest is the only poetic interest, for the reason that all poetry deals with one kind or another of human experience and is valuable in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates that experience; but I do not believe that a descriptive poem is negligible or off the real line of poetry. A descriptive poem deals with a certain kind of experience, an extremely simple kind, but one of real value; namely, the contemplation of some fragment of the sensible universe. This is a moral experience, like any other, and the task of the poet is to evaluate it for what it is worth.

Roger Scruton believes that artists should once again adopt the goal of art as pure descriptive beauty (in his manifestly shallow sense). But this idea has slowly wrought the damage that has led to the greater and greater loss of beauty in the literary arts, down to the dirt-throwing desecrations of the present age, as ever more artists have refused to seek understanding as the final cause of their art — the evaluation of experience, as Yvor Winters put it.

Nonetheless, Scruton's piece is worth reading. What is the role of beauty in a classical, moral theory of art as Yvor Winters roughly sketched it in his criticism? Winters didn't have enough to say on that important topic — in fact, he sometimes irritably dismissed the whole matter, as in the opening paragraphs of the "Preliminary Statement" to Forms of Discovery. I believe that the subject of beauty, however, needs much deeper study among classicists as the field of aesthetics has become prominent once again.

Sloppy?

2010-09-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

Late last year. Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker. Sub-heading to an article about an artist:

"Urs Fischer's Inspired Sloppiness"

That could almost be a classicist's definition of the modern arts, from fiction to painting to sculpture to a lot of High-Cult music and, of course, obviously, to poetry -- even much of the so-called New Formalist poetry. The difference is that the classicist, and the Wintersian, sees the sloppiness as simply no more than that, sloppy, plain and simple -- that is, UNinspired sloppiness. (The photo is a shot of one of Urs Fischer's paintings at a recent gallery show somewhere.)

Yvor Winters had a good deal to say on what we could call sloppiness in his essay "John Crowe Ransom, or Thunder Without God" in In Defense of Reason. One interesting discussion that relates to the modern insistence on sloppiness comes in Part IX of that essay, "Meter and the Theory of Irrelevance." At one point in the discussion of a quotation from Ransom about "roughening" meter, which is, so Ransom said, pretty much pointless anyway, Winters enjoys himself poking at Ransom's ideas:

There is no relationship, then [in Ransom's theory], between meter and meaning; the meter, like the meaning, goes its own way, gathering irrelevancies to itself; but the two cooperate to this extent, that in interfering with each other they increase the irrelevancies of the total poem. Ransom at no point explains why we take pleasure in the irrelevancies of meter; he merely states it as axiomatic that we do so. He nowhere suggests the romantic theory that meter is a form of music, arousing the feelings by pure sound: indeed, his theory precludes the possibility of such an idea, for if meter can do this it is expressive of something. Ransom apparently assumes that we take pleasure in metrical irregularities for their own sake, as we might take pleasure (if we were so constituted) in the bumps and holes in a concrete sidewalk. Since the meter has no relationship to any other aspect of the poem, it is easy to see that the writing of regular meter will be merely a mechanical task and beneath the dignity of a true poet, who will take pains to introduce roughness for the mere sake of roughness:

"It is not merely easy for a technician to write in smooth meters: it is perhaps easier than to write in rough ones, after he has once started; but when he has written smoothly, and contemplates his work, he is capable, actually, if he is a modern poet, of going over it laboriously and roughening it." (quoted from Ransom's book The World's Body, p. 12.)

Things seem to have changed little since Winters's wrote in the 1940s. Sloppy irrelevance remains the goal, it appears. Most of the contemporary poetry I read nowadays (I follow Poetry and the New Yorker, and "Poetry Daily" and "Verse Daily" on the web) is so obstinately casual, so averse to formality, that "sloppy" hardly characterizes its lack of structure. I just read a bunch of Seamus Heaney's new book of poetry Human Chain, which William Logan rather generously reviewed in the New York Times last week. Like much of his "mature" work, this latest stuff from Heaney is just plain sloppy from end to end, though a nicely turned phrase does emerge from time to time amid the slops. Not many, alas, but a few.

Kirsch's Curse

2010-09-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

Adam Kirsch's short piece on Yvor Winters, which first appeared in the 2003 Poetry Issue of the New Criterion, was back in the lit-news last year, since it became one of the principal essays in his collection of criticism, The Modern Element, which hit the shelves late in 2009. There were a few reviews of the book, most of which can be easily found through a search engine. Several of the reviews considered Kirsch's piece on Winters fairly closely and treated it as though it stands at the heart of the collection. That essay, entitled "Winters' Curse," makes most of the common charges against Winters's criticism: it's too narrow, too nasty, too reactionary, far too hard on Romanticism. I have long wanted to go through the short piece paragraph by paragraph, since its charges are mostly misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Winters's work, but haven't yet found the time, though perhaps the rather short essay is more important than I think. It keeps coming up in google searches as one of the top essays on Winters, and, therefore, could cause a good deal of trouble.

On the other hand, Kirsch is strongly appreciative of some of what Winters thought and practiced, and for that I was relieved. Like many other critics, he considers Winters's understanding of form and poetic meter to be consummate and well worth attending to, and I certainly hope that many more readers will take Kirsch's implied advice. He also takes the insightful view that whether you approve the results of Romantic theories in literature, no one can help you understand those theories and what happened in modern literature as a result of Romanticism better than Winters. Amen! So what is the Winters Curse? To be so right in so few areas but so wrong in so many others.

But Kirsch himself misunderstands Winters in many ways. For now, let me just say that narrowness is hardly a fair objection, since being narrow was the whole point of Winters's criticism. If you are a standard critic who accepts the "Standard Canon," as I call that very rough consensus on the great works of literary art, there is no purpose in being narrow. For your defintion of the canon is as shapeless and unprincipled as the canon itself, a mass of works misnamed "classics" for no reason but that they have become accepted in the consensus. But if you are a critic who is seeking to substantially revise the canon, to get a new canon adopted (or even considered), why would you not be narrow? Indeed, you would have to be narrow to properly define why a new canon should be adopted and what should be in it, wouldn't you? Of course you would.

Further, as Kirsch just can't quite understand, Winters was seeking more than a new canon, but to define near perfection, greatness of an order far above the kind of work most poets and writers ever achieve. Naturally such a search would lead to what is perceived as narrowness.

Even further, why does anyone think that because Winters did not consider various poets to have written great poems that he did not think they were worth reading at all, that he thought that what they had written should never have been written? The implication is ludicrous. Winters himself read widely in poets that he considered less than great and many he considered downright bad. Though he failed to say it clearly enough, he didn't think there was a clear and wide distinction between the great (and very few) sheep of literary heaven versus the great mass of goats consigned to hell. There was no narrow gate for Winters. But he was trying to make a true canon, by which he meant not books that remain "fresh," as Pound said, but works that are truly supremely great.

Naturally, these would be few, for a true canon is a measure, the supreme standard by which we judge other works. He concentrated throughout his public critical career on these very best of the best — to the point of trying at the end of his life, as he faced death from cancer, to rewrite the literary history of English poetry by way of the poems he thought had achieved near perfection. But all along he failed to make clear that he wasn't trying to be a censor or an inquisitor (such analogies have been made against Winters by many hostile critics through the decades), but a critic trying to define and discover near perfection. That he would make mistakes seems inevitable. Even Winters thought so. Several times he confessed his own fears of being wrong in his bold judgments. But the narrowness arises from the work he set himself to. I applaud that work and think he was often right.

Amused by his alledged "narrowness," Kirsch laughs at Winters with his neat little analogy of Winters as King of his tiny literary Monaco. But that's exactly what a Wintersian should hope for, or at least what I'm hoping for: an enclave for modern classicism, as I have discussed on this blog a couple times (search on the word "enclave).

Now, as to this charge of "brutality," which Kirsch, like so many before him, levels at Winters: I must object again, briefly. The charge is simply biased against Winters. First, his disapproving comments on various poems and poets are hardly "brutal," an extreme word of moral judgement that simply does not match what he wrote. Second, I have read many a criticism of a literary work just as harsh and condemning as Winters's from authors and critics of every stripe, experimental, postmodern, traditionalist, etc. I have a book on my shelf, Literary Quotations, that contains a lengthy chapter of witty and cruel put-downs from all through the history of English literature (most of them from the past 100 years), many much harsher than anything Winters ever wrote. Some are so harsh that they could be considered libellous. And what, for example, of Mark Twain's endlessly repeated comment on the style of Fenimore Cooper? Somehow this does not make Twain in general "brutal." Why? Perhaps, simply, because modern critics agree with Twain (though I must pause to note that Winters found a lot to judge highly in Cooper, recounted in his wonderful essay on him in Maule's Curse, as republished in In Defense of Reason). Judging from my reading, it seems that someone is considered brutal when he happens to disagree with the popular mid-Cult critics of any time, with, that is, the hoary consensus. Therefore, it's time to put this nonsense about brutality to rest (as I have tried before).

I must end by praising Kirsch for questioning the achievement of John Ashbery, who has enjoyed perhaps the most ridiculously elevated career in the history of literature. That his poetry is considered poetry at all, let alone ever more often praised as the finest poetry of the 20th century in American literature, is cause for embarrassment — though, incredibly, unlike the fairy tale, our critical courtiers still cannot see that Emperor Ashbery has no clothes. Kirsch gingerly tries to justify his doubts about Ashbery's god-awful work, but if he had taken his own advice he could have made quick work of it. Winters explains where Ashbery came from in his various extended comments on Romanticism throughout his writings, but particularly in The Anatomy of Nonsense (third book in In Defense of Reason). I suppose every generation has its blind spots (to keep mixing the metaphors), though the love for Ashbery seems more like a full eclipse of literary sanity. Do I need to go through this? I hope not. But I think I do need to go through all that Adam Kirsch gets right and gets wrong about Yvor Winters some time, since, obviously, Winters is now being seen through his interpretive lens more often than almost any other.

The Origin of Lists

2010-09-21T12:58:00.000-07:00

I've written a good deal about the concept of the canon and lists of great poems and books on this blog, since the whole topic gets short shrift among those who study Yvor Winters nowadays. (In fact, the matter gets no attention at all. For example, the dozen or so authors of the erudite and thoughtful essays in the valuable 1981 "Yvor Winters Issue" of the Southern Review, edited by Donald Stanford, made not one mention of the issue of the canon or of literary evaluation.) I enjoyed and found insightful an article in the Independent (UK) some months back, "The art of the chart: How we fell in love with ranking the world," on the modern history of making best-of lists. The author, a fellow named Boyd Tonkin, sees its origins in the still massively popular Guiness Books of World Records, which often to this day easily outsells the most popular thrillers, mysteries, and romance novels.

Yvor Winters clearly saw great value in making lists of the greatest literature, though he did not make it sufficiently clear what he was trying to accomplish with these lists. Most writers who study or write about his criticism — almost all academics of one sort of another — soft-pedal his lists, claiming with some embarrassment that they are made up of mere "favorites" of his (in the hope, I assume, that that will help make Winters a little more palatable). But I agree with Winters, as I understand him, that it's very important to make lists of the best, however much list-making has become trivialized in the past 40 or 50 years, however close it is coming to fatuity with all these books about the 500 or 1001 books one should read or movies one should see, or restaurants to hurry to, or theme parks to visit (and so on). Is my judgment that lists are important to the study of Winters related to this phenomenon? After all, I loved the Guiness Books when I was a kid (which came about at roughly the same time Winters was making his lists). It's an interesting matter to contemplate.

Tonkin opines that the current pop-culture (low-cult?) mania for making lists is a "dream of reason," the hunger to make order out of chaos. That could have been the purpose of the lists Winters made — and of those I have been making as well. But maybe it's much more than a dream, but a just application of reason in a world of numberless (and growing) ideas and opinions and positions on matters of every sort to say what we think is greatest and on what grounds we make our claim.

Empty Churches

2010-09-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

I was studying Philip Larkin's fine poem "Church Going" the other day as a consequence of having re-read the opening essay in Alan Shapiro's fine quasi-memoir The Last Happy Occasion, which focuses on this poem as one that has changed Shapiro's life. (As another of the essays in the book vigorously depicts, Shapiro was once a devoted adherent of Winters's.) Studying the poem brought to mind that John Fraser chose the poem for his New Book of Verse, that recent and very important online anthology that seeks to update the Winters Canon, which I have discussed quite a few times on this blog. And re-reading "Church Going" gave rise to the thought that modern classicists stand in much the same condition as those still willing to visit countryside Anglican churches. Just as many walk into empty churches, sense the decline in religious faith in themselves and their friends and family and in our culture, and yet still feel some twinge of attraction to the beliefs symbolized in the architecture and furnishings of the churches, so many seem to read poetry written in so-called traditional forms (or verse) and feel a tug of nostalgia for and perhaps attraction to literary styles and ideas of beauty that have long gone out of fashion. (I must put aside the issue of whether Larkin was right about the general decay of Christian belief in England, which, it seems to me, he was not, at least not entirely. Just last night on NPR -- the coincidence is amazing -- I heard a prominent British sociologist of religion claim that about 25% of the adult population of Britain is still strongly religious. That's decline from olden days, but not emptiness.)

Would many readers of modern literature feel something as Larkin says he did in the empty country church he stopped at if they were to look at the shelf of poetry in my musty basement library, with its dozens of obscure volumes of "formalist" poetry, elegant fiction, and modern classicist or "formalist" criticism of various sorts? It would be a small boon if some did. The closing stanza of "Church Going" holds out the same kind of hope I have, that some will see that there is "serious business" going on in the libraries and offices of us modern classicists. Maybe some will start, someday soon, coming back to "church" with us.

On the side issue of the achievement of Larkin's poem, I have strong doubts that Winters would have thought highly of it. I doubt that he would have considered it great -- or even close to great. But we should not be wholly constrained by his judgments, or our guesses at them. We have our own judgments to make. So what do my readers think? Is "Church Going" a great poem, as John Fraser suggests and Alan Shapiro seems to feel? I have my doubts, as well written as it is at points, but it is certainly worth knowing and appreciating, whether we judge it great or not.

By the by, if you find "Church Going" moving or insightful, you might look into two poems in the Winters Canon, as roughly delineated in Winters's 1968 anthology Quest for Reality, on similar or complementary themes to "Church Going": namely Edgar Bowers's "The Virgin Mary" from the 20th century and Thomas Traherne's "On News" from the 18th century. Both these poems, in my judgment, are far greater than Larkin's poem in just about every aspect. The most prominent difference between the two Quest poems and Larkin's might be Larkin's offhand diffidence, his unwillingness to say anything clearly or deeply serious about the "serious business" he seems to believe once went on or possibly could go on again in the empty country churches he liked to stop at. Compare that diffidence to the strong, clear assertions made in Traherne's and Bowers's poems. I must note, as I have before on this blog, that though John Fraser does include Traherne's great poem in his New Book of Verse, he makes a bad error in dismissing Bowers's from his anthology. "The Virgin Mary" is surely one of the greats.

By the by a second time, I note that Fraser has revised the "Critical Preface" to The New Book of Verse. The revision takes no note of my close study of the founding principles of Fraser's anthology published earlier this year on this blog.

The photo is my own of the courtyard of an Episcopal church in downtown Chicago on a snowy night.

The Imagism of Early Winters

2010-09-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

I have been reading and greatly enjoying Laureates and Heretics, the new book by Bob Archambeau, a student of one of Yvor Winters's last students in the mid-1960s (Archambeau now teaches at Lake Forest College in Illinois). In his chapter on Winters, as canon-heretic, Archambeau places a lot of emphasis on Winters's imagist poetry and poetic theories. Yet I don't quite see how Winters's imagist beginnings have much to do with his eventual attainment of the status of heretic, but I found the discussion tangentially insightful and helpful in a number of ways. Archambeau's main point, that Winters has been rejected from the canon because his mature poetic theories and practice were not consonant with the much more frequent practices and much more frequently espoused theories of the prominent poets and critics of his times (and are dissonant with our times as well) is enlightening, if, perhaps, rather obvious. In general, I have appreciated Archambeau's emphasis on literary canons and their making, though I think Archambeau makes a big mistake in not defining what a canon (or "the" canon) is -- or at least what he thinks it is or ought to be. I admit, though, his defintion of canon, which is crucial to the study of Yvor Winters and the whole matter of classicism (Archambeau calls it Augustanism) and so-called traditional verse in our times, might arise cumulatively in the course of the book. I might study parts of this book in more depth on this blog in the months to come.

Winters and His Last Students

2010-03-11T11:05:00.000-08:00

Bob McLean sent me a note that Robert Archambeau has published a new book about Yvor Winters and some of his later students, Laureates and Heretics. Archambeau is the author of the "Samizdat" blog. The book studies the influence Winters had on several of the last graduate students he taught at Stanford University before he retired and died shortly thereafter in early 1968. Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck are the students, all of whom became poets -- one nearly famous, one well known, the others marginal. Hass and Pinsky served as Poet Laureates of the United States. The others have received much less recognition. None has been "canonized" (a term to debate endlessly, of course) as the amazom.com blurb says. Archambeau was a student of Matthais, if I recall correctly. The book's blurbs say it's about the "cultural politics" of literary and specifically poetic reputation in our times.

Frankly, I have never figured out why Archambeau is interested in Winters and seldom read Samizdat because of that. His blog doesn't seem to have any bend toward Wintersian classicism in any sense. Hass and Pinsky, as I have discussed quite a bit on this blog, have wandered far from classicism of any sort, and both have a tendency to misrepresent Winters's ideas to a greater or lesser degree. I have read the poetry of the other three and have found little of value in their writings. If anyone wishes to make a defense of their work, I am willing to listen and read again. I hope to get the book, but it sure is expensive.

Shhhh! Say As Little As You Can About Winters

2009-12-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

At "Slate," Robert Pinsky keeps publicizing the Winters Canon, this time by offering a brief look at and an audio reading of Ben Jonson's poem "Ode to Himself":

http://www.slate.com/id/2237012/

It's a wonderful thing to see, of course. In the current convention, naturally, Pinsky has to take Jonson's poem down many notches before he can praise it. Deflating revisionism is all the rage in our times. If you can't haul some work or person down a good long way, what critical good are you? In this case, Pinsky makes "Ode to Himself" sound like a simple, childish compaint, a kvetch, as he says, that rises, seemingly accidently, to profundity. He makes it sound as though Jonson might have described how he wrote the poem something like this: "I was just bellyaching like mad on paper the other day, as I usually do, and all of a sudden I noticed that I had all written a lot of pretty good stuff, you know that high and mighty writing that makes it sound like you're a deep thinker. So I put it in my book. Why not?" It's an interesting take on the poem, worth considering, at the least.

Whatever his critical position and opinions, Pinsky is the only nationally known writer or poet with connections to Yvor Winters (Pinsky was his student at Stanford University in the 1960s) who is doing anything to revive interest in Winters's work. Though what the nationally known give, the nationally known can easily take away just as quickly. For Pinsky keeps failing to mention Winters, as in this case, or downplaying Winters's ideas when he discusses the classical poems that Winters pretty much rediscovered for our era. It doesn't make me particularly angry, just sad that Pinksy doesn't make it clear, concerning Jonson's "Ode," that it was Yvor Winters who first championed this poem as one of the greatest in the language.

But this is not unlike Pinsky's reticence about Winters on other occasions, such as in his discussion of Herbert's "Church Monuments" on the same site some months back. In that piece Pinsky did mention Winters, at the least, but I found the mention a little odd. Pinsky left out that he was Winters's student and that Winters taught that poem for decades and, further, that Winters considered it one of the greatest ever written. This downplays Winters's ideas to the point, perhaps, of silencing him. I wonder why. It might be that it's entirely innocent. It could very well be that Pinsky is embarrassed by his association with Winters. I can't say. But it looks suspicious.

Finally, Pinsky's audio readings of the "Ode" and Herbert's poem are disappointingly weak. See what you think. Is "Slate" or Pinsky at fault for this very bland reading? I can't say. But they won't do much to help great poetry gain more attention.

A Steele Poem

2009-12-09T07:08:00.000-08:00

Though not forced to wear the shameful label of "Wintersian" -- like a scarlet W -- Timothy Steele has certainly drawn the attention of many Wintersians, such as the late Donald Stanford, who published a number of reviews and poems by Steele during Stanford's long years as co-editor of the Southern Review. (Steele's three books on prosody, by the way, are very learned and enlightening.) Steele has more frequently been thought as one of the "New Formalists," which, he has written, is a label that suits him well enough. I like his poetry and think well of it. But I can't say that any single poem has inspired me in some significant way, standing as some sort of monument worth reflecting upon often. The following poem, though, is one that keeps coming to mind for some pondering. I think it pays on close reading, on the act of critical contemplation.

The Library

Emerging through the automatic doors,
I feel the Santa Anas' gusting heat.
It's five o'clock. The grainy sunlight pours
Through eucaplyti whose peeled bark strips beat
The trunks to which they cling like feeble sleeves.
The campus lawns are eddyings of leaves
Viewed by day's milky, unassertive moon.
The sculpture garden has a recessed seat.
I take it, thinking of the afternoon.

And of the library. Cultural oasis?
Few would object to its conserving aims.
Still, tracking books by way of data bases,
I feel I'm playing Faustian video games.
And jotting notes down from computer screens,
I doubt our armories of ways and means:
Whether in books or trusted to a disc,
The written record may, as Plato claims,
Subvert and put our memory at risk.

Yet books consoled me when I was a child,
And seeing words and software joined and synced,
Even philosophers might be beguiled.
And if a relish verses nimbly linked,
Here flowing, there concluded with a twist,
It was Greek librarian-archivist
Who had an odd pedantic inspiration --
Make prose and poems textually distinct --
And first gave lyric measures lineation.

Banners on the Art Gallery's facade
Ripple and flap; in a collegial wrath,
Two birds dispute the rights to a carob pod;
A puffed-up brown bag somersaults a path
Where Rodin's Walker [ital] makes his headless stride.
Leaves spin up into coilings and subside.
This windy much-ado, arising from
The desert could well serve as epitaph
For Alexandria, Rome, Pergamum --

For all the ancient libaries whose collections
Have vanished in a mammoth wordless void.
And though I have the evening clouds' confections,
Thoughts of the art and science thus destroyed
Leave me a little empty and unnerved.
The consolation? Some things were preserved,
Technology now limits what is lost,
And learning, as it's presently deployed,
Is safe from any partial holocaust.

I could construct a weighty paradigm,
The Library as Mind. It's somehow truer
To recollect details of closing time.
Someone, as slotted folders on a viewer,
Tucks microfiche squares in their resting places;
Felt cloth's drawn over over the exhibit cases;
The jumbled New Book Shelves are set in shape;
The day's last check-outs are thumped quickly through a
Device that neutralizes tettle-tape.

And shelvers, wheeling booktrucks through the stacks,
Switch lights off at the ends of empty aisles;
Jaded computer terminals relax;
Above lit spaces of linoleum tiles,
The hitching-forward minute hands of clocks
Hold vigil still, but a custodian locks
The main door, and the last staff members go
Home to their private lives and private trials.
Still over us, the Santa Anas blow

The leaves about in rustling shifting mounds;
The long, rusty-colored needles pine trees shed
In broom-straw trios strew the walks and grounds;
Winding, as though along a corkscrew's thread,
A squirrel has circled down a sycamore.
The frail must, in fair times, collect and store,
And so, amid swirled papery debris,
The squirrel creeps, nosing round, compelled to hoard
By instinct, habit, and necessity.

The varying stanza form is one that could, and should, provide a model for our times. It is similar to the 10-line stanza Paul Valery used for a few good and great poems ("Palme" and "Ebauche d'un Serpent," for example); the rhyme scheme that varies yet remains similar stanza to stanza could give modern formalists who don't want to get too rigid quite a bit more freedom than the traditional poetic forms of English allow. (Loose rhyme schemes and metrical patterns appear to be a major need for modern formalist poets and could help turn a few poets from prosetry to poetry. For the bane of rigidity has been almost completely scorned in our times [though I am ever puzzled why even the word appears to elicit shrieks of horror], even among the New Formalists. I should write more about this, but I only have time to say that if it takes loose forms to get more a few more poets to write in some sort of credible poetic form, then bring on the loose forms. A little bit of form is better than none at all.) Steele's nine-line stanza is expressive and well worth imitating for anyone aspiring to write real poetry, not the almost mindless, slapdash prosetry that fills our journals and magazines. His iambic line is well turned, though some of the variations are too loose. His diction is casual, in the way of the New Formalists, who hold court in their small fief nowadays while imitating the prosetic musers who run the cultural kingdom at present.

As to theme and content, there is a lot in this poem, about the meaning of the intellectual life, about civilization, about the importance of poetry and reading, about books holding off the winds of destruction, while books themselves succumb to those same winds. (I was just reading in a history of the Jews in ancient times of a lost history written about Nero's and Vespasian's war against the Jews in AD 68-70 that was written in answer to Josephus's famed work on that same topic. It is crushingly sad that that work did not survive.) It makes me want to get over to the library and gather some nuts for the winter -- though I really don't need much encouragement to do that, summer or winter. The symbolism is strong and moving, almost Post-Symbolist, in Winters's definition, though it is really not much more than a plain analogy -- and there's not a thing wrong with that, I hasten to add. Some of the diction here is pure ornament, but most of this cake's icing is understated and well turned. Are these witty moments weaknesses, like the empty flashiness of a vibrantly decorative stylist like, say, John Updike? I would say that they are slight weaknesses in a good poem. But I dislike quibbling about something so good as this.

It's interesting that the poem is so thematically diffident. Right in the midst of the poem, Steele writes that he thought about writing of the analogy of the library as a place where, perhaps, "Mind" is fulfilled and preserved. But then he immediately sets any such grand theme aside for some further musings about leaves blowing about and squirrels gathering nuts. He seems as milky and unassertive as the moon of the first stanza. The turn away from the big theme seems emblematic of our age, when our poets feel, or seem to feel, a little shy of big ideas. Winters certainly had no such diffidence. The poems he thought greatest are all about big ideas, perhaps too big in some ways. (I think of those dense poems on subjects like "being" that Winters wrote, wrote about, and thought highly of.) Perhaps Steele, like many another writer, felt that he is simply not up to the task of speaking of something so profound as the "Mind" and consequently felt compelled to set his sights much lower, even though his premise led him to the brink of saying something big with his suggestive analogy. But these are for now mere reflections, things I will ponder in the years to come as I think of this poem.

Yvor Winters, if I were asked to make a guess, would not think all that highly of the poem's style. He would almost certainly consider large chunks of it "journalistic," which was a particularly damning adjective for him. This word seems to have meant to him "pedestrian," and much of Steele's writing in this poem is a touch -- in the dogged convention of our era -- pedestrian, perhaps arising in part from the diffidence I just mentioned, but perhaps arising too from the need to get published, since this sort of chatty writing reigns in our literary culture. As to Steele's ideas, Winters would probably have found them poorly developed and the poem as a whole structured rather sloppily. I would agree with that assessment to some degree. The poem is not great, perhaps 2 stars or so in my system. But it is worth taking time to contemplate. It is a bit of a musing ("take some interesting subject; look at it in several ways and from a bunch of angles; see what pops into your mind by association or otherwise; finish by tossing your best notions into a pile, which then becomes the poem"), but at least it muses upon important matters with moments of fine style, a few sharp insights, and a fairly strong poetic line.

Any thoughts from my readers are always appreciated.

Logan on Wallace Stevens

2009-12-02T11:42:00.000-08:00

I offer a brief note to say that I did read William Logan's overview of Wallace Stevens's poetry in the New Criterion in October of this year, which I am sure you would expect me to have read, since I read Logan regularly and since Stevens is a poet whose work has a prominent place in the Winters Canon. The chatty, witty, balloon-busting essay is worth reading, though not because it has any affinities with Yvor Winters's classical take on Stevens's work. I like Logan's iconoclasm, which irritates plenty of fans of particular poets and wins him few friends (how he stirred the nest of Hart Crane fandom a couple years back with a few sharp pokes).

As we all realize, Stevens has become one of those much beloved central figures in American literature, one of the untouchables, the object of a protective fan-base, almost a celebrity of sorts. As you also may know as well, though Winters considered Stevens to have written some of the greatest poetry in the English language and several of the greatest poems of the modern era, Winters also touched the now untouchable Stevens quite forcefully. I would say that he punched him -- and pretty hard. For Stevens's poetry degenerated badly in the last two-thirds of his career as a poet, in Winters's judgment, and my own. (I have no idea exactly when Stevens wrote his poems. I presume he tinkered with them for years before publishing them. I refer to their order and time of publication.)

At the end of his essay, Logan includes a list of the poems he considers very good or great in Stevens's body of work, and some of these poems aren't too bad. But Logan passes over almost all the poems Winters considered great. Only "The Snow Man" makes the list of both critics. Logan even makes the colossal mistake of thinking "Sunday Morning" tedious (without explaining why he thinks so). Winters considered this, perhaps, the single greatest poem written in English in the 20th century, and I come close to agreeing (Winters's own "To the Holy Spirit" gets my vote, provisionally). Logan doesn't quite say so, but it seems that he finds "Sunday Morning" to be soaked in amateurish philosophy, a view with which, if accurate, I cannot disagree more.

But, overall, Logan's is a provocative read and worthwhile for being that. And that's what William Logan is often after, a little provocation (though I do think that he truly holds the opinions he uses as sticks to poke nests). Regrettably, however, he doesn't sum up Stevens well. We hardly get any sense of why to read his poetry other than that it sparkles from time to time with some elegant lines, vivid diction, and passages that have little or no meaning or importance or substance. There is much more in Stevens than that, even in the weak later poetry. Logan seems to get nothing out of Stevens that I can tell from this piece. I see in his work a desperation that arose from a loss of meaning in life, the result of a flustered effort to find some purpose for modern humankind, which has lost all confidence in past truths. This overarching theme, for me, makes Stevens one of the truly representative modernist writers, even though his work declined so much in the later years as he treated his theme in ever more bizarre ways. I recommend for a summary of Stevens, if only it weren't so obscure and hard to find, the discussion of his work in Donald Stanford's Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, in addition, of course, to Winters's essay on Stevens in In Defense of Reason and his later reconsideration in Forms of Discovery. By the way, though Logan discusses a passage of it at length, I find R.P. Blackmur's study of Stevens nearly worthless.

On a side note, I wanted to say that I was very appreciative of a reader who sent the recommendation of the poetry of Australian Stephen Edgar, whose work I have been reading lately (and you too can find a few of his poems on the web). This is what I was hoping for a lot more of on this blog. I repeat my call for comment: please send me your recommendations for new classicists we can all consider. I will post a note on Edgar some time in the near future.

A Consideration of the Theory Behind the New Book of Verse, Part II

2009-10-09T08:41:00.001-07:00

THE CRITICAL PREFACE

I turn now to the longer and later essay, in which John Fraser wrote that his anthology The New Book of Verse (once again, NBV hereafter) sprang from his desire to find poems that simply “had to be” in an anthology of “good and great poems.” I quote those phrases from the “Unknown Flights” introduction (considered in "Part I"), though Fraser does mention this purpose in the “Critical Preface.” When I first read it a year ago, I deeply hoped that the preface would give us an account of the critical theory at the foundation of the NBV. Alas, it offers only slightly more help in understanding the nature of the NBV than the introduction.

To summarize, the preface offers no clear, sharp, or detailed account of why Fraser selected the poems found in the NBV and not others. Even though the title of this essay implies that Fraser will discuss a literary theory in the preface, he is almost as vague and elusive in the preface as he was in the “Unknown Flights” introduction that he wrote four years earlier. In the preface Fraser offers no theory of literature, no system of evaluation, no take on the art of poetry, and no assessment, provisional or otherwise, of Winters’s literary theory or any of the concepts that form that theory. As in the introduction, Fraser seems to be saying that the NBV simply offers poems that he admires, which is what so many critics of Winters (even those few who generally or loosely approve of him) have thought Winters was doing -- mistakenly, I believe -- with his lists of great poems and his anthology of great or important poems, Quest for Reality (hereafter QR).

As in “Unknown Flights,” John Fraser’s “Critical Preface” offers no clear or sound account of his critical principles, despite his laying out several short and direct paragraphs about those principles. Let me turn first to some of the implied criteria, those varied comments that Fraser drops intro his discussion and that appear to describe, roughly, provisionally, his critical principles.

Early in the essay, Fraser mentions that one poem is “a fully realized poem,” which implies that full realization is a central criterion for the anthology. But such a phrase is almost entirely obscure. A critic could conceivably construe just about anything written to have met such a criterion. Later, when discussing how themes are treated, Fraser mentions “selves… engaged in realizing the being of other selves.” Again, the context of this comment implies that this activity is another important distinguishing feature of the poems of the NBV. The phrase has the appearance of profundity, but when you examine it closely, you realize how vague it is. Just about any poem ever written could be taken as meeting such a criterion, even the most privately confessional poems of the 20th century. My guess is that what Fraser means by these and similar phrases is that exceptionally good poems are not too personal, however much “personalness” might be judged too much or “publicness” too little. Returning later, it seems, to this idea of a poem’s being too personal, Fraser implies that a very good or great poem should be “free-standing.” But, again, he fails to make it clear what that phrase means exactly. How freely and in what ways does a poem have to stand free to be considered good or exceptionally good? Moreover, as it stands without further elucidation, a critic could construe just about any poem to have met this principle, which makes the principle only a whisker above meaningless.

This matter of “personalness” comes up again in passing when Fraser offers a very brief yet seemingly important discussion of certain poems by Philip Larkin. In this passage, Fraser returns yet again to this matter of poetry’s needing impersonality, in some way, to be judged good or great. Fraser mentions “personal” and “depressive” as being weaknesses of a certain Larkin poem, which implies in context that very good poems avoid being personal and depressive. But such adjectives are simply too vague to be of any help. Fraser adds that another of Larkin’s poems is “heavy-footed,” which implies that “heavy-footed-ness,” whatever that is, is a sign of weakness. Yet again, however, Fraser fails to explain this word. A critic could say any poem avoids these three adjectives that have apparently kept two good poems by Philip Larkin poems out of the anthology.

Among other minor criteria mentioned or implied, Fraser mentions that good poems offer “finer states of selfhood,” which, as noble a phrase as it is, could mean anything at all -- and is thus almost wholly meaningless. Fraser also implies that a poem is very good or great when its themes or purposes are “sustained” throughout the poem. That is more than vague; it’s meaningless, since the phrase could mean anything at all and since any critic could make a case that any poem meets the standard.

