Another Review of the New Thomas Hardy Biography

The New York Times Book Review has joined the current discussion of Thomas Hardy, one of the great poets of the English language whose work is well represented in the Yvor Winters Canon of the greatest poems. It has published Thomas Mallon’s review of the major new biography of Hardy that initiated all this activity. The biography is entitled Thomas Hardy, by Claire Tomalin. (By the way, Mallon is a fine journalist and writer, who has delved into some interesting topics in his career. His popular survey of the history of memoirs, A Book of One’s Own, I highly recommend.) Mallon’s insightful, if rather brief, review is entitled “Thomas Hardy’s English Lessons” and can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Mallon.t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

There is much to ponder in the piece. Mallon considers, as Tomalin does, the so-called Emma poems to be central to Hardy’s literary career. As Tomalin apparently does, Mallon stresses that these poems about his late wife explore some kind of guilt and regret Hardy experienced over their troubled marriage. Once again, I must stress, as I have in previous posts, that Hardy’s poetry, even the poems that we can discern to be about Emma, make few direct references to his first wife or to any specific troubles in their marriage. Few, too, are the references to any specific mistakes either spouse may have made or to any specific cruelties dished out (so I hope no one will start reading Hardy’s poetry to find some sensational details about his peccadilloes). Rather, Hardy studies his experiences of and with Emma mostly in generalities, though his inexplicit language is beautifully concrete. There are many examples of his poetic method, but I chose one, which I happen to know well, that I think more clearly shows his typical way of composing a poem. This is not a great poem, but it is a good one and illustrative:

A BYGONE OCCASION

That night, that night,
That song, that song!
Will such again be evened quite
Through lifetimes long?

No mirth was shown
To outer seers,
But mood to match has not been known
In modern years.

O eyes that smiled,
O lips that lured;
That such would last was one beguiled
To think ensured!

That night, that night,
That song, that song;
O drink to its recalled delight,
Though tears may throng!

The night is called “that” night, but which night is not specified. Nor are the song, the eyes, the lips, the night, the delight. The poem is not discernibly about Emma, or about any occasion Hardy was willing to identify, as the title tips us off. This shows Hardy’s common method, in my opinion, which differs from what Mallon suggests you will find in Hardy’s poetry about Emma. The final two lines, I note in passing, may stand as one of the most sparklingly concise expressions of Hardy’s view of life in his poetry: life has delights, but tears will fall in recalling them. Note, however, that we don’t quite know from this poem what might cause the tears to throng.

Mallon also touches on a number of large topics, such as Hardy’s curmugeonliness, his fascination with those who delight in the world despite its obvious pains and sorrows (he appears to have been one of these people himself, like Tess of his famous tragic novel), and his final great novel of cosmic injustice and cruelty Jude the Obscure. Yvor Winters, I must note, had very little to say about Hardy’s novels, even when he chose to discuss serious fiction in his essays. I presume Winters read them, just because of his high regard for Hardy’s poetry. Judging from his critical bent overall, I think we can safely conjecture that Hardy’s novels were much too melodramatic for Winters. Melodrama, in which the emotions conveyed far outstrip their occasion, is a form of sentimentalism, an emotional tone or stance which Winters derided in any form of literature; he considered sentimentalism an unjust and inappropriate, perhaps even a dangerous, emotional bearing to take toward any profound or important subject matter. Mallon also mentions Hardy’s “memory of [Christian] belief,” which his alternating beliefs in atheism and the malevolent god he speculated about had pushed aside. This stands in distinction to Adam Kirsch’s strong stress upon Hardy as an atheist, which I discussed briefly in a recent post. Yvor Winters had little regard for Hardy’s metaphysical opinions, considering him an amateur as a philosopher. But he also believed that the value of his poetry did not lie in his overt philosophy, but in the supreme intelligence of the way he wrote about his views. (This is a crucial matter of Winters's critical theoriy I must and do plan to return to shortly in this blog.)

In his final paragraphs, Mallon admits to a curious opinion about Hardy’s writings:

To those, like this reviewer, who have always thought Hardy as unwise to have given up fiction as George Meredith was to neglect poetry, even for a time, Tomalin’s treatment of the Emma poems prompts at least a tentative reconsideration.

This is a striking admission for a learned literary journalist to make, that he has long disregarded the great poetry of Thomas Hardy. At least Mallon has been inspired, though only tentatively, to give Hardy’s poetry another look. I join Yvor Winters in offering a much stronger commendation, as you might guess. Hardy’s poetry deserves a lifetime of study, for its searching examination of the meaning of life, its moral profundity, its emotional power, and its superior language and poetic skill.

Final Note: I quoted Hardy's great poem "My spirit will not haunt the mound" in a recent post on Thomas Hardy. Several different aspects of this poem are discussed by Aaron Haspel in his "God of the Machine" blog. Just go to the blog, which has a link on my front page, and search on the poem's title. Much of Haspel's discussion of the poem, especially concerning its technical aspects, is worth reading.

Some Modern Religious Poems

The Poetry Foundation recently put out a feature article by poet Mark Jarman about modern religious poetry entitled “Original and Unorthodox: Ten religious poems worth knowing.” In light of the topics we have been discussing lately on this blog, the article is worth a brief look, though perhaps no more than a brief one. The article can be found at:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/feature.onpoetry.html?id=178954

As a Wintersian, I don’t consider most of the “poetry” Jarman recommends to be poetry exactly, nor most of the prose reflections -- a form of literature which I would like to see everyone begin to call “musings” rather than poems -- to be all that well written as prose (let alone as poetry). But a few lines and turns of phrase were worth reading and a few of the nearly random ideas were worth pondering. I doubt that Yvor Winters would have wasted more than a minute of his time on any of this work except for, perhaps, the only two pieces in the list that I, and probably Winters, would consider poetry, those by Edwin Muir and W.H. Auden. Muir’s piece is a moderately sharp, loosely coherent, and mildly insightful study of hope and unorthodox Christian salvation written in a loose blank verse. The idea that all creation, even all evil deeds and horrors, will be redeemed at the end of all time, which Jarman takes to be “unorthodox” in some way, is actually an ancient idea that goes back to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

Auden’s verse never impressed Winters much, nor me. His flaccid meters and meandering poems probably would have not passed muster with him, as they often don’t with me, though he is at times worth reading. Winters mentioned Auden only once in his published writings and very seldom in his letters. He claimed to have read him. I take it that he was very little impressed, since he didn’t consider it worth his time to write about his work. But that’s just a reasonably well informed guess. Perhaps someone who knew Winters better could enlighten us all on his take on Auden.

Concerning the remaining eight poems -- or rather musings, as I should begin saying -- that Jarman has chosen, they are all just prose chrestomathies of observations that try to be sparklingly witty and resolutely serious. None of these remaining poems is closely argued or presented as a rational statement about some aspect of human experience. They proceed almost by pure association, a widespread and tiresome way to construct a poem -- to me. The first piece, John Berryman’s, can serve as representative. It is little more than an unorganized catalog of observations in prose broken into random lines and pointless four-line stanzas, in which Berryman tries hard to use unusual words and syntax in order to appear intelligent and sensitive. The poem has little coherence, save the “poet’s” whimsy. A few of Berryman’s observations are interesting, one or two are even sound and striking in one way or another. But this is far from great or even good poetry. It’s not even especially good prose.

I noticed in passing that one of people who left a comment to the article asked for poems about atheism. This has been a topic lately on this blog, especially concerning Thomas Hardy’s work, in which that reader might find a congenial metaphysical view -- at least according to Adam Kirsch, who in writing of Hardy recently in the New Yorker so strongly emphasized his atheism, accurately or not.

It’s worth noting that many of the poems Yvor Winters chose for the Winters Canon (follow the easy links to the Canon through the Ben Kilpela web site, the home page of which is linked in the right column on this blog) are concerned with religion or metaphysics (in the traditional sense, not the modern magical sense, which refers to beliefs in such peculiar ideas as the efficacy of tarot cards) in one aspect or another. Winters’s choices are well worth knowing, everyone one worth memorizing, in my judgment. They are far superior to anything offered in Jarman’s article, though I think Jarman’s poems are worth reading, at the bare minimum -- though they’re not really “worth knowing,” as Jarman claims. Well, maybe I’m being too harsh. The Muir poem might be worth knowing, and there are a few scattered fragments in the other poems worth knowing, if you want to wade through all the useless chunks and crumbs and chips to find them. Here’s a few modern religious poems (several atheistic in one sense or another) from the Winters Canon to get you started:

1. “My spirit will not haunt the mound”, Thomas Hardy [I have quoted this poem in full on this blog already.]

2. “The Virgin Mary”, Edgar Bowers [John Fraser did NOT choose this great poem for his New Book of Verse, which I have been discussing on this blog from time to time. I must come back to this ommission, for I think Fraser has made a mistake in judgment.]

