The Imagism of Early Winters

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.

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

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

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

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.

What I Hope to Work On - Part 2

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.

+++

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.

What I Hope to Work On - Part 1

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).

+++

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.

+++

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.

Central Purposes of This Blog

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.

The "Fray" Puts Us in a Fray

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

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

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

Recent Writings on Yvor Winters: “Allusion to the Poets”, 2002

Christopher Ricks regards literary allusion as highly meaningful, an essential and powerful aspect of literature, perhaps the core of literary experience. I would say that he loves allusions; he finds great meaning and pleasure in finding them, understanding them, experiencing them as he reads. He has written a learned book about the theory and practice of allusion in literature. Naturally, since he loves allusion so deeply, he doesn’t appreciate writers who, somehow, oppose allusion -- or even fail to pay enough attention to it in their criticism. This appears to be the “sin” Yvor Winters has committed against allusion, in Ricks’s mind. For Ricks in his much admired 2002 book on allusion has included a chapter on both Winters’s lack of attention to allusion in his criticism and on his quasi-hypocritical practice of alluding in his poetry while “opposing” the concept of allusion.

The essay on Winters is only a small part of a large book, which, overall, is a broad study of the ways and means of allusion as illustrated in the work of a group of specific poets. Ricks thinks that repeating or nearly repeating, or somehow echoing or pointing to, words and phrases of poets and novelists, those whom he calls “ancestral voices,” is a region in which poetry hides much of its great power, an idea I find quite overblown. Through allusion, Ricks claims, poets pay homage to the “immense debts” they owe to their ancestor poets and immeasurably deepen the meanings of their own poems. The book consists of 12 essays on allusion and its permutations. Ricks focuses mostly on the uses of allusion among English poets from the early Romantic and Victorian periods (the standard-issue “greats”).

Before he gets to Winters, Ricks spends the first half of his book on “The Poet as Heir.” This section consists of six essays devoted to individual poets, Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian: Dryden and Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. In the course of these essays, Ricks opines that allusion is a form of inheritance, which should not be hoarded or squandered. Ricks tries to grasp how a poet imaginatively cooperates with those from whom he has received a legacy. Ricks sees the writings of the past as bequests that entail obligations. The words and phrases and ideas of past writers live with later writers more vitally than thrones or lands, even more than languages, the human senses, or money. They are, to Ricks, literature itself, and literature seems to form some sort of sacred Olympus in Ricks’s mind. The second half of his book contains six essays on various aspects of his theory of allusion: its relationship to plagiarism (allusion being its opposite, in Ricks’s understanding); its affiliation with metaphor; its part in literary loneliness (allusion provides company to the lonesome writer); its use in prose (concerning Housman); its importance to translation as a form of allusion (concerning David Ferry); and to the clash between poetic practice and critical principles -- that’s the one on Winters.

Now, I find allusion to be a mildly engaging topic, but not nearly so profound as Christopher Ricks takes it to be. After skimming most of the book, however, I’m not sure why Ricks bothers with Yvor Winters, except, it seems rather clear, to set up and knock down a straw man[1]. By propping up Winters as a dogged and hypocritical antagonist to his own position, Ricks seems to feel that he can better show that allusion, his fixation, is a central feature of poetry and of criticism -- is everywhere in literature and is everywhere profoundly valuable. The problem is that Ricks seems to be under the illusion that Winters thought ill of allusion.

So let’s start there, with Winters’s views on allusion. Ricks is clearly troubled by Winters’s theoretical objections to what Winters called “pseudo-reference.” Ricks appears to think (he is less than clear on this) that pseudo-reference is an exact synonym for allusion, and that since Winters objects to pseudo-reference, he must also object to allusion in some unspecified, undefined way.

This is a faulty argument. Winters’s discussion of pseudo-reference is found in Primitivism and Decadence, his first book. This is a complex subject, and I do not have the time to make a case for my views here. But I opine that this term does not mean allusion, but what I might call “empty” allusion -- repetitions of words and phrases made for the sake of appearing to discuss concepts or stories or scenes or situations that are not properly fleshed out. But a discussion of pseudo-reference and Winters’s views on proper allusion is a big topic that will have to wait. All I wish to point out now is that in my judgment Christopher Ricks does not understand what Yvor Winters means by pseudo-reference and takes his own meaning as Winters’s. That is a basic critical error. Though my case will have to come later, you can start by reading the relevant materials, Winters’s essay and the relevant parts of Ricks’s book.

For this reason, I find Ricks’s discovery of hypocrisy, Winters’s practice of alluding in his poetry while opposing allusion in his criticism, to be neither compelling nor interesting. Ricks hears what he wants to hear in Winters: a poet-critic who objects to allusion but who hypocritically alludes in his poetry anyway (we will get to some of those specific allusions in a moment). By showing this, he believes he is demonstrating, negatively, how important allusion is, since he believes he has found a determined opponent of allusion who still made allusions. This seems to have been Ricks’s chief purpose in studying Winters. Once he picks a few passages from Winters that appear to stand in opposition to allusion, as Ricks understands it, and then gathers a string of allusions from Winters’s poetry he has enough to show Winters up -- or so he thinks.

Worse than misunderstanding the concept of pseudo-reference, Ricks appears to have no interest in understanding Yvor Winters’s poetry, nor even in seeing how Winters’s alleged allusions to Ricks’s favored 19th-century poets deepen the meaning of Winters’s poetry -- nor even in uncovering how Winters’s allusions react to or change or reflect the poetry to which he supposedly alluded. Now, it’s not so surprising that Ricks pays attention to these poets, for the early English Romantics and Victorians of the Standard Canon are Ricks’s specialty. But his essay doesn’t elucidate or hardly touch on their work or Winters’s in any meaningful way. Ricks, as I will illustrate below, spends no time even trying to fathom or evaluate Winters’s poetry, or anyone else’s, in this essay. He appears to want to write about Winters solely because Winters’s views on Victorian poetry bug him -- and to catch Winters in literary hypocrisy. Not only does Ricks charge Winters with making allusions at the same time that he allegedly thought allusion to be worthless, but also, worse to Ricks, with alluding to poems that Winters did not judge to be great, but that Ricks, we can only surmise, considers superior. Thus, Ricks’s essay endeavors to show how wrong and foolish Winters was not only in opposing allusion but in alluding to poems by authors whose work he considered less than great, flawed, or downright bad to one degree or another.