Late in the “Critical Preface,” Fraser does offer an explicit list of principles, to which I now turn. In this section, Fraser mentions that exceptionally good and great poems must use coherent metaphors and solid similes -- and not use them excessively. What makes a metaphor coherent and a simile solid? Again, we can have no idea because the criteria are unacceptably vague and left unexplained, though Yvor Winters discussed proper metaphors extensively in his writings. Fraser then mentions “generalizations that are obviously untrue or simplistic.” That seems sensible enough, but on its face, it means almost nothing in theory and could mean just about anything in practice.

Finally, among various other implied or hidden evaluative criteria in his list, that most important Fraser mentions are these:

1. “psychological substance”
2. “craft”
3. “not formalistic”
4. “a degree of ‘concreteness’”
5. “relative tautness”
6. “something ‘happens’ rhetorically”

This is not an exhaustive list, but these seem to me the main criteria. I see nothing in any of these words and phrases that helps us understand the principles behind the NBV or in any way develop, add to, or enhance the critical thought of Yvor Winters. Nor do they even mean much. Each phrase or word is frustratingly nebulous.

Though he doesn’t mention vividness in his list of attributes, Fraser, both in the preface and in other writings in Voices in the Cave of Being, appears to be mostly concerned with what I call “thereness,” by which I mean descriptions of certain objects or settings or events as being so vivid that they “live on the page” (yet another phrase left unexplained). At one point, in discussing some passage of description that he considers thrilling, Fraser writes that the scene is “there,” and puts the word in italics, as though this sense of vivid, living “thereness” is a central feature of the best poetry. But he fails to explain exactly what this quality is. He sounds no less fuzzy about “thereness” than Ezra Pound once sounded about “freshness” in his famous book The ABC of Reading:

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Well, I suppose so. But what’s fresh and what isn’t? How does anyone know? Anything could be construed as fresh by someone who happens to find it fresh -- anything!

For all these reasons, I find John Fraser’s implied theory of literature and literary evaluation to be seriously wanting. But even more disappointing than the vagueness of his critical discussion is what Fraser has neglected in his “Critical Preface,” especially since it purports to be a quasi-Wintersian anthology. Fraser does not define what poetry is, nor try to explain, develop, or strengthen Yvor Winters’s definition of poetry (admittedly vague in itself) as “a statement in words about a human experience.” Fraser does not discuss any of the central concepts of Winters’s theory, despite his various comments about Winters being the greatest critic in English (see "Part I" of my essay). Fraser offers no discussion of Winters’s ideas about connotation and denotation. He does not discuss didactic or hedonistic poetry, which Winters rejected as unsound. (Judging from his emphasis on “thereness,” by the way, Fraser seems to be something of a aesthetic hedonist, though that is a matter I will have to take up later). He offers nothing on Romantic aesthetics or philosophy that builds on Winters’s ideas about Romanticism or relates the NBV to Winters’s critical thought. Most strangely, he offers not a word on the morality of poetry, which was a central concept in Winters’s criticism and in his work of evaluation and the development of the QR anthology. Despite the importance of the concept of morality to Winters’s theory, Fraser seems to have no interest in the subject, as my brief run-through of his critical principles indicates. Rather, he seems to have been mostly interested, rather simply, in “realization,” in “thereness,” in vividness, which, in my judgment, all mean little more than “well written.”

Finally, concerning the neglect of Winters, though Fraser writes several times that the NBV focuses on formal poetry, poetry written in what are nowadays commonly called “traditional poetic forms,” he has nothing to say about the meaning or importance or value of form at all. We are left wondering why he focuses on form other than that he likes poems written in traditional forms (a phrase, to repeat, I distinctly dislike). Further, Fraser has nothing to say about Yvor Winters’s theories of form, neither to approve or disapprove or to develop those ideas. And it is most puzzling that he has not a word to say about Winters’s theory of meter, the part of Winters’s work as a critic that is most often begrudgingly praised by those who know of that work, though Winters’s theories about the meaning and value of meter are more often ignored, dismissed, or reviled. (I must add that I have my doubts about this aspect of Winters’s theory, too.)

As you see, John Fraser accomplishes nothing more on theory in his “Critical Preface” than he does in his “Unknown Flights” introduction, and it is a huge disappointment to me. Fraser has done something important through the NBV, given us some new poems to read, profit from, and consider. He has given his own stamp of approval as great or exceptionally good to many of the poems of the Winters Canon. But he has done almost nothing to advance the study of Yvor Winters or to develop his ideas with the NBV’s prefatory essays. Without a coherent and full-blooded critical theory behind it, including clear and sound tenets of evaluation, the NBV amounts to a book of personal likes and dislikes.

So what does it come down to, this anthology? I think we can derive a hazy system of evaluation from Fraser’s writings. The poems of the NBV are exceptionally good or great poems (4 to 5 stars under my system, I would guess) that are written in traditional forms (mostly), are impersonal in some unspecified manner and to some unspecified degree, concern general themes to some unspecified degree, contain vivid writing of some unspecified kind, and are well written in some unspecified way. (Being “well-written” is what most of Fraser’s criteria come down to in the end).

A telling test case for the value of this set of critical principles is whether the poems of John Ashbery should or even could be included in this anthology. I do not consider Ashbery a poet -- or even a good writer. Yet it appears obvious that a critic could claim that Ashbery writes great poems (as more and more critics, unbelievably, absurdly, have been claiming lately) that are personal reflections on impersonal general themes; that are vivid in some sense (as many have claimed); and that are very well written (as has also been claimed). The only lack in Fraser’s system in Ashbery’s badly written pseudo-poetry is traditional form, though it bears remembering that Fraser includes a number of free-verse poems in the NBV, such as several by Wallace Stevens, and considers them to be formal in some sense. (Many critics claim that Ashbery’s formless drivel has some kind of formality as well.)

On the basis of this test case, I conclude that John Fraser has done little to advance the development of modern classicism with this anthology, as valuable as the NBV is for other reasons.

For I do not wish you to mistake my judgment. What John Fraser has done is valuable and important. He has given us new poems to consider, poems he appears to consider as part of the classical tradition. He has given a credible stamp of approval on the status of Yvor Winters. He has given us a variety of essays that offer lots of comparisons and contrasts to get a better feel for his vague ideas about poetry and literary evaluation. But despite all this, he has not given a full or even an outline of a classical theory of literature and literary evaluation -- and certainly no ideas that update or improve on those of Yvor Winters. The work he has done with the NBV is commendable. But much more is needed if classicism is to find many more adherents in the modern age.

John Fraser still has a chance to accomplish much more through the NBV anthology, for he is still working on his book and adding to the anthology. But it appears that he is content with the work he has done. I appreciate what he has accomplished, even deeply so, and have been studying it closely and reading it frequently. I have profited from the NBV and its associated essays a great deal. I have even truly enjoyed most of Fraser’s writings. But I see a great need for the next greats not only to be proposed but to be properly defended for Yvor Winters’s classical literary ideas to be properly developed and strengthened. This John Fraser has yet to do or even try to do.

If the deeper study and refinement of Yvor Winters’s ideas is going to occur any time soon, it must begin with what John Fraser has done, given us new poems that a critic supportive of Winters’s classicism considers great or very good. But someone must go on to show us why and how we know they are great by consistent, clear, and detailed argument.

A Consideration of the Literary Theory Behind "The New Book of Verse," Part I

2009-09-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

I have made the assertion several times over the years I have been writing this blog that John Fraser has done some of the most important work advancing the study of Yvor Winters in the past 20 years. Most notably, Fraser has published on line an anthology of very good and possibly great poetry that began from an effort in the 1970s to publish together as many of the poems Yvor Winters apparently judged to be either great or very good in one collection. The anthology would include the poems Winters mentioned as, roughly speaking, good but left out of his controversial 1968 anthology, Quest for Reality (hereafter QR), which, in my judgment, Winters intended, in part, as a collection of the very best poems in the English language.

Fraser’s anthology became the New Book of Verse (hereafter NBV). It is on line and is linked in the right-hand column of this blog. In the following years, the NBV and its supporting essays have become part of a larger and distinctly valuable work on traditional-form poetry (how I dislike having to write such phrases), entitled Voices in the Cave of Being. In those same years, Fraser decided to add poems to the NBV, presumably poems that he judges to be as great or as remarkably good as the poems Yvor Winters had chosen for QR or mentioned in his essays as being extraordinarily good.

I use the NBV frequently and have wanted to assess its purposes and Fraser’s case for his selections to see whether they can advance the study of Yvor Winters’s classicist theory of literature or even play a major role in the development of Yvor Winters’s ideas beyond the point Winters left them. Sad to say, however, Fraser’s introductory and explanatory writings about the NBV make no detailed, systematic, or strong case that the NBV contains anything other than the poetry Fraser happens to admire. This short essay is my effort to understand and evaluate those writings.

There are two main pieces to consider, the introduction to the NBV entitled “Unknown Flights” and the “Critical Preface.” Before assessing these essays, let me state again and clearly that John Fraser’s extensive work in Voices in the Cave of Being is one of the most significant and valuable developments in the study of Winters and his critical theory since his death. Fraser once called Winters “the most important American man of letters since Henry James,” as Fraser quotes himself in his introduction to the NBV. On top of that, Fraser dares to recount his praise for Winters’s most reviled book, Forms of Discovery (1967), which Fraser once wrote was the work of a “great mind.” Indeed, building out and up from Forms and its companion QR anthology, Fraser writes that he set out with the NBV to make a “fat” anthology of the poems Winters thought excellent, especially good, or vital to the future of literature and modern classicism.

These comments lead us to believe that Fraser intended the NBV as a development of Winters’s critical ideas and practices, as an attempt to bring greater maturity, precision, and depth to Winters’s classicism. For these reasons, I believe we need to look closely at the introduction (dated November 2004) and the “Critical Preface” (dated February 2008) to try to comprehend what Fraser’s purposes for the NBV are, as well as what his theories of literature and specifically of the evaluation of poetry are.

I will consider the introduction “Unknown Flights” first, which was posted on Fraser’s web site some years before the “Critical Preface.”

* UNKNOWN FLIGHTS *

This introduction explains that Fraser was influenced by Yvor Winters through the late Don Stanford, the modern classicist who was editor of the Southern Review, Second Series, till 1982. (I have mentioned or discussed Stanford numerous times on this blog.) In addition describing how the anthology came into being, Fraser gives us a few hints about its varied purposes. However, I must be candid in saying that the critical principles that inform the NBV are left extremely vague in the introduction. The literary theory behind what Fraser has chosen for the anthology and what he has left out, if he has any such theory, is left a mystery, at least in this piece. I was going to write that the introduction leaves Fraser’s theory “a little fuzzy,” but he is much more vague than that. His critical tenets are almost entirely lost in mists.

A central problem for the introduction is that, despite his strongly implied approval for Winters and his critical ideas and practices, Fraser doesn’t state openly or precisely why he wanted to publish this anthology, on line or otherwise. He does quote his own comment that Winters had a “great mind” and was a highly important man of letters, which imply that Winters’s selection of very good and great poems (published not only in the 1968 QR anthology but in the various lists of great poems he made throughout his career) is to some degree consonant with Fraser’s own views. Near the end of the introduction, Fraser even writes that Winters “was the greatest critic of poetry in the language”. Those are words of high praise -- perhaps the highest praise possible (assuming that Fraser meant “is” the greatest and has not changed his mind or found another critic who has superseded Winters).

Nonetheless, from this introduction, we get no sense of why Fraser thinks Winters is the greatest critic in English, nor what his case for his claim is, nor how his claim accords with his anthology or accounts for his additions and subtractions. Further, Fraser writes that the overview of poetry discussed in Winters’s final book, Forms of Discovery, which most critics disdain (when giving it any attention at all), was an “exhilarating experience.” But Fraser does not explain or elaborate upon why it was exhilarating. We can suppose he is hoping that his readers will find the NBV anthology equally exhilarating, but why should they? Fraser fails to explain or elaborate upon these opinions or even seek to justify them in any sound or significant way in “Unknown Flights.”

Still, the introduction does make a number of offhand, sketchy comments that seem intended to explain and substantiate his opinions of Yvor Winters’s critical ideas and practices and to help us make sense of the NBV anthology. Let’s take a look at the main comments. Fraser writes that the poems he has chosen for the NBV are “well-made and clearly individuated.” These two phrases appear to stand as criteria of the finest poetry. But, as you surely see, the phrases are exceedingly vague and provide almost no help in understanding a classical or Wintersian critical theory that might underlie this anthology. Later Fraser writes that his additions from the 20th century are “strong poems.” This seems to be a criterion, too. Obviously, though, the limp adjective “strong” is of no help whatsoever. Just about anything can be -- and just about anything has been -- called a “strong” poem. With a tone of approval, Fraser once mentions that the work of another scholar has helped to keep “the Wintersian tradition of verse alive.” This comment implies that keeping that tradition alive is part of Fraser’s purpose in compiling this anthology. But Fraser doesn’t define the tradition in this piece, which makes the comment of very little help in understanding the theory of critical evaluation that informs the NBV.

Yet along his way, Fraser keeps dropping in more of these comments, which appear to tell us what makes the poems of NBV particularly admirable. He writes that some of the poems provide “richness of experience” and a bit later “magnificence.” In passing, Fraser also mentions that the poems exhibit “splendor of language,” “intelligence,” and “craftsmanship.” But Fraser explains none of these words and phrases, even though they are so nebulous as to be nearly meaningless.

Finally, in section XXIV of the “Unknown Flights” introduction, Fraser brings out a list of attributes of the poems, an inventory which promises to give us some sound insight into his critical principles and might build in some significant way upon the literary theory of Yvor Winters. As he begins his list, Fraser gives us the sense that in it we will find, at the least, an outline of his critical theory. He implies that the listed attributes justify the selection of the poems and stand as the evaluative criteria behind their selection.

So what is in this list? Fraser writes that the poems of the NBV avoid “versified autobiography or philosophy or social commentary.” They are dedicated to poetry as “expressive form.” They are different from the poems found in best-selling anthologies. They are “some of the best poetry,” written in “living language.” Fraser lists a few more attributes in much the same vein, but I consider these to be the main items. They are enough to see that every one of Fraser’s criteria is far too imprecise to help us understand Fraser’s views or see how they might improve on, refine, deepen, or advance Yvor Winters’s classical ideas -- or help us find the best poems or aid us in making discoveries of good or great poems on our own.

Near the end of the introduction, Fraser implies that the NBV contains some of the exceptionally good and great poems of the English language, but this comment only leaves us wondering how Fraser makes the distinction between the two, what those other good poems are that have been left out, and, further, which poems in the NBV are good and which great. But no deeper explanation of “good” and “great” -- nor any critical theory at all, for that matter -- is forthcoming in “Unknown Flights.”

When I first read, it, the introduction to the NBV left me more than a little deflated. But it was not to be the end of the story. I was highly pleased when I saw that just last year John Fraser had published an additional “Critical Preface” to the NBV. I hoped that that newer piece would give us significantly deeper insight into what Fraser is trying to accomplish through the anthology. To that essay I will turn in the second and last part of this essay.

Let me add as well that rather than focusing on what is missing from these two essays, I will consider more fully what John Fraser has achieved with the NBV and its attendant materials at the end of Part II.

An Obscure George Herbert Poem Well-Known to Wintersians

2009-09-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

Robert Pinsky continues to put out some valuable short articles on poetry at Slate. Just a couple weeks back, he offered a very brief overview of the great poem “Church Monuments” by George Herbert, the 17th century Anglican priest who wrote a lot of top-notch classical poetry. Pinsky, as you might recall, was once a student of Yvor Winters’s at Stanford University in the 1960s. Though some have labeled him a Wintersian, of some sort, I have opined on this blog that he can hardly be so construed. Still, Pinsky has written well about poetry written in traditional form down the years, and even recently, and some of the poems he has focused on are works that Yvor Winters thought great or highly important.

I know I’ve been hard on Pinsky at times, especially for his poetry, which has descended into trivialities and downright bad writing in recent years, but I do appreciate Pinsky’s efforts to focus attention on some of the poems and issues that Winters thought crucial to the future of literary culture. Pinsky’s article on Herbert’s poem can be found at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2226655/

If you wish to dig deeper into this one poem, I also recommend John Fraser’s wide-ranging and sometimes very personal discussion of it in his on-line book Voices in the Cave of Being (which contains the anthology I have often touted on this blog as a highly significant, if not the single most important, development in the study of Yvor Winters in the past 20 years, the New Book of Verse). Fraser’s essay on Herbert’s poem can be found at:

http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/church_mon.html

Why all this emphasis on one 24-line poem? Clearly, Pinsky and Fraser deeply admire Herbert’s stellar achievement in this one poem, which has been overlooked or forgotten almost throughout the entire course of English literary history (most books and web sites offering selections of Herbert’s poetry do not include this poem). Having introduced both Pinsky and Fraser to the poem, as they both mention, Yvor Winters considered “Church Monuments” to be one of the half dozen greatest poems ever written in the language, as he made clear in several of those short lists of the greatest great poems that he put out from time to time in the midst of his essays. It was the only poem of Herbert’s that Winters considered to have achieved greatness. The poem is simple to find on the web, so I won’t reprint it here. In fact, it is reprinted at both sites I have linked to in this post.

My judgment on “Church Monuments”? I agree with Winters. It’s surely one of the greatest of the great poems, though it is still infrequently anthologized or discussed or paid attention to in literary culture. Because it is so great and because Yvor Winters “discovered” it are two chief reasons why I believe he is to be largely trusted and looked to as one of the greatest literary critics in the English language. This poem was one of the main reasons I became a Wintersian.

By the way, another modern classicist poet, David Middleton, who once studied with Donald Stanford at LSU, wrote in the 1980s that Winters failed to see the excellence of Herbert’s “Love (III),” which Middleton considered a great poem on a par with or perhaps greater than “Church Monuments.” Of note, John Fraser has mentioned not “Love (III)” but “Affliction” as Herbert’s other great poem. Winters, it is evident, did not judge either of these poems to have achieved anything near the canonical standard that “Church Monuments” and the other greatest great poems of English set. What do you think? For now I will forbear to reveal my own judgments concerning these poems. Here’s Middleton’s choice:

LOVE (III)

by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
. Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
. From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
. If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here";
. Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
. I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
. "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them; let my shame
. Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
. "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
. So I did sit and eat.

Look to the Poets!

2009-09-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

I was sent a notice over the summer that Poetry had published two previously unpublished letters from Yvor Winters to a new student and that student’s father. The letters originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry and can be found on line at:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=237082

The letters are certainly fascinating, both for their tone and for their audacious opinions. Surely, the tone will a bit shocking to those who haven’t read much in Winters’s essays or in his letters (the first edition of selected letters came out just nine years ago). He can seem discourteous, inappropriately direct and honest, too sure of his own judgments, even somehow almost brutal in the way he assesses the work of individual young poets. I would hate to read an assessment of my work from him. Thank goodness I will never have to (or at least never have to in this life -- perhaps some unpleasant fate awaits me in another).

The opinions about the importance of poetry and of university departments of English will undoubtedly be a bit shocking or bewildering as well. Winters explains in these letters, especially the second to the young poet’s father, his extremely elevated estimation of the work of the finest poets. Their work serves as the chief guardian of our civilization, the sine qua non of the intellectual and spiritual health and vitality of the West, in Winters's judgment. I’m not certain I agree with a view of poetry so exalted, as much as I appreciate reading in and studying the art. Does anyone out there stand with Winters on this, that poetry forms the heart of civilized life? It doesn’t seem that any Wintersian I know of, not even such devoted classicists as the late Donald Stanford or John Fraser, comes close to agreeing with Winters on this towering view of poetry.

Searching Reason

2009-07-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

Ah, summer is here. I have found it difficult to find the energy and passion needed to write for this blog. But I want to continue reflecting on many poems I have been thinking about over the past few months. As some may remember, I live in summer in Copper Harbor, Michigan (the state's northernmost town), to run, with my brothers, a passenger ferry across Lake Superior to Isle Royale National Park. Any family business can be time-consuming, of course, and the business takes time away from my work on this blog.

With that in mind, I offer a poem this week from John Finlay, who was an exceptionally fine poet who died young. Though almost entirely unknown in American literary culture, a number of poets have taken and keep taking note of his achievement, including the late Donald Stanford during his days as editor of the Southern Review, Second Series. Finlay was deeply interested in Yvor Winters and wrote a dissertation on his work and a couple essays on Winters as well. You will have a lot of trouble finding his poetry and essays, though David Middleton edited a small edition of Finlay's collected poems in the 1990s. I own that book, but I do not know whether it is still in print (it can be purchased as a used book at various web sites). There is plenty of excellent poetry in Finlay's body of work to choose from, but here is one that I admire a great deal:

The Case of Holmes

The scientific searcher scans the blood,
The objects in the room, the tracks of mud,
Thickest around the pathos of the corpse.
He doesn't let instinctual grief that warps
The vision cause him not to find that fact
Which later hangs the murderer. Abstract
And lean, he seems emotionless cold thought,
Almost at times as sexless, always taut.
He has to drug a mind that will not cease
Once a case is solved -- cocaine's release,
Or trance before the chemical blue flame.
And there are states of mind he cannot name,
As skulking in the fog, urban night-wood,
He feels compressed, erotic brotherhood
And for the hardest criminal. But these
Are freakish states and disappear. He sees
Himself as whole in this: revulsion for
The great malignant brain who wages war
On those who break an ego's brutal dream.
He matches brain to brain in the extreme
Of hot collected nerves and cold reserve.
Fear also makes him whole; he must preserve
One being in the conflict with that brain
Or else, at one mistake, he will be slain.

This is dense stuff, poetry crammed with ideas. Written in expertly managed heroic couplets, Finlay's iambic line is nicely controlled. The themes are pertinent to much in our present society: the fascination with the killer and the mass killer; the interest in deviancy; the trust in science; our frustration with a lack of answers on crucial questions about the mind; the risks of studying the mind closely. The poem's approach to these themes is similar to much in modern free-verse and experimental poetry, such as one might fnd regularly in The New Yorker. Many poets nowadays write in Finlay's manner in this poem: take a subject or object from popular culture and then treat it seriously, though with wryness and wit. The technique often becomes cloying and leads to bathos and prosetic musing of the worst sort. But some poets are skilled enough to handle the technique well, as I believe this poem does. I know I really should explain what's good and bad in the use of the technique, but I do not think I have the time now for an extended discussion of the matter.

I should note that "The Case of Holmes" does not stand in close line with Finlay's usual style or approach. He was a much more serious poet than is suggested here with the wit he put on display in "The Case of Holmes." Nor is this a great poem -- though I do believe that John Finlay, as obscure as he is (certainly more obscure than even Yvor Winters and nearly all the poets of the Winters Canon), wrote a few great or near-great poems (4- or 5-star poems, in my system). But this poem is a striking example of what top-knotch verse focused on ideas can still accomplish, even at this late stage in the decay of poetry.

As I noted concerning the George Turberville poem I discussed in May, many of the poems in the Winters Canon directly concern this matter of the power of the mind and the province of reason. Much in Winters's own writings concern this matter, and I believe that Finlay was deeply influenced by Winters in his own poetry and criticism. One Winters poem I think of is the very fine poem "John Sutter," Winters's equally dense and ideational poem about the power of emotion to derail the processes and powers of reason. That poem was chosen by Ken Fields as part of the anthology Quest for Reality, the book that I call, somewhat loosely, the Winters Canon. (Fields chose Winters's poems for the anthology after Winters died in early 1968 before the anthology was finished.

There They are -- Some Olympians!

2009-06-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

For decades, writers and critics have been bashing or dismissing Yvor Winters for trying to make a new canon, at least when they pay attention to him at all. Even those who have strong interests in or affinities with his critical work are so vexed by -- perhaps even ashamed of -- his classical canon-making that they refuse even to acknowledge that evaluation and revising or renewing the canon stand at the center of his critical thinking. As you certainly know if you read this blog, I harp on about this compilation I call the Winters Canon and the philosophy of canon-making to counter this refusal. Yet recently, I came across yet another suggestive indication of the importance of canon-making in the general literary culture. It came in an issue of The American Scholar, the Winter 2009 issue, in which some writer I’ve never heard of entitled an essay:

“Lunching on Olympus”

Well, there you go. That’s what the the making of canons is all about: deciding who the "Olympians" are, those artists wose works are so well written and so important that they are literary gods. The essay can be found at:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/lunching-on-olympus/

The title, and the essay that follows, reveal, by implication, that the author believes (and, by deeper implication, that we all should believe) that among the "gods" of modern literature reign W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson, for these are the four authors he writes of lunching with "on Olympus." The essay is a casual one, offering no discussion or assessment or even praise of the four writers' work. In fact, the essay is a simple recounting of four mundane conversations, almost in the manner of an old Esquire bio-essay. The essayist treats the four writers mostly as celebrities, not overtly as "gods." But the implication is clear: by giving these writers this kind of rapt attention, by implying that their humdrum lunchtime quips and quotes are worth laying out in detail, by giving all that title, we are meant to see these men as four of the Olympians, Gods of literature!

Now, what does this symbolism of Olympus mean? The essayist wishes or expects us to see these four writers as canonical -- that is, the writers whose work we should pay attention to, read often, ponder frequently, write and read criticism about, teach in class, expect educated people to know of, consider the best. Again, the choice of the word "Olympus" and the tone of the casual essay make the view plain and clear.

None of these poets, in my judgment, qualifies as an “Olympian” in this sense (though, I should note, John Fraser includes poems by Auden and Larkin in his New Book of Verse, which has led me to reassess my evaluation of their work). But many people will no doubt continue to read these writers in part because of what the author of this American Scholar essay -- and most other critics -- say about them, that these writers are worth paying the closest attention to, as though their artworks were nearly scripture or revelation. (I say "most other critics" with the probable exception of Empson, whom few writers consider one of the greats of literature as well as I am able to determine.)

That, my readers, is what making canons is for: declaring whose work should be read, which of their works should get the most attention, which should get the highest praise, which should serve as models and standards, which should be considered as supremely important -- and studied and contemplated as such. Should we pay more attention toi T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or to Elizabeth Daryush's "Still-Life"? To discover the Olympians, and to delineate how we can and should identify them, that is almost exactly what Yvor Winters was trying to achieve in making what I call the Winters Canon, those lists of greatest poems (and the anthology Quest for Reality) that so embarrass even those who have affinities with Winters's work nowadays. (The photo is of a sculpture depicting a fight among the Olympic gods.) Yet Winters realized, wisely, that evaluation stands at the heart of the work of criticism -- even among those who deny its centrality. In the "Forward" to In Defense of Reason (1947) he explained the matter wisely and succinctly:

The professor of English Literature, who believes that taste is relative, yet who endeavors to convince his students that Hamlet is more worthy of their attention than some currently popular novel, is in a serious predicament, a predicament which is moral, intellectual, and in the narrowest sense professional, though he commonly has not the wit to realize the fact.

Our professors identify or accept designated Olympians. Much of the very loose and vague system of canon-making in the general literary culture is built on, importantly, selecting what will be taught in class, but also on what will be written about in journals and, perhaps most importantly in our day, what will be said about particular literary works and authors in popular magazines and web sites. One example of the large role of popular media is Ron Rosenbaum's short essay on Slate last year claiming that Keats's "Ode to Autumn" is the greatest poem in English, a matter which I have already discussed on this blog and on Slate.

Hence, don’t listen or cower the next time someone bashes or dismisses Yvor Winters for canon-making. Writers and critics and even readers of all stripes practice it -- mostly implicitly, but occasionally explicitly as well, as shown in this essay about lunching on Olympus.

Out, Out, Alien Reason

2009-05-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

Let's reach back into the English Renaissance for a poem from a literary era that Yvor Winters held in such high esteem (so high that many have thought that he wished to return modern literary culture to its conditions, which is a thoroughly misinformed view). Winters chose none of the sharp, short, witty, poems of George Turberville for the Winters Canon, but he did use one of Turberville's shortest ditties as the epigraph to the Quest for Reality anthology. His work is all in the Plain Style, which Winters so ably delineated during his critical career -- and I would certainly like to see more modern poetry written with this approach: dense, abstract, focused on ideas and wit. As to theme, Turberville's work is mostly conventional for the times, concerned with time passing and the challenges of love, as much of English and French lyric poetry of the time. Though I do not judge the following poem great, I find it thought-provoking and very well written:

To His Love, That Sent Him a Ring Wherein Was Graved, "Let Reason Rule"

Shall Reason rule where Reason Hath no right
Nor never had? shall Cupid lose his lands?
His claim? his crown? his kingdom? name of might?
No, Friend, thy ring doth will me thus in vain;
Reason and Love have ever yet been twain.

They are by kind of such contrary mold,
As one mislikes the other's lewd device:
What Reason wills Cupid never would;
Love never yet thought Reason to be wise.
To Cupid I my homage erst have done;
Let Reason rule the hearts that she hath won.

Notes:
by kind": by nature
"lewd": common

One would have to dig deep to understand fully what Turberville intended here. Is he bucking himself up to make or keep a commitment to some babe, or his wife, with this mythology of Reason and Cupid? From what I know of him, which is quite modest, he meant what he seems to have meant by the first and last lines, that he wishes to exclude Reason from matters of love. But to what purpose he wishes to indulge himself in such a construct, as we might now put it, I do not know.

Yet despite the sharp excellence of this small poem, I find the central premise to be almost entirely untrue. Reason and Love do not hold sway over seperate realms, and Love rules no province in which Reason has no right. (The very idea of rational thought having rights of any sort within the precincts of the human soul or spirit is very strange.) Reason can, does, and should control activities in the land of Love to some degree, sometimes small, sometimes quite large -- perhaps most often as an Inner Check on the promptings and demands of Cupid.

So why, we may ask, did Turberville wish to tell himself these little myths (if myths they are, which is wide open for endless debate, of course)? He doesn't seem to be proferring these ideas insincerely or satirically, from what I know of his life and work. But it is clearly obvious, and was so in Turberville's day, I believe, that human beings often do employ reason in the business of love. So why would the poet defend his myth? We can only speculate about Turberville, while trying to survey the lands where Cupid and Reason vie in our own souls to see what application his ideas might have. For we in this age are deeply taken with this same myth, that the ways of Love cannot and should not be controlled or influenced by Reason. Indeed, so much does the poem express notions that are widespread in modern times that it feels almost romantic in its implications, though, of course, Romanticism would not come to full flower until more than two centuries later.

Many poems of the Winters Canon are concerned with issues that are central to "To His Love," which we might generally call the province of Reason. Yvor Winters's own "John Sutter" is one of the great studies of the power of desire or passion in human experience. One phrase from the poem, "grained by alchemic change," strikes to the heart of the matter. The phrase refers to the "madness" for gold that overmastered and led to destructiveness the prospectors on Sutter's land. The poem speaks to the power of the passions nearly to transform our nature, at least for periods when we give in to their sway, though Winters held that Reason can and does and often should hold sway over such passions.

But what came to mind more readily is Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, one of the great novels of all-time in the judgment of Yvor Winters (I concur), perhaps the first prominent critic to judge it so highly. The Age of Innocence concerns, in part, the ways in which Reason and other forces check Cupid. I think that novel stands above this poem as a more true and complete evaluation of the relationship between them because it more accurately portrays the psychic landscape where Reason and Cupid and moral codes and competing desires jostle for control. Also, I might add, Martin Scorsese's film of the novel is worth seeing as well. I consider this film to be one of the finest ever made, judging it apart from the novel it adapted so well and so thoroughly as I am able. Though off the subject, I note that the film uses the symbol of sumptuousness more forcefully than the novel, with insightful results. But that's a subject for another post.

Turberville's poem also brought to mind a passage from William James's famed speech "Remarks at the Peace Banquet," which he gave in Boston on the closing day of the World Peace Congress in October of1904:

Reason is one of the very feeblest of nature's forces, if you take it at only one spot and moment. It is only in the very long run that its effects become perceptible. Reason assumes to settle things by weighing them against each other without prejudice, partiality or excitement; but what affairs in the concrete are settled by is, and always will be, just prejudices, partialities, cupidities and excitements.

Turberville goes beyond this. However feeble it might be, he seeks to exclude Reason, though, as I say, what he fears from Reason malingering in Cupid's supposed realm is uncertain.

Of course, the Renaissance is littered with poems on or related to the subject. One I thought of is Christopher Marlowe's famous lines from "Hero and Leander":

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight.
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

There's the expression of a myth that reigns in hearts to this day, as Hollywood shows us again and again. Lastly, I must note that William Shakespeare also had much to say on the subject of the relationship of Reason and Cupid. "Sonnet 147" from his famed series is particularly complementary to Turberville's concerns:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,
Desire his death, which physic did expect.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Note, however, the much different tone -- Shakespeare seeing love in this instance as a hellish disease. In contrast to this sonnet, Turberville's poem expresses no lament over Reason leaving him. Rather he insists upon Reason's departure -- to the point of denying its rights in the lands of Cupid.

Ah, well, now we have much to reflect on. In sum, George Turberville's little poem brings up a questions that I have pondered a lot in my days. For me, the principal one is why we tell ourselves -- and often deeply convince ourselves -- of little myths, like Turberville's, by which to live our lives. I believe Turberville is mostly wrong, as sharp and sure as his verse is. But, perhaps, his myth is valuable, maybe even essential, for some purposes. Perhaps we can only love truly and fully by believing that love has no truck with reason. How I wish J.V. Cunningham had studied this subject of Reason and Cupid in English Renaissance poetry.

Time Fulfilled

2009-05-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

I hereby nominate this week's poem as a great poem, meaning that it stands among the 200 or 300 all-time best in our language. I have mentioned it before, but I haven't placed it before my readers yet. I know of no critic, poet, or scholar who has judged this poem to be great, though, as I will discuss in a moment, Helen Pinkerton, drew particular attention to it nearly 30 years ago. (The photo is a shot of a greenhouse worker discarding lily blossoms, the significance of which you will see in a moment.)

