A Poet of the Pacific

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

To My Father

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

Agnes Lee? Who's That?

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

Convention

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

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

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

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

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

Epigram 12

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

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

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

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

The Literary Cafeterias

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

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

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

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

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

Two Poems by Philip Pain

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

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

Meditation 54

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

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

Meditation 56

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

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

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

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

Meditation 8

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

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

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

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

A Poem by T. Sturge Moore

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

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

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

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

Value and Extent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What About the Women

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

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

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

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

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

Are There Any Greats Out There?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materials and Time Mostly Wasted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nabokov the Trickster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Hope to Work On - Part 2

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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2/03/09 comment from James Matthew Wilson:

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

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

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

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

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

Are the Religious Strongly Drawn to Yvor Winters?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Hope to Work On - Part 1

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

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Recent Essays on Winters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Finding Nazareth

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

From Greg Stone:

Ben,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thy will be done; and let discussion cease.

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

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

Greg

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Greg:

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

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

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

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

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

Ben

Central Purposes of This Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faint Taste for Hart Crane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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