Before considering these charges, I must point out that there is little doubt that Yvor Winters alluded continuously in his poetry. To my mind, the fact is entirely unremarkable if one knows his work. Winters’s allusions are worth deeper study as well, though many of the Stanford School have already examined his allusions in some depth, if not as part of some grandiose, comprehensive theory of allusion. Ricks appears to think he has made a stunning discovery -- a gleeful “Gotcha!” He thinks he has revealed a “clash” between Winters’s practice and his critical principles. But this is hardly so. Winters alluded because he read, as most writers do, and he read a lot of poetry. He said once that he read the entire corpus of Robert Browning, a stunning admission from a critic who did not judge Browning’s work highly. It is natural for writers, as it was for Winters, to allude to what they read, to respond to ideas or comments, to address issues they find other writers addressing and consider important -- or to echo words or turns of phrase or ideas or concepts that they find insightful or compelling or useful in one way or another. Winters seems to have had no objection to allusion as such, though he found it, I would guess, as unremarkable as I do. It’s a natural part of writing, not some mysterious, magical property. This is probably why Winters spends little time studying it, though I am only guessing.

A look at two secondary questions will help us see how far Ricks has gone off the mark: (1) Did Winters allude continuously to poems he considered less than great? (2) What is the meaning of his having alluded to poems Ricks thinks are better than Winters did, if he so alluded? Whatever value Ricks’s essay might have will lie in his answers to these questions. Ricks starts out early on the attack, making it plain what he thinks of Winters:

Winters as critic does not have much time for many poets; as poet, though, he has not only time but place for many poems, including those by poets whom as a critic he “places” to the point of displacing them. Particularly, of course, poets whom he finds guilty of Romanticism: William Collins, Keats, Tennyson, and Arnold.

This short, irritable passage is full of unfounded, ignorant, or ill-considered charges and assumptions. First, Winters spent time with hundreds of individual poems in his criticism, perhaps more than any other critic I know. The charge that he didn’t take time with poems is foolish. What he didn’t take time with are those poems Ricks loves most -- the poems, we might say, Ricks thinks better than the poetry Winters judged great.

Further, Winters had no desire to “displace” poets, which seems to mean to Ricks to keep them from being remembered or read, to see them forever banished from literary culture in some fashion. Since Ricks does not define this term “displace,” a major critical blunder, I must guess at his meaning. If he means what he appears to mean, I deny the charge. Winters did not believe, I ascertain, that we should in some sense discard all poems that he judged less than great or “displace” them from memory to such a degree that they are never to be read again[2]. The charge, as vague and as common as it has been, is blatantly silly. Winters regularly read and appreciated countless poems that he judged less than great. He even esteemed mediocre poems written by poets who he believed had written great poems. For example, judging from all his writings on Hart Crane’s work, it is obvious that Winters had no desire to displace (discard?) Crane’s poetry, even though he judged that Crane had not written a single great poem, a single poem worthy of the Winters Canon. Nor, to consider another example, did Winters wish to displace Robert Bridge’s poem “London Snow” (a Bridges poem often chosen for anthologies) because he didn’t judge it as great. Nor did he wish that no one would ever again read Eliot’s “Gerontion,” a poem Ricks discusses briefly, because of his judgment that it is less than great (and by a good measure).

Similar examples could easily reach the thousands. Ricks and all Winters’s opponents should read him for understanding if they wish to comment on his poetry or his criticism. At the end of his essay, Ricks ridiculously accuses Winters of being “monstrously unjust” in his judgment of “Gerontion,” but what I find truly unjust (let’s just charitably overlook the ridiculous hyperbole of that word “monstrously”) are Ricks’s ignorant assumptions and baseless summary judgments concerning Winters.

As I have argued repeatedly on this blog and on my web site, the primary goal of Winters’s criticism was to identify the very greatest poems we have, the exemplary standards by which all other poetry should be judged, the greatest achievements in poetic discourse ever composed; he did NOT endeavor or desire to separate the “sheep” from the “goats,” as though every work of literary art that was not reprinted in Quest for Reality or tagged as “great” in one of Winters’s essays should only be consigned to the Lake of Fire and forgotten forever. I will continue to do all I can to counter this ugly, ignorant, dim-witted misconception of Winters’s critical theories and principles to the end of my days. I wish members of Stanford School would do something to help me along, but, alas, contributions on this important task have been nil.

Also in the passage from Ricks I last quoted from there is the usual misunderstanding and mischaracterization of Winters’s judgment of Romanticism. Romanticism, to Winters, is not something one can be guilty of when writing, as Ricks claims by implication. It is something that logically engenders flaws in one’s writing and thinking, as Winters discussed time and again. Whether one agrees or not with Winters on Romanticism, one should properly and fully understand him. Ricks’s comment is foolish and ignorant.

Following this stumbling, rather hostile opening, Ricks begins to study Winters’s allusions to show, it appears, how hypocritical he was about allusion. He first finds a bit of William Collins in one line. I find the discovery sketchy and unimportant, at best. But Ricks draws an enormous conclusion from this one supposed allusion:

The great are not forgotten, and Winters’s calling upon Collins on such an occasion... must accord to Collins, in this poem at least, that endurance that Winters the critic denies.

How silly. Winters made no such claim, that Collins doesn’t deserve to “endure,” whatever that means to Ricks (he unacceptably fails time and again to define such loose terms). Winters assumed that readers could and would continue to read Collins and many a poet of similar standing[3]. Such a matter was past considering. For Winters, what was worth weighing is exactly how valuable Collins’s work is. He concluded that it’s weak and flawed. Ricks doesn’t bother with any case for why Collins’s poetry should be understood differently or judged more highly. Nor does he bother with the idea that Winters might have found some of Collins’s flawed work to be, nevertheless, profitable, in the largest spiritual sense of that term.