It was written by Janet Lewis, wife of Yvor Winters. Mrs. Lewis was an accomplished poet who put out relatively little poetry. She did, however write several great or near-great poems, as well as many other very fine pieces. I rate most of her work at 3 or 4 stars by my rating system. Her novels are also excellent, perhaps as fine as near-great (perhaps 4 stars by my system). She has mostly been forgotten, except among Wintersians and those with some interest in Winters. Here is the poem, from later in her career, that I judge to be one of the greats of the English language:

For the Father of Sandro Gulotta

When I called the children from play
Where the westering sun
Fell level between the leaves
. of olive and bay,
There where the day lilies stand,
I paused
. to touch with a curious hand
The single blossom, furled,
That with morning had opened wide,
The long bud tinged
. with gold of an evening sky.

All day, and only one day,
It drank the sunlit air.
In one long day
All that it needed to do in this world
It did, and at evening precisely curled
The tender petals to shield
From wind, from dew,
The pollen-laden heart.
Sweet treasure, gathered apart
From our grief, from our longing view,
Who shall say if the day was too brief
For the flower, if time lacked?
Had it not, like the children, all Time
In their long, immortal day?

(Mrs. Lewis's note: "written for Vicenzo Gulotta of Milano whose son was dying of leukemia.")

(By the way, the lines beginning with periods are actually set over to the first tab, but Lord help me if I can discover how to set a tab in this blogger software. I wanted to indicate the original typography in some way.)

As I have discussed briefly a couple years back, Janet Lewis did not appear to share the bracing, brave, yet sorrowful stoicism of her husband. This poem offers no explicitly religious theme, though we might not have to dig far into Lewis's writings and biography to reach the conclusion that in this poem she was expressing some kind of Christian hope. But on its face, the poem does not give us a hope that is specifically, explicitly Christian. Indeed, the final lines are so indefinite as to leave us rather bewildered. We can interpret them, or assent to them, in myriad ways as assertions about "the world to come" (or "worlds" to come, I might add). But is that the central purpose of the poem, to express some view of an afterlife? Religious pluralist as she seems to have been, Lewis appears in this poem not to have wanted to hold out some kind of hope in an afterlife, but to explore the meaning of "Time" in our lives and deaths, even in very short lives, such as that of day lilies. This poem offers no identifiable hope in a separate supernatural existence, though it is probably true that Lewis believed that there is one. But the poem as it stands only expresses a vague, uncertain feeling of hope -- and as a poem, not as a set of philosophical propositions. But as such, the poem is a beautiful explication of its themes.

By the way, I have spent too much time writing the paragraphs below to offer much now on the structure and language of the poem. Let me quickly say that the diction is flawless and the lines are wonderfully made. In particular, I would like you to note the movement in and out of rhyme, which I consider a superb model for future work in contemplative verse. It reminds me of another old device that has found few poets to give it to a try, Shakespeare's use of a couplet to end a section of blank verse. Lewis herself offers several couplets here and there with expert control. The meter, too, is skillfully managed throughout the poem and deserves close study.

Turning back to themes, the great modern classical poet Helen Pinkerton, who is still living, wrote some years back that this poem expresses a belief that Time (with that capital "T") is "fulfilled" through living, however short the life is as measured by time (with the small "t"). As much I respect Ms. Pinkerton's work, she does not elaborate on this idea in a way that makes more sense than the poem itself, I must confess. I don't see how "Time" is fulfilled in living within time as a measure. I cannot see what such a concept would mean for my life if it were true, nor what it might mean for anyone else's life as a whole, ended in death, to be a fulfillment of Time. The concept sounds like blather, as much as I have pondered it. Sometimes, I get the sense that it is a Buddhist idea of some sort -- one of those supremely vague notions of a person's life being like a drop of water that falls into an eternal ocean of pure and exalted being. Pinkerton's is an interesting, though brief, meditation on the poem, though I will leave it for you to discover yourself. It can be found in the "Introduction" to Lewis's Poems Old and New, 1918-1978 (Swallow Press, 1982).

"For the Father of Sandro Gulotta" expresses ideas that are similar to Yvor Winters's in some ways, but it holds out something different. As is clear from her body of work, Lewis wrestled with some of the same notions of time and Time as her husband (though let me be clear that he never wrote of a difference between small-t-time and captital-t-Time). There are at least a dozen poems in Lewis's oeuvre that directly address the matter. One of the most interesting for our purposes here is an earlier and fine sonnet entitled "Time and Music." This poem, which I will not quote in full, was adressed to Winters, who had written a poem about that mentioned being "trapped in time." In reply, Lewis expressed the idea in "Time and Music" that just as a piece of music is experienced in and through time passing but has a wholeness beyond time, so human beings live life within time but can see their lives whole as part of Time. This appears to be vaguely related to Lewis's notion in "For the Father" that one day is immortal. As a melody rides time in a piece of music, wrote Lewis in "Time and Music," so we "from life as well as death are freed...." As I say, I cannot fathom how it could be that the passing of our lives inside time, like the passing of a piece of music, has a more complete and even immortal existence (or something like that) outside or above or beyond Time. That string of words I just laid out sounds perilously close to nonsense when I think about them for long, though they might summarize what Pinkerton was talking about in her comments about Time's being fulfilled in living, however short the life.

This leads us to the question whether Lewis's indefinite ideas about immortal days and lives, whether true in any sense, provide any comfort, as they appear to have been intended to do? Though I consider the poem a great one, a classical one, I find the idea of an immortal day, as well as I can understand it, rather cold, like Greek warriors giving their lives to violent death for longlasting fame. Nonetheless, I remain open to conceptions of time and Time that can help us and comfort us at the prospect of death.

Another point to make is that many poems in the Winters Canon are deeply concerned with time, especially with the sorrows of its relentless, unstoppable passing. I have done no systematic study of the diction in the 185 poems of Quest for Reality, but a rough run-through showed me that the word "time" is probably the most oft-used word in the anthology. If you are one of those who look to word counts for insight into ideas, this is surely an important finding. One ringing example is Shakespeare's Sonnet 77, especially these lines:

Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know
Time's thievish progress to eternity.

This is something very different from what Janet Lewis had in mind, as you no doubt see (she knew this sonnet well). Time as a thief does not mesh well with the idea of death fulfilling time. My general point, though, is that there is much to study, many differing views of time, across the Winters Canon. Someone really should take up a study of the matter.

And this leads us, at the last, to a reconsideration of the poem's achievement. Is it possible for a great poem to be rationally obscure -- or rather significantly obscure -- at the point that it reaches its fullest evaluation of its material? For, as I have said, I find the idea of fulfilled Time to be obscure to a great degree. Yet I am holding out hope that I will someday see that this concept of Time is rational, or at least not significantly, ruinously obscure. Perhaps I will see the matter otherwise in the years ahead, one way or another. For now, I judge "For the Father Sandro Gulotta" one of our greatest poems.

Your sundry reflections, as always, are welcome.

Someone Dear

2009-05-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Who or what might this be? I suppose we're stuck with saying that it's up to each one of us to decide for himself who or what it is or might be. Some of us find comfort that it is God, as he is conceived in one of the longstanding concepts of divinity, such as one of the many Christian or Jewish concepts. But other people, especially in the last 300 years, have wandered, searching, into new conceptions of what or what this might be, such as into pluralism or a finite god or even many gods (though, of course, various polytheistic systems have found adherents among men and women for thousands of years). Especially nowadays, others have resolutely set off on new roads on which they trust, with whatever regrets, that there is no "someone dear" to be found and no "home" to go home to.

But is this sonnet about ultimate reality, as I infer? There's nothing certain in it to indicate this, except for the tone and feel and a few words (such as "majesty" and "faithless"). But to me the chilhhood events described feel as though they stand as symbols, and many readers of the poem have taken them as symbolic. But the poem could be about this world alone -- about the human experience of hoping for some kind of literal home on Earth. Do we look to the author to decide?

The Poet at Seven

And on the porch, across the upturned chair,
The boy would spread a dingy counterpane
Against the length and majesty of the rain,
And on all fours crawl under it like a bear
To lick his wounds in secret, in his lair;
And afterwards, in the windy yard again,
One hand cocked back, release his paper plane
Frail as a mayfly to the faithless air.
And summer evenings he would whirl around
Faster and faster till the drunken ground
Rose up to meet him; sometimes he would squat
Among the bent weeds of the vacant lot,
Waiting for dusk and someone dear to come
And whip him down the street, but gently home.

Donald Justice was once a student of Yvor Winters in the latter stages of his career at Stanford. Justice died in 2004 after a long career as a poet and teacher. I offer this poem because some quasi-Wintersians and others who have remained interested in Winters's ideas have pointed to Justice's work as exceptionally strong poetry that has roots in Winters's classicism. John Fraser has included several of Justice's poems in his quasi-Wintersian anthology, A New Book of Verse, implying that they are at least near-great. Justice wrote many poems in traditional forms, though he sometimes loosened the forms a great deal -- in many poems even to the point of losing almost all sense of an ostensible form. But he also wrote poems in a prosaic free verse (though it was consistently good prose) that barely rises above what I call prosetic musing.

In this variation on a Petrarchan sonnet, Justice maintains a strongly iambic pentameter line while varying from the underlying meter in strikingly expressive ways. The only oddities in the verse are the endings of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th lines. These lines all follow the iambic pattern until the final foot, which are anapests. I don't see any point to this particular emphatic variation at these three positions in the sonnet. The 4th line in particular is made a shambles by the anapest, and the line gains nothing thematically important from the clunky variation.

I judge John Fraser's selections for his New Book of Verse to be good poems, some better than others. But I find "The Poet at Seven" to be a better poem than several Fraser selected, none of which I judge to be great or close to great. I don't consider "The Poet at Seven" a great poem, either, but it is a fine one, and it adheres to some of the principles of Wintersian classicism that Justice learned in class and toyed with during his career.

But what of the symbolism? I see Justice's look back at play when he was 7 years old as symbolic. What do you think? Justice remembers the games he played and appears to turn them into symbols of the desires and goals and work that have occupied him across his life. The hiding from the rain suggest his running from adversities. The flying of a paper airplane suggests his seeking to achieve his aspirations. The spinning until dizzy suggests a delight in the world of the senses (though this symbol is much more uncertain and probably a mild weakness). His waiting for a parent or friend to take him home suggests his desire for some greater being and some better home than this world gives us -- something like William James's "Something More."

I consider the symbol of home to border on a cliché, but I must admit that the use of home as a symbol is a prominent one in the poems of the Winters Canon, especially in poems written in the last century. Winters himself and his wife Janet Lewis both used the concept of home in their finest poetry. The symbol appears to be central in some way to human life, so vital that it cannot be dismissed as sentimental or vapid. That is something that could bear closer study.

Among other great modern classical poems that address the issue at hand in "The Poet at Seven" -- ultimate reality, we could say -- I think of Wallace Stevens's "The Course of a Particular," in which one element in the world of nature issues a cry that "concerns no one at all." The suggestion is heavy in that poem that there is no home for us to be taken to, that we wait in vain among weeds in vacant lots, if any of us are waiting at all, for a friend or lover or parent to take us there. Also, there is Stevens's "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb," in which the poet ponders his grave, chilling description of an "abysmal night / when the host shall no more wander."

Yet another poem, a very short one, that concerns these ideas, one that Winters seems to have considered at least near-great, was written by the forgotten Adelaide Crapsey, "To Man Who Goes Seeking Immortality, Bidding Him Look Nearer Home":

Too far afield thy search. Nay, turn. Nay, turn.
At thine own elbow potent Memory stands
Thy double, and eternity is cupped
In the pale hollow of those ghostly hands.

Home is in the mind, Crapsey appears to be saying, which echoes some of Stevens's less accomplished poems, such as "The Idea of Order at Key West." (I wonder what Crapsey's reaction would have been to developments in beliefs about memory in the past 20 years or so, as more and more thinkers and writers abandon all belief -- sometimes cynically, but often blithely -- that memory delivers anything real from the past, that everything we remember is a construct of the imagination.) Crapsey appears to be saying that no one is coming to whip us, gently or not, away from the weedy lot of this material existence.

Finally, though I have merely scratched the surface on this topic, I think again of a poem I have quoted already on this blog as one of our greatest and most important poems, J.V. Cunningham's "Epigram 43":

In whose will is our peace? Thou happiness,
Thou ghostly promise, to thee I confess
Neither in thine nor love's nor in that form
Disquiet hints at have I yet been warm;
And if I rest not till I rest in thee
Cold as thy grace, whose hand shall comfort me?

In contradistinction to Justice's poem, this poem portrays a world in which the "homes" the poet has found or tried to find have given none of the comforts we believe home should bring, though he longs for that comfort still.

There is much more in this vein among the poems of the Winters Canon, as found in Yvor Winters's great anthology Quest for Reality. At this point I leave the matter for your own study, though I look forward to your comments and reflections on Donald Justice's sonnet.

Now We Have to Decide What to Do with Them

2009-05-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

I thought of Bernie Madoff's crimes when I recently ran across a short poem by Raymond Oliver, once a student of Yvor Winters and now a retired professor of English and all but forgotten in the literary world. Oliver has specialized in the epigram, the very short poem, and translations of late Medieval and Renaissance verse. A few of his poems and translations are superb; others are well struck but minor; yet others are light verse, though good stuff nonetheless. Here's one for our times from his 1982 chapbook Entries that amounts to acerbic light verse:

The Last Judgment

Medieval scuptors knew,
Better than marxists, what to do
With the exploiting upper classes:
You carve them naked into stone,
With fiends that strip them to the bone
While shoving skewers up their asses.
Torture them richly and with skill.
And then let them pay the bill.

More than venting one's frustration, this sharp, short poem is about shame. No longer fearing death much -- what with hell and even the afterlife mostly denied or ignored nowadays -- wouldn't many an exploiter like to hang on to his so-called earthly "legacy," as we see, for example, in the opening efforts of the Dubya team in recent months. Maybe the thought of lasting infamy is part of what keeps exploiters in line as well as they can be kept in line. That's worth some thought. Though I am a political liberal in the current parlance, I know a few erudite conservative commentators who have argued forcefully and persuasively of late for a renewal of shame in our culture. In that vein, this poem from Raymond Oliver gives rise to some valuable reflection.

On another matter, I noticed that the late Thom Gunn, a semi-Wintersian, blurbed a couple years back for Oliver's latest book of poems (which I have not seen and cannot find), His Book of Hours, “Ray Oliver's poems are like none others I have read.” I think I know what Gunn meant, but the blurb is unintentionally funny because it actually says nothing at all -- not unlike many an advertising tagline (such as Pizza Hut's latest vapid pitch: "Now, that's eating"). Oliver has written mostly in traditional forms, but he has published a few free verse poems that come close to prosetic musing. If you are inclined to try, it will be hard to track his work down, of course, but a few poems are available online here and there. He is not a great poet, in my judgment, but he has done some skillful and thoughtful work that deserves attention in a Wintersian classicist enclave, as Donald Stanford gave him in the Southern Review more than 20 years back. Oliver wrote an essay for and published more than dozen poems in the 1981 Yvor Winters issue of the Southern Review. (That rich issue, by the way, is an important one that deserves attention among modern classicists.)

At some point I will come back to one or two of Oliver's translations.

Drifting Vagrants

2009-04-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

Catherine Davis (1924–2002) was another of Yvor Winters's students at Stanford back in the 1940s, a student whose work he regarded very highly. Indeed, Winters chose six of her poems, which are epigrams, for the Winters Canon, a decision which has received no second that I know of, even among Wintersians. This is not to say, nevertheless, that Davis's poetry has been thought poorly of in the Stanford School. John Fraser chose three of her poems for his quasi-Wintersian anthology The New Book of Verse, even though, without comment, he discarded Winters's choices.

One or two of Catherine Davis's poems have remained in circulation, which is heartening. You can find them on the web with a search engine. Further, just last year, after her work's long rest in near complete oblivion, Stanford University put on a reading of her poetry in her honor at some anniversary or another. But I wonder how many non-academics, or even academics, have been reading her work, besides me, during the past 40 years? It can't have been many. Any readers of this blog?

This week I reach back and offer a poem that has enriched my life over three decades. It was first published in the first issue of the Southern Review, Second Series, January 1965, that year's Winter issue, Volume 1, Number 1, though I read the poem some 15 years after its first publication. (The photo is of Pastor Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran leading a prayer service at the Chapel of Restoration in the Bronx, the pertinence of which you will see in the poem.) As I have discussed a number of times on this blog, Donald Stanford, classicist and former student of Winters, restarted the Southern Review at LSU and turned part of his editorial work toward the development of a Wintersian or Stanford School enclave from 1965 to 1982. Here's the poem, a forgotten near-great of modern classicism:

The First Step

The last step is the first.
And so I have descended
(Being of single mind)
Through fifteen narrow years,
And knew what I intended
But not what I should find.
The downward flight, reversed,
As I look back in dread,
Ascends and disappears
In shadow overhead.

What will the next step be?
It should have been the climb,
The ardent foot and hand
Seeking the laurel rood.
But I have come in time
To know that where I stand
Is not the place where he,
Bernard, or some lost guide,
Who led me here, had stood,
Stripped of his lusts and pride.

This figure of the stair,
Being a monk's design,
Having a monk's intent
Of purging self-regard,
I must at last resign
(God knows, some monks repent!)
As neither here not there.
The self unsatified
Is what I find, Bernard,
Not God; nothing but pride.

How does it help, sweet saint,
To know our wretchedness,
When there's no going back?
How does it help to know
By heart how comfortless
We are, how much we lack,
And what we fear? The taint
Of death, of broken meat
I've tasted, too, and oh
How cold the food I eat!

How does it help to see
How sick at heart we are,
Or find out where we erred?
I see both whence I came
And where I am, how far
I've drifted who preferred
My own fool vagrancy:
If, knowing this, I go
My own way all the same,
How does it help to know?

Boy, I gotta step out on the limb here and say that, if not great, this is pretty close to a great poem, even though Winters might have considered it too personal to be worth much. Though he never wrote specifically about this poem, he didn't think it even came close to reaching greatness, as is clear from his endnote in Forms of Discovery on the seven poems from Davis that Donald Stanford published in the 1965 Southern Review: Winters wrote, rather brusquely, that they are "of little interest." (By differing from Winters on this poem, as you see, I play my oligatory modern cultural role, as all writers must, in showing that I am an independent thinker beholden to or enthralled by no woman or man -- even though I have been called Winters's "epigone" [oh, what a shameful tag to be labeled with, even if irrational].) I guess I'm still willing to hold off and wait for some sort of confirmation of my judgment that this poem is great, not being as strong-willed or as sure as Yvor Winters about my judgments. So far as I know, I stand alone in my high judgment of this poem. Anyone want to join me? Or must all, as is irrationally required by the aforementioned cultural rule, differ from me? Was Winters wrong about it? Did he miss its achievement -- and, perhaps, badly?

The poem is the work of a person with a certain sensibility, going through a certain kind of experience. But it's delineation of moral resignation and weariness, of the dangers of acedia, is deeply powerful and searching. The structure is elegant and strongly rational. The meter and phrasing are downright superb. They deserve careful study, which I might get to some time, if I find the energy. The end of the fourth stanza, in particular, is strikingly meaningful, especially as the stanza moves to its chilling, insightful final line. I've been talking with this poem, answering it, letting it reply to me, for most of my adult life. I believe it to be worthy of attention across the American readership. I'd say that it's better than 80% of the poems in William Harmon's Top 500 Poems. In other words, it should, as I provisionally opine, be a touchstone. But whether it achieved greatness or not, it is a terrible shame that it has been forgotten for so long.

A couple additional notes: As I mention, John Fraser chose three of Davis's poems for his New Book of Verse. Fraser has been adding some new poems from living poets to his online anthology lately, and I encourage you to visit his site. He does not include this poem.

Finally, I want to point out that "The First Step" complements a number of extraordinary poems that Yvor Winters judged to be among our finest works of literary art. I think of George Gascoinge's "Woodmanship," which is also about spiritual or psychic weariness and frustration, though that early Renaissance poem has a very different emotional bearing. (That's the poem I have been stuck on in my review of the Winters Canon, on which I'll get restarted, I hope, by the fall.) Also, the poem has certain resonances with George Herbert's "Church Monuments," which concerns in an oblique but incisive way the earnest search for what to do with life. Further, it can be profitably considered with Robert Bridges's great poem "The Afflication of Richard," which is about the inability of a believer to quit a faith that frustrates him. Lastly, there is Baudelaire. My, there is a vast subject, which I do not have the time to go into now (who has?). But Baudelaire's trenchant examinations of "spiritual torpor" (as Winters called the condition in his discussion of acedia in his essay on T.S. Eliot from the early 1940s) is unquestionably resonant with Davis's poem in many ways. A sonnet to start with might be "Le Mort Joyeux" ("The Joyful Dead"), which Winters considered one of our greatest French poems (the rough translation of the first stanza is my own):

Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots
Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde,
Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os
Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde.

(In a fatty plot of ground, full of snails,
I'd like to dig myself a deep, dark grave,
Where, at leisure, I'd spread my old bones
And sleep in oblivion, like a shark in a wave.)

A Poet of the Pacific

2009-04-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

A poet whose work I have always admired a great deal is Donald Drummond, a former student of Yvor Winters's at Stanford in the 1940s. His poetry was featured in the second regional poetry anthology Winters edited, Poets of the Pacific, Second Series. Drummond is wholly forgotten now. I do not know of a single writer or critic who has mentioned his work in the past 50 years. Here's a strikingly well composed poem of Drummond's from the pacific poets anthology, which was first published in 1949:

To My Father

The strong grow stronger in their faith
And from their strength their faith grows strong.
And you who fastened on a wraith
Which moved John Wesley were not wrong

To fix your being to that rock
From which the purest water flowed,
Allying pity to the stock
Whom Calvin fired into a goad

Which pricked old kings and cardinals
To fury, and whose faith subdued
The Plymouth winter, and the calls
Of flesh which tore the multitude,

Who built a solitary state
Upon the bare Laurentian soil,
Who looked on slothfulness with hate
That moment they were hating toil,

You were not wrong to scorn the man
Who scorning, turned the other cheek,
Nor with your grave religious scan
To seek the best which best men seek.

And you may challenge, not condemn
The risk each generation runs:
That faith from which your being stems
Prove insubstantial to your sons.

This is moving poem, and much of the emotion derives from the superb handling of the seemingly rigid structure. Note that it has a theme that it consonant with my discussion of Agnes Lee's "Convention" last week. The long second sentence, which runs over several stanzas, is particularly charged with emotion. Drummond had a style most readers nowadays would consider wooden. But I find his style to be particularly suited to a revival of classicism in our times, well ordered and dignified. This style is not going to be especially popular, I realize. But it pays well on careful reading. In this poem, the subtle variations from the strict meter and controlled structure are very well executed. There is only one minor flaw, this in punctuation. The line ending in "hating toil" should end with a semi-colon. As punctuated, the comma makes for a run-on sentence.

Finally, I pause to note that Drummond is one of the many, many students Winters taught whom he did not champion as great poets. Winters has far, far, FAR! too many times been accused of nepotism, for supposedly ridiculously favoring poets unheralded by any critic other than himself. But Drummond, as fine as his work was, did not merit much discussion in Winters writings, and he chose none of his poetry for the Winters Canon. Let me state again: it's time for critics to shut up -- stop making this silly charge of nepotism, which has unjustly damaged Winters's reputation. It is true that Winters thought a few of his students wrote great poetry, but I will both defend those judgments and counter that he passed over the work of many fine poets who have been lamentably forgotten. Donald Drummond is one.

Agnes Lee? Who's That?

2009-04-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

Another of those seemingly bizarre judgments Winters made concerned the excellence of a small poem by Agnes Lee, a now almost entirely forgotten American poet of the late 19th century. The poem in question is "The Sweeper," which can be found on the web. It is hard to say exactly how highly Winters judged this poem, though that he judged it very highly and wanted to draw attention to it are without question. Some critics suspect that he didn't really consider it one of our greats, which doesn't touch on the question of whether we should consider it great. Those are important subjects for discussion when I come to the poem in my reëvaluation of the Winters Canon. For now, let me offer another poem by Lee, which in tone and structure is much like "The Sweeper."

Convention

The snow is lying very deep.
My house is sheltered from the blast.
I hear each muffled step outside,
I hear each voice go past.

But I'll not venture in the drift
Out of this bright security,
Till enough footsteps come and go
To make a path for me.

I admire this poem a good deal. It is hard to know without some deep study what exactly Lee might have been sheltering from and what the footsteps symbolize in this little parable. Was it religious belief? Judging from many of her other poems and the charged diction (blast, bright security), it seems so, though I do not know enough about her to venture a guess as to what exactly she believed about ultimate reality or religion. But the poem is poignant and thought-provoking. Of course, it runs against the American myth of rugged individualism, but that myth has always been very much more observed in the breaking than in the keeping. There is much more good stuff in the poetry of Agnes Lee. I'll get back to her -- she deserves the attention.

For now, another matter to think about is Yvor Winters's strident conventionalism, the idea that a rational society and culture are built on the shoulders of of our greatest thinkers past, who laid down the footsteps we should follow (to mix metaphors). Winters believed that modern literary practices and theories threatened the whole rational order of Western civilization. (The pictured T-shirt, by the way, reads: "Conventional wisdom is the ruin of our souls." There's a foolish saying for you, but it has surely become a modern myth in our society.) It is a position that no one I know of has tried since to make a case for or develop. Winters himself was fairly sketchy about the whole idea, with however much table-thumping certainty he wrote of the matter (as of nearly all matters). It's an idea that needs and deserves a new look, though no one has yet bothered to take it.

Also, I should mention that J.V. Cunningham, Winters's friend and one-time student, was closely interested in this matter of convention. He wrote a number of superb poems that reflected on the issue, as well as a lot of criticism that addressed it. Though only a Wintersian in a rough sense, Cunningham certainly was a classicist who gave us some exceedingly important insights into modern literature that, alas, have been mostly ignored. One of his epigrams from The Judge is Fury came to mind when I was pondering Lee's short poem:

Epigram 12

I was concerned for you and keep that part
In these days, irrespective of the heart:
And not for friendship, not for love, but cast
In that role by the presence of the past.

This poem is about human motivation, a frequent topic in Cunningham's verse, but also about conventions and social expectations. Particularly, it concerns conventions that are somehow assigned to us in living our lives as social creatures. I have been pondering this little poem for a long time. It troubles me. It is partially true, as a general idea, but it is not the whole general truth about familial concern.

Finally, let me mention as well that commitment to following the footsteps of others through the storms of life does not gaurantee virtue or success or safety. Following convention, as an abstract principle, is morally neutral. It promises neither good nor evil. For some conventions are evil and should be discarded. Slavery, to trot out one obvious example. Conventions, we could say, are good when put to good purposes, evil when put to evil purposes. Some conventions are so good that they are worth keeping against all enemies and defending with one's life. People disagree about which conventions are which, of course, which good, which evil. It takes great wisdom to know. It takes, too, in the end, a leap of faith, and often faith in other people. This is a matter I have written about in my on-line book A Journal of Doubt (1991), especially "Part V," the last part. The immediate context of that book was a struggle with believing Christianity, but my discussion has more general application to the difficulties surrounding setting, finding, and following the wisdom of the past, which hardens at times into convention.

Well, I have wandered far afield from Agnes Lee's little poem. Perhaps I had better bring these reflections to an end.

The Literary Cafeterias

2009-04-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed a recent article on church shopping on Slate, which can be found at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2211937/

The short piece brought to my mind the idea that people are also doing a lot of literary shopping in our culture. What people read and appreciate and admire is all up for grabs (as in a cafeteria, I suppose) -- and it seems that that will be so for a long time to come, if not to the very end of our civilization, which is becoming ever more of a mishmash with every passing year. This is one of the stumbling blocks to the favorable reception of Yvor Winters and his ideas, who seems so cocksure and dogmatic, so narrow ("Your choices here are boiled potatoes, a wedge of lettuce, and a slab of seared red meat!"), to those who first encounter him. As much of we like cafeteria-style religion, as described in the Slate essay, we also appear to like the plentiful and varied offerings at our literary cafeterias. Do we not often read nowadays about High-Cult writers and critics and artists who like Low-Cult artworks, popular entertainments, of all sorts? It has become some sort of badge of honor to think both Shakespeare and, say, Elmore Leonard are great writers, or that both Bach and the Grateful Dead are supreme artists. We need a new Dwight MacDonald to study again this growing, mutating phenomenon of literary "cults."

There have been suggestions, particularly by James Howard Kuntzler (in his novel World Made by Hand and his environmental study The Long Emergency), that we will soon return to a land of villages. And then in what will our culture lie? But that seems a ways off yet. Americans and Europeans are simply deadset agsinst putting all their literary likes and needs and dislikes into one movement or organization or style or purpose. Literary classicism, let alone Winters's austere, demanding brand of it, won’t fulfill all the needs of all (or even many of many it seems), just as Catholicism or Dutch Calvinism or Eastern Orthodoxy or Southern Baptism do not any longer satisfy everyone or often even any single person, in whole or in part, or all the time. We shop around. We love shopping. We slum around, too (as the saying goes) -- and we love our slumming unabashedly.

My merest hope is that artists will start or keep writing and people will keep reading and judge highly good classical poetry, fiction, and criticism, as they "slum" with the Rolling Stones or Merle Haggard or "The Dark Knight." That’s one of the overarching purposes of this blog: to draw enough classical “converts” for us to be able to offer a few classical entrées or tidbits -- maybe even a main course or two -- in the literary cafeterias.

Two Poems by Philip Pain

2009-04-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Winters wrote a few times about the critical ability of finding the best poems. So important was this, he opposed the gist and theories of the criticism of several other specific writers in his essays (and almost all modern literary culture in general) on the grounds that those specific critics under discussion were, in his judgment, unable to discern which poems are truly great.

One of the discoveries Winters made of great poetry, a finding often considered bizarre by the few who know of it, was a small poem by an almost wholly unknown colonial American Philip Pain (who wrote in the 17th century), "Meditation 8" ("Scarce do I pass a day”), which Winters chose for the Winters Canon. I notice, nonetheless, that this sharp poem was chosen for the Oxford Book of Short Verse, which offers many strong and insightful works (but no J.V. Cunningham -– the editors must be kidding!). Some years back I read all of Pain’s other verse, which is small in volume as we have it. Here are two poems from the Meditations, which closely match the theme of "Meditation 8":

Meditation 54

The sons of men are prone to forget Death,
And put it farre away from them, till breath
Begins to tell them they must to the grave,
And then, Oh what would they give but to have

One year of respite? Help me, Lord, to know
As I move here, so my time moves also.

Meditation 56

The time will be, when we shall be no more:
Where will our World be then? 'Twill be no more.
Where will our Comforts be? They'll be no more.
Where will our Friends be then? They'll be no more.

Lord, grant me then thy grace, lest that no more,
Do seize upon me, and I be no more.

No More! O solemn sound: this night I may
Be struck by Death, and never see the day.

These are well-struck pieces. In my opinion, they are, roughly, as good as most of the poetry in Pain’s Meditations. Also in my judgment, it seems clear that it is only the poem that Winters singled out as great (or perhaps nearly great**) that truly stands as one of our best. Here it is again, as given in Winters’s 1968 anthology Quest for Reality:

Meditation 8

Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear
Some one or other's dead, and to my ear
Me thinks it is no news. But oh! did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to die,

My pulses all would beat, I should not be
Drowned in this deluge of security.

What do you see here? "Meditation 8" is very good stuff, better than the other work, which I believe is still pretty good poetry. In what lies the difference, the measure of greatness or near-greatness? That’s something no writer or critic has bothered to comment on since Winters wrote. It’s about time. In #56, in contrast to #8, Pain seems all too aware of Death -- what with those rather insistent and almost hysterical italics. The whole of the collection is an interesting study of the waxing and waning of that awareness.

** NOTE: I will re-asses the merit of "Meditation 8" some day as I work through my reëvaluation of the Winters Canon on this blog. I have no idea how long that might take.

A Poem by T. Sturge Moore

2009-04-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

I wrote last of Elaine Showalter’s new book on American women novelists, saying in part that I would to see whether she had included any writers whom Yvor Winters or Janet Lewis considered significant or particularly valuable. Upon finding at my local Barnes and Noble that Showalter does not even mention Janet Lewis, does not discuss Catherine Gordon except for a lone comment about her civil war novel None Shall Look Back as compared with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and includes no discussion of any other writers the Winterses found compelling besides Katherine Anne Porter -- that took all the wind out of my sails ever since.

I have spent the last week or two just recovering from the blow that what I am doing with this blog has almost no meaning or importance. Yvor Winters and modern classicism are just too obscure, too long forgotten, too different to create a community of modern Wintersian classicists (non-academic classicists), despite a few essays that have shed a little light on his work (such as in the New Criterion, David Yezzi’s 1997 piece and Adam Kirsch’s 2003 piece).

But, hardheaded as I apparently am, I have come to feel compelled to try something new. I have been working through the Winters Canon, stalled as I am at Gascoigne for now. But I will continue that work in time. What I want to do now is add some poetry, especially the work of those authors whom Winters championed but who remain preposterously obscure. I will try to put up one little known poem a week from great or very good, but little known, poets whom Winters judged highly over the next year or so, while I try, meantime, to find some energy to labor on with my notes on current critical issues and my re-examination of the Winters Canon.

Forthwith, let me begin this series with a poem from Thomas Sturge Moore, a British poet of the late 19th and early 20th century, whose work is included in the Winters Canon, but who receives precious little attention nowadays -- and who is usually deployed as an example of the folly of Yvor Winters (something to this effect: "How could he champion Moore over Years?! Hah Hah!"). Here’s one poem I consider very strong, a classical poem with strong rational content, but yet subtly powerful emotions:

Value and Extent

The more they peer through lenses at the night,
The finer they split the rays of stellar light,
The vaster their estimates
Of distances, of movements, and of weights!

The stupor of this unimagined size
Like a mole’s eyelid palls the keenest eyes.
Yea, like unearthed moles,
We, by truth tortured, writhe outside those holes…

Dark homely galleries of confined thought,
Whose utmost reach must now be held as naught
Compared with that grand space
Which those unlike us may superbly grace.

Substance more subtle, forms of comelier growth,
Diviner minds, nothing but mental sloth
Prevents me thus to bid
Against the size revealed, with worth still hid.

No reason can be urged why all this room
Should hold no more life than, within a tomb,
The first small worm that stirs;
For all known life is less in the universe.

Undreamable communications, sun
To sun, may be the hourly routes they run,
Swifter even than light,
On business purer than a child’s delight!