3. “Love Not Too Much,” Robert Bridges [I have quoted this poem in full as well on this blog.]

4. “Epigram 43, J.V. Cunningham (“In whose will is our peace”)

5. “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb,” Wallace Stevens

6. “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens

7. “O strong to bless,” Elizabeth Daryush

8. “Autumn, dark wanderer,” Elizabeth Daryush

9. “To the Holy Spirit,” Yvor Winters [In my judgment, this is perhaps the single greatest poem in English.]

10. “For Elizabeth Madox Roberts,” Janet Lewis

11. “Indecision,” Helen Pinkerton

12. “Error Pursued,” Helen Pinkerton

Lots of superb poetry there. And there’s certainly more in the Winters Canon and more excellent work by these poets that concerns religion in general, if you care to pursue more of their best work. I hope you can find the poems. Most university libraries will have them all, as well as Winters’s anthology containing them, Quest for Reality. I’d just print them all out if I weren’t worried about copyright. I will try to trickle out a few poems without getting permissions, on the assumption that if I find it printed on an American web site, my reprint here will slide in under the law.

Another Web Essay on Thomas Hardy

Slate has come out with a brief, sharp, informative essay on Thomas Hardy’s poetry -- or at least a portion of the poetry: the famed poems that he wrote about the death of his wife, whom he mistreated for long periods, the beloved Emma Hardy. The essay, “A Pessimist in Flower: The love Songs of Thomas Hardy,” is by Meghan O'Rourke, Slate's literary editor and can be found at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2157841/

O’Rourke offers many an insight into Hardy’s work, and her explication of Hardy’s poetry discusses his atheism very little, in contrast to what Adam Kirsch did in his recent New Yorker piece on Hardy (see my previous post). Kirsch apparently believes that atheism stands at the center of all Hardy’s writing. Instead, O’Rourke points to Hardy’s “realism” about life and death, a philosophical and moral stance which Yvor Winters found to be the most important achievement of Hardy’s work:

Unlike the Modernists, Hardy places little value on individual experience; the speaker's loss is rendered as an immense foreground only to be dismissed with the matter-of-factness that earned Hardy the label "pessimist" (but that he might himself have merely called "realist"). In his view, bleakness is not fatalism, but an accurate portrayal of the mechanics of life. That he insists so while appearing to inhabit forgotten emotions all over again is the more extraordinary -- and one of the reasons these poems, with their condensed bursts of insight, are the equal of his best novels.

I consider this an apt summarization of Hardy’s Emma poems. I would quibble with the idea that he “dismisses” his individual experience of love and joy, or that he does so almost nonchalantly, as O’Rourke implies. I think Hardy’s work usually feels a little cold and distant, at times downright bleak, because there was no convention of detailed personal confession that we have grown so accustomed to over the last 60 years or so. Consider just Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (two sometimes bleak poets whose poems feel strangely personally warm) as examples of the convention, among thousands of poets -- if not millions. Hardy felt the joys of life strongly, I believe (I would argue his poetry shows this well), but the poetic convention he employed is one that reaches thousands of years back. A poet did not speak personally in his or her work, or refer to the small events of private life, but spoke in generalities and abstractions, because in olden days poets endeavored to speak of general truths in this fashion (a fashion that Yvor Winters highly approved and championed throughout his criticism, by the way). For these reasons and others, I agree with O’Rourke that labeling Hardy as a “pessimist” is inaccurate for the most part.

Review of a New Thomas Hardy Biography

For Wintersians, the New Yorker has been on a roll of late (see several of my blog entries during the past few months). The magazine has come out with yet another essay that is acutely pertinent to the study of Yvor Winters’s critical theories, an essay on the fiction and poetry of Thomas Hardy, on the occasion of the release of a new biography on Hardy. The essay, by Adam Kirsch, a fellow who has written specifically about Winters a couple times in recent years, is entitled “God’s Undertaker: How Thomas Hardy Became Everyone’s Favorite Misanthrope,” and can be found at:

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/070115crbo_books

Yvor Winters considered Thomas Hardy to be one of the greatest poets in the history of English literature. He included 10 of Hardy’s poems in his anthology of the greatest poems in English, Quest for Reality (see http://www.msu.edu/user/kilpela/quest1.htm for the Table of Contents and links to most of the poems). Ten is the third highest number of poems for any poet in the Winters Canon, exceeded only by J.V. Cunningham and Winters himself. (I must hasten to explain that Winters did not select his own poems for his distinction as “great”; Winters’s graduate student co-editor, Kenneth Fields, added Winters’s great poems to Quest after Winters’s death in early 1968.) Winters used passages of Hardy’s poetry as illustrations of superior craftsmanship dozens of times in his essays. Further, in those casual lists Winters made of the greatest poets or best poems, when he wished to get his readers to rethink what I call the “Standard Canon” or to point them quickly to works of art that best illustrate his ideas about true literary achievement, Winters regularly pointed to Hardy as among the six or seven finest poets in English.

Adam Kirsch leaves the clear impression that atheism stands the center of Hardy’s life and career. And yet you’ll find very little open mention of God or his alleged “death” in his poetry or the fiction. I would characterize Hardy as less atheist than “anti-Christian.” For his disagreement with Christian ideas and doctrines played a more significant part in his life and his writings, though some sort of atheist indeed he was. Still, Hardy wasn’t quite the pure and sure atheist that Kirsch makes him out to be. Many who have studied Hardy have discerned a unmistakable strain of the supernatural in his poetry. Also, quite evident at times is a sense of fate as some sort of divine power -- and the suggestion comes across in dozens of poems that Hardy at least entertained the thought that there might be gods or a god ruling over us (usually with the cautionary proviso that these powers are probably malevolent, as we can surmise, in Hardy’s judgment, from their unending mistreatment of us). This is why I think of Hardy as more anti-Christian than atheist, though I do admit that atheists will find affinities with many of his poems and ideas.

Kirsch claims that the baldest presentation of Hardy’s atheism will be found in the novels. Winters said almost nothing of the novels in his criticism, which concentrated almost solely on Hardy’s poetry. Like Winters, though, Kirsch leaves us with one suggestion that there might be something spiritually beneficial in Hardy’s atheism, though he leaves the comment for the very last phrase of his essay. Here’s the whole final paragraph:

It is this readiness to confront bitter facts, and to make their bitterness sweet through his art, that makes Hardy not just a great writer but a wise and trustworthy one. Poetry has had plenty of mystics and experimenters since Hardy’s death; even before he died, he saw that the modernists were turning toward the forbidden magics of vitalism, occultism, and nihilism. “At present,” he wrote in 1922, “when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and ‘the truth that shall make you free,’ men’s minds appear . . . to be moving backwards rather than on.” But almost a century later, when Yeats’s visions and Eliot’s piety and Pound’s politics seem to belong to a troubled past, it is Hardy’s sad Victorian rationalism that still has the power to convince, and to console.

A great deal could be said about the various sweeping summary opinions expressed in this one short paragraph, but I will make just three comments for now.

1. Does Hardy make the bitterness sweet? Hardly. He asks us to confront all that is bitter in life, and his art is his effort to understand the facts and properly orient our emotions to the understanding of the human condition gained thereby. There is no effort to make the bitter sweet as such, which suggests that Hardy was trying to transform poison into punch or help us get the poison down with a spoonful of poetic honey.

2. And where does that final phrase come from, stating that Hardy’s poetry has the power “to console”? There is no indication anywhere in Kirsch’s essay of what he Kirsch finds important in Hardy‘s atheistic poetry, besides its superior craft, until those final two words. But what Kirsch thinks is or might be consoling about Hardy’s vision of human life without a god is left for us to discover on our own. Kirsch should have at least given us more than a hint at his own views. The hint is in that quoted comment that Hardy thought that believing in God is in some sense a “moving backwards,” though Kirsch does not defend this position in any way and though it is highly contestable at every level. Sadly, Kirsch tells us nothing more of his ideas about what in Hardy’s treatment of a universe without god he finds consoling. Or whether it is the best or most rational consolation, though Kirsch makes it quite clear through the whole tenor of his essay that he believes that it is.

3. Does Hardy’s poetry have the power “to convince” us that there is no god? That, my friends, is also highly contestable. Hardy makes no philosophical case for his atheism in the poetry. He just assumes it. If you are convinced by other means that atheism is true, you will find Hardy’s ideas roughly congenial to your views. But Hardy offers nothing in his poetry or fiction other than a vague argument against the existence of a god on the basis of the problem of evil. This objection to a god is answerable and has been answered in many ways down the centuries and during all the decades since Hardy lived and wrote. Hardy’s metaphysics do not convince me, and naturally so, for they don’t seem to have been intended to convince anyone of anything. Hardy assumes his philosophy for his art; he does not bother to defend it therein.