Turning next to the 19th-century English Romantics, Ricks finds that one poem, Winters’s sonnet “Appollo and Daphne,” contains allusions to Keats. Perhaps it’s true. I don’t find Ricks’s case convincing, but the notion isn’t half-crazed. But Winters never said that Keats could not write a good line or never offered a single valuable insight or idea in his poetry. Winters certainly read Keats, perhaps read every line he wrote more than once. Why wouldn’t he echo a particularly fine line from a poet he had read so much or occasionally address themes that Keats wrote about that Winters also considered important? There would be nothing the least surprising in Winters alluding to Keats, if so he did (which, to repeat, I find not fully convincing). Winters didn’t think Keats worthless garbage. What he didn’t think was that Keats’s poetry was GREAT. Winters even stated that Keats wrote a few fine lines, a point which Ricks either didn’t notice, couldn’t understand, or (much worse) chose to ignore. Winters’s discussions of Keats do NOT imply that he thought every line Keats wrote is hell-bound rubbish, not worth reading or remembering by ANY reader EVER again -- as Ricks appears to think Winters believed.

Rick’s next covers a handful of alleged allusions to Tennyson. These turn out to be sketchy as well. You can decide for yourself on Tennyson and several additional poets, if you think the matter worth considering. I won’t go through Ricks’s unimpressive list of Tennyson allusions one by one. I find them all not only doubtful but inconsequential. But this slap at Winters at the end of the discussion of Tennyson borders on silliness:

That Tennyson is one of the lasting voices, whatever the critic Winters might rule, comes out in this sense that two poems of his have gone to the fashioning of what Ulysses glimpsed, “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

This quoted line is not clearly reflected in the Winters’s poem in which Ricks claims to find its reflection (you can look it up for yourself, if you care to). At best, the allusion is a reach. Ricks’s claim almost looks absurd to me, but he could be right -- who knows for sure? But the central point is that Winters never thought Tennyson would not last. As with Keats, he simply wanted his work downgraded, and quite a bit, whether one agrees on the downgrading or not. Still, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who finds Ricks’s purported allusions to Tennyson convincing. I’m open to having my mind changed.

Ricks’s reaches his big finish with Winters’s purported allusions to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (the photo is of Dover Beach, England) found mostly in one Winters poem, “The Slow Pacific Swell,” which is part of the Winters Canon of the greatest poems in the English language as anthologized in Quest for Reality (Ken Fields chose the Winters poems for that anthology after Winters died). In this case so many of Arnold’s words in “Dover” are repeated in Winters’s poem that it appears hard to claim that Winters was NOT alluding to Arnold. But let’s look at his list of alleged allusions to “Dover” in “Swell” (Arnold first then Winters, in each pair):

stand vs. stands
land vs. land
tranquil vs. tranquillity
sound vs. sound
distant vs. distance
darkling vs. dark + darkening
dreams vs. dreaming
sea vs. sea
hear vs. hear
night vs. night
withdrawing vs. withdrawing
“Into the mind the turbid ebb” vs. “ebbing out of mind”
moon vs. moon

That’s quite a lengthy list, and perhaps its length shows that it’s undeniably allusive. What do you think? Was Winters alluding to Arnold at the same time he thought the poem not even worth alluding to, as Ricks implies? I’d really like to know whether anyone out there buys this argument. For are these not extremely simple, common words. Sound? Stand? Sea? Dark? Hear??! Night??!!!! Combinations of four or five of these words could coincidentally be found in thousands of poems. Ricks makes no case that they are allusions. He just lays out the pairs and assumes we will be convinced. Are you? Well, I am not. It’s POSSIBLE, somewhat remotely, that they are allusions, but I’m not convinced they are, mostly since nothing in the content of “The Slow Pacific Swell,” not even in Ricks’s discussion of it, reflects in any clear and specific way the themes of Arnold’s poem. I could accept that a few of Arnold’s lines and bits of diction might have been influential with Winters, but I don’t see them as allusions. Winters doesn’t appear to be answering or reflecting upon Arnold’s poem or working out from his themes in any significant way.

Thus, the biggest problem for Ricks’s position is that it doesn’t really matter whether Winters alluded to Arnold. For Ricks has nothing to say about the themes of EITHER poem and, unconscionably, even appears to have no desire whatsoever to understand Winters’s poem. He does not discuss the themes of “The Slow Pacific Swell” or “Dover Beach” at all. This means that he never even gets to the crucial matter of whether the poems “talk” to each other in some vital, meaningful way through the allusions. Near the end of this essay, Ricks opines, sharply, that Winters “impoverishes” his critical understanding by paying too little attention to allusion, implying that he leaves his analyses of poems in some cases “needlessly amputated.” But it is Ricks’s criticism that betrays signs of impoverishment, whose views seem amputated, because he pays no mind to the themes of the poems in which he finds such wide, endless streams of allusions.

Further, and most damning, Ricks appears to be entirely unaware of what Winters’s poem clearly alludes to: the symbolism of the sea in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which is a matter of some extensive and insightful commentary in several books on Winters (see Dick Davis’s Wisdom and Wilderness, Terry Comito’s In Defense of Winters, and Don Stanford’s Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry). Ricks can’t even be bothered with chronology. “Swell” was written in the early 1930s. Yet Winters’s final, much lower rating of “Dover Beach” didn’t come until the late 1960s. Such errors of commission and omission bring into serious question everything Ricks writes about Winters.