But that I can, like scornful Plato, fear
Our fine things but poor copies of true worth;
Proportioned to this earth,
There thrill and shape small genuine glories here.

This poem reminds me of another and favorite poem of mine (though it’s actually a prosetic musing), John Updike’s “Mites,” a poem about how insignificant humans are in light of the immensity of the universe, like the microscopic mites who live with us in our world. I couldn’t find that poem online, but it can be found in Updike’s Collected Poems. It was published in the New Yorker many years ago, which is where I first read it. On a similar theme, Moore’s is much the better poem and deserves and repays careful study. I find the simile on moles to be particularly striking and moving. I have felt at times, in the face of my own struggles with skepticism (as recounted in my online book A Journal on Doubt) like a mole writhing outside its hole. Those brilliant lines are worth knowing well. But there are many more superb turns of phrase and strong lines in this compelling, insightful poem.

Suggestions and contributions are welcome. Want to hear from a certain poet, or have a certain poem of your own with some classical bent, drop me a line.

What About the Women

2009-03-11T11:56:00.001-07:00

Just a couple weeks back, here is how "Arts and Letters Daily" summarized the issue considered in a new book on American novels: "Why is it that novels about men in boats (Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn) are treated as important, while ones about women in houses (House of Mirth) are not?..." This was the Daily’s blurb to draw our attention to a review of Elaine Showalter's new book on the standing of American women writers in the standard canon, entitled A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

Besides this book appearing to be a learned and interesting one, the Daily’s blurb drew my particular attention because Yvor Winters was one of the first critics to significantly praise the work of Edith Wharton (author of The House of Mirth), in his essay on Henry James from the late 1930s, which was collected in his early book Maule's Curse and later reprinted in In Defense of Reason. Winters took a lot of heat for decades for his high judgment of Wharton’s fiction, but for the past 20 years or so Wharton’s reputation has been rising so steadily that there is little of that sort of talk about Winters any longer (at least, critics no longer use the example of his evaluation of Wharton when they are on the attack against Winters). The House of Mirth was not one of the her novels that stood out as great in Winters’s eyes. He focused rather on the high achievement of The Age of Innocence and also mentioned The Custom of the Country, both of which I also judge to be among the greatest novels in our language. Nonetheless, I agree that Mirth is a superior novel.

Winters had little to say about Twain, though I have to say that I can only guess why. He doesn’t appear to have focused on Twain in his American Literature classes, and no former student (there are not many left) has written about the omission that I am aware of. He did consider Melville to have written one of the three or four greatest novels ever in Moby Dick. So here was a poet-critic who could appreciate the work of a woman novelist, as Showalter appears to be urging us to do more appreciatively.

Now, I’m not saying that these comments validate Winters in some way. I don’t expect Elaine Showalter to reflect a little glory onto Winters’s achievement because she happens to agree with him on this matter or any other. My point is simply that Winters had an admirable way of cutting through the fashions of his time, and his approach can help us cut through the fashions of our own time. If he could recognize the estimable excellence of Edith Wharton’s fiction long before most, perhaps it’s time that you find out why. For he might also have recognized the importance of other writers and works whom he championed but who still languish undeservedly in obscurity, such as Frederick Godard Tuckerman (especially in his truly great poem “The Cricket”) or even Wharton’s first novel The Valley of Decision, which I consider almost as great as her two finest that I have mentioned.

I hope to get a chance soon to skim Showalter’s book. I hope it contains some discussion of Winters’s wife, the superb novelist Janet Lewis. If anyone out there knows anything about this, let me know.

Are There Any Greats Out There?

2009-03-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

If there has been a more appropo article in a national publication for this Yvor Winters Blog, I haven't seen it. But there it was, a week ago, David Orr's meditation on poetic greatness in the New York Times Book Review. The article “On Poetry -- The Great(ness) Game” can be found at the Times's Books page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1&ref=books

I give Orr credit. He is in there pitching, considering big questions, some of which were central to the literary criticism of Yvor Winters -- and many of which Winters took a lot of heat for back in his day. But since the piece is no more than one of those short NYT Book Review articles, Orr can't explore any of the central issues of evaluation or greatness deeply enough, let alone resolve anything concerning the Canon. But the article does brush past many of the major issues of literary evaluation and canon-making that are germane to the work of Yvor Winters, even if David Orr doesn't fully understand or accept what's happening in literary culture.

Nonetheless, in the final paragraph of the short piece, Orr implies that he believes that the work of determining true "greatness" is important to the future of literature -- just as Yvor Winters once argued forcefully and I have contended time and again on this blog and in my book on Winters. The truly great poems give us models and standards, as well as enduring works of art that are important to personal and social development. Orr appears to agree strongly with this, though he can't quite figure out what makes for greatness beyond the acclaim of those who take unto themselves some sort of authority. The most disheartening, almost sickening, aspect of the essay is the claim that the only great poet we currently have on tap is... I can barely say the name... is... John Ashbery. Oh ugh!! I cannot think offhand of a worse poet to serve as a model and a standard. Ashbery is far from great. He is, indeed, nearly worthless as a literary artist and, further, a model of bad poetry and unconscionably shoddy writing. Ashbery is probably everything the classicist wishes to see wither away (though I have little doubt that his influence will remain strong for a good long time to come).

When such decisions are made, such as whether Ashbery is great (I wince at the thought), is the point at which canon-making becomes extremely important and what this blog is nearly all about. I am trying to get Yvor Winters's modern classicist views to receive an appreciative hearing among enough people that some sort of new enclave can develop in which modern classical poetry, fiction, and criticism will be written, appreciated, and furthered. If other people want to proclaim and follow the false "greatness" of John Ashbery, we classicists can only lament the inevitable loss of yet more talent and time and effort to the nearly worthless literature that the idea that a poet like Ashbery is great will surely help give rise to. But I can't worry about all that. And no other classicist should either, I believe. It's just the way things are and will remain for a long, long time to come, despite Winters's foolish yet confident predictions that soon all the errors of modernism would be recognized and pass away.

By the way, Orr speaks of poetry that takes a person's breath away as a measure of greatness, the truly great works that seem so vastly important in one sense or another. William Carlos Williams's enraptured comments on Eliot's "The Waste Land" came to Orr's mind. For the classicist there has been little of late that would even feign to take the breath away. But I am pondering whether Helken Pinkerton's superb blank-verse poems in Taken in Faith might some day, soon, become one of the models, a standard of modern classicism. They have been almost taking my breath away. Please, please, tell me about anything else out there that you think might achieve this kind of importance. I have been reading Pinkerton, Adam Kirsch, Bill Coyle, William Logan, David Yezzi, Kenneth Fields, the Australian Judith Wright, of course the very fine Dick Davis, and a few others. They are doing (or did do) some good work that really is poetry and very worthwhile. But I haven't yet read anything great. Does anyone have something that truly will take the breath away, will astound most anyone who reads it (or at least any classicist)? Please tell me -- tell us all!

Materials and Time Mostly Wasted

2009-02-27T13:10:00.000-08:00

I suppose it’s about time to take on the wearisome chore of discussing Robert Hass’s Time and Materials, the book of poetry that won the Pulitzer for poetry in 2007. I know, I know, I’m a little slow in taking up this matter. But if the book is important and valuable, then a review should matter as much now as it did a year ago, at least. (And if it’s highly important, it should matter 50 or 500 years from now, right?)

You may well guess that I didn’t find much to admire about Hass’s latest work. (Does any classicist out there? Please let me know, one way or another. The photo is of Hass reading from the book.) So why, you might ask, bother with this dreary chore at all? Only because Hass was once a student of Yvor Winters’s and has thought himself competent to speak about Winters from time to time in print, even though he has distorted and misrepresented Winters’s ideas.

So what do I think of his prize-winning collection? Very little. There are a few strong turns of phrase, a few good lines, some snatches of good prose (broken into, in the common affectation of our literary culture, lines), some dimly memorable moments, but not a single wholly successful poem -- and certainly not one good or great poem.

This is Hass’s his first collection since stepping down as U.S. Poet Laureate. For the first time that I know of in Hass’s career he makes poetry and politics bedfellows. But Time and Materials is a mish-mash. It stirs together occasional pieces, imitations, a couple translations, some long narrative poems that are Hass's trademark, and a couple of prose poems.

I won’t cover much in the book, but I think the best writing in this slim volume is on politics. In the face of the controversial Iraq War that George IV dragged this country into, Hass has clearly decided not to keep his poetry free from political argument. I find this commendable, even though William Logan challenged this in his review of the book in the New Criterion. At least Hass is trying to communicate some ideas clearly and sharply. When it comes to the four anti-war poems in Time and Materials, they do “fall like bombshells,” as some reviewer wrote, in the latter half of the book, dropping upon readers quite unexpectedly, given Hass’s previous books. Other pieces take up other political causes, such as the human cost of global finance. Many of these poems stuck in my mind, however briefly. The most compelling, I thought, is "Bush's War," a long meditation on innocence lost to violence, a poem which shows Hass trying to write polemically:

I typed the brief phrase, "Bush's War,"
At the top of a sheet of white paper,
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at hand,
Set the facts out in an orderly way.

This isn’t poetry, nor even verse, in my judgment, and it still appears that Hass is skeptical of poetry that has this kind of subject matter. He admits to arguing from facts he doesn't possess, but at least he’s trying to think, rather than to offer more of his customary blather about the fragments of his trivial personal life, which are ever drifting along the brackish, sluggish stream of his experience. True, his call to the light of "reason" even seems to stir with sarcasm, and the poem is written in very loose, almost wholly inappropriate language, a flaccid, mealy prose. But, as I say, he does take a shot at an important subject and at a rational argument of some sort:

The rest of us have to act like we believe
The dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the raw white of the exposed bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom
Which is the virtue of the injured us.
It's hard to say which is worse, the moral
Sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.

As William Logan pointed out, Hass sounds like he’s lecturing. But contrary to Logan, I find this something to take seriously. Nonetheless, Hass clearly hasn’t thought too well about situation he describes and judges. For every war, just or unjust, leaves in its wake many dead and suffering who did not deserve to suffer or die. Yet honorable and virtuous human beings have judged that some acts of mass governmental violence are worth the cost in lost lives and human suffering, as is the common judgment concerning the Second World War and the American Civil War, to consider only two examples. Hass shows little sign that he has a mind that can help us get beyond liberal cant, however much I happen to agree with the cant as applied to this one instance. Can Hass think less slothfully than the prosecutors of the Iraq War, think deeply about a difficult subject? It doesn’t seem so. But at least he’s doing a little bit of thinking through poetry, for goodness sake. For that I applaud him.

But what of the poetry in those lines I just quoted? They have a nice rhythm and several sharp turns of phrase. They give the feel that the poem has structure because of the stack of prepositional phrases that Hass erects and because all the lines end at natural grammatical breaks. But there is no meter. Overall, in contrast to a lot of Hass’s poetry, these lines have the feel of near-verse. They certainly are better than a lot of the trivial blather in this book.

Hass may wish he'd tried thinking in poetry a lot sooner than now. "Bush's War" and the similar political poems in this volume give attention to World War II, Vietnam, and the Korean War. These poems are fast-paced and disjunctive, lurching from horrific moment to horrific moment with little pause where contemplation can focus. As "Bush's War" reels from Nazi death camps to 9/11 to Iraq, Hass laments "a taste for power/ That amounts to contempt for the body." He seems to be fighting not political war-hawks or the moral dangers of state violence, but the destruction of physical being itself. But, alas, and predictably, you can’t quite be sure (a typical weakness). Still, at least, for me, he’s fighting for something, anything!, in verse.

I will only turn to one other poem amid all the very minor works to be found in Time and Materials. This is the only poem that has really struck me, though it is a prosetic musing, not a poem. It’s a prose narrative:

When I was a child my father every morning --
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen-forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.

This is a cruel story, confessional and disturbing. You dearly want to know whether Hass has something important to say about this material, though I was worried as I read it that the poem would fall flat. The father here is a vague figure, someone of cold practicality whom we can’t quite understand without more information. But just when Hass might begin to explore his mother’s drunken benders, which have given rise to his father’s treatment of her, Hass calls up rather, with supreme pretentiousness, the scene of Aeneas escaping the flames of Troy with his father astride his shoulders. After that nonsense comes the denouement:

Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world -- about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things -- from somewhere.

Whuh? you stammer. That’s it? That’s what he has learned, what he wants us to learn from the wrenching scene he describes at length in this poem. What a waste. Hass appeared to building toward something. But typical of his work, perhaps typical of most modern poetry, the poem almost makes a flatulent sound as it falls flat, as Hass refuses to offer anything truly insightful about an arresting and compelling subject.

As usual -- as is typical of modern art, in fact -- Hass seems to expect us, his readers, to decide what to make of this disturbing family story, thereby forsaking his role as the visionary of life that we should expect our artists to strive to be. The poem takes a typically diffident, weak-kneed approach. Yet I give credit to Hass for trying, however feebly, to fathom big ideas, like justice and power. He even looks at what we now call “gender.” These aren’t trivial themes, though William Logan said in his New Criterion review that he thinks little of them, especially the matter of gender (“What was a harrowing family portrait finishes as a lecture on gender”). But to my mind the problem is not that Hass wants to explore the issue of “gender” in light of this old family incident; it’s that he finds almost nothing to say. The lecture is empty. Hass is such a meager thinker, at least as he is willing to reveal in poetry, that he has no compelling insight to give us based upon the striking and valuable anecdote. What are we to think about gender issues in light of this anecdote? What gender issues is he even talking about? In the poem, Hass betrays no pity for his father, the man guilty of a terrible crime, who did not want to leave his son with a drunk. Or is there? Are we expected to feel pity for the father as well as the mother? Well, you can feel any way you wish about anything in the poem. What does Hass want us to think? What evaluation of the theme are we meant to take with us, what vision of life? Hass leaves it to us to answer such questions, another instance of one of the most typical and worst errors of modern writing.

The writing in this poem isn’t stupid. It’s just weak. It’s unconscionably hesitant. True poetry, great poetry, seeks so much more. Readers should want more from their poets. I want poets who declaim, who are hortatory, who’ve got something to say, agree or disagree. They should seek to enlighten us, guide us to understanding. That was what Yvor Winters was after, a point I could discuss at quite great length. Hass seemed about to let go and really lecture. But he seems to have locked himself in the prison of modernism, where all he was allowed to do was mumble his way to a close.

As many have pointed out, poetry for Robert Hass has started to become a matter of conscience. But he has not found a way to get past the late modernist conventions that flatten and weaken his thought. And what he’s writing, all in all, is not poetry, except by self-definition. It’s prose, or what I call prosetic musing. It’s often not even good prose, as William Logan also pointed out in his review. The syntax is badly wobbly. The movement from thought to thought is often pointless, sometimes even silly. Modifiers dangle and phrases are strung out. Logan seems to think that Hass is avoiding the “poetry of witness” -- Logan considers this deadly contemporary genre -- to write the “poetry of lecture.” Contrary to William Logan, whom I read and respect, I wouldn’t mind some lecturing, if the lectures were sound and well executed in good verse.

And what, finally, of the much-praised descriptive passages of Time and Materials? One poem that received a good deal of attention, “State of the Planet” (yet another polemic of sorts) starts with one of Hass’s pastoral moments that he is so fond of:

Through blurred glass
Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled
Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum
Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color
Of skinned copper.

This is not poetry. It’s descriptive prose. But things actually get better when he starts droning on about chlorofluorocarbons, passages which William Logan finds weak. He preaches a bit about the destruction of the ozone layer, which ain’t a bad thing to write about (though probably not the best subject matter for poetry to get a grip on). Logan thinks this kind of thing is just plain boring, the preaching that is. But I rather think, again, that Hass’s problem is that he has nothing to say, nothing that even has a shot at persuading us. It’s mostly the usual clichés, jumbled together and boiled until they’re turned into a grayish pulp. Another poem offers a potted history of aerial bombardment in Vietnam and another an account of the horrors of the Korean War. Neither is a poem. The piles of facts are not properly organized or explored. Hass seems to want them to serve as parables. But he winds up with muddles that fail to advance our understanding of any of these matters one whit.

It's disappointing that Hass didn’t accomplish more with this new effort to infuse poetry with politics. There are many other poems in Time and Materials on other matters, but I don’t wish to take up any more of them, none of which are very distinguished. He offers poems about poetic impotence, and some meditations on time the destroyer and time the error-maker. There are other poems about vague boomer disappointments. Overall, there’s not much to any of it. I don’t think the book is worth reading. But if you want to put yourself through some frustration, go ahead. Rather quickly, I think, Hass’s musings in this book will be forgotten.

Nabokov the Trickster

2009-02-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

I’ve been getting a big kick out of all the ruminations upon the meaning and importance of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita lately, all attendant upon the 50th anniversary of its American publication. This novel’s reputation as great seems to be rising ever higher and stronger at the same time so many critics claim that it has no purpose beyond the pleasures of its prose and the panache of its narrative. The latest group of essayists have been gnashing their teeth over the problem of Lolita’s subject (as opposed to theme), the seduction of an adolescent girl by a lustful middle-aged man. Is Lolita encouraging or approving such behavior? Almost uniformly, the critics are claiming that the novel’s subject is out of bounds, as they defend the novel from the view of aestheticism, of some more or less vague notion of art for art’s sake. Lolita, so go these new apologies, is about the beautiful way Nabokov tells the story, not about any moral or social or political ideas.

Nabokov, of course, is mostly to blame. Endeavoring to be the contrarian in most things, and as well to play along with the aestheticist theories and practices of many a modernist, he said in a 1962 interview for the BBC that he had only aesthetic pleasure in mind when writing Lolita:

Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

This, of course, is obvious nonsense, a playful tall tale (though there is the possibility that it’s self-delusion). I can’t say for sure what Nabokov intended by such inane comments, but I take them as funny, and it has always surprised and amused me that critics have been weeping and gnashing their teeth ever since to force themselves to believe in Nabokov’s rascally ruse. Lolita is -- obviously! -- a deeply moral book, as every essayist I have read in the recent round has been forced to admit by the unambiguous nature of the case.

My favorite among the recent essays that have come out is “Reading Lolita in Alabama” by Allen Barra on Salon, which can be found at:

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/12/22/nabokov/print.html

Baara thinks Nabokov's masterpiece is still dangerous -- but not for reasons we usually think. Like hundreds who have already joined this endless queue of the self-deceived, Barra tries to force himself to believe Nabokov’s stunt:

This is the nicest way I can think of to tell Nafisi [author of Reading Lolita in Tehran] that Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything -- politics, feminism, humanism -- that she [Nafisi] does, at least not in any of his fiction.

Ah, such have been the tired and tiresome claims from many critics, claims that are so evidently false that they read as ludicrous. But, of course, Barra is simply paraphrasing Nabokov’s own words:

I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

That’s from an interview in Playboy magazine in 1964, in which he went on, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist.” Mediocrity, Nabokov thought, thrives on ideas, by which, as he told Time magazine in 1969, he meant "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales."

Putting all this together, you wind up with the confusions and hare-brained theories like those described in Gerald Graff’s fine 1979 book, Literature Against Itself, which I will discuss below and encourage my readers to find and read. But was Nabokov confused or joking? Nabokov said he was intent on writing a “serious” book, as he told his French publisher in a well-known letter. So he must have been very serious about this beautiful telling of a story, whose content is incidental to the manner of the telling. Perhaps Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, makes the most sense of such ideas in his discussion of the concept of art for art’s sake. Barzun’s sharp insight is that the concept of art for art’s sake is better expressed by the phrase “art for life’s sake.” That is, the aestheticist writer endeavors to seal himself off from ordinary reality, as it were, because his writing reveals or creates a higher reality of some sort, a reality of almost religious importance.

The confusions and incoherence of aestheticism frustrated Yvor Winters. Perhaps his most trenchant discussion of the matter, among several occasions he wrote on it, is in the essay “John Crowe Ransom, or God Without Thunder,” from the Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), which was reprinted in In Defense of Reason, which remains in print. In that essay he chided Ransom for believing that a serious work of literature like “The Tragedy of Macbeth” was about Shakespeare’s “love” of the subject matter, rather than an effort to communicate a full understanding of that dire subject matter, the commission of the crime of regicide.

As I say, one of the finest works on the issue of aestheticism I have come across is Literature Against Itself, especially in Graff’s first chapter, “Criticism, Culture, and Unreality.” Graff was a student of Winters’s at Stanford in the mid-’60s. He went on to do some original critical work that has bearing on modern classicism, and I recommend him highly. (In recent years later, I pause to note, Graff has sought to find ways to learn from and find affinities with postmodernism and literary politics -- efforts that I find laudable, if difficult.) Believing that aestheticism and related theories trivialize literature, Graff incisively delineated the twin concepts of the artist as a “hypersensitive weakling” and a “revolutionary prophet.” Graff found this, naturally, in Wilde, who talked like Nabokov’s prophet:

Oscar Wilde uses formalist rhetoric when he says in the Decay of Lying that “art never expresses anything but itself,” and that “art finds her own perfection with, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror.” He switches to visionary rhetoric when says in the same essay that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” a view which defines art neither as a veil nor a mirror but as a mode of seeing which reorganizes life in its own terms.

Note the strong similarities of Wilde’s theorizing to Nabokov’s. Graff’s book, as the title makes plain, is an important, if long overlooked, effort to show that such views played a significant role in literature coming to be “against itself,” striving to undo its own purposes.

The critics battling to cram Nabokov’s novel into the art-for-art’s-sake box need to look at Winters and Graff to make much better sense of Lolita. Just as Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth, as Winters argued long ago, is not intended to express “love” for regicide -- or even for the telling of a story about regicide -- so Nabokov’s portrayal of Humbert Humbert’s grisly yet titillating seduction of a girl is not intended to make us “love” the seduction of adolescent girls or the mere telling of a story of such seduction.

Perhaps it’s time to take Nabokov for what he showed himself to be when he theorized on his own art, a trickster. Yeah, I know the idea of the trickster has become a new high-brow cliché, arising from the interesting work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, but I am going to use the idea because it’s useful. Nabokov wrote one of the most moral novels of the modernist movement, a scathing indictment of ethical confusion and egoism. Let’s enjoy a good laugh at his playful deceits, but then let’s use Winters to get down to the business of understanding what Nabokov achieved.

By the way, is anyone interested in what Winters thought or might have thought of Lolita? He never wrote a single word about Nabokov that I am aware of, though they both taught at Stanford for a short while in 1941. I think Winters would have found Nabokov’s style fragmented and wasteful and his theme improperly developed. More importantly, he would have had very serious doubts about the use of an unreliable narrator. This matter is related to the issues discussed in the essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.” Using a narrator like Humbert, I believe Winters would have said, forced Nabokov to write less well than he could have and provided him with no sound way to generalize his theme or fix what he wished to communicate about the complex experience of lust. In general, I think Winters would have said, the author who uses an unreliable narrator has no means to reach a final judgment of his subject matter, which amounts to an abdication of the writer’s primary responsibility and a short-circuiting of the chief source of literature’s power.

Do any classicists out there think Lolita is a great novel? I’ll hold off on revealing my own judgment for now.

What I Hope to Work On - Part 2

2009-02-12T08:21:00.000-08:00

Here’s some more articles I want to get to. These also directly concern Winters as poet or critic:

+++

11. poets.org has twice featured a piece on Hart Crane and Yvor Winters by a writer named Tom Donnelly, whom I do not know. The short essay first was posted in 2006, but was reposted as a lead article for the site again recently. I need to give that piece some attention, particularly since it is distinctly favors Crane’s wild and woolly poetics to the disparagement of Winters’s classicism. But maybe I’ve got a few things to learn. We’ll see.

12. David Orr, a poetry critic of some renown (meaning in literary culture), reviewed Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems of Winters, briefly, in the New York Times some years ago (2002, I think). I’d like to take a look at the last look at Winters’s poetry in a national publication.

13. In a small journal named Gulf Coast, some poet named Kathleen Osip wrote about Winters as being a symbol of all that she is against as a member of the avant garde. This piece came out in 2006. It was an amusing essay that deserves a look, as genially negative as it is toward Winters’s art and ideas. (The photo if a shot of a pond in a Michigan woodlot. It is purely decorative, and, thus, an artistic weakness, do you think?)

14. A couple years ago, there was a piece on Hart Crane and Winters in Poetry (the 11/06 issue). I surely have to get to that soon.

15. Issue 3 of the now-defunct Canadian journal New Compass, from several years ago, was the journal’s "Yvor Winters Issue." It contained several insightful essays that I have yet to discuss here. I believe that the issue is still posted online. Sadly, the New Compass has ceased publication. Its editors have moved on to other matters. Though it published only four issues in the early 2000s, it offered an array of fine criticism and commentary in addition to its work in studying Yvor Winters.

16. Jan Schreiber, a poet and reviewer, wrote on Winters some years back in an essay entitled “The Absolutist.” As near as I can tell, this piece is a review of the poetry and criticism of Winters. It was published in the online journal Contemporary Poetry Review in 2004. I still need to get my hands on the piece and discuss it.

17. In the journal Literary Imagination, William Edinger, unknown to me, published an essay entitled “Yvor Winters and Generality: A Classical/Neoclassical Perspective.” The piece looks at some features of literary generality in the poetry and criticism of Yvor Winters through the language and methods of classical and neoclassical criticism. That sounds worthwhile, if a little stuffy.

18. A good 10 years ago, poet Alan Shapiro published a memoir essay, entitled “Fanatics,” on his attraction to the critical principles of Yvor Winters. I’ve mentioned the essay a couple times, but I really want to give it a close look at some point.

19. I haven’t found the time to get to Stanford Magazine’s short articles on Yvor Winters at the time of the centenary of his birth (2000). One was by Ken Fields, another -- a scathing attack on Winters’s teaching methods -- by Richard Elman. On VHS, I also have a couple of the talks given during the event (one by Dana Gioia, for example). These might be nice to discuss.

20. Finally, some journal going by the name of RALPH published an amusing piece on the worst poetry of 2003. Yvor Winters’s Selected Poems was chosen as the honoree. I would like to give that short piece the once over some time.

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These are the writings I know about. Please let me know of other writings on Winters that you know of, and I will add them to my list of duties. Or you can write something for this blog yourself.

In a post to come soon, I will list writings that are in some way closely related to Winters poetry or criticism.

"Strange" Essays, T.S. Eliot, Helen Pinkerton, and More

2009-02-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

James Matthew Wilson, the Treasonous Clerk (at “First Principles”), has written a couple comments in reply to a previous post, but his latest comment seems to require rather a reply by post than by further comment. I have reposted Wilson’s most recent comment below the following reply to it:

James: You make an unexpected turn here to Winters’s strange essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature,” which, for readers who aren’t all that knowledgeable about Winters, can be found in the readily available book The Function of Criticism. I’m not exactly sure why you make this turn in this context. We were discussing the attractions of Winters’s critical ideas to religious people. What does this subject have to do with Winters’s unique theory of genres (using the word “unique” in its strict sense -– the essay truly has NO parallel that I am aware of). Perhaps you can explain, though it might not matter.

But as to that essay itself, what I mean by calling it “strange” is that the singular ideas discussed therein have drawn not a single advocate in the past 60 years and few, if any, admirers. Indeed, no single critic, Wintersian or otherwise, has tried to build out from or improve on those eccentric but compelling ideas. I can think of no poet or critic, past or present, who has written sympathetically about Winters, to any degree, who also has endeavored to defend the “Problems” essay in whole or in large part. Further, only one obscure essay that I am aware of directly and thoroughly assesses the “Problems” essay (“Yvor Winters and the Antimimetic Prejudice,” Jonas Barish, New Literary History, Spring, 1971 [the photo is of a modern staging of one of the ancient Greek tragedies, which have occasioned much discussion of mimesis]). Barish’s nearly 40-year-old piece was almost entirely negative. I have long wanted to address Barish’s take, but haven’t found the time, alas. For I have so many defenses of Winters to throw up on other fronts, I have found it improvident to try to defend matters, as of now, universally rejected -- even by Wintersians.

Nonetheless, let me state, briefly, that I believe that Winters’s ideas in the “Problems” essay can be tweaked in such a way that those ideas might become more appealing to those who love and think highly of epic poetry, fiction, and drama. In my judgment, the real issue for Winters, an issue that, perhaps, he didn’t fully comprehend himself, was that writers in those “weaker” genres have not discovered or created sound ways of making general evaluations of their subject matter, with the ultimate goal of increasing our understanding, which, as Winters argued at length in the essay, stands as the final cause of literature. By rethinking the specific ideas in the essay in light of its more general, foundational concepts, I believe Winters’s objectives in the “Problems” essay will make greater sense and have much greater appeal. They have great appeal for me, at the least. Nevertheless, not a single writer has tried to back Winters up on his general approach to literary genres or on any of the specific ideas, leaving its defenders (or defender, meaning me alone) almost nothing to work with in developing a new approach to the essay. Still, as I imply, I agree with Winters quite widely and deeply on the ideas found in the “Problems” essay. As a consequence, I suppose it falls to me to try to defend a foundational approach to the “Problems” essay.

On yet another subject you raised, I’m not quite sure why you think Winters “loathed” Eliot (a word that I think offhand characterizes his view too strongly), but I am interested in your fleshing out your views on that. My view has been that Eliot’s writings, meaning in Winters’s judgment, were a rag-bag of insights, willy-nilly opinions and half-thought-out notions, in both poetry and criticism. The poems don’t add up to wholes, and this was for Winters a central, urgent concern -- as it is my own concern, if I may say. Winters prized and hoped to foster comprehensive, fully coherent evaluations in works of literature (all the parts working together as fully, properly, and rationally as possible). At the same time, he grew frustrated that so many writers at one time thought of Eliot as a sound and systematic thinker, rather than an occasionally erudite and interesting muser, a recorder of myriad learned notions and sparkling opinions. Winters wanted to get writers to put Eliot in proper perspective, albeit in his sharp way. (I add once again, though, that Winters’s “sharp way” was hardly any sharper than many reassessments of all sorts of writers and critics by hundreds of critics throughout the 20th century. I will probably never understand why Winters gets tagged as exceptionally harsh in the environment created by the endless literary wars of the past 12 decades, and more.)

I will say, though, that I disagree with Winters at points, about critical ideas and about individual judgments. What do you disagree with him most about, James? I’m very interested to know. I respect your judgments and opinions a great deal. I might disagree with you, but I am eager to reconsider my views in the light of the thoughts of someone I find learned, important, and worth careful study.

Pinkerton’s recent work is astounding. The blank verse meditations collected in the book Taken in Faith are, I judge (I am being cautious still), great poetry. I am almost sure that they should be part of the Winters Canon, standing among the very finest works of poetry ever written in the English language. John Baxter has published a study on her verse meditations on paintings, which are very fine poems, no question. But it is in the several blank verse meditations that Pinkerton reaches greatness, as I provisionally believe. I hope you’re going to write about them.

Finally, as to Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” I can hardly see any potential way to agree with you. I think there are passages of good poetry in them. But as a whole, they are badly lacking in overall coherence and generalized evaluative power. They are worth reading, don’t mistake my views on that. But they exhibit serious weaknesses. I don’t want to say more, so that my readers, few as they are, can feel at ease in studying the matter for themselves without fear of my jumping on them. (Apparently, I come across as too combative myself. A couple of critics who have interested in Winters won’t even write to me any longer just because I happen to disagree with them about certain things and am willing to defend my views, calmly and rationally. I don’t think I have ever been harsh, but people appear to be think differently. To me, they seem awfully touchy.) I truly am interested to hear why you think the "Quartets" are so great.

Also, would you call yourself a Wintersian, James? Well, maybe you should save an answer to that for some later post. That’s a big question that begs, perhaps, a big answer.

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2/03/09 comment from James Matthew Wilson:

What is so rewarding in Winters is his effort to ensure that a reader knows why Winters believes what he does, and judges as he does. One senses his "foundationalism," that is, his belief that beliefs have foundation to the extent that they are true, and that such foundation can be explored and articulated. He was not an "emotivist," as Alasdair MacIntyre would put it: one's judgments are accountable in terms that are not reducible to a mere, inarguable emotional preference.

Winters's fascinating theory of literary genre in The Function of Criticism is the great challenge to any of his admirers. I admire the consistency, and see that he has discovered some truths about literature in general. I don't agree with most of the conclusions there drawn, because the premises on which they are based seem weak. I know of no other modern critic, however, about whom one could make such an assertion. Most of them confuse or conflate their premises with their conclusions; or, rather, they hide the former and pass off the latter with a kind of erratic, pretentious swagger. Such is what Winters clearly loathed about Eliot (though I think Winters misperceived the rationale behind Eliot's writings, and consequently couldn't read them properly).

As a general point, let me note that it is not for being "excessively judgmental" that one ought to condemn anyone. Judging is what the mind does to come to know what it perceives. If one finds Winters shrill -- and in a few cases, I do find him so -- it is not because he has judged "too much" but because he has judged a premise true without adequately entertaining possible objections to the premise.

An update: a) the Pinkerton essay is away, and I intend to pitch a second one to another journal, because her work requires more attention, even within the scope of what I wish to say about it; and b) Finlay does deserve an essay of his own, and I'll provide it within the next two years; finally, c) Finlay clearly had immense admiration for Winters; what he criticized in Winters was a "gnostic" tendency that is evident in several poems. As Pinkerton has argued in an essay responding to Finlay, this tendency is evidently not present in other Winters poems. It would take a great deal of space to hash out who is correct; I'll get 'round to it.

P.S. surely Auden qualifies as a major Christian poet, though no poem of the Twentieth Century can compare with Four Quartets. It is the one long poem of the last century that is unquestionably a permanent addition to the life of mankind -- and of course it is about Christian belief, experience, and theology.

Are the Religious Strongly Drawn to Yvor Winters?

2009-01-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

Definitely, some connection exists between the literary thought and art of Yvor Winters and religion, and, further, specifically between Winters and Christianity. I haven't addressed this issue directly on this blog, but I have noticed the matter again and again through the years. I was reminded of it again when a recent correspondent wrote to me about how he came to become interested in Winters. He had been introduced to Winters's ideas and art in a college course taught by one of Winters's former students some decades ago. But his interest sharpened, it appears, when he learned of Winters's use of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and other classical Catholic thinkers in the development of his critical theories and his poetic art. My correspondent has become a Catholic himself.

