A Poet Blogger on Yvor Winters, Part II

I continue with my final installment of random reflections springing from comments made on a recent post on Yvor Winters by poet blogger Reginald Shepherd, which, once again, can be found at:

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/01/few-thoughts-on-yvor-winters-and-three.html

4. “As Robert Hass notes, ‘What is damaging about the later work is that, in addition to adopting the forms and themes of the English [Renaissance] poets, he adopted their diction. He never solved for himself the problem of getting from image to discourse in the language of his time, and instead borrowed the [language] of another age’ (Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry).”

COMMENT: I disagree with Hass quite strongly on these varied points, just to put it on record. It is a misconception that Winters “adopted” English Renaissance forms or diction in his later career. It is blatantly incorrect that he adopted its themes. His writing was damaged in no way. And it is wrong to think that Winters had any “problem” with language, whatever that might mean. Let’s go through this point by point.

First, as to forms, though it is certainly true that Winters was influenced by many Renaissance poets and poems to a degree, it is a misleading simplification to say that he “adopted” Renaissance forms. My case for this opinion will have to wait for enough time to lay it all out. But for now, let me say that very few of Winters’s poems are direct imitations of forms from another age. Winters’s later poems are indeed written in what we now call traditional forms, but these forms are not specific to the Renaissance, nor did these forms cease to be employed after the Renaissance. Hass leaves the impression that Winters’s is foolishly old-fashioned, or even retrograde, but all he has done is demonstrated how foolishly ignorant he himself is.

But what’s wrong with adopting Renaissance forms anyway? Those forms are superb instruments of poetic art, much stronger than anything offered in modernity, this dear age of willful formlessness. Winters’s poetic structure was influenced by English and French poets who over many centuries wrote in what we now call traditional forms -- but what was once more sensibly called simply “poetry”. (Need I point out that writing poems in “form” was what made poetry poetry before the modern age? Hass appears to need the lesson, though he once served as Poet Laureate of the United States.) For a study of the history and the decline of form in poetry, see Timothy Steele’s brilliant, readable survey, Missing Measures. Or perhaps you should consult the erudite writings of J.V. Cunningham, one-time friend and student of Yvor Winters, who was hardly a slavish follower of Winters and wrote in the superb essay “Poetry, Structure, and Tradition” (reprinted in Collected Essays):

I prefer with respect to poetry... the common or garden variety of definition. I mean by poetry what everyone means by it when he is not in an exalted mood, when he is not being a critic, a visionary, or a philosopher. I mean by poetry what a man means when he goes to a bookstore to buy a book of poems as a graduation gift, or when he is commissioned by a publisher to do an anthology of sixteenth century poems. Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.

Hass appears to have, though I thinks he knows about it, little appreciation for such an obvious definition that has been all but lost in our time. He can disagree with the definition, but to be unaware of it and its long history is downright silly.

Nor, second, did Winters “adopt,” as Hass claims, the diction of Renaissance poets -- a bizarrely ill-informed opinion. Winters’s diction is 20th-century American through and through. Winters wrote poetry in a high register, stately and grave, no doubt, which might give it an old or outdatedsound to Hass’s tin ear. But Winters did not “adopt” (what the hell does that word mean exactly in this context, by the way?) any 15th- or 16th-century English diction. Further, though tracing the influences on Winters would be hard work, in no poem does Winters sound or read like a Renaissance poet. See for yourself. His poetry is available at most academic libraries, and two fine collections of his work have recently been published in just the past five years, one for the Library of America, edited by the late poet Thom Gunn (who was a one-time student of Winters’s), and the other by R.L. Barth for Swallow Press.

Regardless of all this, there is NOTHING that is the least DAMAGING in Winters’s chosen forms, styles, or diction. Exactly the opposite is the case, in my view. There is EVERYTHING emotionally powerful and intellectually cogent in the forms he used and the styles he employed.

Third, as to whether Winters had some sort of problem with language, another supremely strange claim from Hass, I believe that Winters never had any such problem to solve for himself, or for me, his reader. Nor did Winters have any problem writing in the “language of his time,” whatever that might mean exactly. Winters certainly did NOT borrow the language, to any significant degree, of “another age.” He writes like a modern writer, though in a highly intellectual and formal register. His diction is nothing but modern. His themes are his own and highly appropriate to the subject matter he chose to write about. Those themes are in no way derived from Renaissance poetry. They are, in fact, heavily influenced by the Romanticism Winters decried in his later criticism, a fascinating topic that several critics have elucidated. Once again, Winters employed a grave, formal, serious diction, but that does not mean that it is somehow not 20th-century American English. Hass’s comments are simply foolish or ignorant, and Shepherd’s repeating them makes me wonder whether he has read Winters with any understanding at all.

But putting aside the issue of influences on Winters, is a writer required to write in the “language of his time”? Hass’s comments appear to be meant to disparage Winters’s whole career, to portray his poetry and possibly his criticism too as completely “out of touch,” valueless to the present age -- or any age. But there is no need to use the language of anyone’s time to write great, good, or valuable poetry, nor is there any reason not to borrow directly from the language of another age (even though Winters did not do so to any significant degree). One should write in the language that is appropriate to a rational treatment of the chosen subject matter, the human experience the poet is endeavoring to understand and adjust his emotions toward. If the English of 1590 works in a poem written in 1950, then it works and should be used. Do 16th- and 17th-century poems have nothing to say to us today? Do we believe that Jonson and Shakespeare and Marlowe and Donne and Wyatt are hopelessly outdated -- perhaps that they have no meaning today at all? Surely not. Yet the casual, chatty style of contemporary musing prosetry, to use my terms (Hass himself writes plenty of this embarrassingly mindless drek), is inappropriate to one degree or another to almost all serious intellectual subjects. There are a few cases -- I think of a few pieces by Anthony Hecht, for example -- in which the convention of chatty prosetry works fairly well. But it is grossly overused and long ago became hackneyed. Hass might find Winters’s poetic practices objectionable from his view, but I do not share his view in any sense. My cases on all these varied, though related, points will have to wait for later.