Nonetheless, I applaud Kirsch’s piece, even if I find it a little off-kilter overall. I recommend it for all interested in one of the greatest poets of all time, a status that Winters so ably defended throughout his career as a critic.

So where should you start with Hardy? There are 10 great poems found in the Quest for Reality anthology, most of which are available through links on my Quest web page or by searching on google. Perhaps the first poem one should try to absorb is one that Winters discussed most often when he wrote of Hardy, “My Spirit Will not Haunt the Mound,” which is part of the Winters Canon:

My spirit will not haunt the mound
Above my breast,
But travel, memory-possessed,
To where my tremulous being found
Life largest, best.

My phantom-footed shape will go
When nightfall grays
Hither and thither along the ways
I and another used to know
In backward days.

And there you'll find me, if a jot
You still should care
For me, and for my curious air;
If otherwise, then I shall not,
For you, be there.

I don’t want to come off as bashing Adam Kirsch, but let me point out how this more representative poem belies Kirsch’s general opinions of Hardy. First, you see that the disbelief in immortality is quietly assumed in the poem, which does not explicitly argue against immortality. Second, there is little bitterness about life expressed in the poem, and little effort to make the bitter sweet. Rather, the sweetness of life is strongly suggested. The evils and injustices of life are not mentioned. For these reasons, this hardly sounds like the work of someone whom we would call “God’s Undertaker,” the phrase with which Kirsch summarizes Hardy’s career. Indeed, we could harmonize the ideas found in this poem with a conception of immortality and a belief in a god or gods or some sort of higher power (a “Something More,” as William James called humankind’s wildly varied conceptions of the supernatural and divine), since the poem speaks to the earthly existence of the speaker after his earthly death, not to whatever existence he might have beyond this universe (though certainly, from all indications, Hardy’s intention was to write of existence from a position that there is no human immortality).

“My Spirit” is a sharp and lovely poem offering what Hardy believed, at times, to be the only consolation we have in death, our spirit’s living in the memory of those who knew us. The particular emotional effect of this poem (and dozens of others in Hardy) arises from its use of the ballad style. Kirsch does not discuss the style of Hardy’s poetry in detail, which derives from and deepens that ballad convention in English. But it seems clear that the use of ballad form in this poem and hundreds of others lends a striking emotional resonance that can be found in no other poetry in English. I feel Hardy calling on us to accept all we can achieve and to enter death with the spiritually steadying knowledge of whatever we found in life to be “largest” and “best” -- a life that might have been sweet but is, sorrowfully (“tragically” in Winters’s opinion), temporary. How we might define what is or should be “largest” or “best” in life is left open to our personal scruples.

Though not all readers who are moved by this poem will be atheists, this poem gives us one aspect of the human condition. This earthly life could be all we will ever have, yes. But there could be more. For myself, I do hope for more, though the hope is dim. Though I am not a Christian or an adherent of any religion that teaches immortality, I have a hope of immortality like that articulated by the non-Christian scientist Martin Gardner in his very fine book of popular philosophy The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (which I recommend highly). There is consolation in Hardy’s great poem, however minimal, however thoroughly mixed with sorrow, but he expresses little bitterness in this statement of how his spirit might live on (though there is plenty of bitterness elsewhere in Hardy, especially the fiction). As a study of the tragedy of human life and human death without immortality, it is a brilliant presentation of an understanding of the human condition and a proper emotional stance toward that understanding. It does not and cannot give us the whole story about life and death, but it shows what the poetry of the Winters Canon can do so nearly perfectly: rationally treat a subject and properly adjust our emotions to the understanding achieved.

Note, in conclusion, that this discussion of Kirsch on Hardy and Winters’s greatest Hardy poem ties right into our discussions of Winters’s and Janet Lewis’s opinions of Christianity, which I have discussed recently -- as well as into our discussions of Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry, as we have seen, made an effort, in part, to adjust our lives to an understanding of the hegemony of Evil in human life and to our utter extinction in death.

More Recent News on Baudelaire

Upon the release of the new edition of Walter Benjamin’s essays on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, which I have discussed once on this blog, a couple of review essays have been published, one by Richard Wolin at The Nation and another by an English professor named Leslie Whitten, Jr. at The Washington Times. Here are the url’s for the entire articles:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/wolin/2

http://washingtontimes.com/books/20061216-113346-7416r.htm

As I have pointed out, Winters considered Baudelaire to be one of the greatest poets because he saw in many of his best poems, those found in the book-long sequence Les Fleur du Mal, the work of a poetic thinker who had met the metaphysical and moral horrors of human experience and human existence with the calm control, rational steadiness, and spiritual insight of an exemplary stoic. Richard Wolin’s piece mostly concerns itself with Walter Benjamin, the utopian Marxist of the early 20th century who found a kindred spirit in Baudelaire, and only touches on Benjamin’s studies of the French poet. Drawing special attention to an intensely personal memoir of Benjamin's Berlin childhood, which has also been republished recently, Wolin claims that Benjamin sought to bring "to bear on the German capital the same lyrical sensibility that had served Baudelaire so well with regard to Paris in Les Fleurs du Mal.” That seems a rather odd comment, since Benjamin had considered the Berlin of his childhood to be an Eden, to which he longed to return, while Baudelaire felt something close to revulsion at what nascent capitalism had turned the dear city of Paris into.

In regard to Baudelaire’s poetry, Wolin makes a basic mistake often made concerning Baudelaire:

In poems like "A Corpse" and "The Litanies of Satan," Baudelaire formulated one of the key ideas of art for art's sake: An object can be of keen aesthetic interest not only despite being ugly or grotesque but because it is ugly or grotesque.

This has been the typical take on Baudelaire’s ostensible subject matter over more than a century, but a study of Yvor Winters’s writings on Baudelaire -- and on many other poets and authors (such as his brief but insightful discussion of Dante’s religious beliefs in the essay on John Crowe Ransom [which can be found in In Defense of Reason]) -- quickly shows this take to be a mistake and enables us to set such critical confusions aside. According to Winters, Baudelaire was not seeking in “A Corpse” to portray a rotting, stinking corpse as beautiful in itself, as though it were the equivalent of a rose in bloom. Nor was he lauding the intrinsic beauties of Satan or Evil in “The Litanies of Satan.” Rather, Baudelaire was seeking to understand, in the first poem describing a corpse, the meaning of the human experience of a world that has putrifying corpses in it and, in the second poem invoking Satan, the human experience of a world torn by terrifying powers of darkness and Evil that continue to prowl our streets and alleys. The “beauty” of Baudelaire’s poetry resides not in the description of the surface subject matter, but in the controlled, rational treatment of that subject matter. Baudelaire uses his great intelligence to seek to understand -- and most crucially, to properly adjust our emotions to -- a world with corpses and a world with forces of Evil so powerful and massive that they require that capital “E” to name them.

Wolin later discusses Baudelaire’s use of drugs in relation to Benjamin’s own drug use, matters which seem pertinent to our study of Winters in this blog:

It was Baudelaire, too, who inspired Benjamin's experiments with drugs. Benjamin had long been fascinated by the "alternative experiences" championed by turn-of-the-century spiritualists -- among them Chinese ancestor worship cults, hallucinations, delirium, mystical visions. In a sense, these "profane illuminations," as he called them, were gateway drugs for a man seeking inner-worldly transcendence, for liberation from a modern world that stood under the sign of natural science. At the age of 27, [Benjamin] discovered Baudelaire's Artificial Paradise, "an attempt," as he put it in a letter to Ernst Schoen, "to monitor the 'psychological' phenomena that manifest themselves in hashish or opium intoxication for what they have to teach us philosophically." He added: "It will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of this book."

On Hashish contains transcriptions of Benjamin's various drug-induced experiences -- with hashish, mescaline and morphine -- from the late 1920s and the '30s. He was introduced to narcotics by an old university classmate, Ernst Jöel, who had become a physician and needed subjects for his clinical research on the medical effects of hallucinogens. Benjamin eagerly volunteered, joining an illustrious list of writers -- Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey and Aldous Huxley -- who tried to enhance their creative powers and expand their mental horizons via the magic of intoxicants. His drug experiences show once again how singularly committed he was to the program of the avant-garde: overcoming the limitations of the self by subjecting it to an array of pulverizing, Dionysian, ego-transcending influences.

It is mostly true that Baudelaire used drugs in hopes of reaching some higher knowledge of life and death. But his crazed, neurotic use of drugs, whatever its motivations, seems to have accomplished little more than the hastening of his destruction. Oddly, Winters pays little attention to the dissolution in Baudelaire’s life, in contrast to his deep thinking upon Hart Crane’s dissolution and suicide in relation to Crane’s poetry (which I have discussed several times in the past few months on this blog). What did Winters think of the life that Baudelaire continued to live despite the poetry? We cannot know, even though it appears to be as relevant to Baudelaire’s poetry as Crane’s behavior was to his own work. If I were to make a quick guess, I would say that Winters probably believed that Baudelaire’s art and thought shows that he was trying to master the forces that were ushering him toward destruction, while Crane’s art and thought show that he had sided with those forces.