There is more. Much more. The story of my correspondent is only one of a dozen instances in which a person has written to me about how he (the correspondents have all been male) met Winters's writings. In a majority of these cases, the men were religious, in one sense or another, at the time they first met Winters's writings. Many of these men were and remain Roman Catholic (the painting, by the way, is of Aquinas defeating Averroes in disputation). It appears that people have often been drawn to Winters's thought and poetry because of its congeniality to or accord with religious ideas and feeling, with a religious worldview, often specifically Christian. On the other hand (though I haven't yet studied the matter closely), few published scholars, poets, or critics who have had interests in Winters have been overt Christian believers.

What about me? As I have written elsewhere, I also was a Christian at the time I first read Winters. This took place in the mid-1970s while I was in college. I was an Evangelical Protestant at that time; I even dabbled in Pentecostalism (which, it might surprise you, is not irrelevant to Winters -- yet another topic for study). Like so many others, I was drawn to Winters because of the religious feeling in and behind his thought and art. There was something congenial to religion and Christian faith in his ideas that I haven't fully identified or come to fully understand. This feeling remains attractive and compelling to me, even though some years back I converted away from Christianity to religious pluralism, of a sort. (I'll spare you the details, unless I am asked to write on the matter. It might have some bearing on this blog, it's true.)

I also am writing on this topic because I recently re-read Alan Shapiro's highly amusing essay "Fanatics," which was reissued in his book The Last Happy Occasion. In that essay, Shapiro, an American poet of minor standing, wrote of his passion for Winters as a literary "prophet" during his years at Stanford in the 1970s, a few years after Winters died (Winters had been a professor at Stanford for nearly his entire career). Shapiro explicitly compares his zealous devotion to Winters to the religious devotion of a Jewish friend who in the 70s had converted to Lubavitcher Hasidism under the leadership of Rabbi Menachim Schneerson:

Just as Billy believed that the Torah was not only the law of the Jewish people, but the cosmic law of the universe, so we believed that Winters' definitions and prescriptions were true not only for the poetry he wrote and admired, but for any poetry at all that aspired to be deathless and universal.

Hard to mistake the point there. Shapiro sees his onetime devotion to Winters (he says he is no longer an adherent of the "prophet") as some kind of religious commitment -- one that was nearly fundamentalist in nature, much like the commitment of his friend to Hasidism.

No one I know of has studied the matter of the religious slant of Winters's writings in depth, but it seems clear that some religious ideas and moods and attitudes in Winters's writings, in his appraoch to literature and philosophy as a whole, draws in the religious believer, makes him feel at home in Winters's poetry and criticism. This seems evident despite the fact that Winters was not a religious believer, at least of any conventional or traditional sort.

Some of the reasons are obvious. Winters considered some explicitly Christian poets to have written some of our greatest poems. These are poets who have received only short shrift in modern times. Fulke Greville, for example -- though there are more than a dozen others. Further, Winters wrote about his being what he called an absolutist and even a theist in one of his seminal essays, the "Foreword" to In Defense of Reason. I should note, though, that the Being Winters came to believe in was not much like the Christian trinitarian diety, but, rather, a Being of "pure mind," a difficult concept that is almost incomprehensibly vague in Winters's poetry and criticism. As the late John Finlay discussed the matter in 1981 (Southern Review volume 17, number 3), Winters refashioned God to make Him presentable in more "intellectually respectable" terms:

But the unqualified theism [of the "Foreword"] is still intellectual to the core. Instead of extracting the divine essence out of God and setting it up as concept, Winters now leaves that divine essence within God, but eliminates everything else from Him, so that He becomes what that essence is defined as being, which, in Winters' case, is "pure mind."

As intellectually respectable as this might be, I cannot say that I fully understand Finlay's conception of Winters's conception of God as delineated here. But what's germane to this post is that certainly Winters's embrace of theism is something that would draw the religious believer to his work. A conventional believer would take note of the oddness and difficult nature of Winters's theism upon deeper study, and even then it would appear to be congenial -- to some degree -- to orthodox Christian theism, as it appears to have been to the Catholic John Finlay (who was, by the way, a very fine poet if his work is now, sadly, almost entirely forgotten).

Finally, Winters's whole critical system is built upon ideas of morality, which religion is, of course, deeply concerned with. I should note, though, that what Winters meant by "morality" and what religious believers commonly mean by that broad, vague, difficult term can differ considerably.

But in addition to all this, there is something more, something about the way Winters thinks and writes, the indistinct foundations of his work and art. I would like some comment on this matter, especially from the Christian believers who have written to me about their attraction to Winters's work, though I am not averse to hearing from those without religious beliefs who have interests in Winters. Naturally, I hope to offer some more thoughts on the matter myself as time goes on.

What I Hope to Work On - Part 1

2008-12-22T08:04:00.000-08:00

I said I would review what I have on my list of recent or somewhat recent writings on Yvor Winters that I would like to discuss on this blog. I hope my readers will write me about any other articles, essays, or books that they know of not listed here. This and the next post concern writings that are directly concerned with the poetry or criticism of Winters. In my third post, I will list a dozen writings or so that are somehow closely related to Winters’s work. ANYONE with ANY comments on these writings is welcome to post on this blog -- without my gloss (though I will almost certainly comment on anything posted).

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Recent Essays on Winters:

1. In 2006, James Matthew Wilson published an essay on Emily Dickinson and Yvor Winters’s essay on her poetry. Wilson’s piece appeared in Christianity and Literature. I have been studying this dense essay and believe it deserves thoughtful consideration, which is the reason I haven’t yet discussed it.

Wilson, by the way, has become a columnist on American conservatism. He has been writing a regular column for the First Principles web site entitled “The Treasonous Clerk.” Though I am not a political conservative in most ways (as Yvor Winters, I pause to note, was not either), Wilson has already had some worthwhile things to say in his column. I believe his work bears watching.

2. In 2005, a professor by the name of David Reid published an essay, “Rationality in the Poetry of Yvor Winters,” in the Cambridge Quarterly. It was an insightful overview of some of Winters’s poetry and the idea that Winters’s commitment to reason met an intellectual and psychological need. The essay deserves careful study.

3. Going back even further, actually more than five years, to the annual poetry issue of the 2003 New Criterion, Adam Kirsch published a piece entitled “Winters’ Curse.” I have been planning for a long time to get to that one.

4. In 2001, Wesley Trimpi, poet, critic, and former student of Winters, published a piece on Winters and classicism in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. The piece was entitled “Yvor Winters and the Educated Sensibility in Antiquity.” It is about the importance of Aristotle in Winters’s criticism and is deserving of careful study and discussion.

5. I want to discuss various introductions to Winters’s writings, such as to the Swallow Press’s edition of Winters’s Selected Poems (edited by Robert Barth). The erudite introduction to that volume was written by poet Helen Pinkerton, a superb (if not great) poet and a fine critical stylist.

6. Another introduction I have wanted to discuss is Thom Gunn’s brief one to the small Library of America volume of Winters’s selected poetry.

7. Going further back, another introduction that I think needs a look is Ken Fields’s to the most recent edition of Winters’s In Defense of Reason (1995 or so). I found his introduction to be puzzlingly weak. I need to explain why I think so. My guess is that Fields is no longer much of a Wintersian.

8. A fellow who has written of Winters on a blog entitled “God of the Machine” also has written on Wikipedia about Winters’s theories of the Renaissance plain style. Aaron Haspel is his name. I would like to discuss his take on the matter.

9. Haspel also has written on his blog about his views on Winters’s theories on scanning free verse. Haspel has written that he thinks his own theory of free verse scansion is stronger than Winters’s. By the way, Haspel has suspended “God of the Machine” for more than a year now. I hope he gets recharged and starts writing again -- and writing about Winters too.

10. Finally, Haspel wrote a piece entitled “Winters’ Discontents” at “God of the Machine.” It is an overview of Winters for web searchers, and it’s another of Haspel’s writings I would like to take a look at.

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I have a dozen more writings directly concerned with Winters coming in my next post. That post will be followed by another concerning writings indirectly related to Winters.

On Finding Nazareth

2008-12-15T08:37:00.001-08:00

Soon after reporting on the lack of response to this blog in my last post, a buddy of mine who has almost no knowledge of Yvor Winters wrote me that he had purchased a copy of the recent Selected Poems of Yvor Winters, edited by Thom Gunn and issued by the "Library of America." Greg Stone is my friend’s name, and he comes to Winters’s poetry cold. I think his reading of a short poem of Winters’s, one I discussed a couple years ago at Christmastime, to be enlightening. The following is our brief exchange. Greg’s letter is just the kind of thing I’d like to see happen more often on this blog.

From Greg Stone:

Ben,

I'll give you my impression of "Fragment". I often feel that poems are structures that we fill with our own personal experience. As the structure fills, the meaning crystallizes.

First, despite being four lines the poem feels very complete so I take the title to be a comment, perhaps that Christianity is not a central theme in his life, but an unfinished discarded fragment of meaning.

I cannot find my way to Nazareth.
I have had enough of this.

seems clear enough. The first line refers in present tense to a pursuit. The second sentence in past tense shows a definite end. [Note: The photo, posted by Ben, is of the Basilica of the Annunication, which looms large in the city of Nazareth.]

Thy will is death, and this unholy quiet is thy peace.

More difficult - I take "will" (which is probably a double meaning) as a "last will and testament". He was promised eternal life, but understands now that he will be bequeathed simple death from an impersonal ("thy" uncapitalized) god, perhaps nature as god. A lifetime of an unresponsive god shows him that that quiet which had been charged with expectation of reassurance was simple emptiness.

Thy will be done; and let discussion cease.

Again, "will" maintains it's double meaning and "discussion cease" refers to the end of his pursuit and the end of his life.

I can't argue that this was Winters intent, but the poem connects to me in a complete and satisfying way.

Greg

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Greg:

A nice take on the poem -- and in the ball park as to what Winters intended, though that is far from certain. We do not know whether he tried to find God or what he called "the Spirit" from any of his writings. We do not exactly know what many of these terms mean, though some few writers have grappled with the issue in what are now very obscure writings.

I have written in my book on Winters on my web site about his views on Christianity. The passages are easy to find by using Google, such as searching on "Year with Yvor Winters Ben Kilpela Christianity". I could go on at length about Winters's views, but I'm not sure you are interested in them as deeply as I am, so I will forbear.

I enjoyed your note, though. I took it, at first, that you were agreeing with Winters, but I see, on closer inspection, that that is not the case. You're simply saying that you understand and appreciate what Winters appears to you to be saying to you as the reader. You must turn to "To the Holy Spirit" to dig deeper into these matters. Two poems by Edgar Bowers written in the 1950s, a one-time Winters student and very great writer, are directly concerned with such issues as well. I'll send them to you if you're interested ["The Virgin Mary" and "The Astronomers of Mont Blanc"]. Both poems were judged by Winters to be among the greatest ever written, and I would agree.

But, tell me, how does the poem "connect" to you. Do you mean something more than understanding? Do you agree to some extent?

Finally, may I publish this short note on my blog? It's exactly the kind of thing I wish to encourage. I'll try not to gloss your gloss with too much gloss.

Ben

Central Purposes of This Blog

2008-11-12T08:07:00.001-08:00

It has been more than two years since I started this blog. Comments to my posts and comments as separate posts, which I welcome, have not even begun to trickle in. Let me just repeat that a main purpose behind my writing this blog is to create a community of and discussion among the like-minded, or at least like-interested. For the study of Yvor Winters to continue, for his ideas and literary style to find new adherents, and for his advocates to develop his ideas in new ways, people who might be drawn to Winters’s brand of modern classicism need to become informed about Winters and to discuss his writings.

My goal is certainly not to get everyone in the world, or even in the U.S., to agree that Winters is right or that the Winters Canon of greatest poems should be adopted, though the theory and practice of that canon are fine topics for discussion. As I have written before on this blog, there is no chance that literary culture in general will agree to the rightness of Winters’s ideas in my lifetime. But I do hope that, though they are few now, ever more readers and writers will undertake and advance the study of those ideas as they learn more about Winters, employ his theories and principles in new ways, and built out and up from his critical system.

This has already happened once in my lifetime, in LSU’s Southern Review in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was then that Professor Donald Stanford, during his editorship of that journal, fostered a Wintersian enclave in the form of a periodical that would publish writings about and in tune with Winters’s classicism. During Stanford’s tenure from 1965 to 1982, the Southern Review published dozens of poets and critics who analyzed and evaluated Winters’s critical ideas and wrote of and about and according to Wintersian classical principles. Writers and critics quickly disbanded the Southern Review “enclave” upon Stanford’s retirement from LSU in 1982. (I hope to do an overview of the Southern Review “enclave” some time -- yet one more matter to get to.)

There are now very few Wintersian writers left whom I am aware of. Poet Helen Pinkerton is still living and writing, though she is past 80 now. Poet John Finlay died more than two decades ago. Poet David Middleton, once Stanford’s student, is around and writing some poetry and some short essays, but he has not published a lot. Poet and critic Tim Steele has been in the game pitching from time to time, but he has not been devoted his latest work to classical principles (his main interests right now appear to lie with the New Formalism, which is certainly not a bad place for them to lie). I have discussed John Fraser's web site many times, and it deserves your careful reading for many reasons related to the study of Wuinters. I do not consider former Winters students Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, and Robert Hass, though they are prominent in American literary culture, to be Wintersians -- or even classists of any kind. To their credit, Pinsky and Hall have dabbled in the New Formalism, but Hass is hardly a poet. I think of him as a prosetic muser.

Steele’s and Middleton’s work deserves more attention around here, along with Pinkerton’s latest book of poems, Taken in Faith, which is very fine (if not close to great). But what the study of Winters needs are more people writing in and telling me what they know, where the new Wintersian writers and critics might be (if there are any), and who is taking Winters seriously (and mostly positively or approvingly) in their writings. I hope as well that people will start responding on what I have been writing about. Or I invite you to offer suggestions about new topics, or to let me know about recent writings that should be taken note of for having some important relationship to Winters thought and poetry. Also, as always, I invite people willing to post on some aspect of Winters as well, though that, it seems, will take much longer.

I still hope for community through this blog -- or another blog or email list, if my methods do not appeal to enough people to get discussion on Yvor Winters started. My hope appears to be barren at the moment, but the time for a new enclave might come around again.

In my next post, I will review the recent writings on Winters that I am aware of and want to bring attention to and hope to comment upon in the months ahead.

Faint Taste for Hart Crane

2008-11-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

Did you notice that William Logan, poetry critic of the New Criterion and occasional poetry reviewer for the New York Times, came out with a defense of his challenge to the value of Hart Crane’s poetry? I discussed the challenge briefly on this blog a good while back, mostly because of its important bearing on the study of Yvor Winters. (The short piece came out in Poetry last month, and you can find it easily with a search engine.) Apparently, perhaps inevitably, Logan got a truckload of irate mail concerning that review he wrote in the Times about a year ago about the Library of America’s new edition of Crane’s poetry and letters. In that earlier piece, Logan took a couple genial swipes (rather correctly placed swipes, in my view) at the merits of most of Crane’s work.

Logan doesn’t exactly back down in the new piece in Poetry. He calls a good deal of Crane “gassy” and bashes a few lines as “embarrassing,” with the implication that a lot of Crane is just as, if not more, inept. But he doesn’t quite give what I would call a vigorous rational defense of his views, either. In fact, I found the new piece rather disappointing. I was looking forward to Logan’s lacing up the gloves and throwing a few good punches in the form of some sound reasons for his judgments concerning Crane. But in the Poetry article he no more than briefly repeats a few of his opinions concerning Crane’s style but then, quite feebly, defends those views on grounds of the infinite variability in literary taste. I must says that I find Logan’s stand on the relativism of judgment (to be facetious) rather distasteful:

You can't stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can't stand that whiner Keats, I can't stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley -— poets are Rorschach tests.

This from a poet and critic as erudite and as sure of himself as William Logan? I find such comments rather alarming. I could hardly credit that I read them. Come on, Bill. Give us reasons. I agree with you on Hart Crane. I think he is far overrated. He IS full of gas. But enlighten us with some of your good reasons why you think he is.

Yet even Logan belies this limp defense. For at the end of the Poetry piece, he faintly, very faintly, implies that there is something more at stake in seeing Hart Crane’s work for what it is than a matter of relative taste:

If the critic were meant to offer solace, he would have taken up a different line of work. All he can do is record his feelings for the one or two readers willing to look again at Crane -- the critic's job is not to pat the reader on the head and whisper sweet nothings in his ear.

But why bother with trying to get anyone to “look at” Crane again if taste is wholly relative? There is no reason to look again if taste by this definition is all that counts and if one taste is as good as another. But Logan seems to want to say that something important is at stake in recording “his feelings.” It seems that he thinks that there is something important to readers looking at Crane again, whatever that might mean exactly and concretely. Tell us what it is, Bill.

Evaluate Yvor Winter’s judgments and tastes as you will, but he certainly took pains to give reasons in defense of his views -- and he gave them sometimes quite forcefully. (Nonetheless, as I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog, more often than people realize Winters didn’t bother defending himself against many of his attackers.) Winters was out to change tastes and more. Something big was at stake. Winters fought his position in the belief that we readers of the modern age NEED to develop, first, a taste for a new brand of classicism so that a few and ever more poets would away from the damaging practices fostered by Romanticism.

What William Logan claims is that it comes down to style concerning Hart Crane: “If there's a negative case for Crane, it lies in all that waxy rhetoric, glossy on the outside and rotten within.” But Yvor Winters, as a classicist, thought Crane’s weaknesses laid in much more than his decidedly breathlessly bombastic rhetoric. Here is a taste of Winters’s sharp comments on Crane from Primitivism and Decadence, as reprinted in In Defense of Reason:

... the fragmentary, ejaculatory, and overexcited quality of a great many of the poems of Hart Crane is inseparable from the intellectual confusion upon which these particular poems seem to rest (for examples, The Dance, Cape Hatteras, and Atlantis). Crane possessed great energy, but his faculties functioned clearly only within a limited range of experience (Repose of Rivers, Voyages II, Faustus and Helen II). Outside of that range he was either numb (My Grandmother's Love-letters and Harbor Dawn) or unsure of himself and hence uncertain in his detail (as in The River, a very powerful poem in spite of its poor construction and its quantities of bad writing) or both (see Indiana, probably one of the worst poems in modern literature).

Well, I suppose I must admit that these particular reasons are not much fuller (and no sharper) than Logan’s in his two recent pieces. But in the context of Winters’s study of modern American poetry in Primitivism and Decadence, his assessment of Crane gives us much deeper insight into Crane’s weaknesses than William Logan has so far given us. The blatant, resigned relativism of Logan’s latest effort in Poetry helps little to clarify his views or further debate on Hart Crane or any other critical issue he has fulminated upon. For such ideas actually thwart debate -- by laying the whole of all such matters at the feet of the infinitely variable, ever-changing gods of mere taste. Despite this setback, I am still hoping for a lot more from William Logan.

A Canon in Film

2008-10-29T08:04:00.001-07:00

I mentioned some time ago that I have put some work into a book of film critiques from a Wintersian-classicist point of view. This work led me to many books of film reviews and criticism, many of which involve ranking and rating films and making a “canon” of the great films. One recent book in film criticism in particular, despite the fact that I disagree with the critic on most of his judgments about specific films, made some excellent points about canon-making that I think are germane to the discussion and defense of Yvor Winters’s ideas about evaluation.

The book I am referring to is Jonathon Rosenbaum’s Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004). Rosenbaum (pictured), knowledgeable and discriminating film critic of the Chicago Reader, opines that though they are much maligned, canons are highly valuable for getting a grasp on any particular field of artistic study, for forming one’s own values, and for refining one’s critical judgment. Now, these views seem consonant with Winters’s and mine on the making of canons, even though Rosenbaum’s introduction is much more circumspect on the question of “necessity” than his bold subtitle.

In his book Rosenbaum tries to convey his pleasure in watching films, especially those that have yet to find their way onto U.S. screens. Much as Winters believed of poetry, Rosenbaum believes that too many films of too great achievement and value have been overlooked. This was exactly Winters’s point about the development of classical poetry in English through the past five centuries. Almost exactly like Winters on poetry too, Rosenbaum is passionate about the subject of film and its canon, the discoveries he has made and the effort to draw attention to them. Rosenbaum, as Winters did with classical literature, cares about what the Hollywood machine has kept us from seeing and aims to enrich our viewing with the films he believes to be neglected masterpieces and talented filmmakers who are difficult to pigeonhole. Rosenbaum is certainly more eclectic about film than Winters was about poetry, I will not deny. But he points out the blind spots and arbitrariness of the commercial distribution system in film.

This was exactly Winters’s viewpoint, and this is a primary purpose of setting a canon. Exactly, it is my primary purpose in discussing and trying to develop Winters’s canon in the discussion of the poems of Quest for Reality and my repeated endeavors to bring attention to John Fraser’s New Book of Verse.

Rosenbaum’s liking for Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis -– he calls it “the best piece of literary criticism that I know” -– is revealing about the canon he sets. Films, for Rosenbaum, as literature for Auerbach, are supposed to depict reality, i.e. represent the life of “the common people.” Erudite as it is, the book has a tendency to favor realistic films with a social value as the authentic artistic form. Experimental films do not easily or clearly fit into this vision.

Seeing such things, however, is just what is so useful about a canon -– to get into the mind of the critic. It is the best and fullest way to fathom the critical principles by which the critic judges and by which he thinks we should all judge. That was Winters’s purpose as well. It is my purpose too.

I have not read all of Rosenbaum’s book. Frankly, he is no Wintersian -- nor even classicist in any sense. I found it surprising that he looked to Auerbach, for his judgments are almost entirely anti-classical. (Film has never had a classicist critic. John Simon might be the closest so far.) But my central point is that his justification of canon-making is helpful in the study of Yvor Winters.

On the Beauty of Puddles

2008-10-10T08:10:00.000-07:00

Did you happen to notice and read the graduation speech of David Foster Wallace’s published by the Wall Street Journal upon the news of his suicide? The main point of his talk to the graduates, which you can find at the WSJ web site, was to find spiritual strength and perhaps happiness in recognizing that water is WATER. Twice he told the grads to say to themselves, “this is water, this is water” when they come upon a spill or a puddle or a pool or a pond. By cultivating amazement at the recognition of the magical, mysterious existence of water, Wallace believed they will be able to get through the tiresome, nettlesome days of their humdrum lives to come. (The photo is one of mine, of a pond in a garden here at Michigan State University.)

It doesn’t surprise me that a literary, or High-Cult, writer came up with this idea in this chatty, witty talk to students (and I think fairly highly of Wallace’s writing, I must add as disclaimer). Writers and critics by the hundreds have proffered marvel and wonder as the highest purposes of literature, particularly poetry. My view is that this idea, as insipid as it is, has become a leading cliché in our dominant literary culture, as I have pointed out and discussed a couple times on this blog already. I believe it stems from Romanticism, this hyper-concern with knowing small, commonplace things to be amazing. We see the idea everywhere. One of the most idiotic manifestations I can think of off the top of the head is from the somewhat recent Oscar-winning film American Beauty, in which a main character marvels at his videotape of a plastic shopping bag being blown about an empty sidewalk (by the way, I’d love to see some more examples). Is this the best and most important work poetry and literature can perform, to help us marvel and wonder at small things? Yvor Winters would have wretched at the thought. The idea reached one summit in Oscar Wilde’s discussion of beauty in “The Critic as Artist,” in which he proclaims his belief that finding beauty is the essence of all things:

Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes; it is dangerous -- all ideas, as I told you, are so.

This sort of talk is a cross between what Winters called the Hedonistic and Romantic theories of literature, as deliberated in the “Foreword” to In Defense of Reason. The overt hedonism of such thinking about literature did not so much morally trouble Winters as overwhelm him with the pointlessness of the idea:

The chief disadvantage [of the Hedonistic theory] is that it renders intelligible discussion of art impossible, and it relegates art to the position of an esoteric indulgence, possibly though not certainly harmless, but hardly of sufficient importance to merit a high position among other human activities. Art, however, has always been accorded a high position, and a true theory of art should be able to account for this fact.

Is Wilde’s brand of emotionally indulgent, antinomian thinking dangerous (Wilde, by the way, gleefully admitted that it IS antinomian), as Yvor Winters might have thought, or is it just trite? Or is it dangerous because it’s so trite? Any views? And how are the Hedonistic theories and the Romantic theories of literature interrelated, as I believe they are?

The British Debate the Question of What a Poem Is

2008-10-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

The matter bubbled up some months ago, a debate that began in Britain about what poetry is, which led to a number of articles and responses in British magazines. This debate started when the Queen's English Society, through a representative by the name of Michael George Gibson, decided to publically announce the judgment of the QES that certain prize winners in a recent British poetry competition are not poetry because the winners -- and all the finalists, for that matter -– were written in free verse. On behalf of the QES, Gibson claimed that “true poems” are written in some discernible measure and most often in rhyme. True poetry, said Gibson, gives the reader or listener a “special pleasure.”

Gibson, however, made a colossal blunder in defense of the position of the QES, for he foolishly chose to illustrate the claim with a supposed non-poem by English Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, “The Golden Rule” (recently commissioned for Elizabeth II’s 80th birthday). Despite Gibson’s confident pronouncements for the QES that “The Golden Rule” is written in prose, it is a formalist poem in every way. It’s written in a clear and very regular blank verse, which shows that even the well-meaning folks of the QES are as ignorant as that reviewer in the New York Times who said that Robert Pinsky’s recent, much-discussed piece “Poem of Disconnected Parts” is written in blank verse, which obviously it is NOT (see my earlier post on that matter). Anyway, take a gander at Motion’s fine work in an obviously and highly formal meter:

The Golden Rule

The waves unfurl and change the shape of coasts,
The shrinking woods fall backwards through their leaves,
The night-horizons twist in chains of light:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

The language bursts its bounds and breaks new ground,
The fledgling words lay down a treasure-trove,
The speed of heart-to-heart accelerates:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

The sun unwinds its heat through threadbare sky
The lakes and rivers map their stony graves,
The stars still shine although their names grow faint:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

The black-and-white of certainty dissolves,
The single mind insists on several lives,
The ways to measure truth elaborate:
The golden rule, your constancy, survives.

Motion’s iambic pentameter seems stodgy, almost wooden, to those who have lost or have never had the taste for meter. There is hardly any variation whatsoever. The only major departure I see is in the phrase “their names grow faint,” which ends its line in a near spondee. And yet Motion handles the rigid meter** very well. The final stanza, in particular, reaches a powerful moment of insight, the idea of certainty dissolving expressed in a methodical and conventional meter. Gibson, for the QES, said of the poem, “It is in pairs of lines and I will assume they are measured out in a formal way, but beyond that there is no other formal principle. It falls short of being a poem.”

Dead wrong, Mr. Gibson.

I feel almost incredulous that such a mistake could be made -- and then followed up with wide publication. By using a search engine, you can easily find lots of commentary on the QES challenge on the definition of poetry.

Naturally, the British Poetry Society, which put on the competition responded to Gibson’s criticisms. One trustee said: “There is poetry in everything we say or do, and if something is presented to me as a poem by its creator, or by an observer, I accept that something as a poem.” That is a position that is simply unacceptable to me, that anything anyone says is a poem is one. Such a view leads, and has led, to a lot of nonsense in the world of poetry and to a significant diminishment of poetry’s importance and beauty. Ruth Padel, a prize-winning poet (unknown to me) and former chair of the Poetry Society, added, “As for ‘what poetry is’: in The Use of Poetry T.S. Eliot said, ‘We learn what poetry is -- if we ever learn -- by reading it.’” I would also disagree with that, for it also leads to the incoherent position of accepting as poetry anything that anyone says is poetry.

Another British poet, by the name of Michael Schmidt, claimed that the campaign of the QES is similar to a movement in the U.S. labeled "New Formalism." Followers of that movement, Schmidt claimed, “set up a magazine” (just one?) that included any poem as long as it “rhymed and scanned.” The comment about rhyme is incorrect. I don’t know what single magazine Schmidt was speaking of, but there have been several U.S. journals devoted to formal verse in recent years, and none of them made rhyme a requirement and many of the meters employed have been highly experimental. Schmidt was quoted further as saying, “But the bankruptcy of that [the use of meter and rhyme, that is] has been recognized.” The “bankruptcy” of formalist poetics?!

Dead wrong, Mr. Schmidt.

Even in British publishing “new formalism” has had a vibrant life, thanks in part to the work of Janet Lewis’s longtime friend, the late Donald Davie (who was, by the way, editor of Yvor Winters’s Collected Poems).

Interesting to many might be to discover that Yvor Winters, who has so often been chided and derided for his conversion to formalist poetics early in his career, had little to say against free verse in and of itself. In fact, his letters discuss free verse very seldom, as it might be astonishing to realize, and he never railed against free verse in his letters or published essays. In fact, he wrote fondly and insightfully of free verse even after his conversion away from the Imagist poetics that he subscribed to at the beginning of his career. Winters’s views are made more complex because he believed that the best free-verse poetry was not truly “free,” but followed patterns of continual variation. We get some insight into this knotty concept in a letter to John Crowe Ransom in May of 1928 (when Winters was 28 and in the midst of leaving free-verse Imagism behind), in which he wrote informally of his belief that free verse can be scanned:

The question of meter is again too complicated for this letter, but if you are interested, I will send you some specimens of scansion some time in the next year or so. Specimens of “free” verse, that is. My own, {William Carlos] Williams’s, Miss [Marianne] Moore, perhaps [Ezra] Pound’s. I believe that, allowing for irregularities (as in much blank verse) most of the good free verse -– and there is quite a bit of it -– is based on a line of primary and secondary stresses, the first being normally of a fixed number and the second and unstressed syllables varying. Sometimes the line is deformed for various reason, but can usually be straightened out if one has a counting-complex. At any rate I will fight for what pleases me, not for what can be measured by a footrule, and I believe that the above-named poets write verse whether it can be measured or not. I can, incidentally, scan most of my own verse of the last five years on this principle, having done it.

Winters’s formal writings on the scanning of free verse are of great interest (if mostly unconvincing to me). You can find them in his first book Primitivism and Decadence, which can be found as the first part of In Defense of Reason, his most famous work.

** Footnote: I should explain that I do not use the word “rigid” here as a pejorative , as it has been so used in many comments about formalists and Yvor Winters’s own verse, in particular (even among those who admire his work). Rigidity can be beautiful, as beautiful as or even more beautiful than looseness. Andrew Motion’s lines have great character and a certain strong beauty. Of course, I am aware of the current general bias in literary culture against regular meters in our time. But the continuing popularity of old formal verse (Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, et. al.) promises that some day a new and perhaps even large cadre of poets will devote themselves to the use of meter.

The beauty of rigidity, I think, needs a defense for our time.

A Mirror for Witches, by Esther Forbes

2008-09-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

Janet Lewis thought highly of the fiction of Esther Forbes, an author best known nowadays for her fine children’s book set in the American Revolution, Johnny Tremain. One of my books for summer reading was Forbes’s A Mirror for Witches, which Lewis recommended to readers in the book Rediscoveries some years back. What did I discover? A very fine novel on the Salem witch trials that should not be forgotten, that might even be highly important. The novel might truly deserve to last – that is, to command our attention as one of the finest novels we have. I believe Lewis might have been right that A Mirror for Witches is deserving of rediscovery.

The book concerns our sense that the events in Salem 300 years ago were incredible and singular. Forbes surely knew that we would be drawn to the story she tells and her manner of telling it simply because most American readers find it bewildering that so many people could have been caught up in the ignorance and mass hysteria of the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts. (Without question, general incredulity might have diminished in light of the bizarre sex crime scares in the US about 15 years ago.) The novel appears well researched, as evidenced, in part, by its selection for the college textbook, What Happened at Salem? (out of print), which was edited by the fine historian David Levin (once Yvor Winters’s colleague at Stanford). In my considered judgment, the book is exceptionally well written, in a style that is profound, moving, and sharply appropriate to its purpose.

Forbes’s tale concerns the fictional Doll Bilby, a young woman who was adopted by an American-to-be as a small child after seeing her own parents burned alive as witches in France. The man who adopts her, a sympathetic ship’s master, is drawn to Doll’s merrily unruly temperament, which was, Forbes makes clear, shaped by the distress of watching her parents being executed in such a ghastly manner. The intellectual and psychological devastation Doll seems to have suffered, however, does not lead Forbes to a modern take on demon possession. In Doll’s era, mental illness was often seen as evidence of possession by demons, and anyone so controlled must either be in league with them or at least be highly dangerous to everyone else. Forbes portrays Doll as truly possessed; Doll believes it herself. Forbes’s accomplished exposition, written in the style of the 17th century (slightly modernized), evokes both the time and the place and the thoughts and feelings of her characters so powerfully and accurately that we feel as though we have been transported back to colonial times and can thereby more deeply, fully, and sympathetically fathom the colonial mind that brought about the Salem trials. Allow me to quote one important and moving passage of the novel that strikes me as central to its themes. This is part of the scene in which Doll first discerns that she has been in league with demons, whose reality she never doubted, but whose presence she had not yet known fully or clearly:

Now was she no longer alone in this sad world, for her god (that is, Satan) had come to succor her, or had at least sent her a messenger. She asked him which he was, Satan or lesser demon. At the mention of Satan’s name, he bowed his head reverently. He admitted that he was but one of many fallen angels who had left Paradise with the Awful Prince. At first she was cast down, for she had hoped to hear that it was the Prince himself. But she looked again, and marked how handsome a man he was and of what a fine ruddy complexion. She saw how strong were his shoulders, and how arched and strong his chest. She was thankful then that Satan had not seen fit tom send her merely some ancient hag or talking cat, ram, or little green bird, but this stalwart demon. She thought, “He can protect me even from the hate of Mrs. Hannah.” She though, in her utter damnable folly, “He can protect me from the Wrath of God.”

The whole barn fell into the cellar hole. As she looked towards this glowing pit, she thought of that vaster and crueller bonfire in which her soul would burn forever. She thought well to ask him a little concerning those pains which she later must suffer. He laughed at her. There would be, he said, no pain. Those who served Satan faithfully in this world were never burned in Hell. Was not Satan Kind of Hell? Why should he burn those who loved and obeyed him? She was stuffed full of lunatic theology. The only souls that suffered in Hell were such of God’s subjects as had angered Him and yet made no pact of service with Satan....