5. “But the earlier poems have a wildness and a strangeness that I [Reginald Shepherd] find quite compelling. It seems to be exactly this quality against which Winters reacted in his change of style...”

COMMENT: Shepherd implies a lot in this comment. As usual, most moderns are attracted to the wild and the strange, the typical Romantic stylistic ticks that Shepherd discusses earlier in his post. Shepherd doesn’t explain this comment to any degree, other than to imply that he just likes the wild and the strange -- though there is hardly anything wild or strange any longer about Winters’s early poems, language, or form, is there? Haven’t poets been writing the kind of poetry Winters wrote in the 1920s for a century now, from Pound and H.D. right on up to the obscure and purposefully difficult proestry we find in, say, the journal Poetry? Winters would consider this take on his poetry, especially the three poems chosen for reprinting, to be inapt. In those poems, he was trying to achieve a degree of control over wildness and strangeness, the otherness of nature, that he found.

6. “Winters rejects, not just intellectually but first viscerally, any hint of pantheism or a willed unity with nature.”

COMMENT: Shepherd is correct that this was a chief thematic concern of Winters’s poetry. It is one reason why I don’t get much from a lot of his oeuvre. I have never experienced this longing or need to be at one with nature, for some kind of mystical immersion in the natural world, if such a thing were even possible. I don’t even quite understand how to become one with nature, what it would be like if it were to be achieved, what experiences would constitute the condition of being “unified” with nature. In his 20s, in the 1920s, Winters, recovering from tuberculosis that brought him very near death, apparently tried to accomplish this mysterious feat, mysterious to me at least. Here is Dick Davis in his very fine 1983 study of Winters Wisdom and Wilderness on the subject:

There is [in Winters’s early poetry] certainly the already remarked influence of fin de siècle aestheticism, the concentration on a sensibility that considers the world primarily as a source of exquisite sensation. But two factors are not received and arise from Winters’s own mind and situation. There is first what he was himself later to call, in discussing the poetry of Sturge Moore, “the hypersensitivity of convalescence,” a neurasthenia particularly felt by tuberculosis sufferers to whom the sensuous details of life become almost oppressively insistent in their minutest manifestations. Second, there is the suggestion of a mind utterly absorbed by the phenomena of the natural world: this absorption begins in mere attention, passes to a trancelike revery, and ends in virtual identification of observer and observed.... The mental absorption in the natural world became one of Winters’s major themes. He associated it with a mystical pantheism derived from Emerson, and in his later work wholly condemned it as subversive of the intellect. But in these first poems the trance of the spellbound observer of nature is celebrated, and there can be no doubt that as a young man Winters must have been particularly prone to such self-loss in nature.

I must confess that I have never experienced anything approaching this state of mind, the loss of self as a result of hyper-attention to the sensations the world around me is giving me. I love nature. I love hiking and photography and rock-climbing and canoeing. I love wilderness camping, even wilderness winter camping, and getting out into the wild. But I have never felt as though I have become part of nature more strongly than my own physicality, stronger than being a body dependent on certain conditions to remain alive. I think I understand what Davis is describing, but I cannot comprehend the experience itself. For me it sounds like talk of heaven among Christians -- something we have heard repeated so often since our earliest days on earth that we get used to the concepts, even though we can gain no comprehension of what heaven could be like when we concentrate on what it would be like to experience what the oft-repeated ideas about it actually describe. I do not know what it might mean to have my mind “utterly absorbed” in the natural world, to be fully immersed in what I am seeing and hearing and feeling and tasting. I’ve never entered any trance that approximates this experience. No inebriation or drunkenness I have experienced has ever suggested that such a state of mind has been achieved in my days on earth. (I admit I’ve had very little experience with drugs, prescribed or illegal, or alcohol.)

Eventually Winters came to believe that the desire for utter absorption and the attempt to achieve it could lead, to anyone who took the task seriously, to suicide. I don’t even quite see how that’s possible, for a human being to desire or to actually experience union with nature to such a degree that he would take the step of killing himself to heighten or deepen or further or extend the absorption. Winters came to believe as well that this is what happened to Hart Crane, his friend and famed poet who apparently committed suicide by jumping off a ship in the Caribbean. Crane, in Winters’s view, also tried to immerse himself in nature -- to his destruction. (I have discussed Crane on this blog in September and October of 2006 and will get back to him.)

For these reasons, one of the greatest poems of the English language and one of the best Winters himself ever wrote, “The Slow Pacific Swell,” remains for me little more than a magnificent and lovely exercise. The poem is about the rejection of this longing for mystical immersion. Intellectually I can comprehend the issue, with much study and concentration, but I have NO personal stake in such matters. I suppose we will come back to these matters in time on this blog, as well as to that exceedingly fine poem.

7. “I find Winters’s later poetry rather stiff and narrow, not because it is written in traditional forms, but because he too rigidly prescribed what could be done or what could happen within those forms. This is a danger that all systematic poetry faces, whether ‘experimental’ or ‘traditional.’ The later poems obey his critical strictures all too faithfully. Stylistically, there is also too much archaic diction and phrasing.”

COMMENT: How each of us “finds” a style is a matter of taste. Shepherd is, of course, welcome to his tastes. He doesn’t find Winters’s later poetry, that written in traditional forms, appealing. Let me state for the record that I do -- MUCH more appealing, in fact, than Winters’s earlier imagist poetry, three poems of which Shepherd reprints in full. I do not find Winters’s formalist poetry to be “too” stiff or his theories to have been rigidly applied. I find them very aptly and beautifully applied in most instances, though some poems are much better than others, of course. I don’t believe every line he wrote to have been great, but I contend he wrote some of the greatest poems in the history of the language.