Ricks winds up his presentation with a discussion of one supposedly major allusion that Winters makes to Arnold: the word “certitude.” Winters used this word a number of times in his poems, as Ricks shows. Ricks also opines that the only significant use of the word “certitude” in English literature is in the poem “Dover Beach.” Because of this, Ricks thinks the connection between Arnold and Winters is unmistakable. I find this argument rather meager. It’s just ONE WORD, for goodness sake. It is pretentious to think that Winters’s use of one word renders all his work indebted to Arnold in some crucial way (which Ricks doesn’t even bother explicating) or undoes Winters’s evaluation of Arnold’s poetry or is in some way hypocritical. Further, Winters knew the poem “Dover Beach” very, very well. Apparently, judging from his letters, he thought about it a lot. Once, he thought highly of it -- indeed, until the latter half of his career. He even once judged it one of our greatest poems. Yet he came to believe that it should not be considered one of the best and later came to judge that it is badly flawed[4]. Assuming Winters actually did allude to “Dover Beach,” which I find doubtful -- and at least unverified on Ricks’s evidence -- Winters did nothing wrong in employing in his own poetry one word from a poem that he appraised as at least good during most of his career. But Ricks thinks that his use of this one word constitutes some sort of hypocrisy:

It is of the nature of literary art that certainty is not even to be aspired to; certitude is another matter [“SUBJECTIVE certainty” is the definition Ricks adopts from the OED], and I trust in the certitude of “Dover Beach” and its being called into play by Winters’s poems, whatever as critic he might have preferred to be the case.

My certitude is fairly strong that Ricks is wrong that Arnold is “being called into play” in any vital way. More importantly, Ricks fails to prove that this is the case. I will admit that it’s POSSIBLE that Winters could have picked the word “certitude” up from Arnold, but so what? He read the word, liked it, used it. There’s nothing significant in that -- if it is so. Yet the greater problem is that it is wrong for Ricks to think that Winters wanted no one ever to read “Dover Beach” again. Winters didn’t prefer anything (to sum up his changing position on “Dover” as one overarching judgment) other than that we NOT consider the poem one of our greatest artistic achievements. Again, Winters thought it was a fine poem, flawed, but fine. At the end of his career and life, he thought the flaws of the poem greater than he had through most of the decades he had known the poem well. Overall, I think Winters judged that it failed by a good measure to meet the standards of the Winters Canon, but that it is still a fine work of art[5]. Ricks’s implication is wholly mistaken, that “Dover Beach” meant nothing to Winters and was worth nothing in Winters’s critical judgment. It did mean a good deal to him, and he did not wish to “displace” it, as we see from his letters and published writings.

The blurbs call Ricks a "brilliant critic,” a man with “valuable insights into the human psyche and the 'moral life'." Other blurbs says that Ricks “examines the transfer of poetic power in his brilliant and witty study.” They say he is “a painstaking scholar and editor as well as the most stringent and imaginative of close readers.” The Guardian’s almost silly review (U.K.) says that no critic “has dared to isolate this wonderfully ramifying, richly human subject [allusion]... and given it such intensive treatment. With this book about poets and their gratitude, Ricks has earned ours." I don’t what “daring” such an act took, but it certainly took daring to write about Yvor Winters without knowing his ideas or poetry very well. Further, Ricks’s supposed stringent and imaginative skills at close reading are not on display anywhere in his Winters essay.

As I have mentioned, what Ricks pays no attention to whatsoever is all the allusions to poetry that Ricks has no interest in, to Thomas Campion and Fulke Greville (he does mention Ben Jonson, but does not delve deeply enough into Winters’s many allusions to his work), to Herman Melville and George Herbert, to J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers and Robert Bridges and Paul Valéry. It’s early Romantic and Victorian literature that Ricks finds important, so Ricks has no time for Winters’s allusions to the English Renaissance and modern poetry that Winters considered great almost beyond measure, his true partners of discussion in poetry.

Moreover, I find little that is “brilliant” in Ricks’s ignoring how Winters’s supposed allusions deepen the power or meaning of Winters’s poetry. Ricks has next to nothing to say about the meaning of Winters’s poems. As I have said, this essay appears to have been written only with the nasty, narrow purpose of showing that Winters was hypocritical in opposing allusion when he practiced allusion. To be honest, I suspect that Ricks hasn’t read Winters much, either the poetry or the criticism. Ricks doesn’t seem even marginally conversant with Winters’s poetry nor moved by what he had to say through it. Sadly, I conclude that Winters is a straw man for Ricks. He keeps to his preferred poets in any case, Keats and Tennyson, et al. They are his second loves (his first is T.S. Eliot, I’ve read), the standard greats of 19th-century poetry. He has no awareness, it seems, of the many allusions to other, better poets throughout Winters’s poetry, the great artworks of the Winters Canon. Inexcusably, Ricks seems not the least interested in Winters’s discussion of matters that are related to allusion when they concern poets that Ricks has no apparent regard for.

The consequences of Ricks’s essay can be severely damaging to Winters’s reputation, as we can see from the comment of one critic on the essay:

... [the Winters] essay takes the belligerently anti-allusive critic Yvor Winters and demonstrates to comic but powerful effect that in his fine work as a poet he was acutely allusive to Keats and Tennyson, poets he was rude about in his prose.

These are a sample of the results that faulty scholarship and bad argumentation can yield: dreadful misconceptions and errors. I find little that is comic in this essay. And Winters wasn’t “anti-allusive,” whatever that means. Neither Ricks nor his reviewers seem to feel the slightest need to define such terms.

It surprises me that this essay has yet had no answer from a critic of the Stanford School. It demands one. Yet it doesn’t surprise me that Christopher Ricks has no particular regard for the poetry or criticism of Yvor Winters, for Winters sought to downgrade many of the poets Ricks believes are great (I presume) and are his favorites (as is obvious). His judgment on such matters is his privilege to give or take. But his erroneous judgments on Winters should be countered. That no Wintersian has stepped forward to address the weaknesses and errors of this essay is, at best, disheartening.

Footnotes:

[1] I have a guess about what might first have drawn Ricks’s ire. Looking at his career as a whole, Ricks was probably irritated with Winters’s strong objections to the poetry and critical theories of T.S. Eliot, who is reportedly the poet and critic Ricks most admires.

[2] I countered this charge, in another context, on my Yvor Winters web site years ago. I took this post off line for various reasons, but I will attach it to this post in the near future as a comment.

[3] Strangely, Ricks seems to think Williams Collins is much more highly regarded and much, much more widely read than appears to be the case. Collins has hardly any standing left in the Standard Canon, let alone in Winters’s. He is almost a forgotten poet -- outside a few small academic circles of scholars like Ricks -- whether his status is deserved or not.