I could discuss this one wonderfully composed passage at length, for there is much to ponder here, from the author’s voice to the complex meaning of the passage. I quote it just to whet your appetite, though I also want you to see how Forbes delves so deeply into her subject matter that it become a full reality to her readers.

I believe it was this sense of transport that Forbes was trying to achieve. She was not trying to tell us that she believes in demons -- and that we ought to as well. She was trying to fathom what it really felt and feels like to believe in demons so deeply that it could steer people who so believe into unwitting error. By recreating the form, atmosphere, and tone of a seventeenth-century chapbook, in which sinister events are presented as though they are literally true, the 20th-century reader is brought up short, startled with the trueness of other conceptions of life and the world. Reader will take one of several stances on the meaning of the short, violent life of Doll Bilby, "who took a fiend to love." But Forbes wanted something much more, to get us to see that outwardly outlandish beliefs of bygone ages were once really reality, penetrating to every corner of life, deeply influencing, perhaps overmastering, all thought and feeling. I believe that Forbes’s theme can help us in many ways to understand those who are different from us and better comprehend our own past, the essential beliefs of others, and how beliefs shape who we are and what we do. Forbes does no overt moralizing on Doll’s case, though Doll is, of course, condemned. Forbes’s moral is to guide us to a much deeper understanding of human beliefs about the supernatural. The sharply, expertly controlled tone conveys powerful insights into how a young girl could have been be destroyed by ignorance and prejudice that was beyond the full control of those who were ignorant and prejudiced. The story amounts to tragedy. Forbes’s tragic treatment of this theme suggests that, rather than feeling superior to the countless dupes and fools we can prop up from our past, we must look closely and conscientiously at how we are ignorant and prejudiced.

Finally, one of the ideas that lies in the background of the novel, as we see it from our age, was once so deeply believed that it cannot even credibly come into play in the novel. This is the idea that a government has a right and a moral duty to kill those who hold noxious ideas. Forbes could not even explore this theme, so deeply was this view held in the time of the Salem trials. Another novel I have been meaning to recommend as one of my own “rediscoveries” gets to the heart of this matter, Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels. Does anyone else know this very fine novel (by an author of children’s books, too)?

Esther Forbes’s A Mirror for Witches is a truly superb American novel, perhaps even great (I will be pondering that issue) that has been long forgotten. Please check it out.

The "Fray" Puts Us in a Fray

2008-09-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

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.

What Might a Man Dancing in Front of Your Desk Be Doing?

2008-09-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have been going back through some notes on topics that I meant to get to before I took a summer hiatus from this blog (which doesn’t appear to have bothered anyone in the least). One of the small, lighthearted matters I wanted to draw your attention to, from this past spring, was a cartoon animation at the web site of the New Yorker, which I don’t think is available online any longer. The cartoon started with a guy dancing gaily in front of his boss in a corporate office. The boss says, “Say what’s on your mind, Harris -- the language of dance has always eluded me.” It’s a great line, and it brought to mind one of the central issues of modern literary study and practice, the issue of the final cause of literature. The photo is a shot of one of my sons dancing, rather vigorously, around our living room last winter. I can't remember ewxactly what he was trying to say.

On a narrow plane, the issue of cause nowadays often concerns whether poetry or literature in general have special functions or purposes that are above or beyond any purpose behind non-fiction writing or “communications” of any sort. There have been many critics over the past 50 years and even further back, Gerald Graff called them “anti-realists,” who have gone so far as to say that literature has NOTHING to do with life, but only with itself, a truly absurd conception that won’t go away since Mallarmé, for one, so successfully foisted it upon his admirers. (Stanley Fish has become one of our more famous anti-realists, as evidenced in his recent book Save the World on Your Own Time, which is being discussed in many places around the web. I might have to discuss Fish’s views some time.) But the cartoon trades on the idea that the arts really do say something, or, in effect, make statements of some kind. Even the metaphorical use of the word “language” in this way shows that the postmodern critics haven’t yet stripped literature of every shred of hope of realist importance or efficacy. It was Yvor Winters’s belief that literature’s final cause was to make statements, to communicate, even propositionally (God forbid!), and one that plays a central role in his criticism.

The cartoon also trades on another notion as well, that there is something very distinctive about what dance or painting or poetry or other arts communicate. I sense that the feeling is that, like the “language of dance,” the language of poetry is so different from “ordinary” language, written or spoken, and so important as well, that what can be said through the “language” of literature can be done in no other way (Winters believed it could be done in NO better way than poetry, a position I find a little extreme). Harris must speak to the boss through dance, because ONLY dance can say what he needs to say. Yvor Winters believed that poetry and literature are crucially different from or higher than ordinary uses of language.

But poetry and literature, at their core, were for Winters, simply, ways to make statements about life. He hinted on occasion that the notion that poetry was extremely different or even wholly other could be highly damaging to literature and forced many writers and critics down roads that they have gotten lost on. Winters’s rather pedestrian view, a matter of common sense all in all, is that literature, specifically poetry, is a form of communication, akin to all forms of language. Put simply, writers are trying to say something to us, to communicate, about the world we live in. This implies, I believe, that literature and poetry have the same purpose and share the nature of any kind of writing or speaking: memos, letters, news, reports, speeches, lectures, essays, monographs, works of journalism or history or social science. What are the dangers in regarding literature as a nearly wholly different mode of expression or import, something more like dance than a lecture? That is a matter for reflection. Any comments?

A Writer Declares Which Is "The Greatest Poem"

2008-09-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

Ron Rosenbaum came out in "Slate" this past Friday with his judgment that John Keats's ode "To Autumn" is the single greatest poem in the English language. He asks readers to submit their opinions on the greatest poem at the end of the piece, which can be found at:

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

I offered a comment on Rosenbaum's piece "Slate"'s so-called "Fray", in which readers can comment upon the site's essays. Yvor Winters, as I point out, was at one period in our literary history often and sternly chastized for choosing the greatest poems or writings in any language, but it seems that the practice has now achieved some sort of sanction. Still, Rosenbaum is a journalist, not a scholar or a leading literary critic; so it might be that he feels freer to offer opinions on such matters.

Anyone got an opinion on "To Autumn"? The poem was rated, by the way, as the third greatest poem in William Harmon's Columbia anthology of the greatest poems -- based on frequency of appearance in other anthologies. (Keats's manuscript is pictured here.) I certainly do not consider it to be among the greats of English poetry. Nor did Yvor Winters, though Winters did write, late in his career, that the poem has certain felicities that should not be overlooked. In fact, in Forms of Discovery, the only consideration of Keats in his published career, he wrote that it was Keats's most fully realized and coherent poem, though he also wrote that it is not a "serious" poem, however that might be taken. I explained in my comment on "Slate"'s Fray that Winters, as well as I can tell, would have judged Ben Jonson's "To Heaven" or George Herbert's "Church Monuments" as the greatest poems in English. At his web site, John Fraser has devoted a long essay to Herbert's poem, which suggests his very high opinion of it. Fraser, also, selected "To Autumn" for his important quasi-Wintersian New Book of Verse, a decision he does not defend. I presume that he thought Winters's comment in FD partly justified the selection. Also, I wrote on "Slate" that he probably would have thought that Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning" the greatest poem of modern times, though I am less certain on Winters's judgment on that. Any opinions on what Winters would have thought on this score, on the greatest poem of, say, the past two centuries?

Further, any opinions from Wintersians or people interested in Winters on what is the greatest poem in the language? Rosenbaum invites his readers to write two-line blurbs on why their greatest poem is the greatest. That sounds like fun. Maybe I'll try to come up with some blurbs for the Winters greats. On a British web site and at amazon.com some years back, I offered my judgment that Winters's own "To the Holy Spirit" is the greatest poem in English. Naturally, few on the British site had even heard of Winters or the poem, and few gave me any credit for the judgment. Any reactions to my judgment?

In connection with Wallace Stevens's later poetry, Donald Stanford discussed "To Autumn" in his great crtitical work from the 1980s, Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry. Stanford seems to have had a moderately good opinion of the Keats poem, though he does write that it lacks in "ideational content," which is a crucial issue in the Wintersian classical conception of literature. Indeed, in my view as well, the Keats poem is a rather simple, bland affair that offers rather little to the mind or the emotions. Rosenbaum does nothing to convince me that it is the greatest poem with his blurbing on the matter.

The idea of considering blurbing as an literary art form, the main theme of Rosenbaum's short "Slate" piece, I will leave for later consideration. I right now don't wish to get myself all upset about the inane ideas that trundle in through the web door so often nowadays.

Eloquence Receives the Attention It's Due in a New Book

2008-06-04T06:46:00.000-07:00

Professor and literary critic Denis Donoghue has come out with an engaging and important book, in which he endeavors to understand and foster the appreciation and study of eloquence. What he appears to mean by the concept of eloquence, in my judgment, is intrinsically beautiful writing of some sort, and the book makes a valiant attempt to define beauty in literature and illustrate the truly beautiful. I think the book, On Eloquence, is well worth study, for it not only presents an enlightening case for the importance of eloquence but also suggests ways forward in augmenting the literary ideas of Yvor Winters. I hope to find time for a deeper look at the book some time in the near future. (The photo is a shot of someone kissing Ireland’s Blarney Stone, the so-called “Stone of Eloquence.”)

To offer a few summary comments, Donoghue makes a nearly absolute distinction in the book -- questionably absolute, in my view -- between the practical, persuasive discipline of rhetoric and the elevated aesthetic value of eloquence. I think the distinction is useful, to a degree. But I don’t think Donoghue makes a sound case for setting a hard line between the two. In fact, I believe a hard line can lead to a lot of nonsense and the continuing marginalization of literature, especially poetry, and to the uncertainty and desperation about what literature actually accomplishes or can accomplish in our lives. Eloquence, for Donoghue, comes in our time not from the realm of what he calls public speech but from that of literary writing. But the difference between such speech -- what is often called “communication” nowadays -- and literature is not so great as Donoghue thinks. Literary writing, as Yvor Winters opined, is a form of communication. It is a making of statements that seek a deeper or broader understanding of vital human experiences. In Winters’s stronger conception, literature endeavors to employ all aspects of language to enrich our understanding and our emotional alignment to that understanding. Yet a detailed comparison of Donoghue’s theory of eloquence with that of Winters’s theory of literature will have to wait for another post.

In the opening section of the book, Donoghue summarizes the aspects of literature that he cares about as a reader and teacher: "aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, 'how to do things with words.'" As a professor, he says that it has become more difficult nowadays to get students to see that these aspects are interesting and valuable. Donoghue believes passionately that literature is too often read, and expected to be read, in our age as a reflection of writers’ prejudices and the historical and political currents of the world in which it was written. Something vital, something truly life-enhancing risks, being lost in this view, in Donoghue’s mind. The truly vital, the truly life-enhancing, are found, for Donoghue, in the idea that literary eloquence is like dancing:

The dancing of speech is eloquence: the aim of a dance is not to get from one part of the village green or the stage to another, it is to create and embody yet another form of life beyond the already known forms of it. In dancing, the dancers enjoy the certitude of being alive in their bodies. That is eloquence.

What does this analogy amount to? What is the literal activity involved with the making of literature that writers “enjoy”? And what do readers literally enjoy in reading literature? Donoghue doesn’t make this clear. As such, this clichéd analogy is inapt and pretentious (as common as it has become). Donoghue thinks that literature is eloquent when it is at its “most irreducible, when it is most utterly itself.” Unwilling to define such blather, it is at this point that Donoghue goes further and asserts an absolute distinction between the “merely” practical business of rhetoric and the aesthetic charm of eloquence:

Eloquence has no aim: it is a play of words or other expressive means. It is a gift to be enjoyed in appreciation and practice. The main attribute of eloquence is gratuitousness: its place in the world is to be without place or function, its mode is to be intrinsic. Like beauty, it claims only the privilege of being a grace note in the culture that permits it.

There is something distinctly unsettling, wrongheaded, and perhaps even dangerous to literature in the implications of that word “gratuitous.” The common fear of art having a purpose seems quite overblown, even paranoid, as I have written on this blog many times. Donoghue, impassioned on the point, even claims that eloquence isn't “even a distant cousin of rhetoric,” which

... comes from a different family and has different eyes, hair, and gait. Long thought to be a subset of rhetoric's devices, eloquence has declared its independence: It has no designs on readers or audiences. Its aim is pleasure; it thrives on freedom among the words. Unlike rhetoric, it has not sent any soldier to be killed in foreign countries.

I disagree with these comments almost entirely, and the last comment is downright silly. Donoghue fails to make his case -– actually, he doesn’t even try to make a case. He simply states and restates and restates yet again that rhetoric and eloquence are unrelated (whatever that might mean). You can accept the idea, but Donoghue gives no sound reason for doing do so, and nothing Donoghue says persuades me. He doesn’t seem to realize how long eloquence (“beautiful” writing and speaking) and killing have strode together through history. Consider Caesar and his masterly chronicle of Rome's Gallic Wars. The dictator’s iron-sharp eloquence has inspired the military-minded for millennia. Consider Lincoln and his "Gettysburg Address." His exhortation for the nation to give “the last full measure” was an unmistakably direct reference to killing and dying on behalf of the ideals Lincoln and millions more believed were at stake in the American Civil War. Also, there’s Lincoln dizzyingly eloquent "Second Inaugural," in which he sees the myriad deaths in the war as payment for sins. Consider Churchill during the blitz saying that his country shall not yield. Consider FDR’s eloquence, too, upon the attack at Pearl Harbor. Consider Kennedy’s eloquence in 1961, asking us not to ask what we can do for ourselves, but what we can do for our country. Did this eloquent call to devotion not include, in Kennedy’s mind, military conflicts like tha one he would soon expand step by step, the low-level military conflict we came to call the Vietnam War? Was Kennedy’s stirring line any less eloquent because it was intended to -- and almost surely did -- contribute to killing and to many being killed? Donoghue doesn’t seem well suited to deep reasoning, at least not on this direly crucial point. But I can’t overlook such a large blunder. Nonetheless, as I say, a deeper look at Donoghue’s rigid distinction between rhetoric and eloquence will have to wait.

Turning from definitions to illustrations, Donoghue finds eloquence in small lines and phrases, just as Yvor Winters did (though Winters was tiresomely and wrongly vilified for the practice again and again and again by critics of all stripes and colors). In discussing these one-liners, one reviewer has written that Donoghue looks “where others might never think to look.” But that’s hardly so. It is a regular practice among professors and critics to offer opinions about both eloquent and poorly turned or garbled lines and sentences and short passages in books and writings of all sorts. Take John Updike for just one example. I have read hundreds of his reviews, and hundreds are the one-liners or short passages that he has singled out as beautiful writing in one way or another.

But back to Donoghue’s examples. He lays out many bits and pieces of literature that he considers eloquent. For example, he points to a sudden switch by Dante into Provençal in the Divine Comedy. Not bad. Later, he claims that the knocking at the gate in "Macbeth" is particularly eloquent. I’d have little trouble agreeing with that. Yet later, he says he likes the eloquence of the ambiguities in Donne's poem "The Extasie." Here I begin to part ways. But like Winters, Donoghue even draws attention to single words, such as the word "indignant" from Yeats’s famous and over-praised poem "The Second Coming." I have my doubts about any of these samples being especially eloquent, no matter the definition settled upon.

Donoghue even says that for him the contexts of eloquent writings often recede, that he is content even to ignore contexts, in favor of their isolated eloquence. For example, he claims that George Herbert’s line "Then shall the fall further the flight in me" is truly eloquent, even though he can’t name or describe the context of the poem it stands in. He thinks Milton’s line "Love without end, and without measure Grace," found somewhere in Paradise Lost, is very fine. Yet out of context, I can’t see either line as particularly eloquent. "That mine own precipice I go" is Donoghue’s choice of an eloquent line from Marvell, but he admits that he has entirely forgotten the poem. That’s downright sad. In one early passage in the book, Donoghue goes on at length with examples of eloquence:

"Christ, that my love were in my arms, / And I in my bed again" is perennial poetry, exempt from contextual limitation. "The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times" is from a psalm, which one I forget. "Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke; the ashes shame and scorns" is the only line I recall from Southwell's "The Burning Babe." "From you have I been absent in the spring" is from a minor sonnet of Shakespeare's, not minor to me. "There is in God (some say) / A deep, but dazzling darkness" is from Vaughan's "The Night," which I can't further recite.

Donoghue is proud of remembering bits and pieces. Winters, too, paid very close attention to other bits and pieces in like manner. But in the classical, Wintersian view, it is the total poem that engenders the greatest eloquence in individual lines and sentences. My case for that view will have to wait for later, though Donoghue’s book gives us many useful concepts and illustrations to work from in making and refining such a case. Overall, I find many of his examples witty, but not especially eloquent.

For Donoghue’s judgment becomes suspicious at times. For instance, he discusses with rapturous praise a rather mediocre passage from Walt Whitman on death. I find the passage less than eloquent and not a match for, say, Frederick Godard Tuckerman in “The Cricket.” Can we trust Donoghue? The passage from Whitman includes not one, but two lines repeating a single word: “death, death, death, death.” Donoghue sees such pretensions, such obvious weaknesses, as examples of supreme eloquence. All too often, his take on the bits and pieces he finds so eloquent can seem jejune, in my judgment.

But such comments raise the central and thorny issues of what beautiful writing actually is and who gets to decide. Taste, it would seem. But who decides what is truly tasteful? That obvious, weighty, problematic question is left hanging. Donoghue, as far as I have studied his book so far, seems to have no clear notion of what taste is or how it is acquired or judged. He seems to think that we all know what beautiful writing is already -- and if we don’t, all we need do is trust to him or the group of professors he approves of. But classical Wintersians have distinct problems with the tastes of modern writers and critics, even ones as solid as Denis Donoghue. Our classical tastes are very different, and we can and do defend them, as few as we are. But Donoghue must see that the matter comes down to taste, as Janet Lewis once said to her own husband. I forget where I read this, but Lewis said to Winters that his sharp and profound disagreements with modern literary critics and poets came down to matters of taste. Winters gruffly agreed. For taste is a powerful, underlying aspect of Winters’s ideas. He sought a revolution in taste, a revolution that would bring us back to the classical spirit. (It has brought some few of us back, and this blog is intended to invite others back.)

In light of Donoghue’s illustrations, I should spend more time on this blog putting on display and letting my readers put on display the truly great, truly eloquent lines from the classical tradition that gather dust in almost complete obscurity in our time. Quickly, here’s one off the top of the head, Winters’s own opening lines from “Time and the Garden”:

The spring has darkened with activity,
The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree.

There is true, if unrecognized, eloquence -- in context (of necessity, contra Donoghue). There are many, many other examples of supreme eloquence throughout the Winters Canon and in other poems of the poets he championed. But acknowledging this raises many difficult questions. Is Adelaide Crapsey, whose work appears in the Winters Canon, more eloquent than Walt Whitman, whose work does not so appear? How about Frederick Godard Tuckerman than Thomas Gray -- or, say, Tennyson? Was that line of Wordsworth’s that Winters put down in Forms of Discovery truly ineloquent? I say, Yes, to all these questions and many similar ones. Yes, we need to focus on eloquence. The problem is that Denis Donoghue doesn’t appear to know what truly great eloquence is in many, many cases.

As a last classical example, let me put before you one of the supremely eloquent poems of the English language, J.V. Cunningham’s modern epigram “In whose will.” It is truly eloquent, however much its eloquence remains veiled in obscurity:

In whose will is our peace? Thou happiness,
Thou ghostly promise, to thee I confess,
Neither in thine nor love’s nor in that form
Disquiet hints at have I yet been warm.
And if I rest not till I rest in thee,
Cold as thy grace, whose hand shall comfort me?

Yes, we need to herald more writing of such inestimable eloquence on this blog. Send me your examples, and I will post them.

I hope to come back to Denis Donoghue’s On Eloquence some time for a deeper examination of its insights and arguments.

A New Study of One of Winters’s Best Poems

2008-05-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

It has taken me two years to get around to this brief consideration of a young critic who has embarked on a study of modern poetry, essay by essay, that is, in part, bringing attention back to some of the most significant work of Yvor Winters. It has been a long time since Winters’s poetry has received the kind of careful scrutiny that James Matthew Wilson offers in some of his work. A few of Wilson’s essays have been published in the past couple years in Contemporary Poetry Review, an online journal of growing influence. CPR has published some strong criticism on poets who are writing in traditional form rather than free verse or, Lord preserve us, more prosetry. I haven’t been able to find the time for an extended consideration of James Wilson’s work. So I offer this glance at the Wilson piece that CPR published in 2006 on one of Winters’s great poems, entitled “Classic Readings: Yvor Winters ‘The Slow Pacific Swell’.” Accessible only to subscribers, the essay can be found at:

http://www.cprw.com/Wilson/pacificswell.htm 10/2/2006

The very fact that Wilson pays close attention to this one poem in a long essay is a measure of his regard for it. He believes that “Slow Pacific Swell,” little known or studied as it is, is a poem to be deeply admired because it observes the traditional as it embarks on important poetic innovations. This appears to mean to Wilson the ways in which the formal aspects of the poem relate to its modern themes. (The photo, by the way, is of a swell coming ashore on the Pacific.) For Wilson, the poem is important because it speaks of the “eternal in the evanescent,” which is a difficult, abstract theme that the essay tries to elucidate.

In the essay, Wilson first considers another great Winters poem “To the Holy Spirit.” In Wilson’s mind, “Spirit” stands out as one of the finest balanced expressions of Winters’ constant theme (Wilson thinks it might be limited): the struggle of the human reason to perceive and understand the order we can find in a messy and heartless universe, a theme which also forms “Slow Pacific Swell.” Wilson gives a fair reading of “Spirit,” which elsewhere on the web I have written might be the finest single poem in the English language. In his discussion of this poem, Wilson theorizes that most of his Winters’s poetry explores two “modes” of order, intellectual and formal. Some of Winters’s poems strain to understand how the mind can overcome sensory and psychological limitations to "encounter Being and reality in Truth," which Wilson regards as Thomistic concepts. In other poems, those focused on the cognitive, Winters studies the mind in romantic or irrational states, seeking a proper attainment of a classical or stoic balance.

Wilson admits to being frustrated with Winters in his tight focus on the self -- and he is not alone in this. The focus becomes, for Wilson, monotonous. It does seem so to me as well at times. This monotony, nearly an obsession, is a subject for further study.

Wilson believes that “To the Holy Spirit” and the poems on similar themes express, in sum, Winters’s attitude to reality. He says that they are not experiments in the presentation and judgment of reality itself. I don’t quite fathom the distinction Wilson makes on this point. Winters seems to me to have clearly to have sought a judgment of reality in “Slow Pacific Swell.” I might have to come back to this larger topic at a later time for a closer look.

Wilson next turns to the formal aspects of Winters’s poetry. He opines that poetic formalism is crucial to “Pacific Swell” and its take on reality. Wilson says that the rhyme scheme, heroic couplets (of all things), contributes a “virtuous poetic order,” what he calls “good making.” For Wilson, the opposite of rhyme, it seems, or of poetic form in general, is the chaos of unmaking that “verges on prolific non-existence.” This is another difficult phrase, both in and out of context. I’m not certain Wilson explains well enough what he means here, but a study of this matter will have to wait. Yet Wilson states clearly his belief that Winters’s poem deserves our admiration for the virtuosity and variety of its strong heroic couplets, an opinion with which I concur wholeheartedly.

The conceptual structure of “The Slow Pacific Swell” is masterly and crucial, Wilson next claims. Winters presents us with a quasi-allegory, which Wilson discusses at length. He says that the poem’s symbol gradually form a parable. Gradually, readers become uncertain whether the poet is speaking of the literal Pacific, as in the first stanza, or of the effects of cruel nature on the struggling intellects of men and women. But there is, in my view, little uncertainty, as Wilson also appears to see. It is both: the coastal scene described informs the parable as symbols. This conception of the poem is close to Winters’s own discussion of it in one of his letters (the letters were published just eight years ago). In 1958 Winters wrote to Allen Tate at length about the poem and its symbolism:

The ocean throughout this poem is the familiar symbol of the eternal non-human and sub-human of the universe. It is seen from three points of view, and these are arranged in a properly rational order: first the remote view from the hill-top and childhood; send the immediate view of semi-immersion in the thing itself; finally from the relatively mature view of accustomed and occasional contemplation.

In the same paragraph Winters compares his use of symbols to Donne’s much more famous use of them in a poem Winters often discussed:

Here as in [my poem “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight”], the sensory details CONTAIN the theme, but they are not illustrations or ornaments. [John] Donne’s gold and compasses [in the Elizabethan poem “A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning”] are more quotable than any of my details: that is, they are more easily detachable. This is because they are, in a sense, attached, they are ornaments -- extremely good ornaments, but ornaments.

There is a message of sorts to the theme embodied in these symbols, Wilson says. Winters, he says, is telling us that reason, wherever it may take us, is our “chief resource” and cannot, should not, be set aside even when we come to those watery margins that can flood over it. The shore of the Pacific stands for the margins of human experience. Reason not only corrects and validates, but moves beyond the physical senses. Wilson claims that “The Slow Pacific Swell,” surprisingly to him, succeeds not at adapting the heroic couplet to the modern lyric (if the poem may be called it a lyric at all), but rather stands alongside other modernist allegories, of which he names several.

In summary, Wilson believes that the careful deployment of allegory and controlled formal structure in “The Slow Pacific Swell,” as a sonnet sequence written in heroic couplets, makes the poem one of “almost unsurpassed mastery and beauty.” This is a bold, atypical claim with which I wholly agree and which needs badly to be heard. But, as Wilson says, the poem is masterly and beautiful because of its intellectual purpose, to see what constrains and limits the mind, as well as what constrains poetic form itself.

I hope you’ll search out this and other essays by James Matthew Wilson. I hope to give this and him closer study in the months ahead.

Rankings, Ratings, Voters, and MVPs Too

2008-05-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

I have yet to generate much comment or discussion on this blog, but I have soldiered on ruminating on my passions and concerns as they relate to the art and thought of Yvor Winters. One of the foundations of my understanding of Yvor Winters as both critic and poet is his principle of evaluation, which means, as it meant in Winters’s practice, identifying the best poems ever written. As I have mentioned several times in the past two years that I’ve been keeping this blog, this subject has not held much interest for scholars who study Winters and admire his art or are sympathetic to his theories to some significant degree. As Robert Barth once pointed out to me (he’s the editor of Winters’s selected letters, a recent edition of his poetry, and a recent edition of Janet Lewis’s poetry), Winters’s ideas about evaluation have much more often drawn the scornful attention of scholars who think little of his poetry and are largely hostile to his critical ideas.

In our culture, as probably everyone knows, the work of rating and ranking and making best-of and top-ten lists has become a common practice in almost all areas of human endeavor, though it is widely practiced especially in the arts and humanities -- and sports. Have ratings and lists and the like become a joke? Has the practice of rating works of literature been badly tainted because ranking and rating is so prevalent in sports and so many other areas? Perhaps. Yet many are the “credible” scholars who engage in making rankings and best-of lists of artworks, such as Harold Bloom, to consider just one example among dozens. Yet, in light of the scarcity of trustworthy ratings, the plethora of silly lists, and the depth and breadth of disagreement among all the lists, Yvor Winters’s practice of evaluation, of choosing the best and greatest, feels rather cheap -- a forerunner of the tiresome ranking craze that grows ever crazier by the year.

With such notions in mind, I had a good laugh about a recent Washington Post article, “Top 10 Dumbest Sports Trends” (April 17, 2008). Its #1 trend was: “meaningless rankings, power polls, and ‘MVP races.’” The author of this lighthearted, satirical piece is Neal Pollack, and I believe you can find it easily enough online. Pollack’s #1 dumb trend focuses in on the recent practice of making lists of pro athletes who might qualify for a top award in one league or another. This new practice of tracking an evaluation that will be made by vote in some time to come has really become silly because of the hundreds of sports articles over the last winter concerning who was supposedly “leading” the supposed “race” to the MVP in pro basketball, as Pollack discusses:

Sportswriters and pundits... are treating the MVP race with the gravitas of a presidential election. That's because they make up the Electoral College. When they're debating who's going to win the award, they're not really talking about who they think the best player is; they're talking about whom they should pick as the best player. It's the ultimate circle-jerk of sports-guy self-regard.

I hope that my focus on evaluation in interpreting Yvor Winters’s criticism, and even his poetry, is not a matter of bogus, pretentious gravitas. I am trying hard not simply to draw attention to myself by debating with myself. I have loved and benefited greatly from Winters’s work in large part because he chose to say which works of art he thought are truly great, nearly perfect, in sharply specific terms -- and, insightfully and movingly, why he thought so. This is a serious business in my eyes. I hope such work is of much greater implication all the hype surrounding the NBA MVP “race.” I hope the ratings hype in other venues does not taint Winters’s theories and practice of evaluation, or the very idea of evaluation.

Yet, it appears, this subject makes even scholars sympathetic to Winters very, very uncomfortable, almost queasy. For they can’t seem even to bring themselves even to talk about Winters and evaluation, to defend his ideas, alter them, improve them, or discard them. I think evaluation, the work of rating and the justifications of ratings, is central to the study of Winters and central to the future of literature -– or at least of classical literature in our time. For how can we know what to pay attention to, how can we recognize excellence and foster future excellence, how can we properly judge that which is new or unfamiliar or even experimental, unless we know what is great and why it is great? I strive, full of hope, to keep the study of this broad subject matter from becoming a matter of icky, pretentious self-regard.

The business of attention is, after all, crucial. Here in Michigan, from where I write, some state agency has embarked on an effort to commemorate and publicize Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories far and wide because of some anniversary of the stories. This summer there will take place more than 200 events concerning the stories. 200?! I suppose this is partly a good thing, since it encourages reading. But Hemingway’s early stories, weak and almost insipid as they are, are being touted as “masterpieces” across the state. Winters wanted to pay close attention to evaluation because evaluation makes us pay attention. All too often confused evaluations have drawn attention to seriously weak or badly flawed artworks. I have struggled through Hemingway’s sloppy, jejune Nick Adams Stories a couple times, but they are almost worthless in comparison with Janet Lewis’s fine, unpardonably obscure chronicle-novel of a historically prominent family of Michigan’s Sault Sainte Marie, The Invasion, which was first published in 1932 but which has been reissued recently by the MSU Press. I wrote a review of The Invasion for amazon.com several years ago. Here it is:

“Lovely Portrayal of North Country Indian and Frontier Life,” September 22, 2000, by Ben Kilpela: This book is more a chronicle than a novel, and wonderful it is to see it back in print. Janet Lewis wrote this account, imaginatively elaborated, of one of the most important families in the history of Michigan using the journals of John Johnston, the family patriarch, other family journals and memoirs, and personal interviews with members of the fourth generation Johnstons, whom Lewis knew as a girl. It is a superb read, nonetheless: rapt, poetic at times, historically accurate, elegant, and absorbing. It contains one of the finest depictions of Indian life ever written and certainly offers one of our finest portrayals of the "invasion" of Indian country by the fast encroaching Europeans in the late colonial period. Lewis's style is not for everyone, however. Her writing, as polished as it is elsewhere in her oeuvre, is a tad uneven in this, her first prose work (first published in 1932 by the excellent and now defunct Swallow Press). That's hard for me to say, since I love her novels and have long been one of their leading advocates. The narrative loses momentum and wobbles at times, and some characters are rather poorly sketched. Some scenes appear to be unfinished, dashed off, or ill-conceived. Her descriptive passages are, moreover, very intensely beautiful, almost imagistic. Lewis was a fine poet -- a very fine poet, I should say -- and her bent toward Imagism, as found in the poetry of Ezra Pound and many another leading poet in the first half of the 20th century, deeply influenced her narrative style. I love her passages of description, but I realize that not everyone takes to this sort of lyrical style. To sum things up, the novel is an account of the family of John Johnston, an Irishman who came to the wilderness around incredibly remote and rugged Lake Superior as a trader at the end of the 18th century. He married the daughter of an Ojibway "chief" (her nickname became Neengay), and established himself as one of the community elders in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, which was British at the time of his arrival in 1791, but became American in the War of 1812, an affair which plays a role in the story. Midway through the book, the narrative turns to the next generation of the Johnstons, John and Neengay's children, and later moves on the 20th-century Johnstons. It is astounding how quickly the world of the Indians changed, in less than 100 years, and the invasion that brought this change about is the main theme of Lewis's chronicle. In the opening, we read about John Johnston struggling to survive the winter in a small drafty cabin on the uninhabited western shores of Superior and in the end see the Soo Locks open and the Indians witnessing the once unimaginable event of long steamers coming up the once impassable rapids on the Saint Mary's River and entering Lake Superior. A number of important historical figures come into the account, such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Johnston's son-in-law, who used Neengay's stories to form the tales that Longfellow later used to write "Hiawatha" (a somewhat sad fate for the fascinating myths of the Ojibway), and Lewis Cass, who led an expedition across Superior in 1820 after visiting Johnston's outpost and eventually became the first governor of Michigan. There's plenty more to keep your interest, and the history is mostly accurate, so far as I am able to judge. In The Invasion, you will discover some of the most perceptive writings on the life of the northern Indians and the frontier, as well as explore the meaning of the invasion that forms its theme. I hope you will give Janet Lewis a try.

Perhaps a proper evaluation of both Hemingway’s and Lewis’s works will draw more attention to the works that truly deserve it and truly repay the attention paid. I can only hope.

A New Edition of George Gascoigne

2008-05-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

I have arrived at the poems of George Gascoigne in my re-examination of the Winters Canon on this blog. I want to pause in that work -- Gascoigne's "Woodmanship" is upcoming -- to note something that I failed to notice several years back, in 2001, to be exact: that a new edition of Gascoigne's poetry was issued by a British publisher and that this new edition of Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (edited by G.W. Pigman) was reviewed in the London Review of Books. I do not have the web address for the review, but I do believe that it is available online in the issue pictured here. Use a search engine to find it. The new edition itself is available online in a limited, yet generous and handsome, preview at Google books, which will be easy enough for you to track down. An Oxford scholar by the name of Colin Burrow, who is unknown to me, is the author of the LRB review. Burrow offers an insightful overview of Gascoigne's life and poetic career. I learned a few new things about George that will be beneficial in studying his work. He pays some attention to "Woodmanship," which Winters considered a great poem -- indeed, one of the greatest of the greats in the English language, as I shall discuss in my short study of the poem forthcoming. Thankfully, Burrow takes Gascoigne's poetry seriously, though, perhaps, his judgment of his achievement is not nearly so high as Winters's. In particular, Burrow appears to have no knowledge of how Gascoigne sought to adhere to the traditions of classicism in his art, which I consider an error of some importance. But Burrow's review will prove to be a helpful starting-point for your deeper look at the fine classical poetry of George Gascoigne.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 8

2008-05-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

“Lullaby of a Lover,” by George Gascoigne (c. 1525-1577)

Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest;
And lullaby can I sing to,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguil'd,
Full many wanton babes have I,
Which must be still'd with lullaby.

