Are the Religious Strongly Drawn to Yvor Winters?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion of Thomas Hardy Continues, This Time at Length

A variety of essays and articles have been appearing on Thomas Hardy on the occasion of the publication of, now, two new biographies of the great poet and novelist, ten of whose poems Yvor Winters chose for the special Winters Canon of the greatest poems in English. I have already discussed two of these articles in recent posts, so I have been reluctant to post about any more of these recent reviews and essays on Hardy. But an essay in the New York Review of Books and a review in the New York Times Book Review are other matters.

The NYT Book Review piece is entitled “Wessex Man” By Brenda Wineapple. This concerns the second new Hardy biography to come out recently, Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life by Ralph Pite. Wineapple characterizes the Pite bio as almost wholly a study of repressed sexuality. The short review was published March 18, 2007, and can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/books/review/Wineapple.t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin

Earlier, the March 1, 2007, edition of the NYRB offered a long essay on Hardy “Return of the Master” by Tim Parks, which concerns that other new biography, Thomas Hardy, by Claire Tomalin. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy,” wrote a reviewer of the Victorian writer's novel Jude the Obscure (1895), “that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?” The reviewer was referring to the long and painful series of misfortunes that befall Jude, culminating in the moment when his eldest child is found to have hanged his younger brother and sister and himself. So harrowing is the scene that the reviewer's cry for some explanation is understandable. But in her new biography of Hardy, Claire Tomalin declines to offer one. “Neither Hardy nor anyone else,” she tells us, “has explained where his black view of life came from.” Most of his time, after all, was spent working at his desk.

Nice opening, eh? As you see as well, the issue raised therein is sharply pertinent to my discussions of Hardy’s alleged pessimism and atheism in a couple of recent posts. More than that, however, Hardy’s blackness raises a puzzling issue. I have discovered in my years of observing and reading that the comforts of atheism -- as well as the correlated beliefs that evil shows that god does not exist and that death is the utter end of individual human existence, the complete obliteration of the self -- often appeal most to those who have suffered least. Not without fail, of course, but most often. With frequency in the West, it is often among those living at very highest standards, in great relative prosperity and with steady, long, and well-remunerated leisure to pursue the study of abstruse metaphysical questions, that hostility toward belief because of the problem of evil, implacable atheism, and a callous, insolent, Spartan metaphysical materialism have flourished -- in lives lived in places where there always is plenty to eat, where stand convivially comfy homes in winter and lusciously cool homes in summer, where there are often two large, polished cars in large garages, plenty of nights at superb restaurants, and plenty of fine wine too, and from where people can travel, often on institutional budgets, as often as they have a hankering to take in some new sight.

This circumstance has often seemed strange to me, for does it not seem more likely that those who have very little, who seldom find enough food for themselves or their children, who cannot get variety in the diet, who live in near shacks without enough heat -- or air-conditioning at all -- who cannot afford to travel outside the narrow regions where they live and must walk wherever they must go; would it not be these people, faced as they are so much often than the prosperous with the specters of suffering and disease and loss and fear, would it not be these people who shake their fists at god, reject him, declare that he doesn’t exist because of the presence of evil, and cultivate despair with gusto, boil themselves in the acrimony and bracing cynicism that find atheism congenial? Among the least of us, the most ill-treated among us, among people who have truly suffered want and pain, among people who have lived through the problem of evil, among these we find robust religious belief, among these we find the hope of religious consolations, among these we find metaphysical ideas that offer more than the degradations of simple personal annihilation following hard upon real sufferings in life.

From the little I know of Thomas Hardy, he did not suffer a day in his life. He did have a modest upbringing, but did not suffer want. His mother, Jemima, is described by Claire Tomalin in her new biography as having been “powerful, rather than tender.” According to Tomalin, she had a “dark streak of gloom and anger.” Jemima was a literate, book-hungry servant in London before she had to marry Hardy’s father, who was a rural builder as conscientious as his wife with the raising of their smallish, clever boy, whom they educated in rather peculiar ways and then sent off in apprenticeship to an architect.