[4] The poem might not be as flawed as Winters came to judge late in his career. How the Stanford School should rate “Dover” is a matter that needs consideration.

[5] I must at some time reconsider this whole complicated issue, since, for one matter, John Fraser includes “Dover Beach” in his quasi-Wintersian New Book of English Verse, a decision Fraser does not explain or justify. Further, I need to try to fathom why Winters judged the poem to be more flawed in his final assessment. Perhaps someone who took classes with him at the end of his career could enlighten us. Someone like Francis Fike, retired Hope College professor and former Winters student who is still writing on poets of the Stanford School, might be able to help us on this.

Yezzi on Winters, 1997, Part Two

I have a few isolated issues to discuss concerning David Yezzi’s 1997 overview of Yvor Winters in the New Criterion.

MISCELLANEOUS PASSAGES with COMMENTARY:

1.

Early in the essay, Yezzi quotes Randall Jarrell on Winters and leaves the clear impression that he agrees with Jarrell, since he offers no objection to anything in the Jarrell quotations he chooses. In my judgment, however, Jarrell’s characterizations of Winters as a neoprimitive variety of neoclassicist, and even as simpleminded (?!!), are blatantly ridiculous. Winters was as far from simpleminded as can be imagined. (I won’t make any case to counter this inane charge here, and I have no plans to bother with one either. But perhaps it’s needed? Someone tell me whether I need to make the case, because I’ll do it if there is a need.) And he was no primitive, either. He had no interest in a return to some “Garden of Eden” of literary taste. Rather, he sought, admirably, by any viable means a continual strengthening of the civilization that formed classical literature and the greatest works of literary art. Winters, as is so infrequently remembered by his detractors, even praised Romanticism, which he opposed as a system for decades, for what it had contributed to development of classical civilization. It is rather obvious that Jarrell did not understand Winters, and his warped, worthless opinions should have been given no voice in this essay except to be soundly rejected.

2.

Yezzi also takes Winters to task, as so many other critics have, on the issue of nepotism -- that is, his support for his students’ work: “Winters was loyal to his favorite students, however, often crediting them with knitting together the strands of a logical, plain-spoken poetic, which had been frayed so violently by the associative tendencies of the Romantic tradition. Winters makes room at the top of his critical ladder for students and colleagues such as Thom Gunn, J. V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, N. Scott Momaday, Donald Stanford, and his wife, Janet Lewis -- a few of them excellent poets, but a dubious, nepotistic list.”

First, there is NOTHING the LEAST dubious about the superb criticism and poetry of these poets. Winters’s praise for their work should not be considered nepotistic, as has been so often unjustly and foolishly charged. I consider Yezzi’s comment a serious blunder. Cunningham, Bowers, Momaday, and Lewis wrote several of the greatest poems of our language, as I will argue when we get to their work as I slowly work my way through a reconsideration of the Winters Canon. But I am not alone in that high opinion of their accomplishments. Further, Cunningham and Stanford wrote some of the finest classical criticism of our age (and even Momaday has written some fine casual criticism), and again I am not alone in judging their work so highly. Also, it’s important to note that if Winters had been blatantly nepotistic, he would have supported many more of his dozens of poet-students than he did -- which he did not. In fact, he wrote that many of them had produced no better than mediocre work, and he did not notably advocate the work of many students who might be deserving of advocacy, such as Howard Baker, Donald Drummond, and Wesley Trimpi. Rather, he recognized, almost alone, the supreme excellence in the work of several of his students and tried to see their indubitable literary achievements recognized as indubitable. Yezzi is plainly wrong, as common as this scurrilous charge of nepotism has long been.

3.

Yezzi states twice that he thinks Winters’s approach to poetry is what we need, as in this passage I mentioned in Part One: “Nevertheless, as both a description of its enduring ills and a prescription for regaining much that has been lost to the lyric tradition in English, Winters’s bitter pill is our long-overlooked and strongest medicine.”

Fair enough. But Yezzi fails to make it clear exactly what Winters’s bitter pill is, other than more rationally lucid and less emotional writing, composed in “traditional” meters. And why is the pill bitter? I don’t find it the least bitter. This pill has given me and others great relief. Part of the problem with getting people to read Winters is this attitude, that siding with him, acquiring a taste for modern classicism, will somehow be painful, trying, or grim, like Baptist converts having to give up booze or dancing. Happily, I joined Winters long ago on a journey to new, deeper areas of classical art and thought and life.

4.

Yezzi has many good things to say about Winters’s discussion of emotion, as in this passage: “It is important to note that what Winters called for was not the complete eradication of emotion (an impossibility) but the elucidation of it. As his chief weapon against corrosive emotionalism, reason became a tenet of faith for Winters. What skulked outside the purview of the rational, the obscuring darkness at the margins of experience, held the supreme threat. His was not, however, a denial of such murky realms; in fact, far from being an innocent with regard to the deleterious darkness outlying reason, Winters keeps the watch on just that verge of benightedness.”

This accurately summarizes Winters’s views on emotion. He often read poetry and wrote his own poems to keep watch on the edges of experience, which modern poets have explored and contemporary poets continue to explore without caution or control for so long.

5.

Yezzi comments, “For Winters, the purpose of poetry is to describe experience as precisely as possible.”

This is a bit misleading. The purpose of poetry, of literature, as Winters stated many times in his essays, is to judge experience properly. The accurate description of experience, as Yezzi puts it, is surely important to that artistic enterprise, but it is not the final end of that enterprise. Such a view as Yezzi’s can throw a reader far off the track in trying to understand Winters. It even sounds suspiciously like Pound’s imagist ideas about the immediate apprehension of things, which Pound thought the aim of literature and which Winters opposed quite strongly.

6.