Leslie Whitten, in that other review of Benjamin’s essays from the Washington Times, also discusses Baudelaire’s questionable behavior and his drug abuse. Whitten suggests that such misdeeds sprang from Baudelaire’s deep abhorrence at the odious conditions of his times and of human existence in general:

...in Paris, [Baudelaire] misspent his inheritance on dandyish clothes, absinthe, opium and hashish for poet friends and on his whorish mistress who betrayed him even as he tried to nurse her back from her paralytic attacks. In another mode, we see him as the admired companion of France's most esteemed literary and artistic figures (and the despair of many of them). Plagued with debts, he fled France to Belgium which he came to scorn and hate along with almost everything else but his own perfect poetry.

It would seem clear that Baudelaire’s mind, as great as Winters believed it is shown to have been through his art, didn’t succeed in saving him from dissolution, depravity, and destruction.

Whitten’s review is much less concerned with Benjamin than with Baudelaire. Overall, his main purpose seems to be to fathom why people of late have taken a renewed interest in his poetry and life:

Why is all this happening? Maybe because in a unique way we fearful and confused souls recognize that Baudelaire's mordant and yet often exquisitely beautiful poetry and screwed-up life are a kind of mirror noir of our own teetering times. The same violent deaths, political treacheries, religious confrontations -- and yet brief Roman candle bursts of loveliness are there.

Yet such is the character, more or less, of every discernible period of modern history (if not every period of history from its beginnings) between Baudelaire’s day and our own, no? Haven’t there almost always been prophets of doom rising up and declaring that society and culture have become degraded and are heading to destruction? Sheesh, didn’t it happen just a few short decades before in Baudelaire’s own country and city, during the wild times of the Revolution? Have seers not regularly arisen to proclaim that the final days are upon us? In my opinion, the up-tick in interest in Baudelaire is probably nothing all that significant, just the usual random turning of the wheels of culture. Still, Whitten has a few insightful points to make and offers one great poem for your review:

For Baudelaire's poems are dark jewels, magical, capable of changing one's life much as psychotherapy can. I challenge you who have read this far to thoughtfully parse "The Voyage" ("Le Voyage") with its profound words about love, death and God. By understanding what you have read, you honor not just Baudelaire's disturbing truths, but your own perceptiveness.

Whitten never explains these comments or gives an example of how he interprets one of the poems of Les Fleur du Mal in such a way that we can see how they can change a life, whatever that phrase might mean exactly. But he does suggest an excellent poem to turn to if you would like to discover what might be important in Baudelaire on your own. “The Voyage” is a poem that Winters never mentioned in his published criticism or letters, that I am aware, but I have long considered it one of the finest in Baudelaire, which makes it, in my judgment, one of the greatest poems in the history of literature. I would propose this poem for the Winters Canon, but I will save my case for a future blog entry.

In closing, I must say that a study of Winters’s views on and interests in Charles Baudelaire can only be pursued so far, strangely, for though it is clear that Winters considered Baudelaire one of the very greatest literary artists throughout his career, he did not write extensively about him. It would seem that he would have condemned most of these aspects of Baudelaire’s life, but that he still saw greatness in much of the poetry. I believe the matter requires further study for Wintersians, especially in relation to the work and life of Hart Crane.

To get you started on your consideration of the achievement and value of what I consider a great poem, I offer here Robert Lowell’s interesting and rather unbridled translation, typically so for Lowell, of Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963):

The Voyage

I

For the boy playing with his globe and stamps,
the world is equal to his appetite —
how grand the world in the blaze of the lamps,
how petty in tomorrow's small dry light!

One morning we lift anchor, full of brave
prejudices, prospects, ingenuity —
we swing with the velvet swell of the wave,
our infinite is rocked by the fixed sea.

Some wish to fly a cheapness they detest,
others, their cradles' terror — other stand
with their binoculars on a woman's breast,
reptilian Circe with her junk and wand.

Not to be turned to reptiles, such men daze
themselves with spaces, light, the burning sky;
cold toughens them, they bronze in the sun's blaze
and dry the sores of their debauchery.

But the true voyagers are those who move
simply to move — like lost balloons! Their heart
is some old motor thudding in one groove.
It says its single phrase, "Let us depart!"

They are like conscripts lusting for the guns;
our sciences have never learned to tag
their projects and designs — enormous, vague
hopes grease the wheels of these automatons!

II

We imitate, oh horror! tops and bowls
in their eternal waltzing marathon;
even in sleep, our fever whips and rolls —
like a black angel flogging the brute sun.

Strange sport! where destination has no place
or name, and may be anywhere we choose —
where man, committed to his endless race,
runs like a madman diving for repose!

Our soul is a three-master seeking port:
a voice from starboard shouts, "We're at the dock!"
Another, more elated, cries from port,
"Here's dancing, gin and girls!" Balls! it's a rock!

The islands sighted by the lookout seem
the El Dorados promised us last night;
imagination wakes from its drugged dream,
sees only ledges in the morning light.

Poor lovers of exotic Indias,
shall we throw you in chains or in the sea?
Sailors discovering new Americas,
who drown in a mirage of agony!

The worn-out sponge, who scuffles through our slums
sees whiskey, paradise and liberty
wherever oil-lamps shine in furnished rooms —
we see Blue Grottoes, Caesar and Capri.

III

Stunningly simple Tourists, your pursuit
is written in the tear-drops in your eyes!
Spread out the packing cases of your loot,
your azure sapphires made of seas and skies!

We want to break the boredom of our jails
and cross the oceans without oars or steam —
give us visions to stretch our minds like sails,
the blue, exotic shoreline of your dream!

Tell us, what have you seen?

IV

"We've seen the stars,
a wave or two — we've also seen some sand;
although we peer through telescopes and spars,
we're often deadly bored as you on land.

The shine of sunlight on the violet sea,
the roar of cities when the sun goes down;
these stir our hearts with restless energy;
we worship the Indian Ocean where we drown!

No old chateau or shrine besieged by crowds
of crippled pilgrims sets our souls on fire,
as these chance countries gathered from the clouds.
Our hearts are always anxious with desire.

(Desire, that great elm fertilized by lust,
gives its old body, when the heaven warms
its bark that winters and old age encrust;
green branches draw the sun into its arms.

Why are you always growing taller, Tree —
Oh longer-lived than cypress!) Yet we took
one or two sketches for your picture-book,
Brothers who sell your souls for novelty!

We have salaamed to pagan gods with horns,
entered shrines peopled by a galaxy
of Buddhas, Slavic saints, and unicorns,
so rich Rothschild must dream of bankruptcy!

Priests' robes that scattered solid golden flakes,
dancers with tattooed bellies and behinds,
charmers supported by braziers of snakes..."

V

Yes, and what else?

VI

Oh trivial, childish minds!

You've missed the more important things that we
were forced to learn against our will. We've been
from top to bottom of the ladder, and see
only the pageant of immortal sin:

there women, servile, peacock-tailed, and coarse,
marry for money, and love without disgust
horny, pot-bellied tyrants stuffed on lust,
slaves' slaves — the sewer in which their gutter pours!

old maids who weep, playboys who live each hour,
state banquets loaded with hot sauces, blood and trash,
ministers sterilized by dreams of power,
workers who love their brutalizing lash;

and everywhere religions like our own
all storming heaven, propped by saints who reign
like sybarites on beds of nails and frown —
all searching for some orgiastic pain!

Many, self-drunk, are lying in the mud —
mad now, as they have always been, they roll
in torment screaming to the throne of God:
"My image and my lord, I hate your soul!"

And others, dedicated without hope,
flee the dull herd — each locked in his own world
hides in his ivory-tower of art and dope —
this is the daily news from the whole world!

VII

How sour the knowledge travellers bring away!
The world's monotonous and small; we see
ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday,
an oasis of horror in a desert of ennui!

Shall we move or rest? Rest, if you can rest;
move if you must. One runs, but others drop
and trick their vigilant antagonist.
Time is a runner who can never stop,

the Wandering Jew or Christ's Apostles. Yet
nothing's enough; no knife goes through the ribs
of this retarius throwing out his net;
others can kill and never leave their cribs.

And even when Time's heel is on our throat
we still can hope, still cry, "On, on, let's go!"
Just as we once took passage on the boat
for China, shivering as we felt the blow,

so we now set our sails for the Dead Sea,
light-hearted as the youngest voyager.
If you look seaward, Traveller, you will see
a spectre rise and hear it sing, "Stop, here,

and eat my lotus-flowers, here's where they're sold.
Here are the fabulous fruits; look, my boughs bend;
eat yourself sick on knowledge. Here we hold
time in our hands, it never has to end."