Yet Hardy spent many of his days calling out against God or the gods, often damning them if he admitted that they, he, or it exist. I admit that I do not feel far from him. For I too have suffered not one day in my blessed and bounteous American life -- I have felt want even less, I would guess, than Hardy a hundred years before in England. Yet religious belief is always tenuous in me as well. The problem of evil troubles me as well. In my case, though, contra Hardy, perhaps, I long for some god or gods to be there, above us all, waiting to welcome us, waiting to give to us all that we need when our time is done, to make up for what we have endured and lacked. Not actually for me. I long for this for those who have truly suffered. I could die and cease to exist myself and never have reason to hurl insults against the gods. I could even suffer before my death (though who desires to suffer?) and still have little reason to remonstrate with the rulers of this universe, if any exist. For I have lived richly every minute I have spent so far on this earth as an affluent middle-class American. But oh, there are so many millions upon millions who haven’t had any hope of enjoying what I have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy. Though the object of my faith is as dim as a faint star, unseen by any hopeful eye, I yet hope in a god or gods who will redeem what those who have suffered on earth have never seen and believe with their shallow hope.

As we study Hardy’s poetry and its many hints at and several outright declarations of atheism, it might be beneficial to keep such matters in mind. It might be helpful as well to reflect on whether our views of human existence, of the meaning of life, of the answers to the Big Questions, do not arise more from temperament (and, as I suggest adding, personal circumstance) than from rational argument, as William James discussed at the opening of Lecture I of his famed book Pragmatism:

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability.

I have only skimmed the piece in the NYRB, but it appears to be a strong overview of Hardy and Tomalin’s new biography. It is not available on line, but you can find it in your bookstore or library. The title of the essay itself suggests the agreement of the author with Yvor Winters’s lofty assessment of Hardy as one of the very greatest English-language poets ever to have lived. But there are great pleasures and moral profit in Hardy’s novels, as well. Just to whet the appetite, here’s a favorite passage of mine from Jude the Obscure. It comes early in the novel, when Jude Fawley feels a strange sort of compulsion to see again a handsome young woman named Arabella:

The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black mark on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past months.

It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,--the re-reading of his Greek Testament--his new one, with better type than his old copy, following Griesbach's text as amended by numerous correctors, and with variorum readings in the margin. He was proud of the book, having obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher, a thing he had never done before.

He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon's reading, under the quiet roof of his great-aunt's house as formerly, where he now slept only two nights a week. But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.

He would not go out to meet her, after all. He sat down, opened the book [for the study of Greek], and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands to his temples, began at the beginning:

HE KAINE DIATHEKE

Had he promised to call for her? Surely he had! She would wait indoors, poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him. There was a something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from promises. He ought not to break faith with her. Even though he had only Sundays and week-day evenings for reading he could afford one afternoon, seeing that other young men afforded so many. After to-day he would never probably see her again. Indeed, it would be impossible, considering what his plans were.

In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him--something which had nothing in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto. This seemed to care little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had nothing in common with his own except locality.

HE KAINE DIATHEKE was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude sprang up and across the room. Foreseeing such an event he had already arrayed himself in his best clothes. In three minutes he was out of the house and descending by the path across the wide vacant hollow of corn-ground which lay between the village and the isolated house of Arabella in the dip beyond the upland.

As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours, easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading after tea.

There is so much in that short passage, about will and mind and desire and courtship and sexuality. It’s packed with sharp insights -- as so much of Hardy is. It might be time for you to get back to his great work, poetry and fiction alike. I was lucky: it so happened that I was reading in Hardy’s poetry and starting out on Jude just before this wave of critical interest broke upon the release of the new biographies.

The Christian Faith of Janet Lewis Winters

I wrote about Yvor Winters’s stance toward the Christian faith a couple entries ago. Having continued to ponder that subject, I now wish to compare his position to that his wife, the fine poet and novelist Janet Lewis Winters, who wrote frequently of Christians and of Christianity throughout her long career. Late in her long life (she died in 1999 at the age of 99) she even offered an oratorio on the birth of Jesus, a poem which can be found in the two most recent editions of selected poems. Judging from various passages in her work, especially from her middle age, it appears quite certain that Mrs. Winters was a Christian of some sort.

To get an overview of this subject, let’s start with a poem entitled “December, 1972: Written for the Christmas Concert at Stanford Memorial Church.” In the following passage from this poem, Mrs. Winters speaks of Jesus as the “Holy Babe,” which seems to imply a much stronger adherence to a very high status for this ancient person than her husband ever seemed willing to credit:

Still in such darkness once was born
The very love that moves the stars;
Star of our night, first flower of spring,
The Holy Babe of Christmas morn;
Who is eternally reborn
For us in our remembering.