First, lullaby my youthful years,
It is now time to go to bed;
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth be still,
With lullaby, content thy will,
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.

Next, lullaby my gazing eyes,
Which wonted were to glance apace;
For every glass may now suffice
To show the furrows in my face.
With lullaby, then, wink awhile,
With lullaby, your looks beguile,
Let no fair face nor beauty bright
Entice you eft with vain delight.

And lullaby my wanton will,
Let reason's rule now reign thy thought,
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought.
With lullaby, now take thine ease,
With lullaby, thy doubts appease,
For trust to this, if thou be still,
My body shall obey thy will.

Eke, lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin, take thy rest;
Since age is cold and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best.
With lullaby, be thou content,
With lullaby, thy lusts relent,
Let others pay which have mo pence,
Thou art too poor for such expense.

Thus lullaby, my youth, mine eyes,
My will, my ware, and all that was!
I can no mo delays devise,
But welcome pain, let pleasure pass.
With lullaby, now take your leave,
With lullaby, your dreams deceive,
And when you rise with waking eye,
Remember Gascoigne's lullaby.

Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I,
Which must be stilled with lullaby.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 5 stars, GREAT

Yvor Winters did not list this poem among George Gascoigne’s finest work in his earliest published study of Renaissance poetry, his once-famed essay, “The 16th Century Lyric in England” (Poetry, 1939). That essay remains Winters’s most influential piece, though it is seldom given credit for its influence (indeed, it’s hardly mentioned any longer).

Frankly, it’s hard to see how Winters could have missed “Lullaby.” It is a superb poem, a playful, yet serious and classical statement of order and reason in private life.

Winters’s high estimation of the poetry of George Gascoigne is one for which he took a lot of heat in his lifetime. But despite the slumbering obscurity from Winters could not awake Gascoigne, it can hardly be said that Winters was wrong. This is a great poem, one of several great or near-great poems Gascoigne composed. Winters often tried to understand why Gascoigne’s art attracts so few. He believed early English Romanticism, which quickly gained wide influence some 150 years after Gascoigne wrote, was to blame, in great part, as he said when discussing Charles Churchill (another great poet unrecognized as such, whom I have discussed a couple times on this blog) in his first book Primitivism and Decadence:

... Charles Churchill, like Gascoigne at an earlier period and like [Samuel] Johnson in his own, was a great master obscured by history, that is, by the mummification, for purposes of immortal exhibition, of a current fashion -— Gray and Collins, slighter poets in spite of all their virtues, were of the party that produced the style of the next century and they have come to be regarded, for this reason, as the best poets of their period.

The theories of Romanticism, in Winters’s view, took English poetry down a different road than the classical and that circumstance has obscured Gascoigne’s greatness. No critic has re-assessed Gascoigne from Winters’s point of view (we’ll come back to that lamentable situation later).

Winters finally discussed “Lullaby of a Lover” in print 28 years later, in his revision and expansion of the “16th Century Lyric” essay, which became the first chapter of his last book, Forms of Discovery (1967). It seems that his judgment of the poem had risen to considerable heights between 1939 and 1967.

Some critics have guessed that the poem is the most frequently discussed in Gascoigne’s body of work. But critical and popular discussion has concerned mostly the fifth stanza, in which the speaker playfully discusses singing a lullaby to his penis. This figure has amazed, or rather titillated, readers and critics alike down the years. But is this some big deal? Hardly. It’s a typical rhetorical device, called synecdoche. That it concerns the speaker’s precious “member” is not all that remarkable, except that it’s rather unusual for our sexually buttoned-up culture. Robert Pinsky recently told a great story about Yvor Winters and this stanza on poets.org. After being read the fifth stanza in the interview, Pinsky commented:

[The poem is] Gascoigne's "Lullaby of a Lover" and it's one of my 3.5's [poems he thinks are very good, I suppose]. He puts to sleep his eyes and then his will and then his fancy, one stanza for each, and in the last stanza, this one, he puts to sleep his penis and says, Now I'm too old: "Let others pay which hath mo pence."

I remember thirty years ago, Yvor Winters reading that poem to me and chuckling very hard while telling me that Sir Arthur Quiller Couch in the Oxford Book of English Verse omitted that stanza. (Laughter.) I also remember Winters saying that he had shown the stanza to Virgil Keble Whittaker, the chairman of the Stanford English Department at the time and a sixteenth-century scholar. Winters said, "Ho-ho. Whittaker had no idea what this stanza was about. Ho-ho-ho." The poem could be called an example of late sixteenth-century phallocentricism in a very charming and appropriately grave mode.

Piquant story. But that’s a big word that is decidedly pretentious here. There’s nothing phallocentric about the word or the treatment of the idea or the poem as a whole. Discussing one’s penis in Gascoigne’s way is a playfully rhetorical device that, in this case, expresses a common fear among men, the loss of sexual potency and desire. More is said about still sophomoric critics and readers getting all worked about the figure than that Gascoigne wrote it.

Though critics have mentioned “Lullaby” here and there, few have analyzed or discussed it in detail. No Wintersian has bothered with it at all, at least that I know of, even though Gascoigne’s poetry is one of those hard cases that I think would have drawn the attention of some Wintersian. It seems that someone should have believed that Winters’s position on Gascoigne was in need of full or partial justification -- or at least another look.

Academic critic Richard Panofsky, in the Critical Survey of Poetry (1992), wrote briefly of the poem. He, like others, seems to think it has received the most attention in Gascoigne’s body of work, paltry as that attention has sadly been. He thinks as well that it shows Gascoigne at his best. I agree that it is great, but it is not the best (as we shall soon see). Panofsky notices that the poem itself constitutes the lullaby by which the speaker endeavors to still and control the youthful urges that linger on in old age. That rhetorical shift is wonderfully expressive. Panofsky believes, nonetheless, that the lullaby is a “frail distraction” from desires and capabilities of youth. This phrase betrays that Panofsky is reading his own feelings into the poem, in my judgment. There’s little hint that Gascoigne considers his lullaby a “frail” answer to his troubles.

By the way, John Fraser does include “Lullaby of a Lover” in his New Book of English Verse.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 5 stars, GREAT

The poem is written in a regular iambic tetrameter rhyming in an uncommon eight-line stanza, ababccdd. The two couplets that form the final quatrain of each stanza are composed with consummate mastery. Each stanza’s first couplet, lines 5 and 6 in each, pick up noticeable speed over each ope3ning quatrain as each stanza reaches its culmination. This is a striking and expressive verse form. Poets should have put it to more uses than they have. Perhaps this blog will help renew interest in the strong structure it provides.

The speaker of the poem begins expertly by grabbing our attention, making us want to know what he is going to compare to mother’s singing a lullaby to a restless baby. Our interest in this leads us into the theme with great skill. The playfulness of the opening also prepares us for the witty discourse to come.

In stanza 2, the speaker states his purpose to quiet his youthful years. It’s a strange rhetorical device, Gascoigne’s use of personification throughout the poem. The speaker writes as though the years themselves are bawling in the cradle as he tries a song to quiet them. “Courage quails” strikes me as a forceful phrase that embodies a moving theme. But despite the speaker’s fears, we sense strongly at this point that the speaker, if not the poet, is trying to adjust himself to his circumstances rationally, which is the most profound and important work of the human psyche -- and the essence of stoicism as well.

Stanza 3 turns to quelling the speaker’s memories of his youthful good looks, and by extension of all the trappings of beauty. How much we rely on our looks. How important they are to us in every stage of life. Coming to this is a rational step in the argument the poet is making. The poet shows that he wants to be free of illusions. Again, he employs the striking device of personification, as though he sings to the eyes to quiet them, those eyes crying like babes over passing time, which is revealed in the furrows etched into the face. These are complex figures pregnant with meaning and emotion.

In stanza 4 comes the imperative turn: let reasons rule. The speaker gives himself and us a call to a life of reason. Reason ought to reign over thought, over fancies, over will. In singing this to the will, the speaker is able to quiet its crying, and the body shall obey the will as directed and controlled by reason. In such ways, the stanza gathers together complex and powerful ideas that form the foundation of the classical life.

Stanza 5 moves boldly on to sexuality, which will be brought under control as well. The whole stanza stands as a powerful expression of the classical frame of mind, as mischievous and witty as it is. The speaker endeavors to quiet his bawling penis, which stands in for the sexual essence, our sexual nature. After the lullaby, the lusts the penis gives rise to will relent.

The conclusion in stanza 6 mentions pains, which brings something new to the poem. The speaker strives to let pleasures go. But are there no compensating pleasures in loss of age and beauty? This idea about pain goes a bit too far, in my judgment, the only flaw in the poem.

The final lines show how deeply the classicist endeavors to look to language and song, to the province of true art, to properly adjust his mind and will and emotions to the conditions of loss. David Hume wrote, not all that long after Gascoigne, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Gascoigne’s poem is one answer to such cynical sentiments. It trusts that granting rule to reason will be effective and that art can be enlisted on behalf of reason. With all this in mind, is it any wonder that Yvor Winters came to judge this poem so highly?

Finally, I should point out that the very word and concept of “lullaby” has myriad connotations in our culture. Thousands upon thousands are the subtly different uses of the word and in thousands of subtly different contexts. The very act of writing of singing a lullaby to still the soul electrifies my mind with reflections, as it should. Gascoigne’s great poem should play a much larger role in the cultural meaning of this word and the concept behind it.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

The poem makes an exquisite and profoundly moving classical statement of commitment to reason and to the proper adjustment of the emotions. Though it is stirring and offers deep pleasures in its rhetorical play and the skillful composition of its verse, “Lullaby” induces a deep melancholy in me. It makes me deeply mindful of the passing of time, the wasting away of life, as movingly given form in the loss of sexual pleasures. Yet this poem has never been an important one in my life, even though every time I have read it I have been struck by the virtuosity of Gascoigne’s poetic expression and his superb thematic control and depth. Now that I have studied it again, I suspect that it might stay with me longer and more solidly.

All comments welcome.

Roundup 2

2008-04-23T08:08:00.001-07:00

1. John Milton turns 400:

Born in 1608, Milton is a difficult case for Wintersians. Winters slowly downgraded his canonical short poetry decade by decade. Late in his career, Winters even severely downgraded his estimation of Paradise Lost (and all epic poetry, for that matter) in the essay that vexed not a few critics in its day, “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.” At the last, he tried to poke some even larger holes in the standing of Milton’s short poems, including the much praised, beloved, and widely taught “Lycidas” (the discussion occurs in Forms of Discovery, published in 1967, Winters’s last book). Winters’s main complaint about Paradise Lost was that the style was far too lofty for the material. For this reason, he judged that the emotions evoked are inappropriate to much of the conceptual subject matter, the paraphraseable content, to employ the still-useful term common among the New Critics. I’ve been thinking about that charge against Paradise Lost for 30 years, and it seems about right to me. O the heresy of it! Here’s what’s interesting: no Wintersian scholar or defender of Winters has endeavored to reassess Winters’s judgment of Milton at any length to determine whether and how much Winters might have been right, first about Milton’s epic and second about the short poems. Further, no Wintersian ever has hinted that he or she might agree with Winters.

But is this unusual? Consider the “Problems” essay. It seems to have made even Wintersians intellectually quite uncomfortable, judging from the fact that not a single scholar, critic, or poet has sought to study that essay sympathetically (an approach which, as I imply, I think it deserves). Yet Winters was hardly uniformly or severely negative about Paradise Lost. Winters made a comment in the “Problems” essay that he believed that certain sections of the epic should be judged great lyric poetry. Winters mentioned Book XI as containing several passages of great poetry. (The etching, by Gustave Dore, is of Adam and Eve learning from Gabriel.) But, like all else concerning Winters’s judgments on Milton, no one has followed up on that fascinating suggestion and tried to determine which sections might be judged so highly. Winters chose none of Milton’s verse for the Winters Canon. The time has been ripe for 50 years and more for someone with a classical bent to reassess Milton’s short poetry, his epic, and his poetic dramas in light of Winters’s judgments of them.

*****

2. A new book on Romanticism in Germany:

The subtitle tells us what the author takes to be the main doctrine of early German Romanticism, “The Enchantment of the World.” This new book is the work of the German scholar Rüdiger Safranski. I have read a couple reviews, which find the book an exciting account of a pivotal period in German intellectual history. One review, from Ulrich Greiner, can be found on line at:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1558.html

Greiner’s review offers a number of insights, such as this one on Romanticism’s desire to break down all inhibitions:

According to [Isaiah] Berlin, in the subjectivity of its aesthetic imagination and the joy in ironic play, Romanticism allowed for an uninhibited profundity, and a subversion of the conventional moral order. [Eric] Voegelin makes a similar argument, but identifies the subverted order as 'theomorph' and extends the criticism of subjectivity to accuse Romanticism of deifying its subject.

Such ideas, which the book appears to cover thoroughly, are germane to the study of Yvor Winters for two reasons. First, that phrase “uninhibited profundity” suggests the course that Romanticism would take on the continent and in the new United States, a course which is still being pushed farther into the hinterlands. Of course I don’t know what that phrase means to Safranski yet, not having read his book, but it points to the ol’ Romantic objection to classicism, that it is somehow inhibiting, somehow unable to reach the heights and depths of emotion or experience. Wintersians say, Nonsense.

Second, the “subversion of the moral order,” as is illustrated daily in our culture, continues to be a central objective of Romantic artists and thinkers, an objective which arose partly from and within Romanticism. By the way, Eric Vogelin was the object of much study in the Southern Review, Second Series, while it was under the editorship of Donald Stanford, one-time student of Winters and perhaps his greatest adherent. Winters focused on literary matters when discussing Romanticism, but his ideas about the movement are germane to Vogelin’s discussion of deification.

So what was Romanticism? According to Safranski, it was, among other things, an "extension of religion by aesthetic means.” To which he adds, “One could also say, a surpassing of religion through the release of the powers of imagination, which reinvented the world in a playful way.” Under the enduringly powerful sway of Romanticism, such ideas common to conceptions of art to this day, which, please note, I discuss in oblique ways in items 5 and 6 of this roundup. Yvor Winters, however, focused almost wholly on Romanticism’s emphasis on the power of art to elicit emotion. Yet the spirituality of the movement was important to those powers and to the vast influences it has had on our general culture and literary culture. These notions shaped the way in which modern poetry and fiction developed in momentous ways, in the work of Mallarme to Pound to Williams to Stevens to Joyce to many, many more and on to many writers of the present. Safranski’s book looks as though it could help us a great deal in enriching Winters’s understanding of Romanticism.

Romanticism remains as powerful today as it was 150 years ago and more. And it was central to the critical thought of Yvor Winters, though he never discussed the European roots of the movement. I think this book might be well worth studying closely.

*****

3. Graff’s work re-emerges:

Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s 1988 history of American academic criticism, has drawn renewed attention lately, even garnering an overview in The Nation, which will be easy to find with a search engine. The occasion is the book’s 20th anniversary, though I must say I was surprised that this book was deserving of such notice. It was the object of some discussion back in the ‘80s, yes, but it hardly rocked the literary world. The book was once considered the standard history of the profession of American literary studies. It begins its story back in America’s colonial days and moves quickly forward, unearthing along the way lots of dimly-remembered ideas and debates that created the literature department as, roughly, it has become today. Of course, Yvor Winters’s career was part of this history, and Graff, who was once Winters’s student at Stanford in the ‘60s, writes of Winters here and there in the book. It’s an enjoyable story, sometimes even funny, as Graff tells it. Graff shows that the heated conflicts of the recent so-called culture wars are similar to controversies over the teaching of literature that began in the 19th century.

I have not read Graff’s new preface yet, but he supposedly addresses many of the challenging arguments that have been made against his work since 1988. Some have said that Professing Literature remains an essential history of literary pedagogy and a critical classic. How Winters fits in with the development of American literary studies, how his ideas might help us break through the impasses that have been created, are certainly matters for further study, even though Graff gives no weight to Winters’s views in the present ideological battles of the day. I believe, nonetheless, that those views are profoundly germane and could be highly productive in improving the course of literature and literary study in our time. No critic or scholar sympathetic to Winters to any degree has sought to use Winters’s ideas to study such matters. The time has come for that.

I have been meaning to get to Graff more broadly on this blog, but I have not yet found time to examine some of his recent writings. But Professing Literature might deserve a close look in the near future.

*****

4. The Hyper Texts: http://thehypertexts.com/

Have you heard of this web site (rather poorly named in my opinion), which once a month publishes selections of modern formalist poetry and essays on formalist poetry of various kinds? I’ve been following it for a time and have made some discoveries of particularly well-turned poetry. I hope I can post some reviews of the poets who are being published on the Hyper Texts. A monthly issue of poems and articles usually highlights the work of one or two recent poets, including a featured poet called the “Spotlight Poet.” Check the site out. I think you’ll find some of the poetry worth your time. For example, I was deeply moved by the second poem, a sharp and powerful sonnet from Spotlight poet Judith Werner “Why I Do Not Write Sonnets” in the February 2008 issue, which appears on the web only:

When to my meditations over art’s
place I summon up tsunamis from the news,
I sigh at nature’s—and the human heart’s—
evils that find no help and no excuse.
Then I despair of using brush or pen,
which just reflect cosmic chaos unfurled:
my inner ugliness mirrored again
in death and entropy, body and world.
Much easier to make ears deaf, eyes blind
with hate, love, sex, fame, wealth, pursuit of power
flickering on a screen than face the mind’s
need for order in grief’s helpless hour;
But when I see things formed and elegant,
I pick up my pen, I suffer, I relent.

Copyright, Judith Werner

In March, Joseph Salemi, the author of some sharp, satirical poems, was the poet in the Hyper Text Spotlight. Take a look at the poem on modern sexuality entitled “The Missionary's Position” to see a fine example of his work. He was followed as poet in the spotlight in April by Charles Martin, a frequent and skillful translator of the ancient Romans. He also offered a poem on modern sexuality that is worth your time: "Victoria's Secret." Let me know what you think of these poem or anything else you discover on the Hyper Texts.

*****

5. Describing a memory of the colors of paving stones:

I found beneficial and enjoyable a recent essay by Craig Raine, “Look Back in Wonder,” in the Guardian (U.K.) on the work of writers to remember as fully, as accurately, and as meaningfully as possible. I don’t have the address to hand, but I would encourage you to look for the essay using a search engine. Raine claims that there is great meaning and pleasure for readers in seeing how authors endeavor to remember through their novels and stories and poems, even in trying to “resurrect” experience in some deep sense in the recording and transforming of memories into literary art. There is little doubt that this is one of the high, though secondary, purposes of literature. Remembering is not what Winters called its “final cause” (a concept which I have discussed at length recently on this blog).

Raine gets a little overheated about Proust’s exhibitions of memory: “I suggest that the pleasure, the joy really experienced by Marcel, and by the rest of us, is bound up with the sensation of imminence, suspense and arrival -- common to sex and simile.” Well, my O my! I can just hear myself saying tonight: “Honey, I can do without the sex tonight; I had a big helping of the ol' simile down at the library.” Though some of Raine's comments are quite overeager, I see his underlying point. To wrest important, telling details from the helter-skelter of private experience is important work for art, though Raine doesn’t seem to understand the difference between experience and art’s descriptions of experience -- that is, the differences between text and gloss, as J.V. Cunningham, longtime friend of Yvor Winters, so brilliantly explored in his poetry and criticism. Raine appears to have no notion of how a reader takes pleasure from an author’s recounting of memories. He doesn’t even realize, it seems, that our finest literary artworks achieve much, much more than the restoration of past experiences, as Yvor Winters argued forcefully in several seminal essays (which, I have said time and again, have received too little attention). Works of art achieve more than resurrected memories, but true understanding and precise emotional fitness, as Winters aptly and powerfully theorized. Still, Raine’s essay is worth reading -- in tandem with a knowledge of Winters’s critical principles.

*****

6. Adam Kirsch in Poetry on Heidegger and his conception of art.

It is with unease that I recommend Kirsch’s short essay on Heidegger that came out in Poetry in January of this year. I would like to have the time to examine the piece in detail, but there is simply too much else to do. The essay gives you a clear sense of where the claptrap about poets seeing things “in themselves” has come from, or at least one of its many sources, Heidegger (though all such aesthetic theorists are probably merely riding the same swift and powerful current of Romanticism). Emily Dickinson stood in thrall at times to this conception of poetry:

Eden is that old-fashioned House
We dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode
Until we drive away.

Well, yes and no. It hasn’t quite been Eden, and it hasn’t been Eden at all for many, many millions (though we of such riches in the West can hardly complain). This quatrain expresses Kirsch’s sense of Heidegger’s conception of art, which he apparently approves strongly. This leads to works of art that Kirsch calls the “poetry of earth,” the finding of extraordinariness in the ordinary, a notion that has become a rampant cliché of our times. How lost our writers, especially our poets, have become in such fancies. Take a look at my earlier comments on Adrienne Rich on this puerile take on art. It will take a long time to undo, simply put, all the damage that continues to be done under their mesmerizing sway. In any case, I think Kirsch’s discussion is worth studying for the purpose of refining the classical ideas and ideals that stand in opposition to these Romantic notions.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 7

2008-04-17T11:02:00.001-07:00

“Content”
Thomas, Lord Vaux (1510-1556)

When all is done and said, in the end thus shall you find,
He most of all doth bathe in bliss that hath a quiet mind;
And, clear from worldly cares, to deem can be content
The sweetest time in all his life in thinking to be spent.

The body subject is to fickle Fortune's power,
And to a million of mishaps is casual every hour;
And death in time doth change it to a clod of clay;
Whenas the mind, which is divine, runs never to decay.

Companion none is like unto the mind alone,
For many have been harmed by speech; through thinking, few or none.
Fear oftentimes restraineth words, but makes not thoughts to cease;
And he speaks best that hath the skill when for to hold his peace.

Our wealth leaves us at death, our kinsmen at the grave,
But virtues of the mind unto the heavens with us we have.
Wherefore, for virtue's sake, I can be well content
The sweetest time of all my life to deem in thinking spent.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 stars, SUPERB

Winters discussed this poem only once, and only very briefly, in his career. The discussion occurs in Forms of Discovery, his last book, which concerned his radical history of English poetry. We can only guess at how highly he judged the poem and what he exactly he thought about it. My sense of things, overall, is that he thought this an exemplary poem, though perhaps not one of the very greatest of the language.

The poem is yet another written during the Renaissance about disillusionment with the world and its titivations. The speaker tells us that all the pleasurable trimmings of this world fail to last or to pay off well in the long run. But thinking provides help, comfort, and joy through all of life and into eternity. This draws on the stoic conception of life, which Winters was drawn to and highly approved. I have noticed that the poem is often quoted on “inspirational” web sites of various kinds as a comment on the supreme value of reflection. In such contexts, the poem becomes a little trite.

I note that John Fraser omits this and all of Lord Vaux’s work from his quasi-Wintersian anthology A New Book of Verse. Fraser offers no comment on this specific matter, even though Fraser told me in correspondence that one of the chief purposes of that online book was to show that Winters recommended many more poems than he anthologized in Quest for Reality. For this reason as well, it is even odder that Fraser excluded this poem in light of Winters’s short list of well-struck poems written by Lord Vaux in his famed 1939 essay on the 16th-century lyric.

Finally, the poem has received almost no critical discussion of any sort that I have been able to discover, not from Wintersians nor from scholars and critics of any sort. What does this lack of attention indicate, that Winters’s regard for the poem has not been seconded by a single critic or poet, not even by a man or woman sympathetic to his views and aims? I have been pondering that, but I have reached no conclusions yet. This issue keeps coming up, though, during this tour of the Winters Canon, as you might have noticed as I worked my way through the poems of Thomas Wyatt.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 3 stars, solid work.

This is a sharp, beautifully rendered classical statement. It has a few mild clichés that damage it slightly. But it is controlled, restrained, emotionally true and proper. Also, it displays a strong commitment to the conceptual nature of poetic statement. Yet though the theme is certainly important, Vaux does not explore his subject matter deeply enough, all in all.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

I have known this poem for a long time, but it has never played any large role in my contemplative life. There simply isn’t much in it, despite the elegance and distinction of the writing. The poem stands as a model of clear, controlled, graceful statement, but it has, simply put, little conceptual depth.

The problem might be that the poem is too abstract, too generalized, however much Winters praised and I still applaud crisp, insightful generalization as a foundation of poetic discourse. For example, from the poem we gain no insight into what having a “quiet mind” might mean. Yet the phrase feels flush with meaning ready to be coaxed to the light. Also, we no longer have the Vaux’s sturdy, cheery confidence that thinking alone can help and comfort us as nothing else in our lives. For thinking can be, at troubling times, as untrustworthy as riches or physical ability. Thought can be discouragingly, frighteningly fickle. Thought can lead, often, to “disquiet,” as J.V. Cunningham wrote of in his great epigram “In whose will is our peace.” (That poem is part of the Winters Canon, but we have more than 160 poems to go before I reach it.) By the by, I have written a book on a topic that, roughly, relates to this subject, A Journal on Doubt, which directly concerns my struggles with a life of thought that gave rise to doubts of the Christian faith to which I once adhered (the book is available my web site).

Further, we sometimes discover to our horror that our minds and thoughts are subject to Fortune as well. As much damage as postmodernism has wrought in our culture and in our philosophy, it has helped us to see that we cannot change our minds as easily as we like to believe -- or that we can find our minds changing without our bidding. Such revelations are truly spiritually, psychically disturbing, despite those blithe postmodernists who seem not the least troubled that all their thoughts are subject to whims that have no discoverable, controllable source or power. Thinking can also lead us astray from virtue (witness, to consider one example among millions, our nation’s long embrace of slavery) and from contentment (witness those who struggle to address the evil acts their own thoughts goad them into carrying out). Thinking can decay, too. And it can be overrun by fears, as often as the body at times. Vaux does not not appear to have thought through his subject carefully enough.

Yet there is a good deal to ponder in this poem. It is well struck, superbly composed. But its conception of the life of reflection is perhaps not as satisfying or re-assuring as its author hoped long ago.

The New Criterion Digs into Poetry Again

2008-04-04T08:16:00.000-07:00

Quick Note:

The New Criterion has come out with its annual poetry issue, which has become a regular event, perhaps the only one of its kind in general publishing. The issue appears to offer a number of strong essays and some compelling poetry, particularly from Bill Coyle (winner of the journal’s 2008 poetry prize). One of the essays, by New Formalist David Yezzi (whom I have written about several times on this blog), is a review of that new anthology of the New Critics, Praising It New, which Swallow Press released a couple weeks ago. I discussed that book briefly a couple months ago, if you’d care to look up my preliminary comments. Yezzi offers a few sharp and intelligent paragraphs on Yvor Winters’s contribution to the anthology, the essay “Preliminary Problems,” which is a very important piece, one which I summarized in my post about the anthology. Yezzi takes very seriously Winters’s ideas about the control and proper adjustment of the emotions, and I hail Yezzi’s take and emphasis on this matter, as he tries, with acumen and sympathy, to cultivate Winters’s theories for a new generation.

But the issue includes a lot more. There is a piece on Walter de la Mare that looks beneficial. Winters did not have much to say about de la Mare’s work, so far as I know. Perhaps he needs a reconsideration from Wintersian classicists. There is, furthermore, a piece on Rudyard Kipling, a poet whose reputation was never high and has fallen far, as most everyone who cares knows. It might surprise you that Yvor Winters thought rather highly of Kipling’s poetry (though he did not judge it as great). I find a lot that is highly valuable in the Kipling’s poetry, and I look forward to studying Roger Kimball’s take on him.

There is more in the issue, but any consideration of the various pieces will have to wait until I get a chance to read the issue thoroughly. I will note that William Logan, a favorite critic of mine, is going to try to resurrect the reputation of a 19th-century American poet by the name of John Townsend Trowbridge (who is pictured here). You might want to check out a few pieces of Trowbridge’s at bartleby.com before reading Logan’s attempt at resurrection. I have found Trowbridge’s writing compelling at points, though judging from what I know so far I couldn’t yet put him near to the class of Jones Very (a Winters great) or William Cullen Bryant (a Winters near-great) or even Walter Landor (a strong poet whose work Janet Lewis much admired). I think Winters -– he never mentioned Trowbridge in any writing -- would have judged his poetry to be tainted by Romantic clichés, which I also find a moderately damaging weakness in his artworks. Still, Trowbridge is not a poet to discard blithely. I want to read what Logan has to write.

Pinsky Poem Widely Discussed

2008-03-26T13:24:00.001-07:00

I really should spend more time studying poems on this blog. Believe me, I am reading poetry constantly. But the work of criticism is laborious, working poem by poem. I do not want to be hasty in my judgments. I have posted on a few of the poems of the Winters Canon, but these are works of art that I have been contemplating for decades.

That said, let me turn, as promised, to that recent poem by Robert Pinsky that has garnered so much attention across literary culture in recent months. The attention is a remarkable occurrence for any single poem -- but more so, for me, because Pinsky was a former student of Yvor Winters near the end of his life in the 1960s. Some label Pinsky a Wintersian, but I don’t think he even comes close to qualifying as a classicist of any sort (as I argue elsewhere on this blog). Pinsky has little to do with Winters’s ideas and the style he promoted any longer, though there was a time that Pinsky made a feint or two toward the classicism that Winters stood for. With his latest collection, there is very little of anything classical left to his poetry. Reading his work has mostly become a dull chore, as has become my labors on this post.

Pinsky’s new book of poetry, Gulf Music, has been reviewed widely in literary publications, and one poem from that book, “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” has received an amazing amount of discussion. It might be the most widely discussed poem of the past two decades in American literary culture. Even writers outside poetry circles have been taking a look at it. The poem has been reprinted on many web sites, but here it is again for convenience:

Poem of Disconnected Parts

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto EACH ONE TEACH ONE.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as "PROFESOR."

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market "Smileys."

The first year at Guantanamo, Abdul Rahim Dost
Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups.

"THE SANGOMO SAYS IN OUR ZULU CULTURE WE DO NOT
WORSHIP OUR ANCESTORS: WE CONSULT THEM."

Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving
Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951.

Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2006
Still nothing finished among the descendants.

I support the War, says the comic, it's just the Troops
I'm against: can't stand those Young People.

Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber.
Ashamed of the government. Skeptical.

After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror
Said she just couldn't vote to convict a pastor.

Who do you write for? I write for dead people:
For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather.

"THE ANCESTORS SAY THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR KNEES
BEGAN IN YOUR FEET. IT COULD MOVE UP YOUR BACK."

But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper
And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens.

Old Aegyptius said, Whoever has called this Assembly,
For whatever reason -- that is a good in itself.

O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth.
THERE ARE MANY FAKE SANGOMOS. THIS ONE IS REAL.

Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear
Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts.

No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison:
Otherwise he would not have written those poems.

I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans.
Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good.

Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes,
In Afghanistan. In Guantanamo he was isolated.

Our enemies "disassemble" says the President.
Not that anyone at all couldn't mis-speak.

The PROFESORES created nicknames for torture devices:
The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby.

Not that those who behead the helpless in the name
Of God or tradition don't also write poetry.

Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes.
Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.

What could your children boast about you? What
Will your father say, down among the shades?

The Sangomo told Marvin, "YOU ARE CRUSHED BY SOME
WEIGHT. ONLY YOUR OWN ANCESTORS CAN HELP YOU."

Copyright Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux

Now, how do I as a Wintersian classicist believe we should we judge this work? First, it’s not poetry. It’s prose. A slack, pretentious prose. A New York Times reviewer described this as “relentless” blank verse. Huh? Is that a joke? I try to be charitable at all times, but this comment has to be one of the most idiotic or ignorant claims I have read about poetry in my entire life. This poem is not written in blank verse by any definition of the term. It can barely be described as verse at all. I will admit that since Pinsky’s generally sloppy lines are roughly equal in length and divided into couplets, with each couplet coming to a period close, you can construe this writing as a very loose, lazy sort of verse. So loose that it amounts to prose, in my judgment. But it is at least plausible that it could be defended as verse.

Turning to its structure, the poem does have a rather disheveled sort of organization, though it is nearly haphazard. The prose couplets of roughly equal length make a series of discreet declarative statements of various kinds that touch repeatedly on a set of broad themes. Beyond this, there is no structural principle. Such an approach is a severe weakness in any poem.

Now, I am aware that Pinsky is interested in jazz. He has even said in interviews and essays that he is trying to do with poetic language what jazz has done in music. The experiment has had some interesting results. But the experiment is mostly failing badly, as it has in this poem. Pinsky’s riffs are wholly inappropriate to serious poetic discourse, which Pinsky clearly wants to engage in. He writes as though he found a few brightly colored beans in a big jar and tossed them on a table for us. We readers are left to do the poet’s real work, the real writing, the real thinking -- making sense of the beans of life that might chance to catch a poet’s roving, rummaging eye. Nothing in this poem clearly indicates the way the beans are to be taken, which means we can take them in just about any way we like, which means that the exercise is just about pointless -- which means that this work of art, if such we agree (charitably) to call it, is just a scattering of beans. As you will see when I discuss themes, each bean stands as an observation or aside on a variety of notions, tossed on the table without evident order or structural purpose other than that they touch on certain broad themes almost at random. I find this structure very weak, truly almost insipid.

By the way, Pinsky mentions various people and situations without explanation. Some of these are perfect examples of a poetic weakness that Yvor Winters called pseudo-reference, which means talking about things that the writer doesn’t explain in enough detail to make sense of. For example, the people Becky, Rose, Sylvia, the comic, Dost, Marvin of the final couplet, and others are all pseudo-references. That’s fine. Sometimes scatterings of beans are mildly interesting or lightly pleasing for one reason or another. But let’s not confuse such scatterings with great or good or satisfying art.