Concerning the stiffness of Winters’s style, I find the opposite to be true. Winters designed the supposedly “stiff” language and style to strictly control and sharply refine the total meaning of each poetic statement. This matter can be studied in depth in Winters’s writings, though the best place to get a deep and insightful overview of his ideas on the strict control of the poetic form can be found in the essay “The Audible Reading of Poetry” in The Function of Criticism.

7a. “Winters believed that forms had intrinsic meanings and carried intrinsic values; he wrote of meter as having a moral significance. This is not a view that I share, but it is consistent with his approach to literature as an ethical endeavor.”

COMMENT: Shepherd raises an important issue here, corollary to item 7., in a comment made near the end of the post. The issue is one of the most difficult and important in the study of Yvor Winters. I don’t know quite what Shepherd means by the word “intrinsic”, for it was not a word Winters used to describe this aspect of his literary theory. Further, I don’t know at all what he means by form having intrinsic “values”. Again, I think he is trying to describe Winters’s ideas as he knows them, but the description is obscure, even for me who knows Winters’s theory very well. If Shepherd simply means that Winters held that form and meter contribute to meaning, he is right. I will come back to this extremely important matter in this blog soon. I have touched on it several times, especially when I discussed Thomas Hardy recently, but haven’t found the time to treat it properly yet.

The word “ethical” also implies something a little different than the word “moral,” which Winters always used to describe his theory. The distinction is worth keeping, a matter Winters wrote about a few times. He opined that the word “ethical” implied that poetry had some sort of direct affect on behavior, whereas the word “moral” implied that poetry somehow refined or adjusted one’s whole worldview, which has effects in many areas of life, in thought, feeling, and action across a wide spectrum of human experience. I don’t think it accurate to speak of Winters as having thought of literature as an “ethical endeavor,” which implies that he believed in a Horatian, didactic theory of literature.

Lastly, I want to point out that the three quotes from Winters’s criticism that Shepherd offers are each crucial to Winters’s critical thought. The first is taken from the seminal “Foreword” to In Defense of Reason, while the second two are each taken from the “Introduction” to Forms of Discovery. It’s encouraging to see Forms -- a book so often downplayed, derided, or dismissed -- get at least some attention. The passages are apt and important to the understanding of Winters.

Now to sum up: As I said at the outset, I don’t exactly what Shepherd was trying to achieve by publishing this overview at this time. He sounds as though he just wanted people to give Winters’s poetry a try, especially the early free verse work. He quotes three important passages from Winters’s criticism, but leaves the strong impression that he doesn’t think much of the ideas presented therein and that they are so far off the mark that it isn’t worth your time to study them more deeply. I’ve been reading him since he made this post, and nothing he has written since has betrayed any influence from Winters. I will say that Shepherd bears reading, though. He is at least concerned that poetry be a part of standard rational discourse and function as a kind of communication, thank goodness.

Contrary to Shepherd, I, of course, encourage you to read Winters, all of him, the early poetry, the late poetry, the early criticism, the late criticism -- and to let yourself get hooked by him if you come to know, as I have, that he is right about many, many aspects of the study of the literary arts. Otherwise, you can move on to something else (which Shepherd already has), even though Winters believed you’d be making a serious, even life-threatening, mistake by not heeding his warnings, his advice, his ideas, and his theories. I doubt that rejecting Winters’s ideas can actually be life-threatening (a matter I must discuss some time, surely), but I do believe him to be right in most areas of literary theory.

Love and the Winterses

An interesting article was posted on poets.org for Valentine’s Day about modern poets who have fallen in love. The article is entitled “All My Poems Are Love Poems: When Two Poets Fall In Love,” by Craig Morgan Teicher. The article offers profiles of the relationships of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall (one-time student of Yvor Winters), and interviews with C. D. Wright and Forrest Gander and Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop (I know the work of none of the last four). The article can be found at:

http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19458

The article brought to mind one of the more obscure poet-poet relationships of the last century, that of Janet Lewis Winters and her hubby Yvor Winters, which I have had occasion to mention on this blog a couple times. Rather little has been written about them as a couple, except in the 1994 book Erotic Reckonings: Mastery and Apprenticeship in the Work of Poets and Lovers by Thomas Simmons. Two of the essays in this book cover the effects of the Winterses’ relationship on their writing (mostly the effect of Winters on Lewis's). Though I haven’t yet studied the book closely, it explores the problem of tradition and authority in the lives and work of three pairs of 20th-century American poets: Ezra Pound and H.D., Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke, and the Winterses. Simmons draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory, including the feminist variety. He argues that the mentor-apprentice relationship is inescapably erotic. He finds in Yvor Winters’s poetry a depth of eroticism that has seldom been noticed or discussed by other critics. I remain skeptical of Simmons’s psychological interpretations, but find him knowledgeable and suggestive. As to specifics, Simmons’s argument appears to be that Pound’s and Winters’s relationships manifest profound conflicts between allegiance to a tradition of knowledge and allegiance to their “apprentices,” who in Winters’s case was his wife of several decades.

As in Pound’s relationship to H.D., Simmons thinks that Winters tended to overmaster Lewis, to bind her, as (in Simmons’s judgment) in a form of domination, to a body of knowledge. Simmons reads a great deal into Lewis’s not having written poetry between the early 1940s and the early 1970s. He takes this fact as convincing evidence of Winters’s domination of her on behalf of his zeal for tradition. The relationship of Louise Bogan (several of whose poems are in the Winters Canon) and Roethke (a correspondent with both Mr. and Mrs. Winters) contrasts to the Winterses’ relationship. In Simmons’s view, Bogan and Roethke were wary of the value of a tradition of knowledge. Bogan played for Roethke a role of sustained reciprocity rather than of domination.