In this passage Mrs. Winters further suggests that Jesus of Nazareth was the very fulcrum of love itself, as implied in the second line. This seems hardly to be the position of a person who had simply a passing interest in Christianity or a belief in it as some kind of myth of ultimate reality (in the best sense) or metaphysical metaphor. The next poem, of unknown date, which I quote in full, speaks of Jesus as our guide:

“Carol for the Nativity”

At His birth as at His death
A fearful darkness held the earth,
But bright His star and radiant host
Proclaimed the joy and not the cost.

How dark the earth since that far day!
Of broken stone, and rough, the way!
Guide us, fair star, the hard way home.
Sweet heavenly Child, Thy kingdom come!

The language used here suggests strongly that Mrs. Winters recommended to us a belief in Jesus as the divine Lord of the whole world. Finally, I quote from that oratorio, “First Songs for Night of Miracles.” In this passage, Mary speaks to her husband:

Joseph gentle, Joseph kind,
I know that He [Jesus] will heal the blind,
Console the dying, raise the dead,
Give His life for sinful men,
Die Himself, yet live again,
So the angel promis-ed

Such words, even though placed in the mouth of an historic figure, are those that someone who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus and his substitutionary atonement would write. I have no certain knowledge at the time of this writing of Mrs. Winters’s faith, but judging from these passages, it appears evident that she was a conventional Christian believer. Nevertheless, she did write a number of strong poems about the meaning of life and the nature of death that bear no sure or obvious marks of Christian doctrines or ideas. In fact, there are many more of these poems than those that speak directly to her apparent faith in Jesus of Nazareth as Christ. In time, we shall study some of these not obviously Christian poems in greater detail, for several of them are very, very good, some possibly great, and highly deserving of our attention. In general, the work of Mrs. Winters will gradually get more attention on this blog. The time has come to put her into the picture, both because of her many similarities to and affinities with her husband and her differences from him.

In considering Mrs. Winters’s faith, we might wonder what sort of religious discussions husband and wife had during their several decades together in what appears to have been marital harmony in Palo Alto, California. Their situation reminds me of my own marriage in some ways. For my wife remains an Evangelical Christian, fully believing in and committed to her faith in every way, though I have come to disbelieve in the faith we once shared. We discuss our now varying beliefs from time to time, for we still go together to an Evangelical church and listen to orthodox Protestant sermons every Sunday, though we do not and cannot now agree on the metaphysical fundamentals. This is not unlike, too, a number of couples whom I have known whose beliefs have differed slightly or diverged widely. I suspect that Yvor Winters learned a great deal about life and faith from his wife -- and about humility, too. Little of it appears to have made its way into his public prose or poetry, or even into his letters. He seldom refers to matters of faith at all in the recent wide selection of letters published in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by Robert Barth. Nonetheless, there are a number of suggestive hints that keep popping up in his writings across his career that Christianity stayed on his mind and that he considered a case for its truth-claims seriously and with care. How much of this respectful attitude toward Christianity was due to Mrs. Winters’s influence I cannot say without further study.

As I said in my previous entry on this matter, the religious beliefs of Mr. and Mrs. Winters is a subject worthy of your study, and a good place to begin is with my Year with Yvor Winters. You can do this easily by searching on google with “Year with Yvor Winters” and some key word, such as “religion” or “Christianity.” You will get results showing the relevant passages I quote and comment on.

There will be lots more to come on Janet Lewis Winters in this blog in the months ahead.

A Winters Fragment on Christianity

‘Tis the season, as we say, and at this particular season we reflect on things Christian, whether we are Christian or not. I have noticed in my years of corresponding with people interested in the art and thought of Yvor Winters that Christians or one sort or another are often attracted to his work. I was once a Christian myself (American Protestant Evangelical) and was first drawn to Winters criticism, back when I was in college in the mid-1970s, because his literary theories and ideas seemed in some vague ways congenial to the Christian faith. I even wondered briefly whether Winters might actually be a Christian. It doesn’t take long reading him, however, to realize that however intellectually or emotionally credible he found the Christian faith, he never came close to converting. In my later college years, I wrote a brief poem, which it would take me a long time to dig out of some moldering box in the basement, about Winters waking up in the afterlife and finding out he was wrong about Christianity. Sad to say, I don’t remember what the poem said.

