The Foil of the New Criticism

Last October on a blog called Samizdat, a fellow by the name of Robert Archambeau put out a small essay on Yvor Winters’s role in the heyday of the New Criticism in the mid-20th century. Archambeau implies with his title, “Beyond Close Reading and the G.I. Bill: A Secret History of the New Criticism,” that he has made some discovery about Winters, but what he says is less a discovery than a compelling reinterpretation of Winters’s place among the New Critics, if any place he has. The essay can be found at:

http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/beyond-close-reading-and-gi-bill.html

Archambeau’s central point, rather recounted than defended in detail, that Winters was someone whom the New Critics considered a heretic and thus, a critic from whom they could negatively distinguish their own positions, is probably correct as far as it goes. Archambeau’s idea doesn’t tell the whole story of the New Criticism or of Winters’s bit part in the movement, certainly, but it appears to be one piece of the story. Archambeau states convincingly that “the autonomous principles of literature” stood at the center of the movement called the New Criticism, and because Winters did not study literature or write his poems as though they were endeavors autonomous from all else in human life and thought, he was seen as a convenient foil to argue against.

The curious conviction of the New Critics that literature is completely autonomous, as you might guess, seems a little silly to me. Their discussions of the concept sound much like discussions of free will in philosophy. Though we might take a position of complete opposition to the concept of free will, it appears obvious, at least in my estimation, that no one can live according to any such belief to any degree for more than 10 seconds. Almost just so, though the New Critics wrote often in vindication of the comprehensive autonomy of literature, none of their writings employs the principle for more than an obligatory phrase or two. Because literature is the work of living human beings in human language and read by living human beings, it would appear, to write it and read it and think about it and talk about it forces literature and life together in snug, far-reaching, and incontrovertible ways.

Archambeau writes a bit about the New Critics’ objections to paraphrasing works of literary art. Across his writings, Winters had a good deal to say about the issue of “paraphrasable content,” though this issue seldom comes up for discussion in current literary debates. And not surprisingly. Postmodernism, in its plenteous forms, long ago won in a rout at the Agincourt of literary criticism and very few of the issues that the New Critics once haggled about still under discussion. Still, Archambeau gives us an insightful, if brief, discussion of the subject. Winters’s discussions of P-content are found mostly in the book In Defense of Reason, especially in the first section, which is composed of his first book, Primitivism and Decadence (which was an expansion and revision of Winters’s Stanford doctoral dissertation from the 1930s). I think the matter of P-content still has importance in and bearing on the study of literature, but the current consensus, however strong or weak it might be, has perhaps gone too far the other way in many respects. Speaking very generally, our current critics tend, under the influence of postmodernism and its endless spin-offs, to read too much for the paraphrase -- and believe in too many paraphrases. Paraphrases in current criticism are in fact endless, and the practice of spinning them out is something deconstruction has fostered in our thinking, in my view.

I must stop there for now on P-content. Much more could be said about the topic. But I hope you’ll offer some of your own ideas on such matters after reading Archambeau’s short piece, which is worth pondering.

Coming back to Winters’s connections to the New Criticism, critics down the years have often mentioned that Winters is classified with the New Critics, but I wonder whether many of them even believe this. For I have found very few who ever tried to defend the classification. Almost always, in my reading, critics have brought up Winters’s relationship to the New Critics in order to say that one barely exists. Archambeau appears to be in agreement with many others about Winters’s divergence from the New Critics and their emphasis upon the autonomy of poetry. Terry Comito in his fine study of Winters’s entire career, In Defense of Winters (1986), argues that Winters’s differences with the New Critics were radical and fundamental:

Unlike the other New Critics with whom he is rather misleadingly grouped [notice that Comito does what most do: mentions that Winters was part of the New Criticism in order to dismiss the idea],... Winters insisted again and again that literary language is not a mysterious “other,” apprehensible only under the somewhat tautological category of the “aesthetic.” On the contrary, it is a refinement and perfection of the language in which society conducts, or seeks to conduct, or fails to conduct, its everyday life. The poet’s language is not, therefore, exempt from the responsibilities incurred in our worldly projects. Indeed, for Winters, it is particularly accountable, and he spent much of his career calling poets and critics to account with a ferocity that seemed unbalanced or faintly ludicrous to those for whom literature remained an academic pursuit.

Comito is correct in this description of Winters’s views, and I believe, more importantly, that Winters was right about the nature of poetry and literature in general. (Yet Comito goes a little over the top. Though Comito claims it here, though others have made the similar claims, Winters was not often so “fierce” in his opposition to other views that he seemed “unbalanced.” Indeed, many another critic, even the New Critics who took on Winters [see Stanley Edgar Hyman in The Armed Vision] were just as “fierce” in opposition to him as he was in dissent from their theories and judgments. I’m not saying that Winters wasn’t forceful and hard, even rough and remorseless at times. But he didn’t achieve a different order of roughness or hardness than many another brawling New Critic. Even gentle Cleath Brooks took a few rough swipes at Winters in his essay on him. It’s time, I think, that we judged Winters less on reputation and more on what he actually wrote.) Nonetheless, Comito’s description of Winters’s view of poetry’s engagement with the world is accurate and highly important to the future of the art.

For as often as he has been mentioned as part of the movement, Winters discussed the New Criticism only a couple times in his published essays, and nowhere did he study that loose grouping of theorists in a comprehensive manner. One of his significant discussions of the New Critics came in a long essay that was republished in The Function of Criticism, “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature.” In that piece he briefly discussed R.S. Crane and Cleanth Brooks, as well as other New Critics (even more briefly). You will find the most sustained treatment of ideas that are associated with the New Criticism in the essay on John Crowe Ransom (pictured on the left) in The Anatomy of Nonsense, which was republished in In Defense of Reason. As a New Critic, Ransom had his own distinctive critical concepts, especially the one that poetry and literature possess tissues of irrelevance, the formal properties of writing, in which are found the essence of literature, as opposed to whatever superficial referential content the writer might have happened to write about. Winters attacked this idea and many of Ransom’s other ideas with great force in the essay, in the belief that such ideas finally render poetry and literature futile:

And poetry, according to Ransom's theories, is precisely contemptible. Aside from the doctrine of imitation, which is so confused that it will not stand criticism even within the terminology of Ransom's own thought, Ransom offers no principle of rightness in poetry. Poetry is an obscure form of self-indulgence, a search for excitement by ways that Ransom cannot define, in which we proceed from a limited and unsatisfactory rational understanding of our subject to as complete a confusion as we are able to achieve; it is a technique, not of completing rational understanding, but of destroying it and getting nothing in return. The poem is composed of rational understanding, which is there because we cannot quite get rid of it, but of as little as possible; of a conglomeration of irrelevancies of meaning; and of what Eliot would call, I suppose, an autotelic meter, which goes on its secret way, accumulating irrelevancies of its own and helping to force additional irrelevancies into the meaning.

This a fair example of Winters’s usual style, which has been for so long interpreted as ferocious. But what Winters does here, and what he does so often in his essays to his opponents, is push Ransom’s views, hard, to their rational limits, which I do not see as “fierce” in the least. How much do I agree with this forceful and cogent assessment of Ransom’s views? Quite a lot. But most of us have forgotten almost all of what was up for debate. Ransom stands higher than Winters, but neither stands high any longer in literary culture. Ransom’s ideas about the tissue of irrelevance have fallen by the wayside, if ever they had much influence. Ah... the grass of the field: here today, tomorrow pitched into the fire.

The New Criterion on Robert Bridges

Like the typical New Criterion overview, the purpose of its recent piece on Bridges, I surmise, is to encourage us to read the poetry of Robert Bridges, one of the supreme poets of the English language according to Yvor Winters. Such is not an unworthy objective, of course, but the short essay on Bridges in the NC’s 2007 poetry issue, the annual affair that I much appreciate, doesn’t offer us any strong motivation for the endeavor. Eric Ormsby, the author of the piece, recommends Bridges’s poetry for little more than that Bridges wrote in meter skillfully and musically.

The NC regularly puts out this kind of essay, and I also appreciate the results quite a bit: short, breezy overviews of the writings of novelists, poets, thinkers, philosophers who deserve our attention but are often overlooked. They are an excellent way to decide whether to give one’s attention to the work of someone we might have neglected. Yvor Winters was the subject of one such NC overview in 1997 (by the formalist poet-critic David Yezzi, an essay which I plan to study more closely some time soon). The April, 2007, essay, “Robert Bridges’s New Cadence” by Eric Ormsby, is posted online and can be found at:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/25/04/robert-bridgess-new-cadence/

Ormsby sets out, first, to portray Bridges as a “happy poet,” a view that is defensible, I suppose, but will hardly do much to inspire many to read him. The word “happy” in such a context connotes, nowadays, a touch of naïve silliness -- even screwiness. So it’s hard to see why Ormsby begins with a characterization of Bridges that might put most readers off (though perhaps he thinks this tactic will appeal to NC readers, an issue to which I cannot speak). I would say that Bridges wasn’t a particularly happy poet, but that the way he took life in his art, generally, could certainly be said to be joyful and enriching, despite his astute recognition of the many sorrows of life and death. Ormsby points out that Bridges’s work does portray and confront life’s grave pains and troubles, but that Bridges also expressed the consolations he discovered for them.

Following a quick summary of Bridges’s moderately wealthy and successful life as a writer, Ormsby offers a slightly deeper look at the reasons we might wish to take up Bridges’s poetry. By implication, Ormsby principally urges us to read Bridges because of his “textured rhythms.” Now, it is unquestioned that Bridges could write “formalist” poetry (as we now call what was once called, plainly and obviously, “poetry”) with great craft and a deep knowledge of metrics. Ormsby reviews a few of the issues surrounding Bridges’s use of and experiments with various unusual meters, in which he wrote with considerable literary beauty. But Ormsby leaves the impression that the principal benefit to Bridges’s work is the musicality of his writing. Ormsby even implies that the pleasures and profits of Bridges’s poetry are “almost entirely aural,” as he says of just one poem but leaves the impression that the comment applies to Bridges’s whole oeuvre. It’s certainly true that Bridges’s poetry reads very well. But the recommendation is oddly skewed. For though Bridges wrote plenty of skilled verse, his greatest poems -- some of great poems of the English language according to Winters -- are exemplary because they are complete works of art, uniting emotion with intellect and aptly and compellingly using all the resources of the language. The “aural” charms of Bridges, in his best work, are fused with the intellectual refinement of his ideas into artistic wholes. Ormsby seems to not recognize this. Even the philosophical ideas of one of the few poems he discusses, “Come so Quando,” a meditation on our profound sense of eternity, comes off in Ormsby’s piece as worth reading only for its poetic musicality.

Ormsby concludes his short essay by recommending a few beautiful poems to us and mentioning that Bridges also wrote finely wrought ballads and descriptive poems. But Ormsby nowhere gives any impression that Bridges’s ideas are of much importance or value. I will not deny that it is highly gratifying to see a national journal putting out a discussion of one of our great poets, as Wintersians judge Robert Bridges, but this appeal to read him is, to say the best, rather wanting. Finally, in passing, I have no idea what “new cadence” Ormsby is talking about. It seems that he was just looking for an eye-catching title.

A small selection of Bridges’s best work (though not all his great poems, a matter which we will come to in time as we review the Winters Canon poem by poem over the next year) can be found in John Fraser’s quasi-Wintersian anthology A New Book of Verse, which is linked on the front page of this blog. If you would like to study Bridges more deeply after reading some of his poetry available online, I recommend Winters in Forms of Discovery and Donald Stanford’s superb study of the poet’s entire oeuvre, In the Classic Mode, published in 1978. You might have difficulty finding that book, but I think most university libraries will still have it. Stanford, who died a couple years back, was a professor of English at LSU and co-editor of the Southern Review, Second Series, was probably the critic who most ably and resiliently carried on and built far and firmly upon the foundation of Yvor Winters’s critical theory. He was also the poet-critic whom John Fraser worked with in fashioning A New Book of Verse. Another work of Stanford’s worth chasing down is his essay “Classicism and the Modern Poet,” in which he classifies Bridges as a true classicist, in contradistinction to Eliot, Pound, and T.E. Hulme, who critics claimed to be classicists but who were a very flimsy variety, if they were any kind at all. This valuable Wintersian essay was published in the Southern Review, 1969, volume 2.

The two poems that Eric Ormsby pays closer attention to in his NC piece, “Nightingales” and “Come se Quando,” are two poems that Stanford praised quite highly in his study. Winters himself rated “Nightingales” highly, but had little to say in print about “Come so Quando.” Winters chose neither poem for the Winters Canon, though he listed “Nightingales” among Bridges’s better poems. Without question, Winters judged Bridges to be a great poet, one of the greatest of the 20th century. Winters scattered his varied comments on Bridges’s poetry, much of it very important to his overall critical theory, across his essays and letters. His most concentrated analyses of Bridges’s achievement are found in two essays: “Traditional Mastery,” a piece published in Hound and Horn in 1932 and reprinted in The Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Yvor Winters, and in Forms of Discovery, his last book, published in 1967. Both of these are available in most major academic libraries and occasionally in community libraries.

In the 1932 essay for the Hound and Horn, of which Winters was the western editor in the early 1930s, Winters cautioned that Bridges’s experiments in new or unusual meters have often been misunderstood, which should make us cautious of accepting as fact what Eric Ormsby has to say about those experiments (Winters’s first brief overview of Bridges was occasioned by the publication of The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges by Oxford University Press back in the 1930s):

Dr. Bridges’ meters have been so often and so fruitlessly discussed that I shall omit entirely to analyze them, though his important as a subtle and learned renovator of English meters is sufficiently great. It is my belief that he has been long enough patronized as a sugar-coated pill for those who wish to brush up on their metrics, as a minor manipulator of outworn graces, and that he should be recognized once and for all as the sole English rival of Hardy in nineteenth-century poetry, as, in all likelihood, considering his formal versatility, the range of his feeling, and the purity of his diction, a diction so free from any trace of personal idiosyncrasy, that a successful imitator of it could never be detected as an imitator but would appear only as that most unlikely of phenomena, a rival, that he should,, I say, in all likelihood, be recognized as the most valuable model of poetic style to appear since Dryden.

I don’t consider “Nightingales” to be among the great poems, but it’s a strong, sound, and valuable poem. Here it is. When we come around to Bridges’s poems in the Winters Canon, perhaps we shall come back to this one:

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,
And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams wherefrom
Ye learn your song:
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air
Bloom the year long!

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence, nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art.

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men
We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,
As night is withdrawn
From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day
Welcome the dawn.

Misblurbing: What Does “Great” Mean Anymore?

There was a fascinating, lighthearted essay on the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday in which a writer laments “misblurbing,” the practice of taking a reputable reviewer’s comments out of context to produce a fervent promotional statement for some book. The amusing piece has some bearing on the thought of Yvor Winters, I believe. For Winters tossed out lots of pithy raves for certain works, poems, novels, even works of history -- honors which sound, to our ears, not a little ridiculous. We have become jaded, and all too reasonably so, about panting praise and lofty paeans to books and authors and movies and art and just about everything else in the “entertainment” business.

Breathless blurbs, along with those sneaky misblurbs, have cheapened the concepts crtiics use in all kinds of artistic evaluation. If the words “great” or the phrase "best ever" can be applied to a banal horror movie or to a comic book or to a cheap wine or to a bland hotel or to a list of soups as quickly and easily as to Donne’s Holy Sonnets, what can the words “great” or "best" mean any longer? And if we have been shown time and again that advertising copy-editors have lifted words out of context to turn disapproval into puffed-up praise, how can we trust what anyone of any reputation might say about the excellence of any work of art? The short essay, “Literary Misblurbing” by NYT regular Henry Alford (April 29, 2007), can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/books/review/Alford.t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin

I bring the whole matter up because it is clear that Yvor Winters took his handling of praise much more seriously than most critics and media business managers. But he praised certain works using words and phrases that are now regularly deployed in commercial blurbing, and misblurbing as well. Yet he meant it when he said some work of art was “great” -- that is, that it was one of the best EVER of its kind, and the best are always few. For Winters, the word “great” was far from a smarmy commercial ploy.

And yet… you don’t even need to uncover obvious pandering and outright lying to feel uneasy about whom to trust, do you? For even the most highly regarded Mid-Cult critics regularly plant all sorts of flags of greatness on different works. Should you trust Edmund Wilson or T.S. Eliot on what’s great? Or perhaps F.R. Leavis, or Lionel Trilling, or John Crowe Ransom deserves your trust. Or perhaps a more recent critic. Terry Eagleton maybe. Or maybe you should rather go back to Samuel Johnson and trust him (who is no longer trusted by anyone). Each of these standard-bearers has declared different works to be great. Whose blurbs are you going to trust? Should you trust any of them?

So, standing under this heavy cloud of suspicion and disagreement, reading Winters’s “blurbs” can feel a little silly at times. You run across his pithy evaluations for works and authors you have never even heard of (which is not unlike many a renowned critic of the 20th century, I remind you). For example, in a footnote in Primitivism and Decadence, his first critical book published in 1937 (republished in In Defense of Reason in 1947), Winters called Elizabeth Daryush “the finest British poet since T. Sturge Moore.” Quite naturally, in light of the lurid practices of blurbing in our time, you will wonder first whether there is any chance the work of a woman whom you’ve never heard of can possibly be so good as that, but then you’ll wonder about Winters’s whole body of work as a critic when you realize that you don’t even know who this fellow Sturge Moore is or how any critic worth trusting could regard such an unknown as one of the greats. Later in this same book, while discussing syllabic meters, Winters comes to a poem (one, by the way, which he would talk about his entire career as one of the great poems of the Winters Canon), Daryush’s “Still-Life,” and says, “One imagines that the medium could not be used with greater beauty than in this poem; there is certainly nothing in the work of the American masters of free verse to surpass it, and there is little to equal it.” Talk about panting praise and breathless blurbs! Can you trust such a blurb? Should you even bother trying?

I believe you can and you should.

But the challenges of trusting Winters will keep coming as you read him. In the same book that he dropped his comments about Elizabeth Daryush, he loftily rhapsodized the obscure 18th-century English poet Charles Churchill:

…Churchill, like Gascoigne [yet another obscure poet Winters praised as great] at an earlier period and like Johnson in his own, was a great master obscured by history, that is, by the mummification, for purposes of immortal exhibition, of a current fashion…

There’s a blurb to make you wonder whether to continue. Still, I caution those new to Winters not to disdain his use of words of praise because advertisers have so often used blurbs to hoodwink us. We are just in being jaded and in always having strong suspicions about blurbs. But we must try to quiet the feeling of disdain and ridicule when reading Winters’s brisk evaluations. He should be taken seriously, despite how little meaning the common terms of critical praise have been left with in our sensibly cynical age.

A publication called Gelf magazine follows the inanity of blurbing, I have discovered. Here’s a recent example of the editors’ amusing work in this area:

http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/great_film_oh_except_the_lead_actor_cant_act.php

Winters has been the subject of plenty of misblurbing himself, though of the opposite kind. Many an ill-informed or hostile critic or professor has claimed that Winters hated the work of certain poets and poems far more than he did. It’s quite common in essays that scorn Winters as a critic to grossly overstate how much he disapproved of the poetry of Pound or Eliot or Stevens or many another. Maybe I should start listing these misreadings and errors. There are hundreds of them from the past 50 years. If Winters’s ideas are ever to receive a just hearing in our literary culture, someone must address the most serious misconceptions of his work.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 1 (Definition of 5-Star Ratings)

This is the first in what I hope will be a long series. There will perhaps more than 200 posts in this series concerning those poems Yvor Winters evaluated “great.” I have mentioned several times that one of my chief purposes for this blog is to begin a re-evaluation of what I call, somewhat playfully, the “Winters Canon,” on which I recently posted a basic definition.

Very briefly, my purpose in this series is to draw attention to and open discussion of the poems Winters believed to be the greatest in the English language by studying those poems, offering my evaluations of Winters’s evaluation of them, and offering a few personal reflections as a Wintersian reader.

For this series, I will use a star rating system. I have been writing, very slowly, a book of film criticism using a 5-star system for rating films that I think can be employed for this series on the poems in the Winters Canon.

Higher-brow critics don’t like star rating systems, but I think they’re helpful. (I will have to make a case for them some time.) For this series I will use the following star ratings. Only a poem with the highest rating of 5 stars do I think belongs in the Winters Canon, the very best of the best ever written.

5 stars: great, or canonic

(I mean “great” as Winters appeared to understand the term. I will have to post a definition of that tricky word some time soon.)

4 stars: superb

3 stars: very fine

2 stars: has redeeming facets

1 star: of limited value

0 stars: not a serious work of art – or, thus, everything else, from works of entertainment down to deeply flawed or totally worthless poems

To be clear but brief (for now), any ranking above 0 stars should be considered a poem worth knowing for some reason. Everything ranked 0 stars just isn’t worth taking seriously as a work of art.

So, with fear and trembling and using this star system, I begin with the first poem reprinted in Quest for Reality. It’s by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who lived from 1503 to 1542 and had a rather interesting life in the court of Henry VIII. Here is the poem:

Remembrance

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart how like you this."

It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION:

Why is this in Quest for Reality? It appears evident that Winters considered this a great poem. I believe that he would have rated it at 5 stars in the 5-star system I am employing in this series. He never discussed the content of the poem in his essays and never put it on one of those short lists of poems that he thought nearly perfect (though he did list it among the best of Wyatt, whom he mentioned as a “great” poet from time to time). Winters’s one extended discussion of the poem did not appear in print until the last year of his life. This comes in the opening essay of Forms of Discovery, in which Winters used a couple pages to study the meter of the poem. This discussion is quite educational, on poetic meter in general and on Winters’s methods in the study of metrics in particular.

Guessing from how he discussed other Wyatt poems and from his moral theory in general, I would opine that Winters thought that the FORM of this poem expressed a certain highly valuable attitude toward human experience, which, throughout his career, Winters defended and wished to see fostered and advanced. This attitude is one of moral seriousness and rational control. But, that said, I must add that Winters spent no time considering the themes of this particular poem or its bearing on life. No Wintersian has commented extensively on the poem that I know of, nor offered any reconsideration of Winters’s judgment of it as one of the greatest poems of the language. John Fraser includes the poem in his New Book of Verse -- however we might interpret the purpose or meaning of that quasi-Wintersian anthology.

As a significant examination of a human experience, the sexual inconstancy of women, the poem seems to turn on the final two lines, which elevate its purposes into the realm of morality. Winters, I would guess (for he never discussed the poem’s themes, as I say), saw in these lines that the poet was taking a certain moral stance toward the issue at hand, a kind of stance that Winters fervently admired and approved (and which I admire, too). Most professors whom I have read on this poem, however, generally treat it as a historical document, a way into the ways and means of courtship in the English court at a certain time in history, the reign of Henry VIII. Seldom have critics, in what I have read, treated the poem as having something to say to us today, as Winters thought (as I would again have to guess). This approach to the poem as history is much like that described in a recent essay in The American Scholar on postmodern critics (such as Derrida), whom Louis Menand called the “greatest generation” because they insist on “difference”:

The insistence on difference, on refusing to see similarities, inhibits dialogue and the chance to learn from, understand, and appreciate others. This is particularly disturbing in the case of art and literary studies. Menand writes that “a 19th-century novel is a report on the 19th century; it is not an advice manual for life out here on the 21st-century street.” So all those who have read Pride and Prejudice in the 20th century and since and felt that it showed something about the dangers of first impressions and the error of equating social ease with merit and social stiffness with coldness or disdain have been wrong? (from “Getting it All Wrong: Bioculture Critiques Cultural Critique,” by Brian Boyd, The American Scholar)

Winters, as you might guess if you’ve been reading this blog, insisted that the finest poetry and literature do and should serve as some sort of “manual for life.” But the service is as much in the way a work of literary art is written, its form, as in what it overtly said, its content, that Winters, I believe, saw a poetic “discourse” like Wyatt’s having meaning for us today, giving us, in this case, valuable insights into the meaning of courtship and its moral implications.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION:

I wish to start my assessment of Winters’s assessment of this poem by noting that it has long been a frequent choice by editors of the most well-known, standard anthologies that have covered English Renaissance poetry. Indeed, it is ranked as the 39th “best” or “most important” poem as listed and reprinted in The Top 500 Poems, that entertaining and enlightening anthology that ranked poems by how frequently they have been anthologized. The poem is often discussed in scholarly journals, and there are many web essays, short and long, that offer studies of it -- some of them with great intensity. Nearly all these studies of this poem rather concern its content, its themes, than its form, metrical or otherwise.

All that said, I find it to be a very well executed, but minor poem. I would rate it at 4 stars, or superb. Thus, to be clear, I don’t believe it belongs among the greats of the Winters Canon, though certainly it is a very skillful and strong poem that is worth knowing well. Further, it is well worth imitating, and I would certainly like to see much more poetry written like it in structure and style. But Wyatt, to my mind, seems to have delighted in contemplating his subject matter, at times, without sufficient seriousness or depth. Sexual politics and the morality of courtship are fundamental issues of human experience, but Wyatt gives us no truly profound insight into these matters in this poem, as finely executed as it is. The poem, in my judgment, offers a vague, incomplete, and perhaps unacceptable understanding of the inconstancy of women. For the poem seems not to recognize the hypocrisy of its speaker, which I consider a serious defect. Still, the poem’s emphasis on the moral issues of sexuality, though hardly new even 400 years ago, is moderately enlightening and much needed in every age and ever society. As I say, I consider the poem very well worth knowing.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

Let me say that any personal reflections from my readers are most appreciated, even if such readers are loath to offer an evaluation of Winters’s evaluations.

Wyatt’s “Remembrance” has never done much for me, I must admit. It hasn’t stuck in my mind, a work of art that I keep coming back to and pondering over and again as I have encountered new situations in life concerning the morals of courtship or the politics of sexuality. In reflecting upon the poem’s lack of importance in my life, I searched back, in my mind, through all my reading to find a poem or writing that has stuck with me much more powerfully than this poem. What I recalled was a passage from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, one also about, in general, the morality of sex. I first read this bestselling book of Christian apologetics when I was in high school in the early 1970s. I was engaged to a Baptist girl and considering becoming a Christian under her influence. I would soon be “born again” at a revival at the Masonic Temple in Detroit some months later. I have long since converted away from Christianity, but I have pondered Lewis’s discussion of sex in Mere Christianity, and its implications to wider issues in morality, for more than 30 years, in contrast to how infrequently I have thought of Wyatt’s “Remembrance,” despite having read the poem several dozen times. I have taken one particularly important section of Lewis’s discussion that I keep pondering for decades and broken up Lewis’s prose into lines to compare it to Wyatt’s exploration of sexual politics. Why? As an experiment.

Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us,
And all the contemporary propaganda for lust,
Combine to make us feel that
The desires we are resisting
Are so 'natural', so 'healthy', and so reasonable,
That it is almost perverse and abnormal
To resist them. Poster after poster,
Film after film, novel after novel,
Associate the idea of sexual indulgence
With the ideas of health, normality, youth,
Frankness, and good humour. Now this association
Is a lie.

Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth -–
The truth that sex in itself (apart from
The excesses and obsessions that have grown round it)
Is 'normal' and 'healthy', and all the rest of it.
The lie consists in the suggestion
that any sexual act to which you are tempted
At the moment is also healthy and normal.

Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart
From Christianity, must be nonsense.
Surrender to all our desires obviously
Leads to impotence, disease, jealousies,
Lies, concealment, and everything that is
The reverse of health, good humour, and frankness.
For any happiness, even in this world,
Quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary;
So the claim made by every desire, when it is strong,
To be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.

Every sane and civilised man must have
Some set of principles by which he chooses
To reject some of his desires and to permit others.
One man does this on Christian principles,
Another on hygienic principles,
Another on sociological principles.
The real conflict is not between Christianity
And 'nature', but between Christian principles
And other principles in the control of 'nature'.
For 'nature' (in the sense of natural desire)
All have to be controlled anyway, unless you
Are going to ruin your whole life.

Note, first, that this passage of prose broken into lines doesn’t sound much different from or ANY less poetic than tens of thousands of published poems written in free verse over the past 50 years. (The sparkling, chatty prose of contemporary poetry is becoming an ever stronger convention. Follow "Poetry Daily" at http://www.poems.com/ for a month if you doubt me.) Second, despite the evident poetic skill of Wyatt’s poem, I consider my transformation of Lewis’s prose into a prosetic musing the more important, more worthwhile, “poem” -- though poem it is not, of course, and regardless of whether I agree directly or fully with Lewis’s ideas or not. The Lewis prosetry tackles the subject matter of sexual politics with considerable literary skill and reason; it offers steady, rational, and deep insight into the subject matter; and the clear picture of what Lewis is telling us has wide and profound implications in many areas of life, in my judgment. I cannot say the same of Wyatt’s poem, despite the undoubted brilliance of its execution. “Remembrance” is a strong poem, in my judgment, as I wrote above, but it has never done much for me. If skillfulness is the reason we must rank it great, then what is greatness for? This is a question we will keep trying to answer more and more deeply as our discussion of the Winters Canon continues over hundreds of posts to come.

Of course, in response to this post and every other in the series, I am interested in every reader’s evaluation of the particular poem under discussion and highly interested in personal reflections on each individual poem: how it is important in a reader’s life, what other poems or writings on the same topic have been more important, etc.

We will be with Wyatt for some time in this series, since Winters judged more than a half dozen of his poems to be great.

A New Edith Wharton Biography

There was a time -- though few can recall it -- when Yvor Winters stood almost alone in his exceedingly high admiration for the fiction and prose of Edith Wharton. In his once well-known, and oft-derided, essay on Henry James, “Maule’s Well or Henry James and the Relation of Morals to Manners” (reprinted in In Defense of Reason, 1947), Winters declared, somewhat notoriously, that Wharton’s Age of Innocence was the single fullest flowering of the Jamesian art:

It is likely that one can find an isolated novel here and there to surpass any by James; one might argue with considerable reason that The Age of Innocence, partly because it corrects, as I have shown, a serious defect in the Jamesian conception of the novel, partly because of its finer prose, is the finest single flower of the Jamesian art; one which James fertilized but would have been unable to bring to maturity.

Winters once received plenty of scorn, even some critical abuse, for that judgment in the 1940s and 50s, but the critical winds took a turn in about the 1980s, when critics started reading Wharton with greater appreciation and started writing many more scholarly monographs on her work, and publishing houses began issuing her novels in new editions with scholarly and appreciative prefaces. (I should offer a note of clarification that Winters might have considered Henry James the greatest novelist in English when considering his entire oeuvre, but that Wharton wrote a few novels that are better executed than any single novel James wrote. Exactly how Winters judged James against Wharton is a minor matter that could use some study.) Winters’s various brief comments about Wharton’s art (I deeply wish he had written on her more) -- contained in the James essay, the essay on Melville (in which he compares her style to the prose of Moby Dick), and the essay on Fenimore Cooper (as part of Winters’s discussion of the social novel) -- are fascinating reading that I hope we find occasion to discuss in detail some time.

I’ve tracked the changing winds on Wharton, because, on Winters’s recommendation, I took up Wharton and read many of her novels and short stories back in the 1970s, when few critics paid her any attention as one of the great fictionists. It’s hard to say how highly she is judged in the Standard Canon, but she is certainly very popular among Mid-Cult, educated readers who still fancy reading novels of great intelligence and superior narrative craft. One indication of the commercial favor her work has discovered might be the number of movies adapted from her books. Though far behind James and Austen in this regard, filmmakers have recently made up for some of the lost time of Wharton’s long obscurity, which appears somewhat similar to that of Herman Melville (it’s hard to remember nowadays that Melville ever rested in obscurity).

A major biography and several intensive studies were published a couple decades ago about Wharton’s life and work, but a new set of life studies has come into view. A couple months ago, Elaine Showalter reviewed Hermione Lee's new biography in the Guardian (U.K.). The biography is entitled Edith Wharton and Showalter’s review can be found at:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2009432,00.html

Lee’s book is important, I think, because of the attention she pays to Custom of the Country, which Lee opines as Wharton’s best novel. I tend to agree that Custom, which Yvor Winters also judged as one of Wharton’s best, might indeed be the finest in Wharton and one of the greatest novels in the English language. I’ll come back to this matter in a moment.

Another review of Lee’s new biography came out a short time later in the Times Literary Supplement (U.K.), “Edith Wharton's Passionate Realism,” by Michael Gorra, which can be found at:

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2588653,00.html

Finally, among those reviews I think deserve mention, Louis Auchincloss put out a review of Lee’s biography in the New York Sun, which can be found at:

http://www.nysun.com/article/51323

All these short reviews are worth reading. They concentrate on the life, of course, but the message seems clear that Lee’s biography achieves quite a bit as a work of criticism.

I would like to come back briefly to Custom of the Country, defended by Lee as Wharton’s best work of fiction. As I say, Winters almost agreed, rating this novel, it appears, second only to The Age of Innocence. Though Innocence is certainly one of the greatest novels of all time, I tend to consider Custom the greater novel because of its treatment of the theme of evil. The novel concerns a woman named Undine Sprague, whose story begins when she has newly arrived in New York in the late 19th century. Upon her family’s coming into money through great business success in the Midwest, Undine becomes ambitious for status and tries to use her riches to buy social position in the tightly controlled society of the Eastern upper crust. She decides to further her cause through a socially advantageous marriage and chooses a young man named Ralph Marvell, who has splendid social connections but little money. Undine gets a measure of status from the marriage to Marvell, but after time passes and she makes a visit to Europe, she realizes that there are still more highly prized social positions to which she may aspire. Despite having a child by him, she divorces Ralph, with tragic results, to marry a Frenchman with a title of “true” nobility.

Promptly, however, Undine finds the eminence she achieves as the wife of a European nobleman less rewarding than she had presumed. For Undine the grass is always greener. With consummate skill in prose style and narrative structure, Wharton tells the story of this beautiful young woman who always wants something she believes is better than she already possesses and who uses her charms and various morally questionable means to get what she wants regardless of whom she hurts. It is a chilling and powerful cautionary tale of deep themes that reach far beyond the narrow confines of the upper-crust societies that it takes place within.

Rather than offer one of the brilliant and powerfully conclusive passages at the close of Custom of the Country, I want to give you one longer passage from this great novel to draw your attention to the achievement of Wharton’s fiction and to interest you in her work. Let’s consider a seemingly minor passage that feels representative to me of the excellence of Wharton’s prose and the skillfulness of her narrative control. This passage comes at about mid-novel, a point in the story when Undine is beginning to have her doubts about what her first marriage to Ralph Marvell can accomplish for her:

For a long time now feminine nearness had come to mean to him [Ralph], not this relief from tension, but the ever-renewed dread of small daily deceptions, evasions, subterfuges. The change had come gradually, marked by one disillusionment after another; but there had been one moment that formed the point beyond which there was no returning. It was the moment, a month or two before his boy's birth, when, glancing over a batch of belated Paris bills, he had come on one from the jeweller he had once found in private conference with Undine. The bill was not large, but two of its items stood out sharply. "Resetting pearl and diamond pendant. Resetting sapphire and diamond ring." The pearl and diamond pendant was his mother's wedding present; the ring was the one he had given Undine on their engagement. That they were both family relics, kept unchanged through several generations, scarcely mattered to him at the time: he felt only the stab of his wife's deception. She had assured him in Paris that she had not had her jewels reset. He had noticed, soon after their return to New York, that she had left off her engagement-ring; but the others were soon discarded also, and in answer to his question she had told him that, in her ailing state, rings "worried" her. Now he saw she had deceived him, and, forgetting everything else, he went to her, bill in hand. Her tears and distress filled him with immediate contrition. Was this a time to torment her about trifles? His anger seemed to cause her actual physical fear, and at the sight he abased himself in entreaties for forgiveness. When the scene ended she had pardoned him, and the reset ring was on her finger...

Soon afterward, the birth of the boy seemed to wipe out these humiliating memories; yet Marvell found in time that they were not effaced, but only momentarily crowded out of sight. In reality, the incident had a meaning out of proportion to its apparent seriousness, for it put in his hand a clue to a new side of his wife's character. He no longer minded her having lied about the jeweller; what pained him was that she had been unconscious of the wound she inflicted in destroying the identity of the jewels. He saw that, even after their explanation, she still supposed he was angry only because she had deceived him; and the discovery that she was completely unconscious of states of feeling on which so much of his inner life depended marked a new stage in their relation. He was not thinking of all this as he sat beside Clare Van Degen; but it was part of the chronic disquietude which made him more alive to his cousin's sympathy, her shy unspoken understanding. After all, he and she were of the same blood and had the same traditions. She was light and frivolous, without strength of will or depth of purpose; but she had the frankness of her foibles, and she would never have lied to him or traded on his tenderness.

Now, this novel is a beautifully managed affair. These paragraphs come after chapters of careful and expert preparation, but the clarity of the prose and the skillfulness of the writing here brings out the central themes to sharp, telling effect. This is a style that can carry a great weight of intelligence and insight. Winters, I believe, saw in Wharton’s narrative style the sort of expository adroitness that he thought was increasingly lacking in so much modern fiction, but which had been a central literary tool in fiction from its beginnings, such as we find, for example, in the work of two of its early masters, Cervantes and Fielding. Wharton shows supreme skill in illuminating out her deep themes and the profound implications of what is being told to us at this point in the narrative. To my mind, this sort of approach is what makes for total and complete excellence in fiction. It is a style that novelists should be imitating and then building out from to make true and strong progress in the development of the novel in our time. The extreme emphasis upon showing over telling -- that hackneyed proverb of our literary era -- has done much to damage and weaken the novels written in recent decades. It is time to get back to employing telling and showing together, with what a writer tells holding sway, directing and deepening the thematic energies of what a writer shows.

A full Wintersian reassessment of the art of Edith Wharton is long overdue. No Wintersian I know of has bothered to study Winters’s judgment of her work or to study her work more deeply from a Wintersian perspective -- that is, using the general literary principles Winters defended. Further, no critic or writer I know of has even been brave enough to side in print with Winters in his evaluation of Wharton as one of the greatest fictionists, as I do. The only general reconsideration of the book of essays that contains Winters’s evaluation of Wharton, an essay by historian David Levin entitled “A Historical Reconsideration of Maule’s Curse” (Southern Review, 1981), does not even mention Wharton. Strange, very strange.

A New Philosophy Book on the Subject of Beauty

I am going to have to start putting up teasers about various articles I can’t find time to study in detail right away. This teaser concerns a book review that I thought might be worth a close reading but have been unable to find the time yet to consider closely. The book is a non-technical work on the subject of beauty, or aesthetics, by a philosopher who has written some moderately popular books for general audiences, Alexander Nehamas. It’s suggestively, puzzlingly entitled Only a Promise of Happiness. A short review came out in the New York Sun in its February 16, 2007 edition. The brief but insightful piece, entitled “The Uncertainty Principle of Beauty” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, whom I know nothing about, is full of suggestive ideas about the philosophy of beauty. It can be found at:

http://www.nysun.com/article/48781

The reviewer, Lewis-Kraus, writes that though beauty has been a chief concern of philosophy from Plato to Kant, the subject has nowadays been almost entirely dropped as a philosophical topic and is now left to fine arts and English departments. I don’t think this is quite so, since I know of major philosophy departments that offer courses in aesthetics and of a few philosophy journals devoted to the topic. But it does seem roughly true that the heavyweight philosophers of our times seldom bother with beauty. With his new book, Nehemas tries to tow the subject back into the mainstream of philosophy. Since Nehamas writes general philosophy, concerning what he calls "the art of living," his interest in the project makes some sense.

Lewis-Kraus pithily explains that Nehamas reaches back in this book to Plato for his concept of beauty’s being inseparable from eros, or desire. That concept has been lost, according to Nehamas, because Kant and other major philosophers of the past 300 years or so began to mistrust “passion" -- for its sordidness, its fickleness, the emotional imbalances it brings about. According to Nehamas, Kant’s ideas damaged the study of beauty because it tried to replace passion with a model of “disinterested contemplation.”

Now, you might be wondering, how might this book and its central concept bear upon the work of Yvor Winters? To put the matter briefly, though he had little to say about aesthetic theory in his writings, Winters, as so many literary critics have being doing over hundreds of years, bandied about the words “beautiful” and its near synonyms throughout his career without ever clearly defining those terms in any way or to any depth -- also as so many critics have been doing. In particular, Winters kept referring to certain passages of poems and prose, often oddly short passages -- sometimes no more than a line or a even a phrase (a practice for which he was often ridiculed) -- as possessing exceptional beauty, as well as certain whole works as beautiful, without circumscribing what beauty meant to him or should mean to us all. This is an obvious, even a vexing deficiency in Winters’s criticism, an area in which a Wintersian could do some very good work in keeping Winters’s critical theory alive and developing it for a new generation. It would seem, speaking offhandedly, that Yvor Winters would side with Kant on this issue, at least as Lewis-Kraus portrays Nehamas’s take on it. I intend to give the book some study. Though I cannot say I know Nehamas’s thought on beauty well enough to make any final judgment, I tend to think that theories of beauty like Nehamas’s, as Lewis-Kraus characterizes it, continue to do a lot of damage in literature and all the arts. I hope to get to this subject some time soon.

The New Criterion’s 2007 Poetry Issue: A Feast for Wintersians

In bookstores is the latest poetry issue of the New Criterion, which has been putting together an annual issue focused on poetry for the past several years. It is quite an unusual series. No other general-audience national journal of this kind or status has been putting out an annual issue focused on poetry in the past 50 years or more. And what’s even better is that the NC’s editors are clearly committed to a brand of neo-classicism (a bit soft at times, it is true) and the movement in poetry that has been called by many the “New Formalism,” which is hardly new any longer, being some 60 years old. As a Wintersian I applaud the efforts of the NC highly. I have purchased the issue, which appears to be excellent as a whole, but haven’t read it all yet. A few of its essays are accessible online for free.

(I must pause a moment to add, just to be keep anyone from jumping to conclusions without warrant, that I am NOT a political conservative, in general. The NC’s coverage of the arts and humanities in general often gets short shrift because of its general political conservatism, which I find often worthwhile, but I disagree strongly that literary conservatism [if we can classify neo-classicism as such] implies or requires political conservatism. Notably, this a significant issue in the study of Yvor Winters that I should address on this blog some time, since critics and readers have often assumed that Winters, because of his literary views, was some sort of fascist -- which he MOST surely was not.)

What’s in the issue? Dan Brown, a poet I do not know, offers an essay on those two Robert Frost favorites "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I’ll be interested in his take on these redoubtable, beloved poems, neither of which scored all that highly on Yvor Winters’s evaluative scorecard (they have never scored highly on mine, either). But I’m looking forward to what an NC writer might have to say about them. It appears at a glance that Brown assumes them to be two of our finest poems. We shall see whether he is able to nudge me closer to agreeing. I should note that the editor George Panichas of the conservative journal Modern Age, many years ago, took on Winters’s superb but somewhat disapproving essay on Frost, written in the late 1940s, which is another subject I want to come back at some point. Meantime, you can find a bit more on Winters’s views on Frost on my Yvor Winters Web Site. Search on google by typing in “Year with Yvor Winters” in quotation marks with some key words, such as “Robert Frost.” You will get results showing the relevant passages I quoted and commented on for my book.

Second, Eric Ormsby has an essay on Robert Bridges, “Robert Bridges's New Cadence,” which I’m certainly looking forward to. It’s the first piece on Bridges in a major publication in long, long time. The essay is available online at the NC web site. Winters considered some of Bridges’s work to be great, however much he has been scorned by most modern critics and poets -- and I agree with Winters with all my critical heart. Bridges’s work deserves careful study and should have been serving as one of the foundation stones of our poetic future. Sadly, though, it has long lain buried in some rubble heap. Winters never stopped championing this great poet’s work, and nor will I, whenever I get the chance, which I hope will come often on this blog. Set Yeats aside; set Eliot aside, too. Give me Bridges.

Further on, the readable and sharp poet X.J. Kennedy, sometime New Formalist, offers yet another essay on a poet whom Winters considered great, “The Enduring Specter of E. A. Robinson,” on the underappreciated American poet about whom a new biography recently came out. I have discussed Robinson briefly on this blog in these opening months, and I look forward to carefully examining Kennedy’s overview of Robinson’s superior work. Kennedy, it seems, offers one of Robinson’s more obscure poems as one of his best. I’ll be particularly interested in that matter.

On tap as well is yet another essay by the NC poetry editor David Yezzi, another piece that I look forward to reading: “The Amis Country,” which concerns the fiction and poetry of Kingsley Amis. Amis was a sometime formalist who deserves some attention, though his work cannot stand among the greats. But I am willing to give his poetry and fiction another good look. Yezzi is a fine writer whom I pay attention to. Even though he is no Wintersian, he has certainly profited from his study of Winters in a number of significant ways.

Included in this issue is another essay by John Simon, who has made a few appearances in the NC of late on poetry. After decades of reviewing plays and films for New York magazine and the National Review, Simon, in retirement, has been focusing on new subjects. I have always deeply appreciated Simon’s film criticism, as well as his work in defending good usage and standard formal grammar. He is my most trusted film critic, though I wouldn’t say there is any Wintersian bent to his work in film or literature. His piece is on German poetry: “The Three Ms of German Poetry,” which is about an anthology of 20th-century German poetry edited by Michael Hofmann.

Finally, the issue has a nice sampling of some strong poetry, including “Untitled” by Adam Kirsch, “Domestic Cappadocia” by Ben Downing, “Deus ex machina” by A.E. Stallings, and “Summer in the high purpose of clouds” by William Logan. I found all these pieces worth reading. All are available online.

Whether you are conservative or liberal in politics should not matter. I hope you will take my recommendation and follow the New Criterion on poetry. There is nothing else like its work in this field in American culture today.

Certainly, I will come around on this blog soon to the NC’s new essays on Frost’s famous poems, on Robinson, and most importantly on Robert Bridges. I might have something to say about the other pertinent essays as well.

Basic Definitions: “Winters Canon”

I’ve used this term repeatedly in this blog without trying to define it fully. Let me try to state my definition in a couple hundred words or less:

Yvor Winters believed that evaluation -- ascertaining exactly which works of literature are better and best, and making clear, sound cases for those judgments -- stands at the center of criticism, as he often argued or clearly implied. In keeping with this central tenet of his critical theory, he often made short lists of poems he judged as “great,” those poems which stand apart for paramount excellence. Though he never defined the word “great,” the evidence shows, I believe, that he reserved the term only for works of literary art that stand at the summit of achievement, works, very few in number, which should serve as models for writers and as the supreme standard of critical evaluation. After claiming that dozens of poems were great during his career, in his final years he wrote a book on the history of English poetry (Forms of Discovery, published in 1967) according to its best poems. These poems were gathered in a companion anthology, Quest for Reality, which contains, mostly, those poems Winters considered great. As shorthand, and a little playfully, I call those poems the “Winters Canon.”

That was less than 200 words. That was difficult -- for me. Yet that’s my short, straightforward definition of the term, without trying to justify the various claims I make about Winters’s critical tenets in that paragraph. Yet though I keep using the term “Winters Canon” as though my understanding of it were something fixed and agreed on to some significant degree, I must admit that it is far from either. It is my own term and concept, for no published critic, not even any Wintersian, has chosen to say clearly just what exactly Yvor Winters was doing when he often made those lists of “great” poems; discussed often which poems are good, better, and best; and later published that anthology containing most of those poems that he had often mentioned, across three decades of criticism, as exceptionally, matchlessly good -- as “great.” Not even his one-time graduate student, the co-editor of Quest for Reality, Ken Fields, who is still alive and teaching at Stanford, has been able to bring himself to say that that anthology is some sort of “canon” of the best or greatest poetry in the English language, which is my understanding of that book.

It is also strange to me that Dick Davis, in one of the finest studies of Winters’s whole career, as both poet and critic, Wisdom and Wilderness (1982), did not even directly address the issue of what I consider the central tenet of Winters’s theory, evaluation. (Just as strangely, Davis did not even address Winters’s critical theory systematically as a whole.) Davis gave a nice overview of the varied judgments of the poets and writers whom Winters wrote about in detail, but Davis did not discuss Winters’s major theoretical essays or the major theoretical statements made within other essays about specific writers and critics. Nor, further, did Davis discuss Winters’s many judgments in terms of Winters’s concept of evaluation, the determination of the best or the greatest. Rather, Davis, as other Wintersians have also done, used euphemisms of all sorts. Winters was “attracted” to this or that poem, Davis opined, or was “sympathetic” to this or that style, or “admired” this work or that. I think these euphemisms significantly understate what Winters meant by the term “great” and distort what he intended as a critic -- however much anyone might disagree with his specific evaluations of what is great. Davis appears to me to have wanted to translate Winters into his own language in an attempt to soften him for those who might not know him well. So lowly is Winters generally regarded, this might have been a wise strategy to get people to keep reading him. I will have to come back to that some time.

My case for my interpretation of Winters’s concept of evaluation must wait for later. I offer this post for purposes of definition only. But I must admit that there are other valid ways to understand Winters on this issue, of course. Some conceptions of his ideas about “greatness” are compatible with my conception of the Winters Canon, some not. One can believe that the poems of Quest for Reality display the kind of poetic structure and style that Winters believed best or most artistic, without saying that he thought that, say, Agnes Lee’s obscure, simple poem “The Sweeper” (to consider just one among several dozen notorious examples) is a great poem, while, say, Yeats’s famous “The Second Coming” is not; or that the obscure British poet Elizabeth Daryush is a great poet, while, say, T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound are not. In both these specific cases, I believe that this is what Winters thought. Yet there are some who disagree with me. (By the way, John Fraser includes “The Second Coming” in his quasi-Wintersian anthology A New Book of Verse, which I have been discussing regularly on this blog. I will come to that specific topic in time, I’m certain.)

I will begin to review the Winters Canon poem by poem and to defend my concept of the Canon in the months ahead. Stay tuned.

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.

A Brief Evaluation of Henry Adams’s History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison

So Winters thought it was great, even “very great,” as a work both of literature and of history, as you read here last week. But how might I evaluate Winters’s evaluation? And what have other Wintersians thought of this work? This post contains my brief, provisional assessment. Still, I offer these comments with some trepidation. For you will see in a moment that I do not regard Adams’s History quite as highly as Winters did.

First, before going through my views, I want to mention that few Wintersians have ever mentioned, let alone discussed, the issue of how good Adams’s History might be as a work of literary art. David Levin, an American historian (and a fine writer, by the way) who was a colleague of Winters’s at Stanford for a time in the 1960s, has written essays on history as literature on occasion during his career. Yet his one extended study of the subject, a book entitled History as Romantic Art, only mentions Adams’s History in passing, though he does refer with approval to its reputation as one of the great histories of American scholarship. Otherwise, no critic or scholar who has studied Winters with any degree of sympathy has tried to study history as literature, assess Winters’s discussion of the subject in his 1943 essay concerning Henry Adams, or directly studied Adams’s History as a work of literary art. It would appear that every writer, critic, or scholar who has read Winters’s writings on history as literature and specifically on Adams’s History has decided that these issues are not worth considering -- except for me, Ben Kilpela, though I, of course, cannot be classified as writer, critic, or scholar. That makes me wonder, as it should, whether the issues I am considering in this post are important to any degree. But I will press on in the belief that they are. Perhaps I’m ahead of my time. (If I am, I am a long, long, LONNNNG way ahead.)

So now, as to my judgment of Adams’s History, I should start by emphasizing that rather than focusing on narrating what appear to be the major events of the time, the History concentrates heavily on studying American congressional politics during the Jefferson and Madison administrations as influenced by those larger events. Adams guides us through a serpentine study of various political and diplomatic maneuverings at the beginning of period of America's growth into one of the world’s powers (which I think, as you will see, was rather predictable) and as an innovatory federal republic espousing democracy. Critical opinion appears to be rising ever so slightly and slowly that the History is the first great history written about the U.S.A. Some have even said that it might be the first great work of history written by an American, though I would quibble with that. The achievements of William Hickling Prescott in the history of New Spain and Francis Parkman in the history of New France perhaps exceed Adams’s achievement, as literature, and they both wrote before Adams.

Some few critics have gone so far as to claim that Adams’s work rivals Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in eloquence and sweep. But such a claim can mislead you. Gibbon’s grand story of imperial deterioration is quite different. Gibbon concerned himself with the long, slow slide to downfall of a vast, widely dominant, and highly and broadly influential empire over more than 1000 years, while Adams studied the way the government of a peculiar new country, governed in daringly new ways, quickly became more centralized at a time when some of its leaders opposed the consolidation and increase of federal power and as that country, unexpectedly at the time, began to loom on the horizon of the world scene. These occurrences took place, I should pause to note, when Napoleon was devising his outrageously grandiose plans for conquest, which he believed would lead to a prosperous and enlightened European empire under his rule. The provincial and fledging United States, in 1800 -- large in landmass, stupendously rich in natural resources, small in population, undeveloped in culture, unsure and unsteady in government, largely untried in the political and social freedoms it espoused -- overcame many obstacles to rise by 1817 from its national adolescence into a state of rapidly increasing international power and prestige. These changes appear rather puzzling because they came about under the leadership of two U.S. presidents who were candidly skeptical about the benefits of a strong central government and the trappings of deep involvement in the game of international power politics. Gary Will’s study of the History, Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), draws attention to how Adams gave us some startling insights into the discordant principles and practices of the 1800-1816 period that shape America to this day.

My judgment, briefly -- and humbly standing in disagreement with Yvor Winters -- is that the History, though a superb work of historical scholarship and at times superbly written, is not one of our greatest histories as a work of literary art. I will have to save a comprehensive case for some later date, but let me say this much: I think that, in general, Adams burrowed far too deeply into the details of congressional maneuvering. Many of his long accounts of the twistings and turnings of political debate are simply too long. Further, in my judgment, the rise of the U.S.A. into one of the world’s powers during the years before and during the War of 1812 should not have been so surprising. The magnificently abundant resources and progressive social system that the U.S. enjoyed in its early years almost made it certain that the new country would rise quickly in power and influence. After much study of the matter, I think Adams’s History exaggerates the backwardness of the U.S. at the same time that Adams ignores the many obvious conditions and circumstances that almost inevitably propelled the country to a much higher status than people imagined it would achieve in the early days of the Republic.

Further, Adams, too often, paid far too much attention to details of secondary or even lesser importance, at the same time he paid far too little attention to many crucial aspects of the development of the U.S. in the period he put under study. For example, limiting my examples to Jefferson’s first term:

1) Adams pays too much attention to diplomatic wrangling in his consideration of the Haitian Revolution. Though certainly these matters played a part in affairs, they are less important than what led Napoleon to offer Louisiana and what the resulting purchase meant for the development of the country. Adams, I believe, did not need to go into such great detail on diplomacy but should have spent a great deal more time trying to fathom the causes and meaning of France’s abandonment of its last major possession in the New World.

2) Adams gets far too tangled in the tidbits of the congressional negotiations over the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Samuel Chase. Though the Chase trial is probably interesting to those with interests in the development of congressional politics and the status of the judiciary in our country, the bearing of the Chase affair on the central themes of the History is never adequately established. I believe the significance of the Chase Affair is far less than implied by Adams’s highly detailed account of political wrangling associated with Chase’s impeachment.

3) Adams gets far too tangled up as well in the details of the political intrigues of the so-called Conspiracy of 1804, the shaky political scheme in which a number of political leaders in the northern states considered seceding from the Union. He also concentrates too tightly on the less important details of political deal-making. Further, Adams fails to arrive at just and satisfying general conclusions about the overall long-term meaning of the conspiracy. Thus, Adams finds the conspiracy important for the wrong reasons.

These examples stand as three of the main reasons I consider the History not to be one of the greatest histories as literary art. Yet it is far from worthless. It is a superb work of literature and history -- just not one of the greats. I can say that I learned some important facts and concepts from the History and recommend it, though it is best read in small doses. It’s so long as well and covers such a short and relatively minor period of American history. Should one put one’s treasured time to Adams or to other works of historical art? The flaws I have pointed out in the History point me to the one larger reasons that I think other greats of historical literature deserve your attention first. This period, 1800-1816, is just not as important as Adams seems to have believed it is -- and now as Gary Wills clearly believes it to be. The whole subject matter of Adams’s History is of tertiary importance in the study of this country, let alone of the study of world history. Therefore, if the History’s value as a work of literature is not as great as Winters claimed and its importance as history is less than Wills takes it to be, I believe that you can wait to read it somewhere down the road, if you find the time.

It’s important to note, nonetheless, that the obscure period Adams put under study has received too little attention. This time, 1800 to 1816, when the young American nation was developing political habits that are much, much less familiar to us than the immediately preceding periods, the periods of the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, and then Washington’s and James Adams’s presidencies. Yet it was in the years of Jefferson’s and Madison’s presidencies that the men who formed the American democratic system that Americans live within gradually chose and negotiated the ways in which our democracy would be conducted. Their choices and compromises -- accidental, willed, or forced -- played a significant role in making us what we are today. It’s an occasionally absorbing story (putting aside Adams’s excessive detail on political wrangling), especially Adams’s focus on the difficulties of Congressional politics, which seems a bit foreign to us nowadays, since the American Presidency became so ascendant over the course of the 20th Century. Also, despite the weaknesses in Adams’s coverage of the Conspiracy of 1804, I learned many interesting details about the attitudes of our early legislators and leaders toward the concept of union and what they might have meant to the development of America’s style of democracy.

Before closing, I want to return briefly to Gary Wills’s book on Adams’s History. In Wills’s opinion, Adams's innovations as a historian were far more than technical -- as Yvor Winters also pointed out. Though I do not have the training to judge the matter, Wills claims that Adams made many important advancements in the writing of history, especially in the use of contemporary documents in his account. Wills believes that Adams’s central, very broad, and overarching theme was an ironic view of the legacy of Jefferson and Madison. Wills claims that Adams argued for a theory that though these two presidents tried to protect the young country from "foreign entanglements," a standing army, a central bank, and excessive federal bureaucracy -- dreaming of an agrarian society untroubled by "big government," which could lead to the dangers of renewed tyranny that the country had escaped in the Revolution -- by the end of their presidencies they found that they had played a large part in permanently establishing all these conditions in American society. Wills sees what happened, through Adams’s History, as a fundamental expression of the "American paradox." He believes this paradox defines us today in our struggles for an idealized desire for isolation and political simplicity against the growth and intermingling of political, economic, and military forces. This is why Wills find Adams’s History such an important study. But the idea appears to owe more to Wills than to Adams. I think that Wills overplays this theme, though it is certainly there in Adams. It is just not so strongly emphasized as Wills claims, in my judgment. Nor is it exactly a paradox. It’s just the difficulties that would inevitably beset a very large, astonishingly prosperous country dedicated to liberty. Also, as I have noted, I think that Adams misrepresents a number of events in the era, and one of the biggest is his inability to see that the geographic conditions of the new country inevitably pushed it forward as one of the great nation-states.

In summary, my provisional conclusion about Adams’s History, offered with considerable humility, is that it is a fine work of literature but has some weaknesses and flaws that keep me from judging it to be one of the great works of literature. I also believe that it is not concerned with subject matter of the highest importance. Nonetheless, the New York Review of Books publishing imprint has given us a smaller book of selections from the History that can help you decide whether to read it and judge for yourself (see my previous post on this subject).

Auden, Auden, and More Auden

The Wystan Hugh Auden centenary passed by recently and a number of articles and essay were written to mark the event. You can find many of them by searching on google. One of best recent overviews of Auden’s career was written by Roger Kimball in the New Criterion in 1999, entitled “The Permanent Auden.” I recommend the piece, not because it has any marks of the influence of Yvor Winters’s ideas, but because it is fair summary of Auden’s achievement, even if the impression is left that Auden was a great poet, which I do not believe he was. The essay can still be found on the web at:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/may99/auden.htm

I have already mentioned in a recent post that Yvor Winters had very little to say about Auden, though he said that he read his work. I take this as a probable indication that Winters did not find his work to be superior. His one published comment on Auden leaves the very faint impression that Winters considered him to be at least worth reading, but perhaps worth no more than that. The comment comes in Winters’s last book, Forms of Discovery, which many critics, including many sympathetic to Winters’s ideas and literary theory, find to have been much too disapproving, and harshly so, of too many good poems and poets. In the “Conclusion” to Forms, Winters named about ten very well-known modern poets, such as Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Lowell, whom he chose not to discuss in the book, his final testament on the history of English poetry, but wished to mention. Winters wrote, “I name them lest the reader think I do not know them. The learned scholar who wishes to devote a history to these poets has my blessing.” That first sentence seems to be intended to counter a charge sometimes made against Winters, that he didn’t cover enough of what other critics believe to be major poets in his criticism. The implication is unmistakable that Winters didn’t think it worth his time to do so concerning many modern poets held commonly in high esteem. The point seems even clearer earlier, when he wrote, “I have had neither the time not the inclination” to discuss poets of great reputation. These two stiff comments suggest to me, quite strongly, that Winters considered Auden’s work not to be close to the standards of the Winters Canon.

For his part, Donald Stanford, critic and editor of the Southern Review, which published a few essays on Auden over the years, also did not write about Auden in his major work of Wintersian criticism, Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, even though that book was concerned with the use and disuse of traditional forms in modern poetry. All Stanford had to say about Auden can be found in a comment made while discussing Winters’s very fine poem “On a View of Pasadena from the Hills”: Stanford said that Auden’s work is characterized by “facile imitations of various conventional verse forms.” That’s the best Donald Stanford could say of Auden? I think we can safely assume that Stanford didn’t judge Auden to stand among the greats.

Yet John Fraser chose four Auden poems for his New Book of Verse, the quasi-Wintersian anthology which I have been discussing from time to time. (See the second post on this blog for a brief look at A New Book of Verse, which still awaits a more extended treatment from me.) I will give the poems Fraser chose some deeper thought before commenting on them.

I will say this much now: Overall, I find Auden to be far too chatty. His poems lack coherence and display the usual modern bent on rational disunity. His handling of meter and poetic form are far too loose as well, in my judgment. His poems are meandering affairs (following the associative method Winters disparaged over and again in his career) that search around for sparkling insights, but usually Auden expresses his floating ideas far too vaguely and loosely to make any strong, definite impression. Even Roger Kimball for all his praise of Auden could give no line or idea that really catches him or me, that makes me want to read Auden again -- makes me think that Auden has something important to tell us. I believe that his work is not close to the standards of the Winters Canon, but is worth reading for its minor virtues. He wrote a lot of loose and mediocre verse, but he strolled around till he happened upon some interesting ideas at times. There is hardly anything terribly significant in any of what he had to say, but I am open to the possibility that some critic or follower of Auden could lead me to something truly first-rate that I have overlooked.

Kimball comments briefly on Auden’s facility with verse forms. For Auden’s commitment to metrical composition we should be mildly grateful, I believe. Yet, I must admit that I have always found Auden’s skill in verse to be only second-or third-rate, at least compared to the masters of modern metrical composition: such as J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, N. Scott Momaday, Yvor Winters himself, and others. Also, perhaps more importantly, Auden’s images function too often as loose and weak ornament. His metrical schemes are too deliberately roughened (a word some critics like to use to describe weak adherence to a metrical norm). His diction is playful, often facile, and his poems can be verbose as well. Further, I find his metaphors and similes too often unmoored to theme and purpose.

I could go into detail concerning on the Kimball essay and lay out many of his comments out for reflection and response. But that will have to wait for later. I have many other matters coming along, and I do not think Auden’s poetry is worth the time it would take to review it closely right now, as more important than many other matters deserving of greater attention. Still, since John Fraser has included him in his anthology I think I must soon consider the poems Fraser selected.