We know the accents of this ghost by heart;
our comrade spreads his arms across the seas;
"On, on, Orestes. Sail and feast your heart —
here's Clytemnestra." Once we kissed her knees.

VIII

It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!
The land rots; we shall sail into the night;
if now the sky and sea are black as ink
our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.

Only when we drink poison are we well —
we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,
to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,
who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.

The Christian Faith of Janet Lewis Winters

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

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

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

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

“Carol for the Nativity”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Winters Great, Charles Baudelaire, in the News

Harvard University Press has been reissuing some of Walter Benjamin’s essays and memoirs in various collections of late. This fall Harvard released a new edition of The Writer of Modern Life, a collection of Benjamin's essays on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. (Information on the book can be easily found by searching on google.) Yvor Winters was heavily influenced by Baudelaire both in his mature conception of poetry and his rational conception of metaphysics -- two subjects indissolubly blended in Winters's later rationalist theories and writings. In 2003 Michael Jennings, editor of the new collection of Benjamin's pieces on Baudelaire, wrote in boundary 2, a Duke literary journal, that Benjamin had come to see Baudelaire as a new sort of artist, one meeting the challenges of modern industry and mercantilism head on:

The classical studies that preceded Benjamin's text had highlighted the early Baudelaire: his ties to Romanticism, the Swedenborgian mysticism of the correspondances, the flights into reverie, elation, and the ideal. Benjamin's reading emphasizes for the first time the other element of the dualism Baudelaire evokes in the section of Les fleurs du mal titled "Spleen and Ideal": Baudelaire's melancholy, his self-understanding as flotsam and jetsam on the tides of modernity. Benjamin's text achieves this by revealing Baudelaire as the preeminent poet of the urban capitalist metropolis. He is the flaneur, strolling through the mercantile arcades at a pace dictated by a turtle on a leash, a ragpicker, collecting images of that which has been discarded by the denizens of the metropolitan jungle. And Benjamin relates these features to historical processes: the flaneur's pace protests against the accelerating tempo at which urban life must be experienced; the ragpicker's accumulation of unrelated detritus from all walks of Parisian life figures nothing else but the division of labor, a prime cause of the fragmentation of that human experience.

This aspect of Baudelaire's poetry, his exploration of changes, good and bad, to human nature in the new urban life, is one that Winters commented on very little in his criticism, though it has been the primary focus of much of the study of the French poet in our times. Winters, rather than contemplating and evaluating Baudelaire's literary study of the increasing degradation and decay of human life brought about in great part by new economic systems, studied closely -- and very highly praised -- Baudelaire's delineation of the calm spiritual control he had achieved in the face of the metaphysical predicament of humankind (and of each individual person, whether beggar or king). In Winters's judgment, Baudelaire described, rationally understood, and properly adjusted his emotions to his recognition of the metaphysical horrors of life, discovered most surely, starkly, and harrowingly in modern times. These horrors arise from our seeing that life utterly ends with human death, that all existence for each and every individual self is completely and irredeemably annihilated. Baudelaire, according to Winters, faced this predicament better than most every other thinker who had come before him, with the calm resolve of the stoic, the steady gaze of one who had perceived the true nature of human existence and yet had found the ancient and classical way to stand firm. For this reason, he chose poems such as "Le Mort Joyeux" as one Baudelaire's very greatest and one of the very greatest ever written in any language. This poem is a stoically, yet suggestively defiant, welcoming of the utter dissolution of death, a poem that conveys through its steady, controlled language and astute metrical control the profound emotional adjustment of its author to a horrfying vision of that dissolution:

Le Mort joyeux

Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots
Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde,
Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os
Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde.

Je hais les testaments et je hais les tombeaux;
Plutôt que d'implorer une larme du monde,
Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux
À saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde.

Ô vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux,
Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux;
Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture,

À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords,
Et dites-moi s'il est encor quelque torture
Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts!

Here's a translation of that poem that I memorized long ago and that I type out of memory. I do not remember the translator and am unsure of the punctuation at the time of this writing:

The Gladly Dead

In a soil rich with snails and thick as grease
I’ve longed to dig myself a good deep grave.
There to stretch my old bones at ease
And sleep in oblivion like a shark in wave.

Wills I detest and tombstones set in rows!
Before I’d beg a tear of anyone,
I rather go alive and lets the crows
Bleed the last scrap of this old carrion.

O worms, Black comrades without eye or ear,
Here comes a dead man for you, willing and gay.
Feasting philosophers, sons born of decay,

Come, burrow through my ruins, shed not a tear.
Only tell me if any terror is left to dread
For this old soulless body, dead as the dead.

And here's another translation I found on the web:

The Joyful Corpse

In a rich, heavy soil, infested with snails,
I wish to dig my own grave, wide and deep,
Where I can at leisure stretch out my old bones
And sleep in oblivion like a shark in the wave.

I have a hatred for testaments and for tombs;
Rather than implore a tear of the world,
I'd sooner, while alive, invite the crows
To drain the blood from my filthy carcass.

O worms! black companions with neither eyes nor ears,
See a dead man, joyous and free, approaching you;
Wanton philosophers, children of putrescence,

Go through my ruin then, without remorse,
And tell me if there still remains any torture
For this old soulless body, dead among the dead!

William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

It is in the language, the connotations aroused by the choice of words and the metrical flow, that Winters sees Baudelaiore's stoic adjustment to the metaphysical horro so perfectly displayed. Here is Winters commenting on great poets who likewise accomplished this important work of facing the metaphysical horrors of modern times, the chief exemplar of whom was, for him, Charles Baudelaire:

The facts of life at best are disheartening: the vision of life which man has little by little constructed (or perhaps as one should say stripped bare) is all but crushing. To evade the facts and attempt bluff vigor, as Browing often seems to do, is not convincing to the man who has experienced the imaginative facts. The artist who is actually ignorant of the metaphysical horror of modern thought or who cannot tell it imaginatively -- and there are many such -- is of only a limited, a more or less decorative, value. But the artist who can feel the full horror, organize it into a dynamic attitude or state of mind, asserting by that very act his own life and the strength and value of his own life, and who can leave that state of mind completed behind him for others to enter, has performed the greatest spiritual service that can be performed. For it is only the superior man, the man capable of expercing art, who finds himself in any dilemma; but the emotional tone, whether of vigor or of decadence, felt by the superior man, will eventually, by whatever devious and subtle means, filter down infecting in one degree or another the entire structure of society.

Such Yvor Winters believed of the works of the very greatest poets, of which he judged the poetry of Charles Baudelaire as nearly the greatest, in this very important essay from early in his career. First published in 1929 and entitled "The Extension and Reintegration of the Human Spirit: Through the Poetry Mainly French and American Since Poe and Baudelaire," the essay was finally republished more than 40 years later in The Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Yvor Winters. Baudelaire, as nowhere else in Winters's oeuvre, is a central focus of this essay.

Yet, since he discussed it so little, I cannot say what Winters might have thought of Baudelaire's study of the decay brought on by urbanization and the economic systems that gave rise to it. Baudelaire's description of the evils of urban life in his time has usually been interpreted by modern critics as an indictment of capitalism itself. Winters had little to say about this, and this lack, in my judgment, is one significant weakness of Winters's criticism, one of the weaknesses that Wintersians should begin to correct if we are to see his ideas develop and prosper. In my judgment, Winters did not focus often enough on those aspects of life and human experience that are only tangentially concerned with the loftiest metaphysical issues, the issues of the nature of human life and death. Winters clearly considered it much more important for the literary artist and his or her readers to contemplate and properly confront the spiritual horrors of existence than to understand the sorrows and sufferings of masses of people at the hands of whatever economic and social ideas, systems, and ideals that control their day-to-day lives.

But is this accurate or true, that reflecting on momentous philsophical issues is of vastly greater importance than comprehending, both intellectually and emotionally, the effects in human lives of economic and social ideas and systems and ideals -- and moving on, in some cases, to doing what we can and should, individually and collectively, to correct those evils and make lives better? I no longer think so, especially if the nature of existence is the horror that Winters believed it to be. For if this brief, horrifying life is all we have, and the brief lives of the indigent and the lost are all they have, then should we not seek to make our life and theirs better? And should not art play the part it can and should in that great mission, as much it seeks to enable us to confront properly the true metaphysical nature of our lives and deaths? I now believe it should, and I also believe that Wintersian artists must begin to dedicate the literary arts to this work, as much as Wintersian critics should work on discovering and studying the work that great literary artists have already done that can best aid us in such great and important tasks.

Jennings goes on to comment on Benjamin's focus on the criticism of capitalism inherent in Bauedlaire's great poetry:

[Benjamin's] book emphasizes, then, the same overriding concerns so evident in The Arcades Project: the rise of commodity fetishism in the big city and a concomitant dehumanization under capitalism. Baudelaire's lyric poetry, writes Benjamin, "breaks in its destructive energy not only... with the nature of poetic inspiration; it breaks — due to its evocation of the city — not only with the rural nature of the idyll, but it breaks — due to the heroic determination with which it makes poetry at home at the heart of reification — with the nature of the things. It stands at the place at which the nature of things is overpowered and transformed by human nature."