I’m not sold on Simmon’s interpretation yet, but I want to give it deeper study. I find very little emphasis on mentor dominance in other discussions of the Winterses’ life together. For example, dominance plays no role in Brigitte Carnochan’s overview of their writing lives in the 1984 book that accompanied an exhibition of some of the Winterses’ papers, entitled The Strength of Art. Nonetheless, there are various small but clear indications of Winters’s influence on his wife, but many fewer of her influence on him. In many ways, it appears that his work fostered the classical development of her style and shaped her choice of subject matters and her treatment of them. And all to the good: she has written several of the greatest poems in the language, and the prose style of her fiction, as I mentioned in a previous post, is masterly (pun noticed, but not intended). Mrs. Lewis’s career is a matter I will come back to from time to time on this blog. First up, shortly, must be her fine poem “For the Father of Sandro Gulotta,” which I have wanted to discuss since our recent discussions of atheism and Christian belief in the life and work of Yvor Winters.

Only a little bit more about the relationship of the Winterses can be learned in the few studies of Winters that have been published, such as Dick Davis’s very fine study of Winters, Wisdom and Wilderness. Or you can glean a few tidbits of information about their married life from the various reminiscences of Winters, such as Thom Gunn’s “On a Drying Hill” or Donald Hall’s piece in his book of such poet reminiscences Their Ancient Glittering Eyes. Also, you can investigate the Winters-Lewis marriage through The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, which was recently published by Swallow under the editorship of R.L. Barth. Finally, there is the book I mentioned, The Strength of Art, which will be hard to find, I believe. The Winterses’ marriage has yet to receive a sustained treatment. Perhaps it never shall, for they burned their letters to each other, according to Brigitte Carnochan.

A Poet Blogger on Yvor Winters, Part I

A poet named Reginald Shepherd has recently posted a brief, readable, and informed overview of Yvor Winters on his blog. It offers three of Winters’s free verse poems, two of them, the first and the third as they appear in the post, among the most often anthologized and discussed poems Winters wrote. The post can be found at:

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/01/few-thoughts-on-yvor-winters-and-three.html

Shepherd makes no comment that indicates the occasion for this piece. Not does he leave any indication of what he was trying to achieve at this time with a brief, general overview of Winters, since nothing in the cultural news appears to have prompted him to write. Also, I don’t get any impression from perusing his blog that Shepherd is a Wintersian of any sort. After reading a number of his posts, I have yet to see anything in Shepherd’s blog that he is the least drawn to any major critical idea Winters had. Nor have I seen any evidence of Winters’s influence in his writing. Nor, finally, does he hint that he has been influenced by Winters in any way. But I don’t know Shepherd well yet. I will be reading him, though he seems solely interested in Winters’s early free verse poetry, written in the 1920s, the weakest work Winters did. But Shepherd is a prolific blogger and has already moved on to several other long posts on poetry, unrelated to Winters. It appears that he just wanted to urge people to read Winters, especially his free verse poetry, but to watch out and not get hooked by or bother too much with his criticism.

I have no desire to criticize Shepherd’s post. He’s welcome to his views. But I will use it as a springboard for my own reflections on Winters. I will quote at random a number of Shepherd’s comments and reflect on them.

1. “While it would be impossible to agree with most of Winters’s literary judgments (although he esteemed Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens and thought well of William Carlos Williams, he placed Robert Bridges above T.S. Eliot, and T. Sturge Moore above W.B Yeats, and considered Jones Very and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman to be two of the three greatest poets of the nineteenth century, along with Dickinson), it is also impossible not to admire the clarity, rigor, and consistency of his arguments...”

COMMENT: I assume that Shepherd means 1) that he himself couldn’t possibly agree, or that 2) the literary circle he holds himself to be part of couldn’t possibly agree, or that 3) all literary culture, however defined, couldn’t possibly agree -- or all three. I would not question what he says about himself and his literary circle, of course, but he is almost certainly right about all literary culture: it is so unlikely that American literary culture will EVER agree with Winters on his evaluations that we could say that agreement is in effect impossible. Nonetheless it is possible for another person and other literary circles to agree with Winters on these evaluations, even that Jones Very is one of the greats of English literature. So let me simply state for the record that I do agree on a great majority of the basic judgments Winters makes, including those few mentioned in Shepherd’s comment, and that there are a number of other Wintersian poets and critics who agree as well -- however circumspect they are about admitting it, a matter I will come to in a moment.

I won’t make a case for the reasonableness of my general agreement here, but I think it’s at least important to state that there are some who agree with Winters (on most literary matters). For most of us who agree with him, Winters has, using a phrase Pascale Casanova used in her fascinating book on canon-making and the marketing of literature, The World Republic of Letters, the “power of consecration.” We’re a very small group, no doubt. But it is THE group most worth following in my opinion. Sometimes praise for Winters among those who admire his work can be shockingly high, such as from the very fine formalist poet David Middleton at the opening of a review of a book about Winters in a 1983 issue of the Southern Review:

Yvor Winters is a modern master of the short poem and a major literary critic. Since few professors will defend these propositions, poets themselves, recognizing the seminal mind of the poet-critic, are placing him among his peers: Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold.

To be placed with those three is high praise indeed -- ludicrously high to those who find Winters wrong in just about everything judgment he made.