I have often wanted to study the matter of Winters’s religious beliefs more deeply, but haven’t yet taken the time. Winters made a number of comments in his essays and poems that appear, on the surface, to be congenial to Christian faith, such as his cautious admission to being a “theist” in a central essay, the “Foreword” to In Defense of Reason, a comment that I quote and briefly discuss in my book A Year with Yvor Winters on my web site (a link to which is provided on the front page of this blog). What the term “theism” meant to Winters, I learned in time, was quite different from what the modern American Evangelical Christian usually means by the term -- though his sketchy conception of theism does not appear to be wholly incompatible with some atypical conceptions of theism that some radically innovative Christian thinkers have adopted during the past 2000 years. Furthermore, Winters made a few mostly unelaborated declarations that he is an absolutist -- sometimes using a capital “A”. Since many Christians hold to a belief in absolute truth and, furthermore, assent to a variety of specific absolute beliefs, though of a different sort from Winters, it would be natural for a Christian to think that a “theistic absolutist,” as Winters claimed to be, has some affinity to himself. Lastly, Winters many times wrote of his evident agreement with the philosophical ideas (in contrast to the theological ideas, a reader in time finds out) of some great Christian thinkers of the past, particularly Thomas Aquinas and Acquinas’s brilliant 20th-century explicator, Etienne Gilson. Such comments would certainly draw the interest of a Christian.

Of course, the most important statement on God and ultimate reality Winters ever made is the great poem “To the Holy Spirit,” which I consider, perhaps, the greatest poem in the English language -- though I do not agree with its every idea about the “Holy Spirit” or ultimate reality. (Don’t worry: though I won’t discuss it here, in time we shall have opportunity to discuss Winters’s magnificent “Holy Spirit” on this blog.) But more than that great poem, the general topic of Christianity brings to mind the dense, elusive poetic fragment, just two iambic couplets, Winters wrote somewhat late in his life. It contains one of only two or three explicit references to Christian faith in Winters’s poetry:

A FRAGMENT

I cannot find my way to Nazareth.
I have had enough of this. Thy will is death,
And this unholy quiet is thy peace.
Thy will be done; and let discussion cease.

Much about Winters metaphysical and religious beliefs concerning Christianity, at least during his middle age, are disclosed in these four dry, simple lines. This is not a great poem, but it is an important one for those who wish to understand more fully Winters’s religious views. I find the poem chilling, with its stark declaration that some supernatural being’s will “is death” and that its offer of peace is constituted by an “unholy quiet,” which we can probably take to mean the simple annihilation of all life of any sort, physical, mental, or spiritual. (Ancillary questions to consider: 1) Does Winters mean that the supernatural being’s “primary” will, or perhaps its “only” will, is death? 2) Does “thy peace” allude to the angel’s proclamation of “peace on earth” at Christ’s nativity?) Yet these lines also contain ideas, indefinite as they are, that can seem congenial to believers in various specific religions, including Christianity, particularly the use of “thy,” which suggests that Winters believed in, however tentatively, a personal divine being of some sort (a very strange sort indeed, as you will find if you go on to study Winters in greater depth).

Notably, the second half of the last line sounds distinctly unlike Winters -- to wish that discussion would cease. As for me, I am most happy to see discussion on the nature of ultimate reality continue on right to my own last end, however frustrated I have been that all the discussion I have read and heard so far has failed, in my judgment, to lead to any firm rational conclusions that engender in me a sense of peaceful near-certainty -- or even semi-confidence. We can only can guess at the full motive behind Winters’s frustration as articulated in this final clause and the first clause of the second line. Yet from my many years of reading Winters, these two clauses appear to convey a sense of vexation that he could not find his way to Christian faith (“to Nazareth”). This suggests, as some of his prose comments also suggest, that he would have liked to have found, and perhaps even tried to find, a way to believe in the Christian faith. Having once been a Christian, I have felt similarly vexed in other ways, as one who though he had found Nazareth but discovered in time that the place is an inscrutable mystery in the Galilean desert.

That first line suggests to me, only very slightly, that Winters almost came to judge Christianity to be true, but that he couldn’t confirm it to his satisfaction. In my case, I once was satisfied of its truth but became unsatisfied and now no longer believe Christianity to be true and have left the faith. If I were to have written this poem, my first line would have read: “I know there is no Nazareth to find” (note that I keep to iambic pentameter). For me, who once believed and still is attracted to Christian belief in some of its aspects, that is just about as frustrating an experience as that which Winters seems to have had.