As to style, Pinsky’s writing here and most everywhere else nowadays is quite slack and even pockmarked with clichés, which, as I will discuss below, has become his standard practice. Ignoring the clichés for the moment, I see nothing in the least distinguished about this writing. It reads like bland conversation, the lifeless prattling of someone who thinks far too much of himself. Pinsky has been writing in this limp, slovenly style for more than a decade now. I find it tedious. It certainly offers nothing eloquent or moving. Since readers of poetry usually love language, it is downright sad that there is nothing in Pinsky’s writing that might draw us in. He offers no formal coherence, no music, no eloquence. There are a couple mildly pleasing turns of phrase, I’ll admit, but so few that the poem mostly reads like the work of an average high school student.

Now, as to theme, the poem is wide open to interpretation, nearly infinitely open. That appears to be Pinsky’s intent, though we can only guess at intent. I could, anyone could, take a merry stab or two at what Pinsky is trying to say to us, but our varied guesses would amount to each of us telling himself what he thinks about these nearly haphazard remarks rather than coming to an understanding of what Robert Pinsky might be trying to tell us (presuming that he knows himself, which is questionable). For there is no clear indication in the poem of what Pinsky wants us to see or know or think about the themes.

Yet from what we can discern, the subject matter is serious. For this I applaud Pinsky. He appears, at the least, to be trying to say something important about social and political life. The misty subject matter of several of the couplets leads us to believe that Pinsky is trying to say something morally and politically serious about a handful of themes. These themes stand out because they are repeated, in Pinsky’s insufferable jazz-like manner. Unjust imprisonment is one such theme. Pinsky gives a few couplets on that subject, especially in the emphatic opening couplet that alludes to the lengthy imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. We guess (all we can do is guess) that Pinsky wants us to consider this imprisonment to be unjust and that, thus, one of the themes of this poem is governmental injustice. (The photo that accompanies this post is a shot of Mandela’s Robben Island cell.) Another implied central theme is shame. Pinsky indiscriminately plops in several couplets that seem, roughly, to concern shame, including the emphatic final couplet. But, at the end, when we try to fuse these jumbled, annoyingly jazzy observations on shame with the random comments on imprisonment, can we come up with anything thematically, conceptually solid? Just barely. Here’s my guess: Pinksy appears to be telling us that he is, and we should be, ashamed about unjust imprisonments and, presumably, other immoral methods of governmental control. For our society to get its governmental practices right, he appears to be saying, we need to tap into and act upon our feelings of shame, which can be rediscovered by trusting the wisdom of our ancestors. But the various comments on these themes do not properly cohere. We can only resort to guesswork.

You have my guess, but there are probably a thousand others just as valid. My main point is that whatever Pinsky is trying to say in this poem can only be guessed at. Indeed, he appears to have intended to make us guess, guess all we wish, make up our own meaning, rather than to make it clear what HE as author means. The reader is put in the situation of having to come up with what he or she thinks, reflecting on what “shame” or “ancestors” happens to mean to him or her in this woolly context. You do get the exceedingly vague sense that Pinsky disapproves and is ashamed of the practices of unjust imprisonment. But he offers no insight into this idea through this treatment of the notion. If a poet is going to make a statement so trite as that, he or she had better offer it in language that strongly adjusts the emotions to the proverbial statement. But, as I have argued, the writing is messy and insipid.

Pinsky appears to try to make a few aphoristic statements, as though he is interested in conceptual generalities, in moral principles. But his aphorisms have no bite because they are loose, vague, and slackly written. Consider for example the line “Culture the penalty. Culture the escape.” This seems to carry some weight. It is a generalized comment that we think might sum up an important turn in the argument. But when we reach the end, we realize that this statement about culture is so trivial that is saying almost nothing at all.

David Orr, a regular at the New York Times on poetry, has had little good to say about Yvor Winters (not that he is entirely negative), but Orr was on the mark about the common compositional mode of most poetry nowadays, which Robert Pinsky seems to be employing as a ritual:

[A certain poet’s] technique is a variation on the trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles (“The Gem Is on Page Sixty-Four”), quirky diction (“orangery,” “aigrettes”), flickering italics, oddball openings (“The scent of pig is faint tonight”) and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent -- basically, two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein. It’s not hard to write acceptable poetry in this mode, which is one of the reasons so many people make use of it. After all, poets need jobs, and for those, they need books -- and for those, well, they need poems.

That’s fairly close to a summary of the style and substance of “Poem of Disconnected Parts.” As you see, the poem is actually anti-communicative. It is not striving to communicate anything, any vision or theory or idea about injustice or imprisonment or shame or culture. It expects YOU, the reader, to communicate to yourself, to put together a puzzle of your own making, since the edges of the pieces are so uniform that they will fit together in any of a thousand arrangements. And it appears that Pinsky is smugly proud of what his poem is, as announced in the title. He appears to want his ideas and musings to be disconnected, so that we readers are forced to connect them in any way we wish. But this is an abdication of a writer’s central responsibility and opportunity, as Yvor Winters argued frequently about experimental poetry. The title is, moreover, obviously, tastelessly ironic. Yet the irony doubles back on Pinsky. For though Pinsky is being ironic in that he pompously thinks that his clumsy, sloppy observations CAN be indeed connected, though he obviously desires us to make up some connections on our own, his bland ideas truly are disconnected. They are just beans on a table. A blooming buzzing confusion.

Thus, the poem traduces one of the central principles of classicism -- order. If I spent time trying to impose what I think these couplets signify on the poem, I would find it to have been a waste of time, which might not be bad all in all. Sometimes you just waste time in life for the sake of diversion. The problem is that I don’t usually read literature in order to waste time. At the end of reading, say, George Herbert “Church Monuments,” I want to arrive at some deeper, powerful understanding, significantly deeper, and to feel my emotions aligned properly to that understanding. Herbert’s poem, for a great example, pays on the effort it takes to fathom the poet’s understanding. But I suspect strongly that “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” as with much of Pinsky’s poetry, is just a waste of time. There will never be a payoff, other than filling some time with idle reflection.

Now, is this a bad thing? Should this poem not exist? Should it not be read? Of course not, in answer to all three questions. But this doesn’t mean that the poem is good. I don’t think this poem deserved to be published, but somebody thought otherwise. It’s puzzling, even sad, but it has happened, and the classicist must live with it.

Before closing, I want to come back to Pinsky’s style. Is there anything in his diction or syntax that could be seen as rewarding, beans of particularly attractive hue or shape? I see almost nothing in this poem worth bothering with, worth trying to enjoy deeply or contemplate with care or meditate on with earnestness. But there is worse. What, for goodness sake, has been Pinsky’s purpose in turning to the strange and icky practice of using gobs of clichés and puns? When did Pinksy wander so far from a basic knowledge of good writing that he became enamored of the cliché in the way of the poseur. Look at me, he seems to be saying, I can use a cliché because when I use it, it isn’t one. Oh, puh-leassssse! Another nauseating example of this from Pinsky’s work is a poem published recently in the New Yorker, “The Saws,” in the February 11, 2008, issue. Here Pinsky uses clichés and puns to... what?... well, to bolster the use of clichés and puns:

The saying dead as a doornail is still dead as a doornail:
Whatever a doornail might be or was, long lost in the dark,

The dark, the dark -— not always deepest before dawn, Pal.
Back then, passing a graveyard you might actually whistle:

No walk in the park, a black back street back in the day.
Zombie expressions, Buddy, as thin as a spare dime.

Generated by generations they still stagger the castle,
Wan, rife. Benighted or bedazed by the March of Time,

Time, time. The old saws hardly ever anymore called saws:
Kiss the cat and you kiss the fleas. And That’s the story of my life.

Copyright The New Yorker

This is worse than lazy writing. It’s dopey, unworthy of a high school creative writing class. Pinsky appears to think (you can’t tell, obviously) that this shows intelligence -- a bit of the ol’ wit and wisdom. It shows exactly the opposite. The man has arrived at a point at which he has next to nothing to say. It’s a sad end for a student of Yvor Winters in near vapidity.

I conclude my long remarks with a quotation from William Logan, the poetry critic who writes often for the New Criterion. Logan recently reviewed Pinsky’s Gulf Music, in which “Poem of Disconnected Parts” appears. He received a letter objecting to his review and then made these sharp comments in his reply:

My complaint [about Robert Pinsky’s poetry] is that even in the poems that are deadly serious, like the “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” it may not be enough merely to invoke Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island or the murder of the desaparecidos. Such shallow references underestimate the poet’s labor and condescend to what he means to honor. It’s as if Shakespeare had just said, “Agincourt!” and left it at that. Context is all....

Amen and Amen. As much as I like to see a poem achieve wide attention in our culture, as much as I could have been pleased that the author of that poem was a student of Yvor Winters, we must move on from this sorry episode in contemporary poetry.

The Usefulness of Art and a Fourth Hunger

2008-03-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

British physician and thinker Raymond Tallis thinks that art can help us satisfy a “fourth hunger,” what he defines as an intense human need and desire to experience deeply and fully our experiences. Tallis published an essay on “spiked online” on this matter recently, last November to be exact.

Once again, as so often nowadays, someone is trying to explain to us exactly what art is for, to describe art’s “final cause,” to use the phrase Yvor Winters favored when discussing these matters late in his career. Why has art’s purpose been of such widespread concern lately? I have read of many books and articles and essays across the world addressing the topic, in general readership magazines of wide circulation, web sites, and many scholarly journals. We appear to have arrived at a crucial moment in the future of the arts. Change might be in the offing. Is a return to classicism in it, too? That’s hardly likely, I’ll admit. But all the discussion of art’s purpose and its general tone suggests that thinkers and readers are feeling a good deal of uncertainty about the arts. Beyond its commercial value, is poetry important? How about fiction? The new journalism? Painting? Music? In general, the arts culture seems a little desperate to find compelling answers to these questions that will create a sound and solid consensus.

Into this cultural moment has stepped Raymond Tallis, whom spiked describes as a British gerontologist, philosopher, poet, novelist, and cultural critic. Tallis has written lots of spirited essays on the web about all sorts of philosophical and scientific issues. I have found him learned and insightful on varied topics. His recent essay on the purpose of the arts, “Art, humanity and the ‘fourth hunger’,” is still available at:

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/4132/

I applaud all the theorizing about art’s final cause. But I recommend that the world’s thinkers interested in aesthetics turn back to Yvor Winters if they wish to comprehend this issue more fully and clearly -- though I would add that Wintersians should have long ago put some effort to fill in and strengthen Winters’s provisional ideas about the final cause of literature. Setting the indifference of the Wintersians aside, I want to look at some of what Raymond Tallis gets right and wrong, with the implication, as you have surely guessed, that Tallis’s work on the subject is worth attending to.

The fourth hunger Tallis defines as 1) the seeking of experiences for their own sake, which means 1a) truly experiencing our experiences. (By the way, the photo above is a shot of my son reading Homer while we were taking an evening walk through a patch of woods on the Michigan State campus a couple weeks ago. Was he satisfying a fourth hunger? Read on.) Now, both of these defining phrases are left quite vague, too vague. You can’t quite understand what Tallis is driving at because the language he employs is far too loose. Nowhere does Tallis make it clear what either of these phrases mean, except negatively. When we don’t fully experience our experiences, Tallis explains, we feel a little bit cheated. This feeling of being cheated tells us that we haven’t gotten all that we hunger for (the fourth hunger, you no doubt see), which are deep or full experiences. I know this sort of thing sounds ridiculously vague. But there is some hint of truth in this misty mist. The kind of example Tallis repeats is a vacation activity, like climbing a mountain or rafting a river or parasailing. When we feel a little less than a full and deep satisfaction by such vacation experiences, we know that we have not fed the fourth hunger, to truly experience. My example would be a backpacking trip to a national park (my brothers and I run a passenger ferry that sails to Isle Royale, Michigan’s wilderness national park on Lake Superior).

Again negatively, Tallis adds that we know that deep or truly true or full experience has eluded us because we feel “a mismatch between experience and the idea we had of it when we sought it out.” The fourth hunger, simply put, is met when experience equals expectation. Tallis admits it’s more complicated than that (certainly, it must be), but nowhere does he say exactly how it’s more complicated or in what way. (Nor, making a crucial error, does he explain how we will know what a deep or full experience is when we can’t seem ever to have one.) But his main point is that we fail so often “to experience our experiences.”

Now, before getting to art, which you have guessed by now will have the primary function of addressing the fourth hunger in some way (he actually implies that it is the sole function of art by not discussing any other function), Tallis pauses again to add that our experiences in general, on vacation and otherwise, feel disconnected. The events of our lives almost always fail to amount to wholes. Yet again, Tallis fails to define what a “whole” experience is. The best he can do is to explain that its lack is the feeling of moving from one thing to another, taste-testing from our the world and from our inner psychic states without putting them all together somehow. We almost always fail to gain an overview of ourselves, says Tallis. But his language is, again, much too loose. The words and phrases can mean just6 about anything. He says that we are stuck in what he calls “The Dominion of And” or “The Kingdom of And Then, And Then.” In these dominions, these mental states, we drift from one event to another, without ever fully experiencing any of them as a whole -- even our big experiences, such as, say, a wilderness backpacking trek or a visit to Chartres Cathedral. Tallis’s adjunct attempt at defining wholes and how we experience them is far too brief and vague. Yet he does have an earlier and longer essay on this particular aspect of our problem satisfying the fourth hunger, “The Difficulty of Arrival,” which looks worth reading and might help. (Some of this essay can be found at Google Books.)

To summarize so far, Raymond Tallis believes that many of us often (usually?) die without having been “fully there or never having fully grasped our being there.” This is because “we cannot close the gap between what we are and what we know, between our ideas and our experiences, our experiences and the life and world of which they are a part.” Once again, art presumably will somehow enable us to achieve this mental state. Let’s translate it into a thesis (which Tallis never clearly states):

Art will enable us to close the gap between what we are and what we know.

That infinitive phrase encapsulates, with yet even greater vagueness, the ethereal fourth hunger. Tallis believes that art is generated by the need to satisfy that hunger, which no vacation, apparently, can -- or at least hardly ever can. Arrival always eludes us:

... our need for art is rooted in the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of arrival in the Kingdom of Ends and there experiencing our experiences. If it is better to journey hopefully than to arrive, it is because arrival is not actually possible.

Here again, Tallis errs in failing to explain how we can know when we have arrived in a mental state of fourth-hunger satisfaction if we have never experienced it and without any clear definition of its indications. But putting that sticky weakness aside, Tallis states that the central purpose of art is to satisfy this need for arrival:

For the great work of art is an inselberg [German for a lone, high mountain standing in a flatland] in the plain of everyday life. From its elevated viewpoint, created when so much is brought together between a single cover, our greatly extended view gathers together what we have known, suspected, thought of, imagined, with a consequent mitigation of And; a ‘de-scattering’ of our scattered, tatty, messy, lives, calling back diffuseness to concentration.

Let’s try to get this straight, if we can. Tallis’s main idea is so thoroughly twisted in a strong of metaphors that it might have almost no meaning. We have a hunger to close the gap between experience and really, truly experiencing. Art closes the gap. By doing what? How does experiencing art close the gap of our individual experiences, make them really true and deep? Tallis explains how too briefly, as you will see in a moment. But this idea of “de-scattering” hints at something Winters understood, that art’s purpose is not only to produce emotion or to give us vicarious experiences. Art gives experience and something more, something richer and deeper: it gives us an understanding of experience. This is not exactly what Raymond Tallis opines, but he seems to have an inkling of Winters’s theory in this discussion of the fourth hunger. Winters discussed art’s final causes a number of times in his essays, but his theory comes out in concentrated form in his essay “John Crowe Ransom, or God Without Thunder” from In Defense of Reason. This is because Ransom theorized, to put it very simply, that art mimics experience (though Ransom certainly had many nuances to his aesthetic theories). In an important section of his essay on Ransom, Winters first describes to Ransom’s theory of art as imitation:

... Ransom regards... the work of art as an imitation, purely and simply, of some aspect of objective nature, an imitation made for love of the original object; and he takes elaborate pains to eliminate from the entire process all emotions on the part of the artist except love of the object.... [I]n God without Thunder he writes: “The esthetic attitude is the most objective and the most innocent attitude in which we can look upon the world, and it is possible only when we neither desire the world nor pretend to control it. Our pleasure in this attitude probably lies in a feeling of communion or rapport with environment which is fundamental in our human requirements -- but which is sternly discouraged in the mind that has the scientific habit.”

Now this is a common theory, going back to Aristotle and even before. But Winters quickly pushes this theory to its limits:

I should say the esthetic attitude [Ransom defends] is definable with fair accuracy in the simple and almost sentimental terms: the love of nature. This statement, if taken in the narrowest possible sense, would appear to limit poetry to the description of landscape; but we discover as we read farther in the three books, that this is intended as a formula for the treatment of almost any subject.

Then Winters immediately counters his interpretation of Ransom with an incisive description of his own theory of final cause:

But how applicable is [imitation] to the subject of Macbeth or of Othello? Were these plays written because of the love which Shakespeare felt, either for their actions as wholes or for any major part of their actions? Did Shakespeare love the spectacle of ambition culminating in murder, or of jealousy culminating in murder? Did he write of Iago because he loved him so sentimentally that he wished to render him in all his aspects? To ask the questions is to render the theory ridiculous.

Next comes one of the most important statements of aesthetic theory in Winters’s career, one of the seminal moments in literary thought in the past couple centuries (if wholly unrecognized as such):

Shakespeare wrote the plays in order to evaluate the actions truly; and our admiration is for the truth of the evaluations, not for the beauty of the original objects as we see them imitated. And how, one may wonder, can Shakespeare evaluate these actions truly except from the position of a moralist? To evaluate a particular sin, one must understand the nature of sin; and to fix in language the feeling, detailed and total, appropriate to the action portrayed, one must have a profound understanding not only of language, for language cannot be understood without reference to that which it represents, not only of the characters depicted, but of one's own feelings as well; and such understanding will not be cultivated very far without a real grasp of theoretic morality.

This crucial passage, which I find to be the soundest statement of artistic purpose in modern times, has been long ignored or forgotten. The Ransom essay has drawn little comment or meditation, even among Wintersians. Yet these paragraphs stand as a central defense of understanding and emotional adjustment as the final cause of literature. This idea was a chief concern of Winters’s middle years as a critic, which culminated in his wide-ranging and oft-vilified essay on literary genres “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.”

Now, returning to Raymond Tallis, he opines that art is an idealization of experience and that this idealization satisfies the human being’s fourth hunger for truly experiencing experience:

And so we see in a work of art an ideal life in miniature. As an exemplar it addresses the wound in consciousness; it acknowledges and consoles us for our customary lack of thereness and lack of connectedness. But a great work of art is a lens as well as a jewel, and through it we may continue the process of widening our consciousness. It invites us to view our own lives with the eyes of an artist. It says: this is how the world might be experienced; now go forth and experience it thus.

This doesn’t quite attain soundness. It also seems trite. Our gaining an “ideal” of deep and true experience makes us, what? -- better able?, immediately able? -- to truly experience our experiences. Again, I’m trying to wade through the metaphors to find something conceptually substantial to make sense of Tallis’s idea. The chief problem with it is that art can leave us feeling just as cold and empty about our own experiences as we did without art. Once we have left an artwork behind, people can and do still feel that they aren’t really experiencing our experience. The lens of art often doesn’t work any better than just giving it the old college try with your own eyes. But I will say this, in the earlier passage about art providing a higher view and connectedness, Tallis at least comes close to thinking of art as a mode of understanding that will help us live better. He doesn’t quite see through the Romantic fog he blows around, but at least he’s exploring at the edges of crucial ideas. It might be worth tinkering with such a theory. It is tangled in Romanticism, of course, but it has elements that suggest and could strengthen Winters’s much stronger, sounder conceptions of art’s final cause. While Tallis’s concepts need a lot of work -- and a lot less metaphor -- what they most need is a telling example or two of how this lens of art works in a person’s life, how an artwork cleared the way for him or someone else to experience his experiences.

Near his conclusion, Tallis feels compelled to explain that under his conception art is useless. But why does he insist on this, when his theory of the purpose of art makes it blatantly clear what he think the use of art is? What is the cause of the general fear among critics and artists of the words “use” and “useful” concerning art and literature? To me the whole issue has never made much sense. But let’s leave that for some future post and rather turn to Tallis’s next concern, art’s rivals for teaching us to experience experiences fully. Like so many, even like Winters, Tallis says that art is better than philosophy or religion for satisfying the fourth hunger:

[Art] is our path to experiencing, with appropriate awe, the extraordinary world which we have in part found (nature) and in part created (culture).

Maybe so. But does art accomplish this or more as no other psychic activity can? Some examples would definitely help make such a case. Nonetheless, this goes too far for me. Religion can order and bring deep meaning to our lives, too, though Tallis thinks religion socially dangerous (he trots out this hackneyed charge without make any case for it at all). He’s even weaker on what distinguishes art from philosophy. He doesn’t say what makes art special. But I don’t think art needs to be special, standing above every other human intellectual pursuit. It is enough for me to see that it is one of the central and most effective ways we can meet our psychic needs.

Finally, like Winters, Tallis discusses the need to find the “very best” artworks, the works that can best satisfy the fourth hunger. Tallis states clearly, as you will see and as Winters believed, that such works are few in number. He implies that only those few can do an adequate job of showing us ideal lives that will enable us, somehow, to experience our experiences fully. For him, these few great or supreme artworks give us the best mean to satisfy our need to truly and deeply experience:

We need to live within, live inside, a small number of definitive works of art that will give us a true image of the human world, equal to its variousness, its depth, its mystery and its grandeur. As Gide said, ‘I write not to be read but to be re-read’. There then remains the unsolved problem of picking the needle out of the haystack; of building a personal library of truly great works.

Those words express something close to Winters’s central critical project, the development of what I call, playfully, the Winters Canon. But Tallis doesn’t offer any examples of the needles he has discovered in the haystack, the great works. This is a major blunder. He ought to have told us what he thinks these few crucial works are, since he considers them so important to the satisfaction of such a difficult hunger to fulfill. Winters told us what artworks of English literature he thought lead to true and deep understanding. I roughly agree with Winters, but I am always open to new and other ideas about greatness. I recently heard from John Fraser about my own work in defining and re-examining the Winters Canon, Winters’s “best” artworks of literature. Fraser wrote that he thought people, especially young people, cannot often live with the best. But Raymond Tallis appears to be saying that this is exactly what’s needed: to know and immerse oneself in the very, very best, which will be few in number. I agree. I think Winters would have agreed. That doesn’t mean that the best is all we can or should study or take in. But I must stop on this subject. It’s a large one that I must come back to. For now, I would agree with Tallis that it’s crucial that we look at the world through the lens of the best.

It hardly seems needed to talk of art’s uselessness again, but Tallis concludes by yet again claiming that art is useless, despite giving one vague, metaphoric use for art after another. He even offers at the end of his essay yet one more use for it:

Useless and necessary, art -- like holidays -- is about experience for its own sake but -- unlike holidays -- such experience perfected. So let there be art, extending and deepening, if not rounding off, the sense of the world, celebrating the wonderful and beautiful uselessness of our half-awakened state.

Such acts are not useless. Tallis just can’t think, it seems, caught up in our culture’s general phobia about art having uses. How are all these actions not uses? Even practical uses in some significant sense? Once again, whence has arisen the general dread in our culture of those words “use” or “useful”? Some day I shall have to come back to that topic.

But before I end, I must note that Tallis still fails to make it clear how seeing art rounding off or deepening experience, perfecting it, idealizing it, enables us to truly experience our experiences, his fourth hunger. But his vague notion that it is in conceptually connecting our experiences that we complete or can fulfill experience, I think he begins to draw close to the critical theories of Yvor Winters.

Roundup 1

2008-03-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

Let me be honest. I just can’t find enough time outside work and family and assorted other fun (reading, writing, photography, serious golf, more serious tennis, marital romance, etc.) to write on nearly the number of topics I have been pondering for this blog. In this first of yet another recurring series (I’ve got a couple going already), here are brief notes on extraneous discoveries and ideas:

1. We’re all tangled in pop culture nowadays:

I ran across an article in the Independent (U.K.) on a study that proposes that cultural elites do not exist as we tend to conceive of them. The web site of the British council that funded this study is:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/status.html

The Independent’s article says that the researchers found that the "cultural elite," people brought up on the so-called higher arts (such as opera, symphonic performance, and theater), people who supposedly disdain “vulgar” pop songs or mainstream television shows, that such an elite does not exist. This topic has bearing on Yvor Winters’s work because of the alleged elitism of his theories and the literature he championed. Are such high-brow theories applicable to objects of so-called popular culture (assuming we can make clear distinctions between artworks of pop culture, Mid-Cult, and High-Cult [to employ Dwight McDonald’s useful terms)? I think there is no fundamental reason they couldn’t be. What the study shows is that even those who prize highfalutin literature (the kind featured regularly on this blog) still appreciate and find edification in artworks of popular culture. This reminded of the philosopher Alexander Nehemas, whose book on aesthetics from last year, Only a Promise of Happiness, revealed that he values, in some serious sense, episodes of the TV show Frazier as much as Shakespeare’s plays. Though they are few, Wintersian classicists, I would guess, drink often at the well of pop culture, too. Winters himself didn’t seem to. He didn’t watch much television that I am aware of. He didn’t go to the movies. I have been working on a study of film using Winters’s critical theories, but Winters probably did not consider film a serious art form. In any case, is it important for classicists to admit their knowledge and appreciation of art from pop culture? What pop culture do my readers prize as much or nearly as much as great literature? I think this issue needs some deeper study.

2. 10 dangerous poems:

I stumbled upon a book entitled Ten Poems to Change Your Life, by some fellow named Roger Housden. This author seems to think his ten poems are “dangerous,” which seems a nonsensical and pretentious claim to make about these ten fairly recent poems, except for the excerpt from the “Dark Night” of St. John of the Cross. None of the poetry has classical roots. Each is a free-verse prosetic musing. Most of it is hardly poetry at all. You might want to find reviews of the book through a search engine and give it a look. Let me know if you think anything in Housden’s list is truly worth attending to. I didn’t find any of his dangerous poetry particularly edifying. Also, I’d like to hear from my readers about how important the poems that Yvor Winters thought supremely great have been in people‘s lives. Has anyone’s life changed because of the poetry of the Winters Canon? Anonymous comments are welcome, too, as always. By the way, since I first jotted this note down, I have learned that Housden has several similar "inspirational" books of poems that can purportedly change your life in one way or another. I haven’t had a chance to look at all of them.

3. What’s a good use for self-help books:

There was a very funny yet disturbing animated cartoon published online at the New Yorker a couple months ago. The animation starts with a close up of a stack of books with titles like these: Affirmation Therapy, More Joy, Self-Helping, Every Day - Every Which Way. As the imaginary camera backs up for a wider view, you see that someone is standing on the stack of books. As the view becomes wider still, you see that the man standing on the book is putting a noose around his neck. It’s funny but thoroughly discouraging. For don’t we writers and readers hope that our books and our readings will help make people better and stronger? Don’t we want what we read to be on a list of “poems to change your life”? Of course most serious readers do, as Yvor Winters argued (though he was certainly not alone in measuring literature by some kind of moral standard). But this cartoon draws attention to the nagging problem that all our efforts are sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, for naught, completely for naught. Winters believed that the way poems were written, their formal properties, their diction and meter and stanza structure, were vital to their meaning and power. Has anyone’s life changed because of the formal properties of any poem or one of the great poems of the Winters Canon? Winters seemed to argue that Baudelaire’s work had had such an effect on him. But there is very little personal reflection in any of his writings, not even in his letters, which are filled with shop-talk on composing poetry, but next to nothing on what poetry did to him. You get very little sense from any of his writings of what poetry really meant in his life. His students have repeatedly testified to the intensity of his classroom poetry readings. But few have commented on what the poems he loved and judged to be our greatest works of art meant to him, how they might have changed his life. What do they mean to my readers? I am slowly working on describing what many of them have meant to me as I work my way through the Winters Canon.

4. Filling in some blanks with Blank Verse:

Robert Shaw’s strong critical work certainly deserves more than a spot in a roundup. I didn’t learn until recently of the 2006 publication of his new book on blank verse, which looks to be excellent upon a thorough skimming. Most pertinently, the book covers a number of poets who are important in the study of Yvor Winters: Wallace Stevens (who wrote, in Winters’s view, some of the greatest blank verse of all time), Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, and others -- including Yvor Winters briefly. The book has no discussion of Winters’s criticism, unfortunately, even though it seems that Shaw is aware of Winters. But Winters didn’t conduct a deep study of blank verse, strange to say. This book and the subject of blank verse are issues that I hope to get back to in greater detail. The book is certainly something to get energized about if you are one of those interested in seeing a lot more poetry written in traditional forms, not to mention rational structures (which Shaw does not discuss). Shaw gives wide, sensitive readings in a loose tradition -- perhaps a formal practice that has been much too loose. Shaw’s work offers technical precision and clear exposition. I hope to take an in-depth look at Blank Verse some time soon.

5. A glass of Gallo burgundy:

Did you see this amusing quotation from art critic Robert M. Parker in Forbes some months back in their “Thoughts on the Business of Life” column:

I know collectors with 40,000 bottles who if you poured them a glass of Gallo Hearty Burgundy wouldn’t know the difference.

I sometimes feel something similar about Winters’s evaluations and the Winters Canon. If I were given an unknown poem, could I discern it’s excellence? For example, would I have thought, say, J.V. Cunningham’s “The Phoenix” is one of great artworks of the language or have discovered myself as such without Winters’s assistance? If not, how can I presume to evaluate the poetry of the Winters Canon, which I have said is something that must be done and which I have begun doing? Who is qualified, who possesses the needed skills, who can set the criteria, to judge such matters? Such considerations and questions hold almost all of us all back from speaking boldly about what’s great and what is less than great. But such qualms didn’t deter Winters, no sir. That’s why he often seems arrogant, almost ridiculously so. Whence came his supreme confidence in his powers and skills? Should any of us trust him? Or anyone else? Even ourselves? It seems, even among quasi-Wintersians, that few do. He has often been treated in the way David Levin, the Stanford University historian, once wrote of his specific evaluations: that they weren’t the main point in learning from him. Yet Winters thought the work of precise evaluation stood at the center of his critical enterprise. The discerning between the glass of Gallo and the so-called finest wines was crucial to all he thought and wrote and felt about literature.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Conclusions on Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry

2008-03-04T12:09:00.000-08:00

We have finished considering each of the six poems by Thomas Wyatt that Yvor Winters chose for Quest for Reality (which reprints the poems in chronological order). Before moving on to the next poem in the “Winters Canon,” it’s a good time to ask whether we can reach any conclusions about Wyatt’s work? More broadly, can we reach any early conclusions about this study of the Winters Canon?

First, it is striking how little very little poetry or criticism the artworks of Thomas Wyatt appears to have inspired among those with interests in Yvor Winters. None of the poetry from the past few decades that I know works with or out from the methods Wyatt employed. Not even Winters seems to have built out from Wyatt’s favored techniques. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, only J.V. Cunningham in the modern age has tried to use a plainly and overtly logical manner in modern poetry, though Cunningham’s methods betray little influence from Wyatt. It might be time for renewed efforts to study, learn from, and re-employ the techniques of Thomas Wyatt.

Second, Wintersian critics, if there truly are any, have not concerned themselves with Wyatt at all since Yvor Winters championed his work during his career. I wonder why this is. There is much to discuss, as I believe I showed in some of my personal reflections on the six Wyatt poems that Winters chose for the his canon. And there is much more in Wyatt’s classical body of work worth careful study. It appears, however, that Wyatt has not “endured” even among those tempted to agree with Winters that he wrote great poetry. Wyatt has been left to scholars. He doesn’t seem to have any influence or significance any longer. Indeed, his work doesn’t seem to have had influence for a long, long time. This is far from true of some other lyric poets from his era, generally speaking. Shakespeare is one obvious example, Donne the other. There is no reason why Thomas Wyatt’s poetry could not have drawn the same level of attention and generate the same personal interest that Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence draws. My guess is that Wyatt simply hasn’t inspired enough poets, critics, general readers, or even scholars in such a way as to generate some kind of momentum that would bring him a wider readership. Why is that so? That’s a matter for reflection and discussion.

The logical method, of course, is very, very little used in our times. Yet if you are drawn to and see the great value in poetry that is written in an overtly logical manner, J.V. Cunningham’s essay “Logic and Lyric” can help you study some of the possibilities of that kind of poetry. The essay can be found in Cunningham’s truly great critical collection Tradition and Poetic Structure: Essays in Literary History and Criticism. After briefly and generally laying out Romantic ideas about literary structure, which routed logical poetry from the field as much as 200 years ago, Cunningham studies a fine poem that exhibits such a structure:

But may the chain of propositions and reasonings [in a poem] be not merely plausible and specious but even sufficiently just and exact? May the poem be not merely subject to logical analysis but logical in form? May, to return to our point, the subject and structure of a poem be conceived and expressed syllogistically? Anyone at all acquainted with modern criticism and the poems that are currently in fashion will think in this connection of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” The apparent structure of that poem is an argumentative syllogism, explicitly stated. "Had we but world enough and time," the poet says, “This coyness, lady, were no crime....”

Later, at the conclusion of the essay, Cunningham suggests that the logical method might be much more valuable than recognized in our times. Consider these comments on Thomas Nashe’s “Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss” from Summer’s Last Will and Testament:

The experience of [Nashe’s] poem is the experience of syllogistic thinking with its consequences for feeling, attitude, and action. It is a mode of experience that the Renaissance practiced and cherished, and expressed with power, dignity, and precision. It is a poetical experience and a logical one, and it is both at once.

Though Cunningham doesn’t quite say so in this essay, he implies quite strongly, quite obviously, that the time was ripe (30 years ago) for some poets to adopt overtly logical methods once again, even to the point of poetic syllogisms.

On the broader question, I have received only one comment about any of Wyatt’s poems, and that was only a comment saying that someone would comment elsewhere on one Wyatt’s poems. I do not know how many people are reading this blog. It is probably not many. I know very little about how anyone perceives this blog. I do not have any answer why Wyatt has generated no comment, other than that less than a handful of people are reading these posts.

And so we move on in the Winters Canon from Thomas Wyatt to one poem by Thomas Lord Vaux, Winters’s next selection in Quest. I will get to that soon.