Yet I also must admit that stating agreement with Winters on his evaluations seems to be a severe problem for many Wintersians. Siding with Winters, at least roughly, on who and what is the best is even something for which Wintersians have occasionally carped at me. I have always found this odd, this extreme diffidence about granting Winters the soundness of his assessments of individual poems and poets. Those who still follow Winters, to one degree or another, nearly 30 years after his death seem almost afraid to follow him, even provisionally or generally, on the central tenet of his critical theory (his concept of evaluation) and the results of the application of that concept (the Winters Canon as delineated in the anthology Quest for Reality).

Concerning Sturge Moore and Yeats, I recommend that you consult the 1983 volume (Vol. 19) of the Southern Review, co-edited for almost two decades by Wintersian Donald Stanford. In issue 1 there is a fine essay and a review on Sturge Moore, and in issue 3 there is a superb essay by Richard Hoffpauir on Yeats compared to Hardy, to Hardy’s great advantage (this essay was reprinted in Hoffauir’s fine study of 20th century British poetry The Art of Restraint). These various writings will give you an overview of why Wintersians generally find Yeats deficient while we consider a few of Sturge Moore’s poems to have been great. Yet Yeats is a complex subject. Many poets and critics who have mild connections to or interests in Winters strongly support Yeats, including U.S. Poet Laureate and one-time Winters student Donald Hall, who in a memoir of his studies with Winters wrote that he never let Winters drive his admiration for Yeats out of him.

Finally, concerning Eliot, as well as Ezra Pound, consult Donald Stanford’s masterly Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry for a brilliant and instructive Wintersian consideration of their many weaknesses.

2. “One also must admire the seriousness with which he took literature and its role in the world, and the high standards he set for literature, idiosyncratic as his application of those standards was. For him, literature was no mere pastime or entertainment.”

COMMENT: I’m not knocking Shepherd at all, but this is a typical take on Winters among those mildly interested in him but not sold on any of his ideas or fearful of being sucked too far into his way of thinking. Such comments often read as rather backhanded compliments: “I can’t agree with this nut about anything, but, boy, he sure gets worked up about poetry.” People have been often impressed by how seriously Winters regards poetry and the study of literature. But in my opinion this ain’t no big deal. His seriousness is hardly distinctive. For every major poet, writer, and critic takes literature very seriously. All the New Critics whom with Winters debated certainly did. So did most of the most influential critics of history, those discussed in Wimsatt’s and Brooks’s Literary Criticism: A Short History. For example, consider P.B. Shelley: every moderately well-read reader knows of Shelley’s claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world (whatever that puzzlingly grandiose epithet might mean exactly).

But Shelley is hardly the only writer to make extravagant claims for literature, just as that lover of art John Ruskin made extravagant claims for the importance of painting. Fact is, I have yet to run across a major critic or poet or writer who doesn’t or didn’t take literature very seriously. Literature was far above entertainment or a pastime, surely, for Blackmur, Burke, Frye, Eliot, Pound, Wimsatt, Brooks, Warren, Ransom, Tate, and on and on and on. Thus, Winters wasn’t much different from thousands of novelists, poets, and critics who devote themselves with great passion to literature, as though it’s a direly momentous matter to attend to. Yet I will say that Winters’s very fine prose does have a solemn, grave formality that certainly sobers one up. (Though historian David Levin said he could take and deliver a joke at times, a character trait that’s rather important to Americans for whatever reason.)

3. “I have no doubt that my work would fail to satisfy his strict strictures, but I have learned a great deal from Winters about the importance of clear thought in my own writing and in reading others’ work, and in speaking and writing about poetry.”

COMMENT: This is another common take on Winters’s work from those who are interested in him but cautious. People often are impressed that he was so thorough and logical in laying out his critical theory and applying it, but they don’t want to adopt the theory that resulted from the thought or sanction the results that derive from the theory. I see no reason why Shepherd should care whether his poetry might have passed muster with Yvor Winters.

On another matter, as to whether I need worry whether I or any one satisfies his strictures, believe it or not, I’m very little concerned with that. I am much more concerned to see those strictures refined and re-evaluated and reapplied these long years after Winters’s death from cancer in 1968. Personally speaking, I have little doubt that Winters would condemn much of my own work, perhaps even my understanding of his theory. But his theory is not his now. With the advice, counsel, and help of as many others as care, I am seeking to study, refine, and improve his ideas and judgments. I or we might come up with something yet stronger as theory than Winters conceived, perhaps not. I think it's work worth pursuing -- though perhaps it’s obvious that I think that. For I believe that Winters was mostly right, or on the right track. But there are areas he didn’t cover or cover adequately, especially areas that critics have concentrated on in the decades since he died. And there are areas in which I think he was wrong to one degree or another and other areas in which others who follow him closely think he was wrong. There were judgments he made that were mistaken or off-kilter and need to be corrected. Yet so much of what he did was so good and right that we must work toward improving on what he did, though in the end he might not approve of what I or anyone else or we all together do in revising or improving his theories.

Well, there’s enough to ponder for one post. I will use a few more random quotations from Shepherd’s post to write my own reflections on Winters in my next post -- unless some pressing topic or news distracts me from that plan in the days ahead.

Janet Lewis Winters and a New History of Paris

In its February 4, 2007 edition, the New York Times Book Review published a review of what looks to be an interesting history of the city of Paris. The subject bears on the study of Yvor Winters in that his wife Janet Lewis Winters wrote a beautifully written, powerful, tragic novel of 17th-century Paris entitled The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. It is one of three historical novels she wrote about actual legal cases concerning misjudged circumstantial evidence in which people were unjustly condemned for crimes they did not commit. One of the novel’s main characters is a book printer and binder who is wrongly accused of and executed for publishing a scurrilous pamphlet about the consorts of Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV. The review briefly mentions that the history covers the topic of the publishing of defamatory pamphlets in the time Lewis wrote of.