Yezzi summarizes well Winters’s concerns with the morality of poetry: “Winters fired back [at John Crowe Ransom] in his essay on Ransom from The Anatomy of Nonsense -- he rarely missed an opportunity to rebut his detractors in print -- that, yes, ethical interest is the sole poetic concern, but a descriptive poem in its contemplation of some small nook of human experience perforce contains a moral element that it is the poet’s job to evaluate. “Morality” in poetry, as Winters intends it, then, is a slippery beast. The morality of a poem is not confined to any ostensible ethical subject matter, but is found in the degree to which the poem adds to our accurate apprehension of experience.”

Accurate and true enough, but as I said in my last comment, there is more going on in Winters’s theory than the apprehension of experience. It is, most pertinently, the judging of experience, which is a moral act (in the very broad sense of that word “moral” as Winters used it). On a side note, Yezzi’s little jab at Winters in this passage is quite inaccurate. The jab is located in the parenthetical comment about Winters seldom missing an opportunity to fire back at his opponents. The fact is that Winters commented only occasionally on the vilifications of his detractors. For example, Winters never offered a single comment in print about Stanley Edgar Hyman’s sharp dismissal of his work in 1947’s popular overview of American literary criticism, The Armed Vision. There are dozens of other examples of disapproving essays that Winters ignored. But what problem is there that on occasion he did defend his ideas, as most scholars and professors do from time to time? Doesn’t everyone have a right and sometimes a duty to do so? I don’t have any idea why this misperception of Winters persists, but Yezzi should not have contributed to its longer life.

7.

Yezzi makes several mistakes in his comments on Winters and English Renaissance poetry: “The best section from this book [Forms of Discovery, 1967], perhaps Winters’s greatest single essay, began as a piece on sixteenth-century verse for Poetry and was expanded to chapter length and retitled 'Aspects of the Short Poem in the English Renaissance.' Save the 'post-Symbolist' poetry of Wallace Stevens, which Winters deems the most versatile in the language, the poems of the Renaissance were for Winters unequaled, the peak from which he perceived a long decline.”

The mistakes are made in the last sentence. As I mentioned in Part One, Winters never thought that Wallace Stevens was the only poet who wrote post-symbolist poetry, as Yezzi implies. Winters didn’t think that the poems of the Renaissance have not been equaled in any other time. Winters didn’t think the Renaissance was the one and only peak of English literature. These are subtle points, but important ones. Yezzi is wrong on each. Though maybe not his greatest essay (a good case could certainly be made for the opinion), “Aspects” might be his most influential essay. Its main tenets have been ably, if briefly, summarized at Wikipedia by Aaron Haspell; see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_of_Elizabethan_poetry

8.

Yezzi discusses the Renaissance Plain Style that Winters made famous, but makes a couple sly and serious errors in that discussion as well. He suggests that Winters did not know the best poems in the style, though the poems Yezzi mentions are exactly those that Winters championed. This yet again makes me wonder about Yezzi. Did he read Winters, or at least read him sympathetically or with understanding?

The problem is that Yezzi leaves several serious misimpressions about Winters and himself in one passage about Renaissance poetry. Let’s start with his comments on Winters’s admiration for the Plain Style: “With regard to Horace’s two-fold description of the purpose of poetry, edification and pleasure, Winters’s preference seems clear. Take as an example of the plain-style seriousness that Winters championed this sixteenth-century lyric by Googe, ‘Of Money’...”

This sounds innocent enough so far. Yezzi quotes the Googe poem and then comments: “While very good, this is not among the greatest poems of the plain style (better would be Jonson’s “To His Son” or Gascoigne’s “Woodmanship”), yet it is typical in certain appealing respects.” This sentence wrongly -- perhaps inadvertently -- implies two ideas. First, it implies that Winters considered this poem of Googe’s the greatest poem of the plain style. But, plainly, he did not consider it so -- and this is a serious error, for it slyly hints that Winters couldn’t quite recognize the best. Second, the sentence leaves the unmistakable impression that Yezzi himself is the one who has the sense to judge the better poems of the Plain Style, Jonson’s and Gascoigne’s, which, indeed, are much greater than Googe’s. But this is a self-aggrandizing misrepresentation of himself and Winters. For it was Winters who first championed Jonson’s and Gascoigne’s poems as among the greatest in our language, as well as who first brought the attention of the literary world to their importance -- and to the value and achievements of the Plain Style, for that matter. It was NOT David Yezzi. (The literary world has long resisted giving credit to Winters for a renewal of interest in the Renaissance Plain Style and, of course, for the rediscovery of many fine poems written in the movement). This small passage is so misleading that it calls into question everything Yezzi writes about Winters. Yet because Yezzi clearly wants people to read Winters (see Part One) and is mostly accurate about his more general ideas, I must conclude that the misimpressions he leaves here are probably inadvertent. Nonetheless, I believe that they must be corrected, as I have done.

9.

Yezzi thinks that Winters’s poetry has been more forgotten than his criticism, as he comments: “The black ox of melancholy that had trod on Winters’s critical writing finds in his poems its fullest and most affecting expression, yet his poetry, even more than his criticism, has fallen off the literary radar.”

This is hardly so. Winters’s poetry is still read by many and commented on much more frequently than the criticism. Two fine editions of the poetry have come out in the 2000s and been reviewed in major publications, such as the New York Times. Further, the poetry continues to be highly regarded by many prominent poets, even many who have no truck whatsoever with Winters’s literary theories. In contrast, the criticism has almost no importance at all, except among the few Wintersians who remain. Even most so-called members of the Stanford School, as Wintersians at times have been called, reject -- or at best neglect -- most of his critical tenets (Robert Pinsky for example). I applaud Yezzi for at least implying that Winters’s general ideas, if not Winters’s application of those ideas, are worth your time and worth adhering to.

+++

That’s it on David Yezzi’s 1997 piece on Winters. In this series I will next turn to Christopher Ricks’s chapter on allusion in Yvor Winters’s poetry in his 2002 book Allusion to the Poets.

Recent Writings on Yvor Winters: David Yezzi, New Criterion, 1997: Part One

This post, part one of two, is the beginning of a series concerning fairly recent writings (meaning within the last five to ten years) that directly deal with the criticism or poetry of Yvor Winters.

I launch the series with a look at an essay already 10 years old, by David Yezzi, one of the so-called New Formalists and poetry editor of the New Criterion. The essay, “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters,” came out in 1997 in the New Criterion. That’s a while back, I realize, but though the essay came out 10 years ago, it is still the most prominent essay written on Winters’s literary achievement in the past several decades. This year, it also has been reprinted in a book of essays from the New Criterion, Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts, edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer (Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2007), which, by the way, also contains several other essays loosely relevant to Yvor Winters’s thought. Furthermore, Yezzi’s essay is one of the most frequently accessed web pages about Winters on the Internet: it was the fifth highest page in a recent google search using the phrase “Yvor Winters,” and it has appeared first many times in the past in searches on his name. I believe, therefore, that it is worth discussing in some detail. The essay is still available online at:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/jun97/winters.htm

It might help to know a bit about David Yezzi. He is a poet and editor who serves as executive editor of The New Criterion. From 2001 to 2005, he directed the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I would classify him as one of the most prominent New Formalists. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, the Yale Review, the New Republic, and the Paris Review and his work as editor of poetry at the New Criterion has helped keep formalist poetry alive and well. His most recent collection of poetry is The Hidden Model (Northwestern University Press, 2003). He lives in New York City.

Now, let’s turn to the essay, “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters.” Overall, I opine that the piece comes to a rather tepid conclusion, that Yvor Winters took poetry tremendously seriously. Such is true, but the notion is a common one, even among poets and critics who revile Winters. Furthermore, seriousness (as depicted in the photo) is hardly unusual or surprising among poets, critics, or literature professors of the past 100 years and more, as I have discussed elsewhere on this blog. There is so much that is so much more important about Winters that taking his seriousness as his most important attribute or accomplishment appears, to me, trivial.

But Yezzi does imply that he thinks better of Winters’s poetry and literary theories than his explicit conclusion. Though he doesn’t quite come out and say so, Yezzi suggests quite strongly that he would like to see you read Winters, especially the poetry, and to consider Winters’s critical approach to poetry with care -- if also with a great deal of caution. As a Wintersian, for these implications I should be and am grateful.

Nonetheless, Yezzi also implies that though the bent of Winters’s criticism is noteworthy and valuable, generally speaking, he does not think the details of the criticism to be worth your time, especially Winters’s judgments of individual writers and individual poems and novels. For this I must object to the piece. Yezzi, in fact, offers only rather nebulous reasons why we should read Winters’s criticism other than that Winters was very serious about poetry, wrote stylish prose, and wanted to put logic and reason back on center stage in poetic composition and criticism. Such general praise, perhaps, might inspire a few readers to give Winters’s criticism a look. After pondering the matter for some time, such views are probably the best that I or other Wintersians could hope for at this point, so low is Winters’s reputation and so anemic his influence. Naturally, I think Yvor Winters’s work more valuable and eminent than Yezzi does, but any effort to get Winters more attention and higher regard has to start with something like Yezzi’s vague, guarded endorsement.

The essay follows the standard New Criterion format for its general overviews, which are a regular feature of the journal, one I much appreciate. These commendatory pieces provide an overview of the life and work, suggest that the subject of the essay is worth deeper study, but usually make no clear and final judgment of the whole career, except by implication. The NC uses this format for writers and thinkers that it wishes, generally, to approve and commend to its readers. The journal’s negative overviews are, on the contrary, always explicit in their rejection of the main ideas of the thinker or writer being surveyed.

Overall, in keeping with this commendation format, Yezzi starts out with a brisk overview of Winters’s reputation, which ranges from bad to lackluster to non-existent. Yezzi suggests, but does not state, that Winters’s reputation is probably mostly deserved. He implies that too many or most of Winters’s declarations that various obscure writers and poems are great are simply not credible. Next, Yezzi covers a few of Winters’s main critical tenets, including the issue of the morality of poetry. He handles these matters reasonably well, though he does make a few mistakes along the way (I will discuss one or two of them in part two of this post). He next summarizes a central aspect of Winters’s thought, his objections to the ideas of R.W. Emerson and the poetry of Hart Crane. In this section of the essay he restates some of the more common perceptions of Winter’s work. Here again, he is reasonably accurate, but not particularly enlightening. Nearing his conclusion, Yezzi turns to Winters’s poetry. By implication, he commends it quite strongly -- in fact, he praises it, again by implication, much more highly than the criticism. He discusses one fine poem in depth, “The Grave,” a somewhat unusual choice.

Now, what is my assessment of Yezzi’s overview? Surely, it is nice to see Winters commended to readers, but unsettling to see him admired for reasons that I consider, mostly, feeble and disparaged for old, unfounded charges. The chief problem is that Yezzi brings up but fails to counter several false charges commonly made against Winters. He repeats, for example, the common notion that he was “brutal” toward opponents in his writings and bizarre in the application of his critical theories, those judgments of individual works of literary art that raised such clouds of dust back in the day. The fact is that critical debates have been not often less argumentative than Winters throughout the development of modern literary criticism. By making no attempt to counter the almost universal party line on this and other matters, Yezzi implies that he sides, and that we should side, with that party line. Much worse, Yezzi parrots the tiresome claim against Winters that he was intellectually nepotistic in the way he supported and acclaimed the work of his students. But Yezzi makes no case for this stubborn, unjust denunciation of Winters, and I think he is entirely wrong on the matter (as I will discuss briefly in the section of miscellaneous notes in Part Two of this post).

When he gets to Hart Crane and what Crane meant to Winters’s theorizing, Yezzi is slightly off on certain points about the theory, but is passably accurate on Winters’s understanding of the moral nature of poetic statement. Yet in his discussion of Winters’s discoveries of good poets, Yezzi makes a couple more serious blunders, such as the notion that Winters thought that Wallace Stevens was the only poet whose work “equaled” that of Renaissance poets. This is such a bad mistake that it makes me wonder whether Yezzi bothered to read much of Winters in preparation for writing this piece. (Again, see Part Two for further comment on this matter.)