As I say, I think now that in contemplating such issues Winters's critical thought is shown to be weaker than it should be. He believed that poetry and literature at its best are concerned with higher issues, with the meaning of existence. But I believe that these other matters are highly important, too, what to do with widows and beggars, the lost and the ill, with the evil born by and in the streets, the ways in which we make and buy our bread and feed our families leaves so many in the ditches to rot and die. Such matters Wintersian literary artists can and should study and contemplate in their poetry and fiction, and these artists should do it more often, I think. Wintersians have yet to witness the coming of the the next critic who can build on Winters's critical work and theories in the area of metaphysics through the study and evaluation of poems and works of fiction that address such social and economic issues, with both rational soundness and emotional propriety.

Yet as Winters judged, Baudelaire is one of our greatest poets, well worth careful study throuhgout a lifetime. I will offer some further reflections on his work and Winters's relations to it in the weeks ahead on this blog.

A Winters Fragment on Christianity

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

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

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

A FRAGMENT

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

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

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

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

Aaran Haspel’s Blog: “God of the Machine”

It’s time for a short entry about coming across, some time ago, another fellow who has been writing about Winters from time to time, Aaron Haspel, in his blog entitled “God of the Machine.” I have provided a link on my front page to Haspel’s blog. Of course, it’s important to see what other people who study Winters -- somewhere Haspel calls him “his main man” -- are thinking and reading, and I think Haspel is worth your time.

To consider a recent example of Haspel’s work, he wrote an entry on that newly discovered Robert Frost poem that made a small splash in the cultural news recently. In the midst of his discussion of the poem, Haspel states his opinion that Frost’s two best poems are probably “The Most of It” and “Spring Pools.” Now it just so happens that these atypical choices as Frost’s best work are exactly the poems Yvor Winters chose as Frost’s best in his controversial, very seldom read, and now almost completely ignored essay on Frost, originally published in the Sewanee Review in 1948 (republished in The Function of Criticism). Judging from this, I think we can safely assume that Haspel has been deeply influenced by Winters, as comes across in many of his discussions of poetry, as well as other matters.

On the subject of what’s best in Robert Frost, I should note that John Fraser selected those two poems for his New Book of Verse, which I have been discussing off and on in this blog (with lots more commentary on Fraser’s important anthology to come -- I also provide a link to it on my front page). As well as I am able to judge Fraser’s purposes (as so hazily set down in his long introduction), he selected poems that are superior or even great in that they best exhibit the stylistic qualities that Winters and some Wintersians find more sound and of more value than the usual fare in modern poetry. These are, presumably, qualities that Fraser and other Wintersians would and should like to see adopted more widely. Here are Fraser’s selections of very good or great poems from the work of Frost (with some brief comments from me):

“Acquainted with the Night” (“I have been one acquainted with the night”)

Comment: Winters believed that this poem is one of Frost’s finest achievements, but the poem has long been popular even among those committed to the Standard Canon. You can find a great deal of commentary on the poem across the web. Early in his career, Winters listed this poem as one of the greatest achievements in modern poetry. This was done in a 1930 letter (as I recall), though Winters described the poem in other letters as great or exceptionally good shortly thereafter. All these remarks were made in the period of transition in Winters’s career and life, when he was changing from imagist techniques to rational procedures in poetry. His opinion of the poem appears to have fallen quickly as he became more sure of his new critical principles in the 30s and 40s. Nonetheless, it’s a strong poem, I think, well worth knowing, but not quite deserving of the Winters Canon as one of the greatest in our literature. It is not nearly at the intellectual level of, say, Bridges’s “Low Barometer” or Jonson’s “To Heaven”. It is a fairly good example of a poetic procedure that Winters would come to call “post-symbolist,” a very useful term that few critics seem aware of and fewer still have put to regular use. It means, briefly, that the sense perceptions described are charged with abstract meaning, roughly as in an allegory.

It’s interesting to explore what readers get out of this poem. Most casual readers interpret the poem as an expression of Frost’s personal feelings of loneliness and depression, both feelings unmoored to any motivating event or concept. Most critics, however, interpret the poem as Winters did, as a metaphysical study, a description of the cosmic isolation of humankind in the universe and the emotional stance we should take toward the recognition of our metaphysical isolation. I think Winters came to see Wallace Stevens’s poems in this vein to be the greater, especially “The Course of a Particular,” which Winters later in his career declared to be one of the dozen or so greatest poems ever written in the English language. If you, my readers, would like to discuss this poem in greater depth, either to evaluate it or explicate it, I would be happy to do so.

“The Most of It” (“He thought he kept the universe alone”)

Comment: I quoted this poem in its entirety in a previous entry “Gratitude and the Winters Canon.” This is a poem Winters focused on much more closely and thought more highly of than almost all Frost critics. It’s another very good poem, similar in theme to “Acquainted with the Night,” and it is perhaps the finest in Frost. But it doesn’t have the emotional power of, say, Steven’s “Course” or the astoundingly great “Sunday Morning.” It is almost whimsical, so dry is its description of human solitude. The poem very subtly suggests the taking of a coolly stoic attitude toward the recognition of the cleavage between ourselves and the world we love. That attitude is probably what drew Winters’s close attention and praise. I would say that this poem is not one of the greats. It just doesn’t go into enough depth or adjust our emotions properly to the rational metaphysical concept offered. Frost settles for a rather simple exploration of difficult and somewhat disturbing subject matter. This is also a poem that I would be happy to discuss with you, my readers, in greater depth.

“Spring Pools” (“These pools that, though in forests, still reflect”)

Comment: This is another poem that drew Winters’s attention for its superior qualities. It is nicely done, but as Winters said, it is a minor work. I do not believe it is great, as fine as it is. Personally speaking, I don’t get much out of it, either. It seems to me to be more or less an appeal to carpe diem.

“Never Again Would Birds’ Song be the Same” (“He would declare and could himself believe”)

Comment: This is yet another piece that Winters drew attention to and mildly praised, though he little more than mentions it in his writings. I think this is as strong as the others already discussed. Winters thought it minor. I don’t see that it is any less minor than “Spring Pools” and many another nicely-turned Frost ditty. This does not belong in the Winters Canon, though it’s not a worthless poem, certainly.

Desert Places (“Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast”)

Comment: Sometimes considered a companion piece to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” this poem is a choice of John Fraser’s as a superior Wintersian poem. Winters never mentions the poem. I think Fraser is on to something. I have been pondering this choice for a while before I decide on my own vote, on a definitive judgment. Other comments are welcome. Off hand, I think the poem trades in a few too many sentimental phrases to be considered great. Frost appears to be indulging himself in some easy emotion rather than looking clearly at his subject in this one. The theme, as you see, is very similar to that of “Acquainted” and “The Most of It.”

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Directive (“Back out of all this now too much for us”)

Comment: This is another choice of Fraser’s, which I reprint below. It’s a stronger effort among Frost’s work that run-of-the-mill critics have studied regularly down the years. Here’s a deeply spiritual study of the poem, though it makes no attempt at an artistic assessment of it:

http://www.quuf.org/sermons/renewal.pdf

On his web site, Fraser offers a long and valuable study of a poem I consider one of the very greatest in English, as Winters did, George Herbert’s “Church Monuments.” In theme, Frost’s poem, which I append to this entry, has various affinities to Herbert’s that are worth looking over carefully. Quite obviously, Herbert’s poem is a directive, too. The comparison reveals the weaknesses of Frost, I believe, his sentimentality in particular. Winters never discussed or mentioned this poem that I am aware of, though he almost certainly knew it. I’m not ready to make a final call, but for now I would say that the poem doesn’t belong in the Winters Canon, though it is a fine poem in many respects. Certainly, it is far from worthless. Another poem worth comparing with “Directive” is Philip Larkin’s “Church-Going,” a poem I intend to discuss in due course on this blog, since Fraser chose it for his New Book of Verse as a superior work of Wintersian art (or however we might interpret the choices made for Fraser’s anthology). I will have more to say on Larkin another time and put in at some point my two cents on whether any of his work belongs in the Winters Canon, which I believe we need to try to reassess and expand.

But getting back to Frost, I think there is more work that is worth close scrutiny in his oeuvre, though I am not sold that any of his work deserves to be part of the Winters Canon.

+++++++++++

Directive, Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Can Writing Be Dangerous?