The NYTBR review is entitled “Paris Confidential,” by Caroline Weber, about the book Paris: The Secret History, by Andrew Hussey. The review can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/books/review/Weber.t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

The Ghost is a strong and undeservedly neglected novel. It remains in print through the Swallow Press (imprint of Ohio University Press), which was the longtime and dedicated publisher of both Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis. It also can be found in academic libraries and the various topnotch web services dealing in used books, such as Alibris and Abebooks.

Novelist and journalist Evan S. Connell made an effort some years back to attract a wider readership to Lewis’s novels. Over the last half century, Connell has written 19 books of fiction, poetry, and essays, several of which have been fine bestsellers, including Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge and the absorbing anecdotal account of Custer’s Last Stand, Son of the Morning Star. Connell published an appreciation of one of Lewis’s novels about historical cases of circumstantial evidence, The Wife of Martin Guerre, in the wonderful book of appreciations of neglected books, Rediscoveries. Also, in an interview for Bookforum, Winter 2001, Connell spoke specifically of his regard for The Ghost:

Q: What contemporary authors do you read? Admire?

Connell: "Admire" isn't in my vocabulary. It suggests worship, genuflection. I've read most of William Styron's work. He's authentic and he's willing to gamble -- Nat Turner, for instance. The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis is one of the most resonant short novels I can remember. I greatly like two other books she wrote: The Trial of Soren Qvist and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. She never got the attention she deserved. So much contemporary fiction is transparent. You could poke a finger through most American novels. I would rather go back to substantial writers from the past.

Yvor Winters never discussed Lewis’s Ghost in his criticism, but he did offer a brief and insightful discussion of The Wife of Martin Guerre in an important essay, in which he claimed that Lewis was one of the finest writers of narrative fiction in English. I would say that Winters would have had no trouble saying that he admired the work of great authors -- nor do I. I find Connell’s fears of the word “admire” to be rather pretentious. Winters’s lofty admiration for his wife’s fiction has not been often seconded, predictably, but I urge you to give Lewis’s extremely intelligent and beautifully composed fiction a try. Her prose comes close to setting one of the great standards for the writing of serious literary fiction in modern times. I hope to discuss it on this blog frequently.

Sheep and Goats

The New Criterion has announced the winner of its annual Poetry Prize. Critic and editor David Yezzi, who discusses or at least mentions Yvor Winters in his writings and whom we discussed last week on this blog, and other NC editors chose J. Allyn Rosser for the seventh annual award for her manuscript of poems that reportedly pay close attention to form. Besides Yezzi the judges were David Barber, Roger Kimball, Hilton Kramer, and Rachel Hadas. A small selection of poems by Rosser can be found at:

http://wiredforbooks.org/jallynrosser/

She’s not an outstanding poet, but certainly not worthless. She has yet to write any highly distinguished verse among those pieces I have read. Her forms are commonly loose, often almost indiscernible, though she at times employs common forms, such as the sonnet. Her writing follows the conventions of what I have begun calling “musing” -- short writings made up of 1) casual prose, 2) meandering personal reflections, loosely connected to some vague theme or symbol (that is, showing a distinct lack of concinnity), and 3) broken into lines to look like something we think poetry should look like on the page. But Rosser does elevate her language at times. Here’s a sonnet from her site:

"Lover Release Agreement"

Against his lip, whose service has been tendered
lavishly to me, I hold no lien.
Here’s his heart, which finally has blundered
from my custody. Here’s his spleen.
Hereafter let your hair and eyes and breasts
be venue for his daydreams and his nights.
Here are smart things I’ve said, and all the rest
you’ll hear about. Here are all our fights.
Now, whereas I waive rights to his kiss,
the bed you’ve shared with him has rendered null
his privilege in mine. Know that, and this:
undying love was paid to me in full.
No matter how your pleasures with him shine,
you’ll always be comparing them to mine.

This shows some facility with language and a skillfulness with the sonnet form -- and with meter, though the metrical scheme is much too loose to gather any emotional steam. The poem has occasionally strong phrasing and makes a couple of striking observations, but also willfully trades in a few weak colloquialisms. As to theme, this sonnet is little more than a cute musing, as nicely written as it is at points. I’ve read a few of Rosser’s recent poems published in the New Criterion, but they have much the same feel as the stuff you can find at the site I link to. She occasionally has something vital to say in her loose poems, but not all that often. She certainly is not a Wintersian poet in any sense, nor is her work up to the standards of the Winters Canon. It wouldn’t even make a first cut with me. It is hardly formalist in any but the loose sense employed by the champions of the so-called New Formalism.

It is said that the New Criterion publishes some of the best poetry in America these days, a lot of it supposedly adhering to poetic forms and eschewing free verse or the most abject prose musings. But the journal hasn’t yet published a poem that I judge outstanding, very good, or, need I say?, great. Among the poets they publish, only Dick Davis’s work do I find even within spitting range of greatness. Davis writes a tight, spare verse and tackles serious subjects with admirable moral insight and formal control. He’s worth paying attention to. He might even have written a few poems already that are worthy of the Winters Canon, which John Fraser judges he has (this is a topic I must save for later). Notably, Janet Lewis Winters and her friends were studying Davis’s poetry late in her long life (she died in 1999 at age 99). But that doesn’t mean that a lot of the poetry that the NC puts out isn’t worth reading. I have profited from a few of the poets the NC has published along the way, including Bill Coyle, the 2005 NC Prize winner, whose work I intend to discuss briefly in a future post.

But I now come around to my main concern in this post. This is a good time to discuss a common criticism of Winters that critics use to summarily dismiss all his critical thought. Many critics, writers, and readers believe, out of ignorance or through the simple parroting of an oft-repeated mistake, that Winters separated all poets and poems into sheep and goats. Winters is partly to blame. Though he said or implied often that there are many degrees of literary achievement, he did praise the great poems of the Winters Canon so highly that he left the unfortunate impression that he held that any poem that failed to make this Canon is not even worth reading. The resulting belief commonly appears to be that Winters believed that there are some few poems that are incredibly beautiful or powerful while everything else is garbage -- or, perhaps more aptly, that there are a few poems deserving of literary Heaven while everything else should be tossed forever into literary Hell, never to be read again. Further, many critics opine, the sheep who enter through Winters’s narrow gate are extremely few, a couple hundred or so, while the goats to be damned number in the tens of thousands. Again, to sum up this view in yet another way, ignorant critics believe that Winters thought that anything that he didn’t believe to be “great” (in his exalted sense of the word) is not worth reading at all and should be burnt. If you pursue the study of Winters in books and journals and around the web, you will frequently come across this opinion, expressed in various ways and believed to varying degrees. Winters, in fact, is commonly mentioned, as infrequently as he is mentioned at all, just to be ridiculed and dismissed for supposedly separating all poetry into sheep and goats in this way.

Because I have been looking at J. Allyn Rosser’s poems in a Wintersian light, I realized that there are probably many readers who have this ignorant opinion of Winters in the back of their minds. I decided to state my opinion here so that there will be no mistake about the matter whenever I consider contemporary poets in this blog and Winters’s system in general: the belief that Winters had a system of sheep and goats, one of absolute and inviolable salvation and damnation, is wrong. I won’t make an extended case for this opinion in this post, but I will state for the record that Winters clearly believed that hundreds if not thousands of poems outside the Winters Canon were worthwhile and in many cases vital and important. The examples could be multiplied indefinitely. John Fraser’s work in editing the Wintersian New Book of Verse (in the Table of Contents Fraser marks various overlooked recommendations from Winters with a double-cross), I believe, was to bring before us some of the lesser but still valuable poems that Winters commended.

My full discussion of the Winters Canon must wait until I have the time for a thorough treatment of the issue. For now, let me say that the Canon is not a matter of sheep and goats. The poems of the Winters Canon are the most supreme examples of poetic achievement in English literature. As such, they set the standard of excellence by which we judge all poetry and, by illustration, delineate the concepts and ideas of the whole Wintersian theory of literature. In drawing up his Canon, Winters was endeavoring to show how literature best works by giving examples of greatness that have been achieved. But as he said or implied, there are degrees of achievement.

In saying all these things I have now burdened myself with finding time to make a full case, but I want to do all I can in the meantime to counter this erroneous view of Winters’s critical theory. The parroted dismissal of him on the basis of "sheep-and-goats" thinking prevents far too many people from reading him.

The Wall Street Journal Reviews a New Biography of E.A. Robinson

The January 27-28 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal offered a short review by David Yezzi concerning a new biography of the neglected American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. The review is entitled “Modern, not Modernist.” Four of Robinson’s finest poems stand in the Yvor Winters Canon of the greatest poems in English. Yezzi is an editor and critic who has shown some notable appreciation for Yvor Winters’s poetry and critical theories. He wrote one of only two pieces on Winters’s work for a general magazine in the past decade, the 1996 New Criterion piece entitled “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters” (I plan to discuss that Yezzi piece in detail on this blog, for though published long ago it remains important and pertinent to all I am striving to accomplish here). Biographer Scott Donaldson, who is also known as a literary critic, wrote the new Robinson biography, which Yezzi praises as “sterling.” The review article is available online only to WSJ subscribers, but I read it in the paper. It’s worth chasing down, short though it is.

Yezzi summarizes his view of Robinson after a crisp survey of his troubled life:

Robinson’s stock has fallen sharply since then [meaning 1935, the year of Robinson’s death, after a career that earned him three Pulitzer Prizes]. This may have to do with his particular brand of modernity: He was modern without being modernist, radical without being technically experimental. T.S. Eliot declared him “negligible.” As Mr. Donaldson explains, Robinson’s traditional prosody quickly began to look old-fashioned; he quipped that free verse came “armed with the devil’s instructions to abolish civilization.” But in his tumultuous portraits of ordinary people, Robinson swept away the cobwebs of the Victorian-era “genteel tradition.” His red-blooded character sketches -— such as “The Clerks,” “Minever Cheevy” and “Ruben Bright” -— make Eliot’s portrait of J. Alfred Prufrock (indelible as it is) seem a bit effete.

Yezzi is a good writer, and as usual he turns a few eloquent phrases in this paragraph, an apt and accurate summary judgment. Yezzi goes on to mention Yvor Winters in his next paragraph, one of only perhaps a handful of references to Winters in a national publication of general readership in the past decade. Even if we didn’t know what he says about Winters, you’ve got to admire Yezzi for mentioning a critic hardly known at all nowadays in literary culture. The reference concerns Winters’s judgment of the poem “Richard Corey,” Robinson’s snappy, jingly character sketch that springs on us its famous surprise ending, that the wealthy Mr. Corey committed suicide with a gun. Yezzi implies that Winters didn’t quite appreciate the poem as much as he should have, but I would quibble with that opinion. I think Winters is right about this poem, that it isn’t all that good. Further, I would say that by discussing this poem in this context, which gives the vague impression that it is one of Robinson’s best, Yezzi distracts readers from Robinson’s truly great work and makes it seem as though Robinson’s flaws and defects are acceptable, perhaps even preferable. He even implies, inadvertently no doubt, that Winters couldn’t read poetry very well. (I am cautious about speculating on psychology, but I would venture a guess that Yezzi is both trying to encourage people to read Winters and protect himself from being labeled a Wintersian – a word almost connoting in literary culture what “Nazi” connotes in political discussion -- which could wreck his career as a popular reviewer. I can’t blame him for seeking protection from that fate.) But neither implication is correct, in my judgment. But I must save a discussion of the famous poem about Rich Richard the Suicide for another post, if my readers show interest. (The poem was made famous mostly, I should pause to note, by Paul Simon’s rewrite of the poem as a song for the hit Simon and Garfunkel L.P. Sounds of Silence.)

