More on Blurbing

In a post on misblurbing from this past spring, I mentioned some of Yvor Winters’s issues with blurbs. To be more specific, Winters was a critic who offered many a suspicious “blurb,” his succinct, seemingly half-crazed judgments that this or that obscure poem or poet is one of the all-time greats. In the course of that post, I quoted a Winters’s “blurb” on Charles Churchill from early in his career. Churchill (who is pictured) remains a relatively unknown poet who was a contemporary of Alexander Pope’s. Winters judged Churchill a greater poet than Pope; in fact, he considered him one of the greats of our language mostly for one poem that remains almost wholly unknown even among students of literature, “The Dedication to Warburton.” Winters’s judgment of Churchill came to mind once again recently because I ran across a comment about Winters’s Churchill “blurbs” by the English formalist poet Donald Davie in his memoir These the Companions. Davie is not a Wintersian, in my view, but he has long been attracted to Winters’s ideas and poetry, as well as to the work of Janet Lewis and some of those he considers Wintersians, in the loosest sense. Davie has called Winters a Puritan, speaking positively it seems, since Davie himself has striven throughout his career to re-establish formalism as a norm in contemporary poetry.

Here is Davie’s comment about Winters’s blurbs on Charles Churchill:

Neither of my chosen mentors, F.R. Leavis nor later Yvor Winters, had much to say about the eighteenth century. And that, I came to see, was a distinct advantage; here was a field in which I could dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s of their respective judgments, could as it were amplify and extend them without, except by the remotest implication, challenging them. In this there was much dishonesty. Winters by the end of his life, following through with characteristic forthrightness on an entirely reasonable objection to the epistemology of John Locke, was advancing one of the boldest and silliest of all critical verdicts -- that of eighteenth century poets in the English language the one that most deserved remembering was... Charles Churchill! He really meant this nonsensical judgment, as he meant every judgment that he ever pronounced. And it was less than honest to pretend that there was margin for civil disagreement, where in fact there wasn’t.

The last two sentences amount to a blurb in themselves, a strongly negative one in this case, and one sharply dismissive of Winters’s views. Yet there are a few difficulties with Davie’s blurb. First, it leaves the impression that Winters was obsessed with Churchill. This is not so. Winters did write a lengthy essay about Churchill that focused on “The Dedication” late in his life, in what appears to have been a final, rigorous attempt to earn his view of Churchill a wider hearing (the attempt has utterly failed, I must admit). But Churchill did not occupy the center of his attention at any time in his career. Second, Davie’s blurb also leaves the faint impression that Winters’s judgment of Churchill was some half-crazed late development in Winters’s thought. But this also is not so. Winters wrote of Churchill several times in his career and mentioned “The Dedication” here and there. He wrote on Churchill’s work in heroic couplets, furthermore, in some of his earliest work, in his doctoral dissertation that became, after much editing and some expanding, his first book, Primitivism and Decadence. Winters always praised “The Dedication” very highly, even in essays and letters written rather early in his career. Back in the 30s he sometimes listed it among the greats.

Third, and more importantly, Davie (and many others, including David Yezzi in a prominent 1997 essay in the New Criterion) have expressed their incredulity that Winters judged Churchill so highly and have made it clear that they consider that judgment to be, at best, cracked. But no one has offered a thorough critique, or even ANY sort of critique, of Winters’s essay on Churchill or of his case for the greatness of “The Dedication” -- or even tried to briefly explain why he thinks Churchill is NOT deserving of the status Winters sought for him. The critics who have bothered with the issue usually merely censor Winters with words like Davie’s: “nonsensical” and “silliest.” But such empty gibes and jabs do not constitute a sound case, or any case at all, against Winters’s views on Churchill. In his 1960 essay Winters laid out a thorough and compelling rationale in favor of Churchill’s poetry and of “The Dedication” in particular. If someone disagrees with that judgment, it falls on him to show wherein Winters was wrong or skewed. Tossing out one-word censures accomplishes nothing.

Let’s take a quick look at some of what Winters wrote about Churchill. This passage is from Primitivism and Decadence and from “Section V: The Heroic Couplet and Its Recent Rivals”:

This sort of thing [found in Churchill’s poem “The Candidate”], to the best of my knowledge, had never been done before; and to the best of my knowledge no one has ever pointed out that Churchill did it; Churchill, like Gascoigne 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 -- Gray and Collins, slighter poets in spite of all their virtues, were of the party that produced the style of the next century and they have come to be regarded, for this reason, as the best poets of their period. We have not in “The Candidate” the mock-heroic convention of “MacFlecknoe” or of “Hudibras,” which, though it involves feigned praise, is frank burlesque. It is closer to a quality of Pope, to which I have already referred, but it is ironical rather than epigrammatical; it is more evasive, less didactic or illustrative of the general, more personal, closer to the sophisticated lyrical tradition of such writers as Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, and Donne. Churchill, in his ambiguous territory between irony and eulogy, awakened a number of feelings belonging neither to irony nor to eulogy, but capable of joining with both, and the most perfect example of the junction may be found in his greatest poem, the posthumous “Dedication to Warburton.”

Well, that (a passage written in the early 1930s) certainly sounds half cracked, don’t it? Sounds too like a man who late in life went so far out of his head that he offered yet another and even more bizarre opinion, don’t it? I guess you can see that I think Donald Davie is way off base. Yet Davie is not alone in refusing to give Winters a hearing on Churchill. Since 1930, no Wintersian I know of has yet to re-assess Churchill in light of Winters’s studies of him. Not even a Wintersian as insightful and as sympathetic as Dick Davis -- whose superb study of Winters, Wisdom and Wilderness (1983), remains essential reading for anyone drawn to Winters -- could be bothered with a consideration of his longstanding judgment of Churchill. Rather, Davis thought that Winters had painted himself into a “lonely corner” with judgments like the one concerning Churchill. For his part, Davis, I would guess, probably did not want to take the chance of watching himself get painted into a similar corner by even considering whether Winters might have been right -- and one could hardly blame him for that, considering Winters's reputation. I think the time has long since passed that Winters’s views on Churchill should be examined out of intellectual respect for everything Winters accomplished. I guess the task falls to me, if I recognize the need, and I will take the matter up when we get to Churchill as I review the Winters Canon poem by poem.

Perhaps it’s true that Churchill shouldn’t matter. Everyone sometimes feels the need to accept and acknowledge that thinkers and writers whom we most admire, from time to time, do, simply, get things badly wrong. Just this, for instance, happened this summer when Carlin Romano, a philosophy and media theory professor at the University of Pennsylvania who writes regularly for the Chronicle of Higher Education, wrote about some of the good ideas of that wacky devotee of anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner, in the Chronicle Review (5/18/07):

Perhaps, as [Saul] Bellow's whirlwind romance with anthroposophy indicated, there's a place for all-inclusive thinkers who invite people with precise intellectual and emotional needs to wander and ponder on their grounds. In his advocacy of a kindly balance between the natural and spiritual, a harmony of the whole person, Steiner sometimes resembled an occultist Aristotle, a spiritualist Sartre. He remains a bulwark, for those comfortable entering his compound, against modern naturalists who want to dissolve the "I" of consciousness into a software program.

So what if he thought that we all had telepathic powers in the "Old Moon" past, that kids shouldn't be taught to read until they lose their first teeth, that Atlantis figures mightily in the history of Western culture? Nobody's perfect.

Perhaps that’s the best I should hope can be said, with a shrug of the shoulders, about Winters’s views of Churchill and many another view nowadays: “Nobody’s perfect.” Perhaps they’re not worth bothering about. Maybe Churchill cannot or should not be rescued or raised to the heights of admiration or given much greater attention in our criticism. Maybe. But I think, in light of Winters’s considerable achievement, that a strong and sound case is required for us to set Winter’s views on Churchill aside. Winters made his sound case for Churchill. Someone has to answer it with equal adroitness for it to be written off to nobody’s being perfect. Calling his views names is simple intellectual myopia.

Before moving on, I can’t resist commenting on another swipe Davie takes at Winters in the passage I have quoted. On the question of whether Winters thought there was margin for civil disagreement on such matters, which is meant, I take it, to give him a good thump because there was in fact no such margin, I refer the reader to Winters’s earlier writings and letters, in which he leaves plenty of room for debate. Further, it’s strangely hypocritical, isn’t it?, that Davie smugly tries to thump Winters for supposedly brooking no disagreement, but then allows no room for disagreement himself by declaring Winters’s judgment about Churchill to be nonsensical -- and it’s even stranger, and sillier, that Davie, in contrast to Winters, makes no case for his own judgment of Churchill, by which his readers might judge the merits of Davie’s view of Winters or of Davie himself as a critic.

These are old issues, of course -- and small ones, too, I admit. But in most cases I feel a need to counter these stubborn misconceptions about Winters’s ideas that writers and critics have been batting around for decades without reply. I have engaged this blog in that work, which someone should have taken up long ago.

It’s` A|bout` Time`` for an Ed`|u|ca`|tion in Pro``|so|dy`

The 92nd Street Y in New York City has announced a class on prosody, the study of poetic meter, to be conducted by New Criterion poetry editor David Yezzi. The New Criterion is the only national general-readership journal that nowadays publishes or extensively discusses what is called formalist poetry (that irritating modern redundancy), and Yezzi is a poet-critic who has done some good work in trying to entice more poets into returning to formalism and the use of logical structures and in informing poetry readers about accomplished or promising formalist poets. He has even written on Yvor Winters a couple times over the past decade, writings that I intend to study closely in the months ahead on this blog. I’d love to hear from anyone about Yezzi’s class once it gets going in October. (Did you notice the sprung rhythm in my post’s title? I did my best making stress marks in my title. Pictured, by the way, is a prosodic read-out of an English sentence spoken in two ways.)

I must disclose that I learned of the class from New Criterion’s blog, entitled “Arma Virumque.” The blog post on Yezzi’s class gives you a link to Tim Steele’s piece on prosody that was published on poets.org a year or so ago, which I have also been intending to take a closer look at some time soon. Steele is a poet who has written a great deal of value on the decline of traditional forms in modern poetry. One of the finest books ever written on the subject, Steele’s Missing Measures, I highly recommend. It was recommended to me personally by Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters’s wife, some 20 years ago.

There are many published testimonies from Winters’s students that repeat the opinion that Winters’s teaching on poetic form and prosody was outstanding, even life-changing for some. Many who took classes with Winters believe, as they have said in print, that his greatest achievement was his work in prosody. In his formal writings, you can find most of what he taught -- or so I surmise from studying his students’ writings about his teaching -- in his first book, Primitivism and Decadence, which is reprinted in In Defense of Reason, Winters’s best-known book, which remains in print through the Ohio University Press:

http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/In+Defense+of+Reason

OUP also published Tim Steele’s newer, lighter book on prosody, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, which seems intended for a much wider audience than his earlier, more scholarly work. (That title might be passable iambic pentameter but is rather a weak one for a couple reasons, in my opinion.) That book is yet another one (Sheesh!) I have to discuss on the blog.

An Edition of Donald Stanford’s Poems

Time is always passing, the years drift by, and many projects are left undone and ideas left unfulfilled. One matter that I have neglected discussing for years on my Winters web site and now on this Winters Blog is a recent edition of the collected poetry of Donald Stanford, which came out already some four years ago. This work, however, deserves the close attention of those committed to classicism in literature, however belated this post might be.

I have frequently mentioned and highly praised the criticism and career of Donald Stanford on this blog in its inaugural year. Stanford, who died in 1998 at the age of 85, was a longtime professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and the co-editor of the prestigious Southern Review, Second Series between 1965 and 1982. I have opined that Stanford was probably our finest Wintersian. He wrote a brilliant book on modern poetry from the view of what I would term a Wintersian classicist, Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, which remains in print, though I don’t know how long it will remain so.

The news I have neglected is that four years ago the Edwin Mellen Press of Great Britain published the first edition of Donald Stanford’s collected poems. I have had a heckuva time trying to find this book in the United States at a price of less than $100, which seems quite steep. Further, I haven’t had any success finding a library in my lending network to give me a look at it, though I see that it’s available at the LSU Library in Special Collections. I can’t guess why the book was published in Britain in addition to the U.S. The editor, who has edited other works by and about Stanford, is an LSU professor, the same university at which Stanford taught. I do not know of Stanford’s having any particularly strong influence in British literary culture. I suspect that he does not.

The book is entitled The Complete Poems of American Poet Donald E. Stanford, 1913-1998, edited with textual notes and an introduction by R.W. Crump. The book purports to be the first complete collection of Don Stanford’s poems, including the three chapbooks he published, his privately printed poems, and all the extant manuscript poems never before published. According to Mellen Press, the textual notes list all the authorial versions, the basic text and all the variant readings. The book also offers tables of Stanford’s editions and collections and their tables of contents, and the appendices reportedly provide some of Stanford’s statements about his life and poetry. The collection’s “Preface” is by David Middleton, a fine formalist poet and scholar in his own right. Middleton wrote a few reviews and poems for the Southern Review during Stanford’s tenure as co-editor. The “Preface” reportedly places Stanford’s poetry in historical perspective and discusses the virtues of his poetic theory and practice.

If you wish to find out a little more about Donald Stanford before I have a chance to discuss him at length on this blog, I suggest LSU’s notice about Stanford’s death, which is still available on line at:

http://www.english.lsu.edu/dept/fac/mem/dstanford

The web site of the Mellen Press includes a couple short reviews, none of which, as far as I can tell, was published in the United States. The book’s six appendices reportedly include Yvor Winters’s fascinating “Foreword” to Stanford’s first published collection, New England Earth and Other Poems (this short essay was also reprinted in The Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Yvor Winters), as well as a formerly unpublished, but undoubtedly helpful statement of Stanford’s about the school of poetry he belonged to and excerpts from two interviews he gave. A fellow named John R. May writes on the book’s web site, “Professor Crump proves here once again that she is a masterful textual editor. The artistry of her work is apparent throughout this volume -- a profound concern for the purity of the text that serves at every turn the transcendence of the poetry itself.”

Reportedly, the number of Stanford’s poems available has been doubled with the collection, and the web site claims that much of this unknown work represents Stanford at his strongest. But whether the release of the “new” poems is an important event remains to be seen. I have discovered no reviews of the collection anywhere and no discussion of it on any web site. Mellen Press also boasts of Crump’s presenting Stanford’s poems to us with great care, bringing us “closer to the poems and the poet.” William Bedford Clark writes that he “would be remiss if I did not also call attention to David Middleton’s remarkably astute preface, which will serve as both an impetus and model for future commentary on Stanford as poet.”

I consider it nearly unconscionable that the Southern Review has not seen fit to publish a review of this collection and downright ridiculous that no academic library in the Midwest network has a copy of this book. Stanford, whatever one’s opinion of his Wintersian criticism might be, was an able scholar and a fine poet who had a great love of literature and stood at the helm of the prominent Southern Review for more than 25 years. I will be working to find this book somewhere at a reasonable price. Stanford devoted his career to the furtherance of the modern classicism that Yvor Winters brought to the fore and defended so ably. We might take Stanford’s description of the basic literary principles of E. A. Robinson (from his book Revolution and Convention) as a rough description of his own Wintersian classicism:

Robinson’s approach to literature and life is primarily rational; intuition and emotion are seldom exalted above reason. His poetry usually has substantial paraphrasable content and strives to communicate rightness of feeling rather than intensity of feeling, the feeling being achieved in part and controlled by the effective use of conventional prosody and conventional poetic forms. Usually he employs the traditional iambic line. His poems have unity, coherence, and a logical structure that is appropriate for the material but is not organically determined by it. The style at its best is impersonal, simple in diction, non-rhetorical, and without excessive ornamentation. (Emphasis Stanford’s.)

Before I get my hands on a copy of this work, I conclude by noting that John Fraser, editor of the important anthology A New Book of Verse (which I have been discussing from time to time on this blog and which began as a collaboration with Stanford, as explained in Fraser’s introduction) chose two of Stanford’s poems for that anthology, a choice which implies, it could be, that Fraser considers them particularly fine examples of modern classicism. (Still, exactly how we should understand Fraser’s choices is a matter for some debate, which I will get to some time.) I offer the two poems below, which Fraser reprints online without apparent permissions.

The Cartesian Lawnmower

The wandering vast unbounded green
Perplexes the intense machine.
I watch, I listen and hear more
Than mathematics in its roar.

But it rolls on, and like a pall
The towering weeds and grasses fall
Till each particular blade or spike
In essence different looks alike.

But there’s a spot it has to pass
Where weeds are thicker than the grass,
And on that spot it’s ill at ease.
With less a roar and more a wheeze,

With less a wheeze it grunts and pops,
And then ridiculously stops,
Until at last the tense machine
Is merged with an intenser green.

This first poem is a very complex, yet playful meditation upon the nature of human experience, as signaled by the title and a couple of words in the body of the poem, “mathematics,” and “essence.” It reminds me quite strongly of many playful-but-deadly-serious poems by J.V. Cunningham. It’s an elegant and even comic rumination. Indeed, it’s almost light verse in the way it employs a somewhat unexpectedly impish vehicle to study the profound subject matter. I will be examining this poem more closely in the future. I would say, off hand, that it is a very fine piece of work, though not deserving of the status of “great” (as Fraser could be suggesting that it should).

The Bee

No more through summer’s haze I see,
In sunlight like a flash of spume,
The resolute and angry bee
Emerging from a flood of bloom.

The bee is quiet in her hive.
The earth is colorless and bare.
The veins of every leaf alive
Have stiffened in the altered air.

This poem seems a little too simple for inclusion in Fraser’s anthology, again without making any final call about what that anthology’s purpose is. It’s a minor and rather conventional, if masterly, meditation on death. It’s not a great poem, but it is a fine one, written with superb style and consummate control. One has to wonder whether Stanford saw himself, like his bee, as “resolute and angry” in the face of death.

Finally, there might a continuing need for a disclaimer on one particular matter. Readers want reassurance that no author or critic takes every word and idea of someone other author or critic as pure GOSPEL. If an author leaves that impression, he loses a great deal of credibility; he doesn’t seem to be truly thinking – which, I might point out, is not a logical argument in itself. But, alas, I must follow the common modern practice and make the compulsory disclaimer in order to have any hope of getting a hearing for Donald Stanford -- or Yvor Winters, for that matter. Here it is: I do not take Winters or Stanford (or anyone) as pure Gospel.

To demonstrate this, I want to relate one disagreement I have with Stanford’s critical views, among several. Stanford was a strong and convincing advocate of the fiction of Caroline Gordon, wife of Allen Tate, during the period of his editorship of the Southern Review. I read somewhere in SR that he considered Aleck Maury, Sportsman, a rather obscure piece that I have never read about in any other venue anywhere in the world of letters, to be Gordon’s finest novel. I have tried reading just about everything Winters or one of his advocates or adherents have ever recommended as important or worthwhile, and I have been repeatedly rewarded with one splendid discovery after another. One of those discoveries, thanks to Donald Stanford, was the work of Caroline Gordon, who has written a number of fine novels that have been neglected or forgotten for far too long (yet another matter that I should get to some time on this blog -- the list of tasks ever lengthens!). But I must disagree, respectfully, with Stanford’s judgment of Aleck Maury. This episodic novel has very little to say and is not even particularly well written. It’s an overlong fictional chronicle of the uninteresting, trifling life of a college professor who has a passion for hunting and fishing. It tells us very little about any significant aspect of human experience. This almost trivial work is far from Gordon’s best piece. It’s not even notably good in any of its major aspects, not in narrative structure, writing style, or themes. I have not often been let down by a recommendation from Winters or a Wintersian, but Stanford’s accolade for Aleck Maury was one of the biggest disappointments that I can recall. Still, those who found A River Runs Through It, the popular novel and movie about fly-fishing, worthwhile, might find something valuable in the turgid Aleck Maury.

Summer Reading for Wintersian Classicists

Did you notice the recent June article in Time magazine about books that writers read during the summer, books that they consider, and most of us also will consider, "guilty pleasures." These are books that are not of high literary artistry or seriousness but are worthwhile for one reason or another. The article offers the guilty summertime reading pleasures of 16 published authors, some of whom enjoy a measure of esteem in the Mid- to High-Cult literary worlds, such as Jane Smiley and Joyce Carol Oates. (A number of these authors, on the other hand, I do not recognize at all -- and many of their works seem to me to constitute "guilty pleasures" in themselves.) I think it's highly valuable for Wintersians and other modern classicists to talk about their own guilty pleasures, books, which people often read during the summer, that are not of the highest literary quality but are worth one's time and effort for some good reason. Some of these pleasures are simply for superior literary entertainment of one sort or another. I'd like to see readers of this blog tell us about their guilty pleasures.

You might be mildly interested in my own. Well, I would first say that there is little on my reading list that I feel the least guilty about -- nothing that I would consider the equivalent of fine chocolates, if that's the best way to think of literary guilty pleasures. With that said, let me go through a few books I've read this summer. I took in the sixth Harry Potter book at the beginning of this summer, and I don't feel guilty about it at all. Every one of the Potter books has told a good story, though I'll admit that I've kept up on the series mostly because my two boys, 14 and 11, love the books madly, as so many youngsters do. I haven't read the madly hyped final installment, though my older son has already read it four times since the day of the big release this summer. Harold Bloom and other critics have taken a few swipes at the Potter books in recent years, but I see no reason for Bloom or anyone else to get worked up in opposition to these engaging tales. They aren't great literature, hardly even literature, but every one of them has been a good read. I can't say that about every fantasy novel I've tried down the years. For example, some readers madly praised Stephen Donaldson's fantasy series from about 15 years ago, but I never got half way through the first novel among six. That I have found Harry Potter at least worth reading is enough for me. Brit Philip Pullman has been a favorite among the higher-brow critics lately, but I have found Pullman a bit strained.

I also read an autobiography of Earvin Magic Johnson early in the summer. I'm from southern Michigan, and Earvin was a big, big deal in these parts in his high school and college days. He played at a Lansing area high school, the region where I have lived for 25 years, and at Michigan State in college, where I have worked for the past 20 years. I also am a fan of college basketball in general. The ghost-written autobiography was rather simply written in a decidedly pedestrian style. But I learned a few things about Magic and enjoyed reading about his perspective on his life. The book was suprisingly a bit flat for such an ethusiastic man. Magic was much less fired-up about something the Michigan public found so amazing, his magical skills with a basketball, in those days when he was a "phenom" in high school. Further, I find it almost incomprehensible that he had doubts about himself. His ever widening public seemed to know his destiny long before he could recognize or believ in it. I might misremember the time of his high school magicalness, but I don't think so. He was the biggest athlete in Michigan then and ever since, by far. No one has ever even come close to the attention he received around here.

In addition, I have been absorbed by the "Roma Sub Rosa" historical fiction series by Steven Sailor. These "detective" novels are set in the time of Juluis Ceasar (I'm a buff of the history of the Roman Empire), and the main character is an upper-class fellow who has many high-level politcal connections and lives in Rome. This man, Gordianus the Finder, has a knack for solving murders, in a time when there were no detectives as such, and these murders usually have some importance to the knotted politics of the tumultuous times. I've been reading one of these books every summer for the past few years. I've found them all worth my time as guilty pleasures. They've taught me about some of the finer points of the history of the Roman Civil Wars, too.

Also, this summer I've been reading a fascinating book on rum-running on the Great Lakes, "Outlaws of the Lakes," which has certainly been eye-opening. It's not particularly well written, sticking mostly to the bare facts and relating them in an overheated tabloid style, but it tells many fascinating tales and gets the facts straight for the most part. I'm interested in the subject, first, because I'm a Great Lakes captain during the summers for the Kilpela family ferry business on Lake Superior; second, because I met a local in northern Michigan whose uncle was a rum-runner on Lake Superior back in the days of Prohibition; and, third, because I am fascinated with questions of crime, its causes and its cures -- and with literature's bearing on the causes and cures of evil. My interest in crime and evil, it might be wotth noting, is surely one of the reasons, among many, that I was first and remain attracted to the literary theory of Yvor Winters -- and that might be the most important point.

One guilty pleasure turned out not be all that pleasurable, Hemingway's "Nick Adams Stories," which I tried to pick up again after some 30 years (it's the second time I've tried to read them after first reading them in my college days). I found the writing, themes, and discernible purpose of these stories, which are famous in this area, since many are set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to be nearly worthless. I quit after three stories and don't think I will return to them ever again.

There are other guilty literary pleasures in my life. To mention a few, I think of Elmore Leonard, the crime novelist, history books about the region I live in during the summer (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan), the history of Christian theology, and the development of Christian beliefs and ideas. But I'd like to hear about the so-called guilty pleasures of readers of Winters, anyone who might be even mildly sympathetic to what he stood for as poet and critic.

A Recent Study of Recent British Poets

I have been wanting to give notice on this blog at some point that well-known poet Dana Gioia recently (in 2003, to be exact) published a book of essays that has clear connections to the literary work of Yvor Winters. Gioia, as most who follow American poetry know, is the poet who wrote that quite famous essay "Can Poetry Matter?" back in the early 1990s (an essay that I would like to study from a Wintersian perspective some time). He has worked tirelessly in promoting and nurturing American poetry, as he understands the art, of course, and has shown a strong interest in the development of the so-called New Formalism, a poetic movement which I as a Wintersian certainly applaud but which hasn't achieved all that it might yet. (Winters, by the way, might not have had very high regard, at least in my judgment, of the work of the New Formalists -- though this is a subject I also must return to some time on this blog.)

Further, Gioia had notable interersts in Winters's work. He was a presenter at the weekend symposia on Winters's career held at Stanford University in 2000 (the occasion was the centennial of Winters's birth). This indicates, at the least, that some prominent formalist poets and critics who have some sort of connection to Winters consider Gioia to be knowledgeable about and sympathetic, in some ways and to some degree, to Winters's poetry and criticism, even though I wouldn't call Gioia a Wintersian in any sense (which, I suppose, is yet another matter worth investigating on this blog).

The book of Gioia's that I want to take notice of is the one on recent British poetry. The book contains discussions of several poets who have connections in one way or another to Winters, including one poet whom Winters considered to have written one of the greatest poems in the English language, the late Thom Gunn. The book is entitled "Barrier of a Common Language." It is part of the Poets on Poetry Series published by University of Michigan Press. The book is about the lack of knowledge about and interest in American poetry in Britain and British poetry in America, which is, according to Gioia, another aspect of America's growing postwar independence in its literary and intellectual pursuits. On the book's promotional site, Gioia is quoted as writing, "... most American readers are not only unfamiliar with current British poetry, but modestly proud of the fact. They do not dissemble, but urbanely flourish their ignorance as an indisputable sign of discrimination." Gioia also is quoted as writing that for British poetry to regain some measure of importance in American literary culture, a level of regard that it had, say, 50 years ago, "will depend on the quality of service it receives from critics, poets, editors, and anthologists who alone can make it accurately heard and understood."

The book includes essays on new British poetry in the late 20th century; James Fenton; a fellow Gioia considers the most unfashionable poet alive, one Charles Causley; Philip Larkin; Wendy Cope; short views on Ted Hughes, Kingsley Amis, Tony Connor, Dick Davis, Thom Gunn, Charles Tomlinson; as well as essays on Anthony Burgess as poet and on Donald Davie.

Gioia's discussions of Dick Davis and Thom Gunn are most pertinent to my concerns on this blog. Davis is a poet teaching at Ohio State who wrote a cogent, learned, sympathetic, and even inspiring study of Winters's career some 25 years ago and continues to write superb formalist verse, some of it published from time to time in the New Criterion. Davis has drawn the attention of Wintersians over the past couple decades as one of the truly finest living poets in the English language. Some of his work, I believe, might even be considered great, that is to say worthy of inclusion in the Winters Canon. In his verse and in his essays, Davis has striven, in part -- and with admirable success -- to keep the classical literary principles of Yvor Winters alive.

Gunn is better known. He studied with Winters at Stanford for a year in the 1950s and went on to a very highly regarded career in poetry while living on the west coast of the U.S. His commitment to formalism -- and even classicism -- is unmistakable and laudable. Gunn wrote one poem that was included in the Winters Canon and so is considered by Winters, as I understand him, as one of the great poets of the English language. Gunn's work is certainly worth your study. His poetry is mostly first-rate, especially his earlier work, the poetry more heavily influenced by Winters. He wandered off a truly classical course later in his career, but his work from this period, the 1980s and 90s, remains very worthwhile. His essays are also excellent; some concentrate on issues of central importance to Winters's critical theories, such as his studies of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. He also wrote a superb reminiscence of Winters in the Southern Review in 1981, which was republished in his very fine essay collection "The Occasions of Poetry," which also contains those fine and illuminating studies of Greville and Jonson.

Gioia's consideration of Philip Larkin, whose work Winters knew, and Kinsley Amis both appear worthwhile, judging at a glance. And Wintersians also should not miss the essay on Donald Davie. Davie is a poet who has shown strong interests in the New Formalism, in its British strain, and was deeply interested in Winters's thought and poetry. So sympathetic to Winters was he once considered that he was chosen to edit and write an introduction to Winters "Collected Poems" in the 1980s. He came to know Winters's wife, the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, in the time after Winters's death in 1968. Nonetheless, Davie has not always found Winters's ideas all that congenial or sensible, not even some of his central critical tenets and practices. Still, Davie is a fine formalist poet who had connections to Winters and to Janet Lewis. I believe he deserves attention and study from those interested in the classicism Winters espoused.

The New Criterion on Frost "Classics"

I have been studying the essay on Robert Frost's two most famous poems, so-called "classics," which was published in the most recent annual poetry issue of the New Criterion in April 2007 (this is a continuing series I highly applaud, by the way). The essay is reverential toward Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." (The photo is one of one of my own recent stops on a snowy evening, in a township park in Okemos, Michigan, where I live in winter.) FAR too reverential, in my opinion. These poems have a nice structure and offer a number of nice turns of phrase. But there's hardly anything significant about them. They give us no truly deep insight into any vitally important human experience nor offer any new or vital understanding of some aspect of human life. They're casually, folksily expressive, sweetly descriptive, and at times pithy. They have obvious stylistic virtues, as Winters acknowledged several times in his major essay on Frost in 1949, and are strongly metrical. But I would recommend many another modern poem as truly classic and truly important, starting with many of the splendid, searing, profoundly moving, densely intellectual works of J.V. Cunningham, Elizabeth Daryush, Edgar Bowers, Helen Pinkerton -- or Yvor Winters himself. These two poems are hardly even the best in Frost -- by far.

The essay is the effort of some critic named Dan Brown, whose previous work I do not know. Brown appears to have intended the piece simply to draw our attention back to these two poems for some unknown reason -- as if either poem needed any more attention than it already gets. Are these two poems somehow in danger of being forgotten? If anything, they more deserve to be lowered in status than raised yet higher again. In addition to speaking very highly of them, Brown briefly describes some aspects of their rhetorical structure. He is fascinated that neither poem contains a metaphor. But just what Brown makes of their lack of metaphor is unclear. He describes the fact, but then simply leaves the subject there. Does the lack of metaphor say something about the poems, about Frost's body of work in general, about American poetry in general, about the current state of affairs in our literary world, about anything at all? Brown has nothing to say about any of these matters. He's just simply fascinated -- and by implication appears to want us to be fascinated too. Well... I am not.

Brown finishes up in his final paragrah with a brief, rather abstract, high-falutin' comment about how these two poems illustrate what he believes to be an important aspect of modern poetry, the departure from norms. But how this aspect is related to the two poems' lack of metaphor is wholly obscure. Concerning "departure," I surmise that Brown is impressed that Frost wrote in metrical verse with a casual, "natural" style. Writing folksy verse is not as hard to do as so many critics seem to think. Like any craft, it's hard to do well, I suppose, but not something hard to do in itself. Yes, I agree, as did Winters, that Frost had a gift for writing casually in verse. But the much more important point is that Frost didn't accomplish much with his skill in these two supposedly classic poems. As with the making of any artistic literary statement, it is best made when made to acomplish something important with the statement. But Frost accomplishes next to nothing with these two poems. "The Road Not Taken" rehashes, simply, the ol' American thirst for independence, akin to Huck Finn's desire to light out for the country. "Stopping By" has very little to say other than to tell us to stop and smell the daisies (or enjoy a pretty patch of snow, as the case may be).

In conclusion, I don't think Brown's essay adds up to anything more than New Criterion's attempt to stamp these two poems as "classic," and to so stamp Frost's entire body of work as well. That's fine, I suppose (though I disagree that Frost's work deserves such a lofty status), but hardly a matter that deserves a leading essay on poetry in the only general-readership journal that has anything to do with formalist poetry these days. There is so much else that is so much more worth the while of serious poetry readers. The essays on Robert Bridges and Kingsley Amis in the same issue are two examples. I see little reason to expand discussion of these two modestly well-turned, yet conceptually thin and trifling, poems.

Top Tens, More Top Tens, and Yet More Top...

I noticed the publication this year of yet another book that ranks the "greatest" books, the rankings accomplished by one means or another. This particular book offers a ranking done by vote, in this case by the voting of a small set of purportedly authoritative professionals, so-called "writers." The book is entitled "The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books" and is edited by J. Peder Zane, who also edited a recent collection about writers' recommendations of excellent, often overlooked books entitled "Remarkable Reads."

"The Top Ten" claims to be "the ultimate guide" to the world's greatest books. The authorities it employs to the task of selecting these books are such writers as Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King (come again!), Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, Margaret Drabble, Michael Chabon, and Peter Carey. Some of these writers have, in my judgment, a measure of literary skill, knowledge, and wisdom, others less so -- some quite a bit less so. Each writer names the ten books that have "meant the most" to him, as the promotional literature puts it (even though this criterion is quite different from a selection of the greatest books). The purpose is to help readers understand the greateness of books they have always loved and to discover great works that might be new to some.

"The Top Ten" includes brief summaries of 544 books, each of which is judged to be among the ten greatest books ever written by at least one "leading writer." As well as each writer's Top Ten List and the summary list based on a simple descending point system, the same sort of system used in college sports polls, the book offers a few other top ten lists tabulated from 544 picks, such as:

• The Top Ten Books by Living Writers
• The Top Ten Books of the Twentieth Century
• The Top Ten Mysteries
• The Top Ten Comedies

It's interesting to me that this practice of ranking works of art and making lists of the greatest works (and greatest among many other sorts of things) has become so common in our time, in the last 20 years or so. Yvor Winters was often vilified, when he was paid any attention at all, for ranking works of literature during his lifetime, but ranking has become commonplace, even among the most highly regarded writers and critics of our time. It feels like everyone and everything gets ranked nowadays, and "experts" choose the greatest and the "bests-of" for many classes of things by one means or another. Though the promotional literature says that "The Top Ten" has sparked debate, nothing in the lists is all that controversial. Here's the top ten works of liteature of all-time, as voted by its gaggle of writers:

1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch, by George Eliot

There is hardly anything suprising about that list, except, perhaps, for "Lolita." Winters wrote little about any of these writers except for Shakespeare. He did say Proust was one of the three greatest novelists, but he never explained himself or made a case for the judgment (the comment was recorded by a fellow named Ashley Brown, who published it in an essay in the "Southern Review"). Janet Lewis, Winters's wife, praised Nabokov's style and skill in an interview some years back, though she didn't specifically mention "Lolita" that I recall offhand. Though Winters studied American literature in depth in one of the seminal, though sadly overlooked or disregarded, critical studies of the subject in our history, "Maule's Curse," which was reprinted in "In Defense of Reason, " he hardly mentioned Twain in his essays. I suspect that he considered "Huck Finn" to be negligible, or at least susstandard, not up to snuff with the finest work of Melville, James, Hawthorne, and even James Fenimore Cooper -- the judgment of Cooper would have stunned and amused Twain, eh?

My main point is that the work of ranking goes on, and people interested in such things, as I am, should pay more serious attention to Winters's once derided and controversial rankings of the greatest -- as well as, more importantly perhaps, to the criteria he used to judge the greatest works of literary art. Some fairly highly regarded literary figures are taking part nowadays in the practice of ranking. In most of these rankings, what I call the "Standard Canon" gets approved and re-approved and re-approved yet again. What would Winters have said about these lists? Would he have approved of voting by descending points, as in a sports poll? It's hard to believe that he would have, though it seems possibly of good sense. But then how else should "greatness" or the "greatest" be defined and adjudicated? Would Winters have approved of writers voting and having their votes tablulated? Would he consider such writers authoritative? Would he have considered these particular writers, Mailer, et. al. authoritative? I can guess the answers to those last two questions more easily. He probably would have found writers of the sort taking part in Zane's vote to be of no significant merit in deciding true literary exellence and probably would have considered these particular writers, almost across the board, to be unqualified to vote for a list of the greatest literature.

On a side note, a fascinating development is that Stephen King has come in recent years to be seen as "literary," a serious writer. King was long regarded, justly, as no more than a pop writer, little more than a hack. But then the "New Yorker" began publishing him and some critics began writing about him and his standing began to rise for some reason that I have been unable to makes sense of, for his writing style and stories remain rather undistinguished. Now, in various venues and for various purposes, he gets consulted as one of our "fine" writers, as a serious literary author. I doubt Winters would have agreed.

Wnters's Supposed Anti-Mimesis

It's summer, of course, and the time for writing blogs seems to evaporate. I've been spending a lot less time working on this project in the past month or so because my life has taken its yearly turn when I go to northern Michigan to help run a family business on Lake Superior with my brothers. Yet I've been reading plenty -- and plenty by and about Yvor Winters, in addition to other fare. One piece I went back to this summer was an essay about Winters's study of the function and usefulness of the drama, which can be found in his essay "Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature," an essay which was republished in his collection The Function of Criticism. The 1971 essay about Winters's work in this area that I have been working through again is by James Barish. It came out in the Johns Hopkins journal New Literary History and was entitled "Yvor Winters and the Anti-Mimetic Prejudice." It is the only detailed consideration, at least that I have found, of Winters's admittedly rather surprising essay ever published, though there have been a number of critics who have made sidelong comments, usually dismissive, or downrigfht derisive, about the "Problems" essay down the decades since it was first published.

Barish's oppositional essay is certainly worth finding and reading. For students and professors, it is available for free on J-STOR, the web site that offers many journal atrticles. If you don't have access to J-STOR, I'd be happy to send you a text version of Barish's essay, though, of course, it remains under copywright and cannot be reprinted without permissions.

I think that Winters's "Problems" essay, despite that it is had no effects on the study of drama, is one of the most important to the future of the study of Winters, as I have hinted a number of times before on my Winters Web Site and this blog. Winters concentrated on poetry quite heavily, as is well known. But his general literary theory, as Winters himself mentioned from time to time, has strong applications to all genres of literature and to many of the other fine arts, as we call those artistic activities that we consider the most "serious" in one sense or another. The "Problems" essay offers a few rough ideas, some no more than implied, that can lead the next generation of Wintersian critics, if it ever arises, forward in more widely applying and extending Winters's ideas about conceptual analysis, literary form, and evaluation to other genres of literature and arts related to literature, such as theater and film.

One has to wonder why Barish, back in '71, several years after Winters's death, bothered with his essay. I will give it a full consideration some time fairly soon on this blog, but for the present, I will say that the title gives us just about everything Barish had in mind to say. He finds Winters to be "anti-mimetic" and Winters's judgments concerning drama to be "prejudicial." Yet, let me state flatly -- though without making a case for my statement at this time -- that Barish is wrong on both points. First, Winters was certainly not "anti-mimetic" in the sense that Barish defines this term or in any sense I know of. Briefly, Winters saw mimesis as only a part, but a logically subordinate part, of works of literary art and of writing and reading those works. He wasn't "against" mimesis at all. He did not believe that mimesis has no purpose, importance, function, or value.

Second, Winters had no "prejudice" against drama as a genre. Yes, he saw theaterical mimesis as less important and as having a different function than thousands of critics saw and see it still, Barish presumably numbered among them. And yes, he believed that poetry was the greater art for various reasons. But Winters argued for a subordinate status for mimesis rationally, clearly, and in detail in his "Problems" essay. That Winters makes arguments in the logical manner that he does shows that he was not prejudiced. He certainly stood in disagreement with many critics about the status of drama as a genre, but was not prejudiced against them and their positions. Simply put, Winters argues for a different understanding of mimesis and the drama. Barish can disagree with Winters's arguments and offer his own counter-arguments, but to call Winters's position one of "prejudice" is to load the dice against Winters from the get-go -- and should be called prejudicial in itself.

My own interests have moved toward the study of film in recent years. I have been looking at film for some time now using the general critical principles of Winters's literary theory. I'm not ready yet to go public with a comprehensive Wintersian look at the cinematic art, but I will be discussing this general subject more when I return to Barish's essay in the next year on this blog. Again, I've been working through Barish's essay and will be considering his ideas and arguments in detail, just because he is the only critic to consider Winters's ideas about drama in detail. His thoughts will provide us with an excellent springboard to study the extension of Winters's theory of literature beyond poetry and even beyond literature in the years ahead on this blog.

Is Winters Taking Over the Poetry World?

In a recent May, 2007, post, I discussed an essay by a poet and literary editor named Robert Archambeau on the relationships between the New Criticism and Yvor Winters. I realized that I should mention that Archambeau wrote another post on his "Samizdat" blog last year that Winters, though dead now almost 40 years, might be gaining a measure of sway over the American “poetry world” through the rise of his former students to prominence and influence. In the work of those students are, Archambeau suggests, to be found strong and truly lasting effects of Winters's teaching and mentoring. The post can be found at:

http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/king-is-dead-long-live-king.html

Archambeau claims, a little playfully I suppose, that “the evidence piles up in favor of my thesis”:

Consider this: even if [Donald] Hall [current U.S. Poet Laureate] serves for only a single year, it would mean that for five of the last twelve years the poet laureate will have been a former student of Yvor Winters (Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, each for multiple terms, now Hall). What else could it be but the spirit of the old poet moving among us, working for unknown ends? It's not like the man didn't have an animus toward the eastern establishment, either: he once told Hall that the people at Harvard thought he was "lower than the carpet." Maybe that's the key -- maybe Winters has worked his posthumous mojo and lined up a series of his former students as laureates just to get back at Harvard by blocking Jorie Graham from assuming the august office.

The idea is striking and amusing. The problem with it, to consider it seriously, is that none of these three “descendents” of Winters has much to do with anything he stood for or believed in or practiced as poet or critic. None of them is a “Wintersian” (see my post defining the term) except in an extremely loose sense. Robert Hass has made a number of misleading comments about Winters and lets fall not a single hint that Winters has influenced his poetry or reviewing in any way (search on his name in the box at the top of this page for a few comments on him from me). His poetry is in actuality what I call "prosetic musing."

By the way, another blogger named Patrick Krup (I do not know him) also discussed this matter on November 22, 2006, in a blog post entitled “The School of Winters”, which can be found at (search on “Yvor” to find the relevant post):

http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

Krup quotes Thom Gunn as having set the defining principle of this “school”:

“The life of poetry is not just contained but is defined by its form.” Gunn’s final point might be taken as the banner flown by this great informal school of American poets -- Winters, Bowers, Cunningham and Gerlach.

I offer a hardy “Hear! Hear!” for that single word “great” as applied to the first three (Gerlach I’m not sold on yet, though I’ll consider him more intently some day). And yet... I would say that there very few traces left of Winters’s influence among the most prominent members of this “school,” which, in my judgment, is non-existent. Only the poet Dick Davis, whose poems are published in the New Criterion from time to time, seems close to being part of any such "school" any longer.

Robert Pinsky has written a few loosely formalist poems, especially back in the 1960s. They show a bit of skill, artistry, and intelligence. But he has written in recent decades almost exclusively like a prosetic muser, much like Hass, even though he often employs the wholly pointless practice of dividing his conceptually jumbled prosetic lines into regular stanzas, on the view, I suppose, that if it looks like poetry written by past masters then it just might BE poetry. Also, Pinsky has written casual criticism about poems that Winters judged, and Wintersians still often judge, very good or great. But his critical thought betrays no more than a trace of the influence of Winters. Still, I appreciate his efforts in trying to keep older, formal poetry alive in the reading public with his various activities on behalf of traditional and formalist poetry, such as the Favorite Poem Project, which has a web site and has published two books of older, well-known poems that people still love and benefit from.

Just for fun, I want to take a look at a fair sample of Pinsky’s work, which is much like Hass’s -- and even Hall’s. This is Pinsky’s ode “To Television”:

Not a "window on the world"
But as we call you,
A box a tube

Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal

Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,

In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much.

Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box -- Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.

Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and
Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing

Home, the image --
O strung shell -- enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.

It’s not really a poem -- is it? -- though it is broken into lines and stanzas. Hey, I know what it is. It’s ersatz poetry. It’s what I call prosetic musing. Indeed, it muses almost randomly. It hardly even follows what could be called an associative method, which Winters often argued was a weak or incomplete method of poetic construction. The lines have no unified character. The theme has no structure or drive or purpose beyond the emptily sentimental. Pinsky drives that purpose at us with the heavy emphasis on the word “home” in the final two stanzas. There appears to be no method beyond mere whim. Actually, the subterranean objective, unconscious most likely, appears to be to sound “deep” -- I'm using the word facetiously, just to be clear -- meaning the way poets feign to sound deep: ponderous, astute, sensitive, emotional, witty. In this way, it reads mostly like a public statement of social marking: intended, again probably almost entirely unconsciously, to identify the writer as belonging to that class of people who are very deep (hands pressing the organ keys and the voice going low as one says these words aloud). For this reason, I find the poem pretentious. Nonetheless, it’s nice to read, though very choppy. It puts a few nice random pictures and notions in the mind. It’s light and easy. But it’s trite, too. “Snuggled in one chair,” "dreams and wonders," “box within a box,” “sick in the head,” “Jackie Robinson stealing home” -- these phrases and too many others are terribly limp, bordering on or crossing over into cliché. But this style has become common in our time, this snaking between the trite and the sparkling, the pop-chatty and the “deep.”

Another sub-goal of Pinsky’s exercise seems to be to see the details of life clearly, to put readers right behind your eyes and let them see as you see or once saw and thought, however loosely, which is a common goal for the river of prosetry that flows endlessly on in our times. But as a whole it’s nearly empty intellectually. I could almost overlook its lack of structure or its lack of a significant overarching purpose if it offered even a few crumbs of understanding. But it offers no insight into television worth pondering. It’s not truly deep, however “deep” it feigns to be, nor is it a work of art, something to ponder and make part of one’s life, something that adds to your store of knowledge or refines the emotions. But I don’t mean to say that it’s somehow painful or absurd to read. It has a few nice turns of phrase. But I've got to say that it’s very close to being a waste of time.

My loosey-goosey analysis of this one poem could apply generally to almost everything Pinsky, Hass, and Hall have written over the past 30 years. \

As I insinuate, like Hass and Pinsky, Donald Hall has for a long time been a prosetic muser -- hardly a poet at all. Back in the 1950s, he wrote a couple of loosely formal poems that showed some promise -- Winters praised one that became an anthology favorite, "My Son, My Executioner" (I hope I recall the title exactly) -- but he has left all that behind for chaotic, muddled, free-verse, prosetic musings. And he writes too often of nostalgia with icky, drippy sentimentalism. Further, his criticism is as slack and loose as his prosetry, though he has tried to keep a few poems Winters considered very fine or great in the public eye, such as his published statement that the great Thomas Hardy poem “During Wind and Rain” (which stands in the Winters Canon) is the single finest poem in the English language. That’s a judgment worth considering seriously, and we will so consider it when we come around to Hardy in my reconsideration of the Winters Canon on this blog. Nonetheless, Hall betrays almost no influence of Winters any longer, though he showed the world no more than a trace of it in his youth. (Both Pinsky and Hall are considered in another post on this blog; search for that post it using the search box at the top.) You can find a healthy selection of the poetry of Hass, Pinsky, and Hall at two web sites:

The Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/

and the Poem Hunter: http://www.poemhunter.com/

Would it have mattered to Winters to have started a school that is now beginning to take control, even if it were true? It reminds me of one of Woody Allen’s great lines: “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” I tend to think that Winters would stand aghast that these three U.S. poet laureates have abandoned almost all he taught them (or tried to) and yet have risen so high. I certainly stand so aghast.

One of the curious embarrassments of Winters’s career was that he appeared to believe with all his heart and mind that his views would some day be vindicated and that his judgments about critical theory and the application of that theory, which has earned the strongest scorn, would be widely accepted in literary culture. I doubt that such will ever happen, and it certainly has almost no chance of happening in the next 50 years or so. But Wintersians, if there are any, keep plugging along and keep guiding people to Winters’s writings and ideas. Not every idea or judgment in his formal writings is valid or true. But he said SO much of SUCH great value, much more than even those who studied with him or have written sympathetically about him are still willing to grant.

Leni Riefenstahl: Content and Form

I briefly discussed the form-content distinction in my post on the New Criterion’s recent essay about Robert Bridges, which came out in the NC’s annual poetry issue in April. Two new essays about the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefensthal have come out that also concern this subject. The essays were occasioned by the publication of two new biographies of Riefenstahl, which have brought up the issue of the content as contrasted to the form of her unsettling films concerning the heyday of German National Socialism. The first essay is by Charles Taylor, entitled “Ill Will” from the May 7, 2007 issue of The Nation. Taylor’s first paragraph makes it plain what he will have to say:

The most durable piece of Nazi propaganda may yet turn out to be the belief that Leni Riefenstahl is an artistic genius. Ever since Triumph of the Will goose-stepped across movie screens in 1935, Riefenstahl has been central to the arguments about whether politics can be separated from art, whether form can be separated from content.

Taylor has more in mind than that “content” is highly important to how we understand and evaluate works of art, an idea Yvor Winters would have approved strongly. Taylor seems to think that not only is the “content” of Riefenshahl’s best films (she's pictured with the leader she lauded) quite obviously morally unacceptable, probably even dangerous (though he makes no case for this view), but also that her aesthetic form, which has been so often acclaimed by film critics, is deeply wanting as well. I believe the article is worth reading and pondering in the light of the critical theories of Yvor Winters. It can be found at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/taylor

In light of Taylor’s essay, I thought of a passage from Terry Comito on Winters’s views on the dire importance of the literary arts to life and of the importance of “content” as well as “form”. This quotation comes from Comito’s fine study of Winters In Defense of Winters (1986):

Poetry was a matter of life and death to Winters just because it does make sense: “makes,” creates, islands of understanding, structures of intelligibility where none were visible before. This was for him not a theory but an irreducible datum of experience that any plausible theory would have to explain. His objection to Eliot and Ransom was their failure, for all their professed regard for such admirable things as logic and tradition, to find a way of thinking about poetry that adequately accounted for this fundamental capacity; and their encouragement, among those for whom their talk and their own poems had a prescriptive force, of poetry in which this capacity was in fact impaired.

How many critics and aficionados think of poetry or any literary art form as providing some kind of “structure of intelligibility”? Not many any longer, I would suppose, judging from all my reading in poetry and poetry criticism. Poetry seems to be written either to muse surreally on images or symbols, to give an emotional buzz of some sort, or to provide some sort of rapt immersion in the quotidian. How many people turn to poetry for knowledge or understanding -- when they simply want to find something out? Not many. Yet Winters’s theory is distinctively focused on the issue of knowledge and understanding. Is Riefenstahl a bad artist because she tries to give us a badly flawed “structure of intelligibility,” as Comito would put it?

The second recent essay that I think worth your time is the New Yorker’s review of the Riefenstahl biographies by Judith Thurman, entitled “Where There’s a Will: The Rise of Leni Riefenstahl,” which can be found at:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/03/19/070319crbo_books_thurman

The essay also gives us an interesting and valuable look at Riefenstahl, though Thurman does not endeavor to make as direct a statement as Taylor has of the dangers of the “form” art takes in the hands of a person who is delivering dangerous “content.”

I might come back to this issue in the future. I offer this post just to make you aware of the discussion of Riefenstahl and its possible bearing on Winters’s critical theory. If you wish to pursue this issue in greater depth in Winters, the best essay to start with is probably the piece in In Defense of Reason, “John Crowe Ransom, or Thunder Without God.” But that entire book is sprinkled with ideas that are germane to this issue.

I am also aware that the New York Review of Books has published an essay on the Riefenstahl biography. I have not yet had a chance to look it over. If anyone else has, I'd be interested on your take on it or either of these other pieces.

What We’re Up Against

I was looking through the narrow, shadowed, dusty stacks at the Michigan State University Library last week (I work at MSU as a fund-raising writer) looking for a particular book. I was in the general literature section, PS 1-100 or so (pictured is the main entrance to the MSU Library some years ago). Always when I’m searching for specific books at the library, I glance at publication dates on location stickers as I pass along the stacks to see what’s new in literary culture or some other area of concern. I sometimes pop the newest books I haven’t seen before off the shelves and search the indexes to see whether they have much to say about subjects or issues I’m interested in, such as (often I’ll admit) Yvor Winters and the Wintersians -- though I do follow a number of other topics and issues, in case some of you are wondering. Well, last week in the stacks, as a result of this practice, I noticed a book published in 2004 entitled A History of American Literature by Richard Gray, whom I do not know and have never read anything by. It was published by the reputable house of Blackwell Publishing. It was a big book, some 900 large, densely printed pages, covering our literature from its beginnings up to the 2000s.

I found, happily, that it included a few sentences on Yvor Winters, though they added up to less than quarter of a page. It’s nice to see Winters given attention even this paltry, though, sadly, the author made a mistake in his first sentence on Winters. Gray implied that Winters was mainly inspired in his criticism by the so-called Fugitives, that group of Southern writers, known as “agrarians” in their early days, who formed the beginnings of what came to be called the New Criticism. But this is hardly the case, though it is true that Winters had relationships with some of the Fugitives, Allen Tate in particular, and wrote briefly in his formal essays about some of them and their movement from time to time.

In any case, all that this book from Blackwell had to say about a man whom some consider one of the most important writers in American letters, even in the history of the English language, was a few sentences amid 900 pages stuffed with names and words. Obviously, I and anyone else who holds the ideas of Yvor Winters in high esteem have a long way to go to see him properly regarded in literary culture. It will almost certainly never happen, of course. I’m no fool (in case that thought has crossed your mind as well). But I soldier on in the hope that those who might need or want to know of Winters’s work will find help in learning about it on this blog and on my Winters web site.

Other writers related to Winters in some way fared even worse in Gray’s book. 1) There was NO(!) mention of Janet Lewis, Winters’s wife. She is a superb novelist and poet whom some consider one of our best novelists, a superior prose stylist, and a great poet (as Winters did himself). 2) The learned and scintillating poet and literary scholar J.V. Cunningham, once a student of Winters’s in the 1930s who went on to a career distinct from his teacher’s in significant ways, did receive about half a page. That’s a sizeable amount and Gray’s discussion of J.V.C. is a fair one, even though he deserves a good deal more. 3) There was NO mention of Donald Stanford, the LSU professor, poet, critic, and co-editor of the Southern Review, Second Series through 1982. Stanford, who died a few years ago, was a brilliant advocate of modern classicism, a superb poet, and a fine editor. 4) Poet Edgar Bowers received no mention, though he was a great American poet (his status as one-time student of Winters has burdened him with an especially nasty curse). 5) Nor did Gray mention Timothy Steele, who has done so much to bring the study of metrics back into our culture, though it could be argued that he is too young to assess his part in the history of our literature. Nonetheless, I consider his work to be very important.

Lastly, on the plus side, Gray did devote four pages to N. Scott Momaday, the only writer with a close connection to Winters to receive extended discussion. Gray treated him as an important Native American writer, of course, not as a Wintersian, which he probably is not in any but a very loose sense. The principal work Gray discussed was Momaday’s fine novel House Made of Dawn, a work that was praised by Winters (in a very brief comment) and various Wintersians back in the 1960s and ‘70s, including Donald Stanford in the Southern Review. Gray does not mention Momaday’s great modern classical poetry.

What does all this mean? That one of the greatest poets and critics of all time in the English language continues to languish in near oblivion. Too, too sad.

Edith Wharton Discussion Flourishes

Edith Wharton’s life and work continue to be a subject of good discussion here and there on the web and in print. Most importantly, John Updike put out an essay, “The Changeling,” on the new Edith Wharton biography in the New Yorker recently. The essay can be found at:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/04/16/070416crbo_books_updike

To repeat, Yvor Winters judged Wharton, pictured as a teenager, one of the greatest novelists of all time, at least in regard to her very best work. (Winters, a bit strangely, I think, hinted that a lot of Wharton’s fiction was substandard, but that, yes, she did achieve greatness in a few novels and stories. I think Wharton’s achievement is fairly consistent and that Winters mistakenly judged a number of very fine works as weak.) But judging just exactly how Winters evaluated Wharton from his few comments on her art is a bit difficult. It is a matter that Wintersians should discuss more fully. No critic at least sympathetic to Winters’s ideas, however, has, it appears, thought the matter needs judicious reconsideration.

John Updike emphasizes that the secretiveness of the family in which Edith grew up had a profound effect on her art and agrees with biographer Hermione Lee that “Reserve and concealment are everywhere in her fiction.” Even Wharton’s “published autobiography is selective and evasive,” according to Lee. Updike, naturally, finds all this compelling, the result of an upbringing in a family that bred extreme discretion:

The starchy Joneses, with their ritual transatlantic reach toward the seats of real culture, their naïve and monotonous snobbery, their strange mixture of religiosity and materialism, their unforgiving family quarrels, do not invite touching.

Updike appears to agree with Lee that Wharton is one of America’s finest novelists and quotes Lee with apparent approval on what made Wharton great:

... her mixture of harshly detached, meticulously perceptive, disabused realism, with a language of poignant feeling and deep passion, and her setting of the most confined of private lives in a thick, complex network of social forces.

That is a fair summary of the themes of Wharton’s novels, and a profound delineation of the nature and power of society they certainly are. Her works have been on my mind as thematic touchstones for decades. Of course, she is very different from the modern “greats” whom she has been in competition with for so long, such as James Joyce, whom Updike mentions:

But [Wharton] was not a modernist, though well aware of changing fashions; her young friends could not convince her of the virtues of “Ulysses,” which she called “a turgid welter of schoolboy pornography (the rudest schoolboy kind) & unformed & unimportant drivel.”

There’s a striking quotation. That opinion of Joyce sounds remarkably akin to Winters’s very brief comments on Joyce’s work in “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” in The Function of Criticism and elsewhere. (I should point out, though, that Winters, at least early in his career, had a high opinion of Joyce’s Dubliners and particularly the great short story that concludes the collection, “The Dead.”)

For his part, Updike says that he doesn’t consider Wharton’s Custom of the Country her finest novel, as Hermione Lee claims, but rather The Age of Innocence. I can’t quibble with either choice. Both stand among the very greatest novels of English literature in my judgment and should stand as such in the “Standard Canon.” I think Custom is too often overlooked, however. It reaches for a higher theme than Age through its incisive exploration of the nature of evil.

Another recent essay on the new Wharton biography worth mentioning can be found at the Washington Times web site. This piece, “The Politics of Prose” by Kelly Jane Torrance, declares rather forthrightly that it is high time that Edith Wharton, along with Dawn Powell and Willa Cather, be ranked among America’s greatest writers. The piece can be found at:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/entertainment/20070412-094043-1459r.htm

Further, Torrance states that these three women should LEAD the “canon,” by which I presume she means the Standard Canon, that general, ethereal, and variable consensus that awards some sort of mystical literary status to certain works and writers:

These three aren't simply undervalued women who in the name of "diversity" deserve a more secure place in the canon -- they should be at its peak. That they're not says much about how literary reputation is born and sustained. Experimentalism counts for a lot; so does cutting a romantic figure.

Torrance discusses experimentalism again later, believing that a big part of the problem for Wharton and the other women has been their seeming conventionality, though that very conventionality might be coming back into fashion:

Experimentalism -- successful or not -- has often counted highly in making a literary reputation. But there are signs that literary modernism -- a stream to which misters Hemingway and Faulkner, in particular, and Mr. Fitzgerald, to a lesser degree, belonged -- is not aging well.

I won’t speak to Powell and Cather, but Wharton’s art certainly deserves a much higher status and deserves your attention as superior classical literature. Interestingly, this critic claims that, perhaps, Ethan Frome should be rated as Wharton’s finest work. I find Frome to be a very weak, though very common, choice. Frome has been the darling of Wharton lovers for decades, though I agree with Winters (we can only guess on thin evidence that he did not judge it as one of the greats) that this is a inferior work that does not even come close to the excellence of Wharton’s finest novels and stories. Among those should be counted an early novel that Winters highly recommended but remains out of print, The Valley of Decision, which is almost NEVER mentioned by scholars and critics writing about Wharton. I have read Valley (I’ve never run across another writer on the web who has) and found it outstanding, just as Yvor Winters believed it to be.

Finally, I wish to mention that the Wall Street Journal also published a review of Hermione Lee’s Wharton biography (available online only to subscribers) “Social Registrar: The novelist who captured the beau monde -- and lived it,” in its April 14 weekend edition. That short article included a couple of telling anecdotes about Wharton that I found worth reading.

A New John Donne Biography

John Donne (c. 1572-1631), one of the great poets of the Winters Canon and an English Renaissance poet whom Winters frequently discussed or mentioned, is the subject of a new biography. Winters wrote of Donne both very approvingly (concerning his finest poems) and somewhat disapprovingly (concerning much of work that remains popular to this day, the poetry that came to be called “metaphysical”). The biography has been reviewed in the May 13, 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review. The article is entitled “Love’s Deity” by the fine writer Thomas Mallon and can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Mallon-t.html?8bu&emc=bu

Perhaps mistakenly, Winters chose only two of Donne’s poems for inclusion in Quest for Reality:

1. “Holy Sonnet VII” (“At the round earth’s imagined corners”). Pictured is a drawing by Fra Bartolommeo from about 1500 “One Angel Blowing a Trumpet and Another Holding a Standard,” in honor of this sonnet’s first line. It’s a pen and brown ink drawing, squared in red chalk for transfer on laid paper (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Woodner Collection, 2006).

2. “A Valediction: Of My Name In The Window”

I should point out, however, that Winters extensively discussed another Donne poem, “Holy Sonnet I,” “Thou hast made me and shall Thy work decay,” in his trenchant essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins (reprinted in The Function of Criticism), which happens to be one of his finest discussions of several individual poems in his writings. In that essay, Winters opens with a comparison of “Thou hast made me,” which he praises quite highly, and Robert Bridges’s “Low Barometer” (even more highly praised) to Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” a discussion which gives deep insights into his theory of literature. He mentioned this sonnet as well in one list of exceptionally great poems in his book on Edwin Arlington Robinson. We will come around in time to considering the poems of Donne’s that Winters chose for the Winters Canon, and at that time I probably will consider a couple other poems by Donne and the reasons Winters might have left “Thou hast made me” out (and whether it belongs back in).

Winters deemed Donne’s early work, that which remains famous, as experimental. You will have to read the essay “Poetic Convention” in his first book Primitivism and Decadence (reprinted in In Defense of Reason) to understand why. Winters’s simplest summary of the matter links Donne to others who might surprise you:

Experimental poetry endeavors to widen the racial experience, or to alter it, or to get away from it, by establishing abnormal conventions. In one sense or another Spenser, Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Laforgue, and Rimbaud are experimental poets of a very marked kind.

I find Winters’s argument for Donne’s classification as an experimentalist convincing, for the most part. But I have never read anyone else who has sided with him in great part on his account of the early Donne. In the same book, in the essay “Primitivism and Decadence,” Winters made a comment that revealed his once very high assessment of Donne’s Holy Sonnets in the 1930s, an assessment which he would gradually lessen, especially concerning the experimental work, in the decades to follow:

The gap between the sonnets of Shakespeare and the sonnets of Donne is not extremely great.

Yet though Winters came to distance himself from that judgment (of both poets, in fact), I would tend to agree with it still. I feel that Winters incorrectly downgraded Donne during the second half of his career. Thomas Mallon’s concluding sentence sums up his very high opinion of Donne:

[This biography] has juice and, best of all, a kind of fearlessness in approaching the “frequently convoluted” emotions of a poet who possessed, if not English literature’s greatest imagination, quite possibly its greatest intellect.

Those are certainly curious judgments to make -- and perhaps indefensible. I’d like to see the case for them made, though, since I like challenging ideas. But, sad to say, Mallon makes not even a brief attempt at a defense. Judging from what I know, Donne did not possess the “greatest imagination” in our literature. Shakespeare would, almost obviously, take that title, in my judgment and that of many, many others, though there are other contenders as well -- Dickens, say. It all depends, of course, on how you define and then apply the concept “imagination.” But I doubt that any case could be made that John Donne is the “greatest intellect” in our literature. My oh my, there are some great intellects that exceed Donne’s by a nautical mile or two: Sam Johnson, Ben Jonson, possibly Shakespeare again, Matt Arnold, Sam Coleridge -- Yvor Winters, for that matter -- and so on.

But clearly, Mallon has a very high opinion of Donne’s poetry, and he makes his life sound as though it would be quite interesting and enlightening fare for study and reflection. Donne’s poetry is inconsistent and sometimes even fatuous, but a good portion of it is worth reading, certainly. The late meditations on religion and the Holy Sonnets have been especially important to me. The earlier love poems, the wild, overly witty, indomitably playful experiments, do not do much for me... but, alas, I find love poetry to have been frequently wildly overrated in any case; as a genre, it has never seemed all that valuable to me.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 2

The second poem printed in Quest for Reality is “Tagus, Farewell,” a.k.a. “In Spain,” by Thomas Wyatt (the poem has been variously titled). Let’s set this short poem before us for study:

Tagus farewell, that westward with thy streams
Turns up the grains of gold already tried;
For I with spur and sail go seek the Thames,
Gainward the sun that showeth her wealthy pride,
And to the town that Brutus sought by dreams,
Like bended moon, doth lend her lusty side.
My king my country, alone for whom I live,
Of mighty love the wings for this me give.

NOTES:

1. “Tagus” [pronounced TAY-gus]: A river that flows west into the Atlantic from Spain through Portugal. Wyatt served as a diplomat in that country until 1539. The wide mouth of the river is pictured in the photo.
2. “grains of gold”: The sand at the bottom of the Tagus was celebrated by, among others, Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400) and John Skelton (1460–1529) for its resemblance to granulated gold.
3. “Gainward the sun”: against the sun. The Thames, in contrast to the Tagus, flows "gainward" the sun, or eastward.
4. “Brutus”: a mythical Trojan supposedly descended from Aeneas. Diana, the goddess of the moon, was said to have appeared to Brutus in a dream, in which she ordered him to travel to Albion (ancient Britain) and found a city, which was supposed to have been what came to be called London.
5. “like bended moon”: the bend in the Thames River through London is in the shape of a crescent moon.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, or SUPERB

Winters listed this poem a few times as one of Wyatt’s very best, but he never discussed the poem in detail or made any case for its inclusion in the Winters Canon as one of the greatest poems of the language. I have posted an image of one page of Winters’s once well-known and highly influential essay on Renaissance poetry, “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” which was published in the journal Poetry in three parts in 1939, and marked on it the passage in which Winters calls “Tagus” minor (the poem is in the same list of poems on the previous page). This suggests that he chose the poem for Quest for Reality because of the excellence of its style and structure rather than for its overall achievement. Judging from the fragmentary evidence, I believe Winters ranked this lower than many other great poems and did not consider it to be part of what I am calling the Winters Canon, the very greatest poems.

No Wintersian has written on the poem, at least that I know of. (For that matter, no Wintersian I know of has written in detail about Wyatt’s poetry, generally or poem by poem.) There is no way to judge how other critics and poets who could be considered at least sympathetic to Winters’s critical theory might judge this small poem. John Fraser does include it in A New Book of Verse, the quasi-Wintersian anthology I have studying on this blog.

Terry Comito, who published a fine study of Winters in 1986, In Defense of Winters, had little to say about Winters’s judgments of Wyatt’s work and nothing to say about “Tagus” specifically. But he did comment briefly on the Winters’s important elucidation of the Renaissance English Plain Style, which “Tagus” appears to exemplify aptly:

Unlike the more highly ornamental “Petrarchan” style of Sidney and Spenser, the plain style eschews both impassioned oratory and the pomp of public ceremony. Its norm is a man speaking to other men in the ordinary world. Its vision is not utopian. The poets of the plain style do not build the “golden worlds” of which Sidney dreamed, but speak in the sober tones of those on whom (in the [Renaissance poet Fulke] Greville’s phrase) the “black ox” of experience has trod. Their poetry is a poetry of direct statement, the language almost wholly abstract, the organization generally logical, the themes broad, common, proverbial. It is a poetry, as Winters wrote of “Truth that is bare and old, / Worn plain with being told.” And it is saved from platitude, and often narrowly, by the poet’s skill in reanimating the emotional truth in the truism -- in persuading the reader, through the precision of his statement and the rhythmical inflection of his voice, that he speaks not by rote, but in the true accents of the experience whose authority he claims.

As you will see as we work through his poems from Quest for Reality, Wyatt employed what Winters called the Plain Style with great but subtle beauty.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 1 Star, OF LIMITED VALUE

This is a decidedly minor poem, in my judgment. It is not up to the standards of the greatest poems in English as we will try to lay them out in the months, and probably years, ahead. The subject matter is almost trite and its treatment is thin and very vague. It adds up to almost nothing. Scholars and the occasional critic of the poem have erected out some magnificent scaffolds of interpretation, however iffy they might be, upon the barest of hints. The key to most of these readings is Wyatt’s mention of Brutus, who was concerned in the myths of the founding of Rome. I consider these interpretations to be quite overblown, nearly pretentious. They read far too much into a couple of words.

But I must admit that with that mention of a mythical hero Wyatt did hint at a huge theme, the imperial desires and dreams of the English nation. But does this hint tell us something vital about imperialism or nationhood or a person’s place in his nation or the meaning of homeland or any similar topic? I don’t think so. The language of the poem is simply too vague and abstract to draw much meaning or emotional power out of it. A few exceedingly vague hints at something more, that mention of the mythical Brutus, the very vague talk of “mighty love,” give us no significant insight into or understanding of the experience of the desire to return to one’s homeland. I see little of value in this poem other than the general skillfulness of the verse and the diction.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

I cannot say that I have gotten anything out of this poem. What I mean by that -- and what I will mean when I will use similar phrases during this series on the poems of the Winters Canon -- is that the poem has given me no crucial or exceptional insight into some issue or problem or concern in human life, nor given me some crucial understanding of some aspect of an important human experience. I have long failed to see why Winters included “Tagus” in Quest, as nicely turned as it is. Knowing it as well as I do has added very little understanding of England, Spain, nationhood, the feelings for homeland, or any other issue to my life. Does anyone else have another view? I’d be very interested to hear it.