I have been talking a great deal in this blog in its opening months about the relationship between Yvor Winters and Hart Crane, because that topic has been much in the cultural news of late (arising because of the publication of the Library of America edition of Hart Crane’s poems). The matter came up yet again in an essay by Adam Kirsch in the September edition of the journal Poetry on the anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginberg’s “Howl.” The essay is entitled, “Starving Hysterical Naked,” the last three words of the first line of the poem. Kirsch, who has written of Winters in a few of essays here and there, including in the New Criterion, wrote of Lionel Trilling’s reaction to Ginsberg’s poem in terms that have pertinence to the study of Winters:

This is the point at which Lionel Trilling's verdict on [“Howl”], that it was "dull," starts to look especially peculiar. Many sins might be laid at the door of Ginsberg and his poem, though it is impossible to separate the influence of the text from that of the period it inspired and came to symbolize, the Beat fifties and hippie sixties. The glorification of violence, the sentimentality about mental illness, the contempt for reason, the political self-righteousness, the waste of reformist energy in theatrical gestures, the confusion of narcissism with moral superiority: all that is worst about the counterculture is foreshadowed in "Howl" and Ginsberg's subsequent poems. But it would take a pretty jaded palate to find "Howl" dull.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t consider myself all that jaded, if I understand what Kirsch means by the term, but I find “Howl” a bore. It’s an unstructured, droning rant to my ear, and it quickly grows tiresome -- it even seemed dull in my earliest days in the serious study of literature, back in the mid 1970s. That I read it in the 70s might be important, since by the mid-70s weariness with the 60s had cured into a block of concrete in the heart. Kirsch’s piece gave me an itch to go reread the poem again, but I found it drudgery rather than an enlightening pleasure. There are a couple of nice turns of phrase, but the poem as a whole is a trainwreck of ideas -- a manic melange, to switch metaphors. You can pick little tidbits from the mass and sometimes find them interesting or even suggestive. But when you step back, there it is: a big, ugly trainwreck after all. I wouldn’t even say it is a poem, except by modern consent, and it isn’t very good prose, either. Kirsch then turns to the fears about writings like “Howl”, which he believes are of a species with Winters’s fears about Hart Crane’s dissolution, which, Winters believed, Romanticism engendered:

What Trilling really meant to communicate, I suspect, is not that "Howl" would fail to excite its readers, but that it would excite them in a way which Trilling himself, and many other imaginative people, had already judged disastrous. For while Ginsberg's belief in radical innocence and radical excess was new to the baby boomers, it was not at all new to Trilling, or to Modernists like Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, each of whom had experienced the suicide of Hart Crane as a parable of the personal cost of imaginative chaos. The antinomianism found in "Howl" was, in fact, one of the fundamental impulses of modern literature, and readers who were in their fifties when Ginsberg was in his twenties had wrestled with it long before. "It seems to me that the characteristic element of modern literature," Trilling wrote in an essay that was not about "Howl" but could have been, “is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it.... It asks us if we are saved or damned -- more than with anything else, our literature is concerned with salvation.”

Again on the shoulders of the principles underlying modern literature, as unsystematic as they are, a critic lays the suicide of Hart Crane. There, too, we read a rather severe, almost hysterical, word, “disastrous,” applied to a writing of just a couple thousand words. Using such words goes somewhat too far for me, as I have discussed in a couple of recent entries in this blog (see “Romanticism Leads to Madness, Reason to Evil?” and “Hart Crane and Connotation”). To my mind, it’s not that chaotic writing is so dangerous. It’s that it’s so dull, just as Trilling said. I don’t read serious literature in order to take a little dip into chaos or vicariously revel in someone else’s bad-boy shenanigans, but to discover truth on my own “quest for reality” (which was the title of Winters’s anthology of greatest poems). “Howl” is dull because it simply doesn’t offer much to think about, doesn’t take us into any human experiences and help us to understand them rationally, or aid us adjusting our emotions to a rational understanding of those experiences. The poem is a frenzied, overwrought mishmash, a pile of straining phrases and harebrained ideas that adds up to a loose compendium rather than a sustained meditation. It’s a rundown of the wild times Ginsburg and his friends had. Big deal. Is it “dangerous” to go through it all. It seems more just plain silly. It’s still surprising that anyone smart took this jejune stuff seriously.

Still, I suppose “Howl” is important historically and worth knowing for that reason, since it has had a significant influence on literature. (I think it’s worth knowing things in the Standard Canon just because the Standard Canon, as Harold Bloom said, is made up of those works that have had the greatest influence). It’s important to know it because of the insight it gives us into the times it concerns. And even a few ideas in the mountain it piles up might have slight value, like Goodwill trinkets found in a trash heap. But as a whole the poem is not much and not worth concentrating on too closely, except as an historical artifact.

Do you, my readers, think that it’s dangerous personally or corporately to write as Ginsburg wrote and read what Ginsburg wrote in the way he wrote it? I’m still not sold on that longstanding idea of Winters’s, to which Kirsch gives his implied assent. Is Romanticism, as spread by literature, a cause of some of the dire problems in our time? In reading Winters, and Kirsch hints at the idea too, one would almost think so. But such matters require careful thought.

Adrienne Rich on What Poetry Can Do

Adrienne Rich made a feeble, supremely vague, yet weirdly grandiose attempt at telling the world why poetry matters during the hardest of times in the Guardian (UK) last weekend. The short essay can be found here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1950812,00.html

After reading the piece I came away even less convinced that poetry matters much to living in a world of strife and troubles. Though Rich seems to have meant well, to be brave in showing the world that poetry can help us deal with such massive tribulations as genocide, she fails to make a sound case for poetry’s importance and offers not a single poem that could conceivably make any difference to genocide or to any currently serious, important, and collective issue in politics, society, or philosophy. Rather, near the end of her fogbound discussion, she wanders around to the suggestion that poetry is crucial to the development of a rich emotional life in men and women:

There's actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it's unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together -- and more.

Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and present: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses -- how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger. That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognise it or not. A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays on poetry and poetics, are written as if such pressures didn't exist. But this only reveals their existence.

But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum, "There is no alternative".

This is little more than blather, special pleading as vague as it is confused. Perhaps Rich, as Yvor Winters would have recommended, could have offered a telling example or two that would have helped us understand her. She should have given us a passage of “poetic language” or a whole poem that “quite literally” keeps “bodies and souls together,” since what those portentous phrases mean is just about nothing without a concrete example or two -- or a dozen -- to give them conceptual solidity. And she should have showed how poetic language can give us even “more,” since it’s impossible to guess what might constitute this “more” she’s talking about. She should have given us, too, a strong example of how poetry “imprints the life of the feelings” in some vitally important way that addresses an issue as daunting and colossal as genocide -- and perhaps an explanation of some kind for what she means by saying that poetry “imprints” feelings.

I’m just guessing (because one can do little more than guess about prose this nebulous) but what Rich seems to be saying is that the very best poetry can do when helping us through genocide and war and massive suffering is make us see the beauty or emotional resonance of the little details of our lives, as is shown in the appallingly vapid and trivial examples she gives of what poetry accomplishes: “how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger.” These are her examples of the best poetry can do in this world?!! Is this a summation of the best that can be said for poetry from one of modernity’s most decorated and applauded poets: that poetry shows us the beauty of little things. (To repeat, I’ll admit that I’m guessing that this is what she means, for she nowhere says what this affected drivel precisely signifies). This is pure Romanticism, friends, icky right to the bottom.

Rich’s examples of poetry’s best offerings to a world of woe reminds me of a widespread cliché found in many, many modern poems (to my mind, not a few of William Carlos Williams’s poems qualify) and of countless movies of all kinds -- especially so-called art films. To take one perhaps better known example that popped into my mind is from the film “American Beauty,” in which to show how magnificently sensitive the main character is, the film shows that character, a young drug dealer, showing his girlfriend the most brilliant piece of video he has taken in his short life: that of a colorful little garbage bag being blown about a sidewalk on a swirling wind. Now there’s a sight to meet the troubles of life -- something to get you through genocide! Have a friend dying miserably of cancer? Go out and watch a trash bag tumble on a breeze. Why wouldn’t watching a sewage spill spread in an alleyway work as well? That scene is the trite, icky equivalent of Rich’s “blur of smoke in the air.” Yet one more example -- there are hundreds of them -- I take from Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” an Iranian film: a man contemplating suicide is convinced not to do it by a fellow who reminds him of just that, the taste of cherries. Oh, please!

Rich pops in a little comment about imagination in the third quoted paragraph, but that doesn’t make sense or help in context, since all she appears to be saying is that you need imagination to see the beauty in shoes for sale or discarded garbage bags or the exquisite patterns sewage can make on the ground.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the sound of the rain and the look of many a shop window are nice and sweet. I do enjoy nice and sweet things, as most people do. But is the enjoyment of nice, sweet things what gives us strength or understanding to meet the great issues of life? Is this all poetry can do to aid us in finding the meaning of life and addressing the vast evils that confront us? Is this the most that poetry can say -- the best poetry can say?