But perhaps I am too hard on Yezzi. He does go on to discuss one of Robinson’s poems that Winters chose for his Canon:

Mr. Donaldson does well by Robinson’s “Luke Havergal,” a haunting poem that the poet Allen Tate called “one of the great lyrics of modern times.” The poem’s spectral speaker, Mr. Donaldson argues, comes “out of the grave” to encourage Havergal to join his departed lover in death:

The leaves will whisper there for her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as you fall;
But go, and if you listen she will call.

Robinson consistently worked to understand human motivations in matters both mundane and extreme.

It was Robinson’s intelligent, diligent work to understand human experience by rational means that drew the attention and admiration of Yvor Winters. Winters wrote his only book-long study of a single poet on Robinson, published in 1946 by New Directions. That book is not much read or studied any longer, that I can tell (not that it ever was). I refer to it much less frequently myself than Winters’s many other essays. But I do quote from the book a dozen times or so in my Year with Yvor Winters, to which a link can be found on the front page of this blog. Yezzi also briefly discusses the poem “Eros Turannos,” another great that is part of the Winters Canon and which has received some extensive and noteworthy study in modern criticism. In particular, I think of John Crowe Ransom’s methodical, insightful examination of the poem is one his collections of critical essays (I can’t remember which offhand). It is beneficial to compare Ransom to Winters on this poem. Maybe we can study that matter at some point on this blog.

Yezzi winds up his review with a salutary encouragement to start reading Robinson more:

Through the compression of his lyrics, Robinson achieves a novelistic density, cramming entire life stories and an impressive range of human feeling into a tight space. As one contemporary critic put it, he is modern poetry’s “biographer of souls.”

I suppose that’s one reason to get back to Robinson. But it’s far from the only or the best reason. But I must such a discussion for later, too. This post has wandered too far afield, and I have other ground I wish to cover. Before giving leave, I want to give you Yvor Winters’s choices as great among Robinson’s poems and John Fraser’s more recent choices for the Wintersian New Book of Verse -- and then briefly compare the two lists. First Winters:

Eros Turannos (“She fears him, and will always ask”)
Veteran Sirens (“The ghost of Ninon would be sorry now”)
Luke Havergal (“Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal”)
The Wandering Jew (“I saw by looking in his eyes”) - DROPPED BY FRASER

Now John Fraser’s choices:

Eros Turannos
Veteran Sirens
Luke Havergal
Hillcrest (“No sound of any storm that shakes”) ADDED TO WINTERS
Mr. Flood’s Party (“Old Eben Flood, climbing...”) ADDED TO WINTERS
Rembrandt to Rembrandt (“And there you are again”) ADDED TO WINTERS

You see by my notes that Fraser drops “The Wandering Jew,” a poem Winters highly praised, mentioned frequently in his essays for illustration, and discussed quite extensively in itself. Fraser has made a mistake here. I agree with Winters that “The Wandering Jew” is great, perhaps Robinson’s single greatest poem. Yezzi mentions that he thinks that “Eros Turannos” is his best, but makes no case, since he’s writing only a short review of a biography. Like Yezzi, I must save the case for “The Wandering Jew” for another occasion, but I recommend its careful and thorough study.

Fraser adds “Hillcrest,” a poem that the late Donald Stanford, one-time Winters student and superb critic and editor, considered one of Robinson’s finest, but which Winters judged to be slightly marred. I would agree with Stanford and Fraser here, and say that this poem is one of the greats. My case also must wait for later.

Finally, Fraser adds “Mr. Flood’s Party” and “Rembrandt to Rembrandt.” The first choice appears to have been influenced by Stanford, who praised the poem very highly in his seminal, great, and unjustly neglected book of criticism Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry. I am still weighing that judgment. (I must get to Stanford’s work on this blog, for he deserves our close scrutiny as, perhaps, the leading Wintersian since Winters’s death in 1968. But I must resist the urge to plunge into his criticism in this post, which has already roamed far and wide.) I must note that “Mr. Flood’s Party” is the 66th best English language poem of all time as decided by The Top 500 Poems, that anthology that came out about a decade ago using one simple, suggestive criteria: the frequency with which anthologies have reprinted poems. Fraser’s second choice, “Rembrandt,” which on his web site Fraser marks as a Winters recommendation, is one among several Winters advocated among Robinson’s medium-length poems. I see no reason why Fraser chooses this one over the others Winters deeply admired. Indeed, Winters opined that “The Three Taverns” was the best among these poems that he considered very good but not quite great. Winters chose none of Robinson’s medium-length poems for the Winters Canon. I tend to think that a couple of these medium-length poems are great, but I haven’t made up my mind which. “The Three Taverns,” which concerns Saint Paul’s entry into Rome, appears to be the best and the most deserving of the Winters Canon. All these poems are available on several web sites.

I must pause again to note that The Top 500 Poems also chose “Luke Havergal,” “Eros Turannos,” “Miniver Cheevey,” and “Richard Corey” as great poems, using its remarkable and illuminating criteria. “Richard Corey,” in fact, was ranked as the 148th greatest poem on its list -- quite high, I think, much too high. I plan to discuss The Top 500 Poems some day on this blog, for it has a great deal of relevance to the study of Winters.

But oh, there is so much more that could be said and debated concerning just these two short lists of E.A. Robinson’s best poetry and Yezzi’s scattered comments in one little review. To sum up, I am more likely to agree with Fraser on “Rembrandt” but vigorously disagree on his exclusion of “The Wandering Jew” and a couple other medium-length poems Winters recommended.

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.