Yet clearly, Yezzi believes that the neglect Winters’s most general ideas and critical inclinations have endured is unfortunate, which implies that he thinks Winters is worth reading for the general tenor of his criticism, if not for the specifics. He has his disagreements with Winters, as we all do of everyone, but he thinks, as he says, in quite strong words, that what Winters committed himself to is of great usefulness and importance:

... as both a description of [poetry’s] enduring ills and a prescription for regaining much that has been lost to the lyric tradition in English, Winters’s bitter pill is our long-overlooked and strongest medicine.

Yezzi also implies that the general, abstract principles of Winters’s criticism are admirable and exemplary, as suggested in this earlier passage:

The critic’s detractors who feel that Winters, through his adherence to logic, has squelched emotion have lost the gist. The connotations inherent in language are expressive of emotion; to this extent emotion is a great part of the point. The “morality” of poetry as Winters understood it lay in how emotion was not
obliterated but managed. Emotion in excess of the motivating argument was contrary to the purpose of poetry, as it obscured the experience under consideration [quoting Winters]: “In so far as the rational statement is understandable and acceptable, and in so far as the feeling is properly motivated by the rational statement, the poem will be good.”

This reads as though Yezzi approves of the way Winters approaches literature, at least in a very general sense, if not of the application of his critical principles. I must say now that that’s good enough for me, coming as it does from a well-known formalist critic in a major publication, even though, as you might guess, I agree with Winters much more broadly, deeply, and specifically, and hope as well that his ideas will gain wider influence (I have no hope for their ascendancy in literary culture). We can presume, then, I believe, that what follows in Yezzi’s description of Winters’s criticism are the concepts that Yezzi considers good, if strong, medicine. And what follows is a discussion, mostly accurate, of Winters’s views on Romanticism, which were mostly negative, and on the morality of poetry, which were entirely positive. Was Yezzi giving a general stamp of approval for such views? It seems so, and I find the act heartening.

Further, Yezzi offers even stronger admiration for Winters’s poetry. I think he overplays a bit how much the poetry has been forgotten (see Part Two); it is actually, in my assessment, the criticism that has fallen into almost complete neglect. There are still some readers of the poetry, and I guess we can hope, however meagerly, that there will be a time when it will again become influential, for in Yezzi’s mind it is the poetry that stands at the summit of Winters’s achievement:

If Winters’s poems are forgotten, they have themselves to blame. They are extreme measures for poetry’s present ills. Likewise, while its often unorthodox judgments can be hard to swallow whole, Winter’s criticism reclaims for poetry a passionate control, and a spareness suited to our perennial concerns.

These words imply that Yezzi hopes, in the abstract, that more American poets will some day more often emulate, in the very widest sense, Winters’s brand of modern classicism. I share such hazy hopes. But the problem I see in these comments is that Yezzi’s phrases are imprecise generalizations. Yezzi doesn’t explain these comments in enough depth to know what they mean to him exactly, how he might apply them, what they might mean to how or why poems should be read or written. What kind of writing best exhibits “passionate control”? What sort of “spareness” should we foster in our poetry? Yezzi says earlier in the essay, “... it is just Winters’s brand of seriousness and his emphasis on logic and reason in poetry that contemporary verse sorely wants.” This implies Winters’s poetry is worth your time and study, and that it should have greater influence. I agree, in the abstract. But, of course, Yezzi does not specify in any way how he thinks logic and reason should be employed in poetry.

Yezzi then reaches his conclusion by commending Winters’s seriousness, which he thinks is the most admirable and compelling aspect of his literary career. I don’t know why people find seriousness so compelling. Is it a BIG DEAL that Yvor Winters was serious about literature? I have found that nearly every critic or author who writes about literature is serious about it. Plenty of modern critics and poets and novelists and writers, just about all in fact, take writing with great seriousness, as I have discussed elsewhere on this blog. Winters might be worth reading for this reason, but I hardly think it’s the single most important reason to read him. The final paragraph appears to be a summation of Yezzi’s views, and I quote it in full:

Winters’s poems never hesitate to swing for the outfield wall. They do everything poems these days ought not to do: they tackle subjects other than the self, grapple with universals, follow strict prosodic norms, command a bold rhetorical tone, eschew imagery for abstraction, favor edification over pleasure. They are, in Winters’s phrase, “Laurel, archaic, rude.” If Winters’s poems are forgotten, they have themselves to blame. They are extreme measures for poetry’s present ills. Likewise, while its often unorthodox judgments can be hard to swallow whole, Winter’s criticism reclaims for poetry a passionate control, and a spareness suited to our perennial concerns. After Winters, every line and every word may be held responsible to standards of emotional clarity. As with Rilke’s archaic torso, or Winters’s own “A Grave,” when each of today’s more fashionable, self-expressive, and wildly emotive poets looks on Winters’s work, there is but one heartfelt message: you must change your life.

Nothing previous in the essay has prepared us for that final clause: that the sort of poetry Winters wrote and advocated calls on us to change -- even demands that we change -- our lives through great literature. I agree, very generally speaking, but I don’t see how Yezzi reached this sudden and stirring finale. However fervent this comment appears, in context it feels tossed in, little better than inspiring nebulousness. And what exactly is Yezzi saying in that final paragraph as a whole? There is little that we can be sure of. The paragraph leaves no more than the impression that Winters’s brand of poetry has much to offer, provides a better model, and is serious business. I can’t quibble at all with such very general notions. But what each item in Yezzi’s litany of phrases, such as “favor edification” or “grapple with universals,” specifically mean to Yezzi remains tenuous indeed. We would have to look to his other writings to understand what he means by such misty phrases as “standards of emotional clarity,” “self-expressive,” or “wildly emotive.”

I must admit that when I first read Yezzi’s piece I was disappointed and a bit irritated. But now, after some years have passed and I have come to know Yezzi’s work a little better, I see that he was probably giving as much support to Winters’s ideas as he possibly could without damaging his own career. For the measure of general support he gives I am grateful. Certainly, Yezzi gives Winters a chance to win new adherents by trying to suggest that readers should take the time to read him.

In Part Two of this post, which I will post next week, I will go through a number of miscellaneous passages from Yezzi’s essay and comment upon them.