Compare Rich’s puerile vision for poetry to what, say, Edgar Bowers accomplished in his great “The Virgin Mary,” from the Winters Canon, to see how truly great poetry can rise far beyond such foolish trivialities.

If Adrienne Rich in this piece says all that can be said for poetry, it’s probably inevitable and right that poetry plays no role in world affairs and has receded so far from public importance. Yet this belief that poetry at its best is the hyper-appreciation of details is spreading ever farther and wider in literary culture. It’s a cliché, my friends. Winters discussed this matter often, especially in his early writings, such as found in Primitivism and Decadence, in which he drew attention to the hyper-sensitivity to detail as a hallmark of the modern associationist writing style, which stems from Romanticism. Judging from Rich’s piece, it appears that those writing techniques are widely believed to be ALL that poetry can do in the face of the Big Issues: charmingly describe little things.

All this can make a Wintersian sigh with annoyance that so many writers think that all literature can give us in the face of the evil and suffering in modern times is a few winks of beauty or a swirl or two of sweet emotions. Of course, I think turning to Winters’s theory of literature is much more profitable, for poetry, for literature, for life. According to Winters, writers and poets make rational statements about human experiences and endeavor to conform the emotions properly to the rational understanding achieved. The proper adjustment of the emotions, unified with intellectual comprehension, is what separates poetry and fiction from prose discourse. We can only hope that more poets will take up the serious work that Winters believed poetry can do, as opposed to the insipid purposes poets like Adrienne Rich have for poetry.

Gratitude in the Winters Canon

In looking through the poems Yvor Winters judged to be the greatest (as collected in Quest for Reality [see http://www.msu.edu/user/kilpela/quest1.htm]), I see that there are very few poems that have any concern with the concept or feeling of gratitude, which American minds turn to at this time of year -- and one that I feel can be important to human spiritual soundness and strength. In the Wintersian great poems, there is some cursory exploration and expressions of joy, a few explorations of love too (though they occur mostly by implication), but very little that we could construe as a quest for the reality or meaning of thanksgiving.

It has often happened in literature that writings on gratitude have veered toward the sentimental, an emotional response that “indulges the sensibilities for their own sake, are artificially or affectedly tender, or are addressed or pleasing to the emotions only, and usually to the weaker and the unregulated emotions [American Heritage],” which is a bearing of the emotions that Winters deplored. The only extended discussion of Winters’s -- that I am aware of -- on a poet who had a recurrent attitude of joy toward the natural world and human life is the piece on Robert Frost, found in The Function of Criticism. Winters chided Frost for the easy-going, folksy sentimentality found in many of his poems (though Winters called attention to Frost’s tougher work), as appealing as these sentiments often are to readers in our current literary culture. The poem that Winters thought to be Frost’s best was “The Most of It” (though he didn’t consider it good enough to rate as one of the great poems, I hasten to add), which happens to make very few best-of lists among the typical Frost aficionados, critics, and biographers. (I have appended the poem at the bottom of this entry for convenience. It’s worth noting that John Fraser included this poem in his New Book of Verse, implying, as it seems, that the poem is exceptionally good and closely in keeping with Winters’s theories of literary excellence, a matter which I will get to some time soon.) In that poem, said Winters, Frost faced “his predicament,” which I take to mean that Frost faced up to the fact that the nature he had, at times, unjustly expansive feelings toward, sentimental feelings that is, was not Frost’s “friend” or ours. Winters wrote often of the ravishing beauties of nature and its endearing qualities and all that, but he often noted ominously that nature will turn on us in the end and cast us and all we care about, through death, into utter oblivion. In much of his oeuvre, on the contrary, Frost cultivated what Winters considered a sentimental attitude toward nature; and from time to time, he expressed or strongly implied feelings of gratitude that he was alive and able to enjoy and perceive nature. Winters had little regard for any of this without the qualifying, bracing recognition that death looms behind all nature’s offerings and rewards.

This was Winters typical stance toward the natural world, toward the universe that he loved so passionately, as his poems imply. Winters seems to have experienced joy in being alive and conscious. He even wrote poems about his thirst for complete and utter immersion in the natural world, some sort of mystical merging of a drop of water into the ocean, and even wrote about the dangers of such a thirst (which he thought entrapped Hart Crane). Yet his feelings of love and joy seldom aroused feelings of gratitude, at least that he decided to write about or sought to help his readers understand and properly adjust themselves to.

On the more general issue, I think that gratitude is an appropriate subject for rational study in an outstanding poem, and further that it is a profound concept that needs deeper understanding and the kind of proper emotional adjustment that a great poet can guide us to. Are there any Wintersian great poems on gratitude? Perhaps there are, and they need to be brought before us. Perhaps Winters’s stoicism hid these poems from him.

William Carlos Williams’s famous and much-discussed “Spring and All” seems close to such a poem (also appended at the end of this entry), though it more directly concerns hope, which is another theme that Winters seemed to think liable to the sentimental and is very seldom touched on in the poems of the Winters Canon or in his own poetry, except by very subtle implication. (I don’t think all that much of “Spring and All” as a work of art, nor do I get much rational understanding or emotional resonance out of it. I will come back to those two specific issues on this blog, in time, for Williams has been on my mind for a long time, since Winters discussed his work often in the early stages of his career and several of his poems made the Winters Canon.) But gratitude is a highly important theme, and there could and should be someone who has written on it with greatness, someone who can tackle it properly, if it hasn’t been done already.

Winters as a poet tended to a stoical position, sometimes to a severe stoicism, as his usual response to the joys of the world and of being alive. He was not given to feelings of thanksgiving, but of inculcating a courageous, austere, resigned resoluteness in the face of the knowledge that life and all human experience must come to an end, that all our joys and sorrows and pleasures and pursuits must end in the utter dissolution of death. You could say that he loved the world so much, that he so badly didn’t want to leave it, that he took the obdurate stance of the stoic toward all his experience, which is a position in philosophy that reaches back to the ancient Greeks. When reading his poetry, it seems to me at times that the thought of losing what he loved so much was outright horrifying. But is not gratitude also rational and acceptable as an emotional stance toward life, if it is guarded from sentimentality? I believe it can be. Comments on this are most welcome.

As I say, I find very little in Winters’s poetry that has any hint that he felt gratitude toward some one or some thing that he was alive and able to perceive the world and think about existence in general and his own existence in particular. The best hint is found in a poem that has been frequently discussed by critics who have taken an interest in Winters’s work, “Simplex Munditiis” (a phrase from Horace meaning, according to R.L. Barth, “plain in neatness”):

The goat nips yellow blossoms
shaken loose from rain -—
with neck extended
lifts a twitching flower
high into wet air. Hard
humility the lot of man
to crouch beside
this creature in the dusk
and hold the mind clear;
to turn the sod,
to face the sod beside his door,
to wound it as his own flesh.
In the spring the blossoms
drown the air with joy
the heart with sorrow.
One must think of this
in quiet. One must
bow his hand and take
with roughened hands
sweet milk at dusk,
the classic gift of earth.

This is a strong, sure, yet minor poem, published late in his time as a free verse imagist, just before he would turn, notoriously, to traditional forms and rational procedures. The poem contains the only mention I know of anything like its recognition that nature and life are gifts that have been given by some one or some thing. There are slight obscurities in the poem that weaken it, in my long-considered judgment, especially in that indeterminate word “classic”. I do not believe it is a great poem, but it is a fine one, as simple as it is. It employs Winters’s free verse technique, based on his complex theory of that once new-fangled metrical scheme, which you can read about in astonishingly great detail in Primitivism and Decadence in the first third of In Defense of Reason. (It’s suggestive to note that though this poem has received a moderate amount of attention from critics and scholars who have written on Winters, Winters himself did not include this poem in his choice of his worthiest work, the 1952 Collected Poems.)

Here’s a short and much more representative passage from another good poem “Moonrise,” which also very subtly implies, before these two stanzas, that the world is a source of joy and a gift:

So we must part
In ruin utterly --
Reality
Invades the crumbling heart.

We scarce shall weep
For what no change retrieves.
The moon and leaves
Shift here and there toward sleep.

This recognition, that life will be submerged in death, only hints at an implication that life is worth a great deal to Winters and should be so to us. Why bravely write of this “reality” as he does unless there is also something of great value in reality? Such is what we commonly get instead of gratitude from Winters’s poetry, the implication that the world is dear, but delivered subtly through seeing the sorrow in its loss.

Well, I must stop rather than close. I intended this entry to be short, but one thought has led to another and the result is getting long. There is so much more to say, so many more ideas that are occurring to me as I write, and I am grateful for the chance to say some of it.

**********************

I append the two poems discussed:

“The Most of It” - Robert Frost

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree–hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder–broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter–love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush —- and that was all.

***************

“Spring and All” – William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -— a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the rood the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines -—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches -—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind -—

Now the grass, to-morrow
the stiff curl of wild-carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined --

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
Entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them; rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken