What Once Was Missed

I recently ran across another book review in the New York Sun that I found thought-provoking and believe to be worth your time. It concerns a pamphlet that was apparently distributed to Columbia University students one evening a week ago about what various middle-aged Columbia authors and scholars wish they had read in their own college days. "What We Should Have Known" is the title of the pamphlet, published by n+1 magazine, of which I know nothing. The review is entitled “The Canon According to n+1”, written by Kate Taylor; it can be found at:

http://www.nysun.com/article/64693

The short review gives you a lot to think about. Reportedly, the pamphlet is about regrets: what authors and scholars at Columbia bemoan not having read in their college days and which oft-forgotten books their students MUST pay attention to nowadays (that could be called the “+1” aspect of this canon). This is an especially constructive topic for those drawn to the writings and literary theories of Yvor Winters, since so much of his work and the work of those who still study him remain so obscure, are so very little publicized, and concern so many obscure literary artworks and artists. Moreover, there are so few Wintersians, or even what I have been calling “modern classicists,” that it is very difficult to find out not only about Winters’s strange discoveries, but about what other Wintersians find worth reading and what they, as classicists, might regret not having read sooner in their lives. A major purpose of this blog is to give people a way to find out what’s going on among people charmed by Winters’s ideas and where to turn to find out more about those who study him and how knowledge of and general agreement with Winters’s ideas changes what people read and how. If only there were a few more Wintersians out there, and a few of them were a little more talkative. It remains my hope, dim as it is after 14 months with little response to these posts, that this blog will bring them out and get them talking.

On the subject of the books I regret having missed in my early days in college, over the past few days I haven’t thought of many that I missed and regret having missed -- I read a lot of stuff from many nooks and crannies of the literary world back in those heady days. But now that I’ve given it some thought, I’ve decided that what I regret most is having not kept up the with Southern Review, Second Series in those years. The late Donald Stanford, LSU professor and great Wintersian scholar, was the co-editor, and his journal was the only major periodical keeping the study of Winters’s ideas alive in the years right before and immediately after his death in early 1968. I went to college in the years 1974 to 1978, and I regret that I was not reading the Southern Review in those days. But I will think more about this and perhaps offer some other regrets of this sort. I hope most of all that other readers of this blog with interests in modern classicism will come forward with some discussion on this topic, which I consider of the utmost importance. I am deeply interesting in hearing from other modern classicists with at least some affinity to Winters on the books they wish they had known about in their younger days. That’s a very worthwhile topic for discussion. The making of discoveries is one of the great pleasures of venturing out into shadowy territory, especially lands that are so little explored or even mentioned in our times, dominated as they are by multiculturalism, identity politics, postmodern writing, and the endlessly varied forms of Romanticism that continue to flourish.

Finally, on this general topic of forgotten works and obscure discoveries, I recently stumbled across a blog entitled “Outmoded Authors,” which has been having some fun giving readers a chance to revive interest in authors whose work has gone “out of fashion,” whatever that vague phrase might mean precisely. I can’t quite fathom the selection criteria being employed, since it seems that D.H. Lawrence, G.K. Chesterton, and a few others on the blog’s list are hardly outmoded authors in any of the several senses of that phrase of which I can conceive. The blog can be found at:

http://outmodedauthors.blogspot.com/

As you might realize, Winters was very interested in the revival of outmoded AND GREAT authors, as were Donald Stanford and others in the Wintersian movement. The discovery of great but forgotten or overlooked poems and novels is one of the chief pleasures of reading Winters. For example, he was one of the first critics to tout Edith Wharton as one of our finest novelists -- though she came to be considered a major novelist in last quarter of the 20th century because of the influence of other critics. Donald Stanford plugged the work of Caroline Gordon, wife of Allen Tate; she has written several exceptionally fine novels, but remains frustratingly obscure. I encourage Wintersians to write to this blog about overlooked or forgotten works, poems, novels, or plays, that adhere in some significant degree to some form of modern classicism, Wintersian or otherwise, which in itself, as you realize, is so outmoded that it was never “in mode” in my lifetime or in a dozen generations before mine. (As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I also hope to hear, quite simply, about the favorite or most important books of classicists.)

The Hurts That Poetry Addresses

Poet Adam Kirsch has written a thoughtful, stimulating book review in the New York Sun that I believe is worth your time. Even the book might be worth your time. It is a collection of essays, memoir and criticism, by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry. The review can be found at:

http://www.nysun.com/article/64712

Kirsch mentions Yvor Winters on the value of form, which I take to mean the importance of writing in some sort of discernible poetic structure that has some sort of significant metrical character (1). Yet the mention of Winters is not what interested me in the piece in particular. The central essay of the book, a memoir apparently, as Kirsch describes it, includes a discussion of the purpose of art -- and naturally the art of poetry in particular. In a couple of Wiman’s ideas that Kirsch discusses you can see a glimmer of what Yvor Winters was talking about when he wrote that the final end of a work of literary art is the evaluation of experience. The experience that many poets want to make sense of and adjust to is what Wiman calls “hurt,” and what I take this vague word to mean is something akin to the sources of Yvor Winters’s own poetic fervor. Kirsch recounts that Wiman discusses the idea that artists make their works in large part to handle the “hurts” of life. Kirsch quotes Wiman thus:

Art -- or, to be more precise, form -- is not only what enables artists to experience this sense of wrongness at all... it is their only hope of wholeness and release.

As an abstract generalization, this is suggestively close to some aspects of Yvor Winters’s understanding of poetry and of his own motivation for becoming a poet. Winters wrote poetry in his teens, but his early years of becoming a poet in the fullest sense were troubled by an acute illness, tuberculosis. For his convalescence, Winters was sent from Chicago to sanitoria in New Mexico. His early imagist poetry appears to be acutely concerned with the experience of a serious illness and the menace of death, even though he wrote no poems directly on the subject of tuberculosis. For this reason, I think Winters’s passion for poetry is almost directly connected to the “hurt” he suffered in his early 20s as a young man who came close to dying and had to face death over quite a long period, months upon months. Here is a brief discussion of this matter by Dick Davis, from his 1983 overview of Winters’s career, Wisdom and Wilderness:

It is common for adolescents, perhaps for adolescent poets in particular, to be preoccupied with death, but Winters’s acquaintance with the subject was real, not immature posturing. A great deal of the earnestness which Winters later showed in his criticism when discussing poets’ moral or metaphysical attitudes comes, I believe, from this early familiarity with death’s imminence, when the reality of what he was later to call the “metaphysical horror” of life and death unsupported by theology came home to him.

Poetry for Winters seems to have been an crucial, elemental way to face the threatening hurt of death. Still, there is little that we can be sure about in this area of his life. For example, it was strange to me to read Winters’s letters from the years of his convalescence, for the first time, and find almost no discussion of what he was experiencing as he was recovering from tuberculosis.

Despite Wiman’s suggestive comments on “hurt,” Kirsch also quotes Wiman on just how this adjusting to “hurt” is often accomplished in modern poetry -- and by Yvor Winters in his early poetry, with its forceful, ethereal, wavering evocations of minute events in the natural world of the western desert. Winters, however, came to reject what Wiman still adheres to, a tired cliché of modern poetry:

More and more what I want is some complete saturation of the actual, to feel some part of the real world wanting me to make it into words.

Yes, so much of poetry nowadays is written with that trifling intention, to see the wonders of things, to fully experience the actual, just as Winters sought seemingly complete immersion in “pure” experience in life and through poetry in his 20s, at the time he had and then was recovering from tuberculosis. Such a desire is dangerous in Winters’s view -- and trivial in my view. I don’t particularly look to literature or art to capture reality or saturate me with reality, however such terms might be construed. These are vague abstractions, and hazy generalities, and as such can be understood in myriad ways, for one person’s saturation is another person’s drowning and yet another’s just plain-old getting wet (I’m in the third category, if you can’t guess). The mature Winters would have rejected such sentiments about the purpose of poetry. He commented upon the matter many times in his writings, but in his discussion of the final cause of poetry, in the essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature,” he sharply distinguished reality from poetry:

The poem is a commentary upon something that has happened or that has been imagined as having happened; it is an act of meditation. The poem is more valuable than the event by virtue of its being an act of meditation: it is the event plus the understanding of the event. Why then should the poet be required to produce the illusion of the immediate experience without the intervention of the understanding? Perhaps the understanding is supposed to occur surreptitiously, while the poet is pretending that something else is occurring. But what is the value of such deception? Is it assumed that understanding itself is not a "real" form of experience?

I take “dramatic immediacy” to mean just about what Wiman appears to mean by “saturation of the actual.” The next sentence of the essay delineates the chief problem with this purpose:

The practical effect of the doctrine of dramatic immediacy is to encourage a more or less melodramatic emotionalism...

Nonetheless, much of the poetry Winters thought great and much of his own poetry concerns the issue of “hurt.” Again, this word is a highly equivocal abstraction; it can be construed in almost infinite ways. But the greatest “hurt” of all is a perennial concern in the poems of the Winters Canon (and I suppose all poetry, really): the hurt of death (2). Take a look at Kirsch’s review and see whether it might be worth studying Wiman’s book more closely, as I believe it might.

Footnotes

1. I wonder how much of the poetry found in Poetry during Wiman’s tenure as editor has had any discernible form at all. From my reading in Poetry, a mostly tiresome labor I put myself through to keep track of what’s current in poetry, most of the “poetry” is prosetic musing and has little to do with using poetic techniques to put form to experience. But these are matters for other posts.

2. On the other hand, it might be more accurate to say that Winters was not concerned so much with the hurt of death but with the hurt of necessity of death, the awareness of one’s impending death, whether imminent or remote. This facet of his poetry and criticism deserves greater attention.

A Winner Declared in the Canon Wars

The 20th anniversary of Alan Bloom’s famous book on the literary canon, The Closing of the American Mind, has arrived, and the event has spawned a good deal of mandatory reflection on the so-called Canon Wars. One article I found thought-provoking was recently published in the New York Times, which seems to think that the war is over and that it can declare a winner. The article, “Revisiting the Canon Wars,” by Rachel Donadio, came out September 16, 2007. I have not heard of this writer before, but her short essay brought up some good points that are worth considering for those interested in the critical theories of Yvor Winters.

Also, another and much fuller consideration of the Canon Wars, no doubt, will arrive shortly in the New Criterion’s issue dedicated to the anniversary of Bloom’s book. I look forward to that issue, which is forthcoming in November.

The contention of Donadio’s Times piece is that the war over what will be taught in American colleges has been won by the multiculturalists, as this very diverse group of teachers and theorists and advocates were once collectively known. The “canon,” the object of the war, is that consecrated collection of what ought to be taught in college literature courses. It is true that the “multi-cults” have indeed successfully changed the “canon” to some degree, in the sense that a majority of colleges no longer teach some “classic” works and teach in their stead a variety of works written by “people of color” (one of our phrases du jour) and women written within the last 200 years or so. The traditionalists, the diverse Alan Bloom crowd, have lost, according to the Times through its spokeswoman Donadio. Nevertheless, of course, much of what the traditionalists opine should be taught continues to be taught in colleges throughout the land. From this we know that the war did not end in a complete rout or some sort of massacre. Not even the entire land has been conquered for the newer canon. “Bloomians” still hold territory as enclaves (meaning some colleges) in which the traditional canon is still taught as of yore -- though not enough, it would seem, for the Times to count their movement as still viable.

There, now I’ve had my fun with the war metaphor (though there is much more to be had). So what can we make of this situation as Wintersian classicists? Yvor Winters, as I state repeatedly (though I am aware that I have yet to make a case for the view on this blog), concerned himself intently with the idea of canons, though he never used the term. As a dedicated teacher, Winters probably would have taken deep interest in the battle over the canon that began with Bloom’s book. In addition to his infamous attempt to make refashion the canon of English poetry, Winters tried to revise the canon in other areas, such as in American literature with a book and his longtime teaching on the subject at Stanford University, where he spent his entire career. Much of what he taught can still studied through that book, Maule’s Curse, first published in the 1930s, which forms the middle section of In Defense of Reason, which is still in print. As with his efforts to hone the poetry canon, however, Winters was largely a failure in his canon-making in American literature. His work to rescue James Fenimore Cooper from disrepute and raise up Edith Wharton to greatness were largely ignored (though Wharton has risen in the past 20 years because of a groundswell of support from other quarters).

Concerning the standard or traditional canon, it appears, judging from his letters, that Winters had little objection to what was being taught in the basic literature courses at Stanford University, where he spent his whole career. Those courses encompassed the works that have made up the standard canon for a century and more. I have found no comment in his letters on such courses, even in the midst of his discussions of departmental issues at Stanford. I don’t know whether he ever taught one of these basic courses. I wish that Ken Fields, who was one of his graduate students in the 60s and is still a professor at Stanford, would write and inform us on that. (Fields has never answered an email letter from me, so I won’t bother trying to contact him again.)

There has long been a misconception about Winters’s canon-making, however, that I wish briefly to counter. Many critical opponents of Winters seem to believe that he wanted to expunge various canonical writers from literature courses at all levels of higher education. That, for example, Wordsworth and Pope and Shelley and many another member of the pantheon should no longer be taught or studied. My case will have to wait for later, when I find the time, but this view is erroneous. Winters, I surmise, wanted students to study and professors and critics to analyze the likes of Wordsworth and Pope and Shelley. What he wanted was for the truly finest works of literature to be recognized as such and become more widely studied and taught in academia. I will study this matter in depth some time.

Still, I think that Winters would have been interested in seeing the standard canon opened up and in seeing some works of the old canon put out to pasture, in the sense that some new works should be considered -- and taught -- as “essential” to a liberal education and that other works no longer need be considered or taught as such. But he would have been solely concerned with defining the canon on grounds of evaluation: properly identifying the supreme works of literary art. I think Winters would have found the primary objective to be “inclusive,” as we say, to be misplaced. Only the greatest works belong in the canon. Lesser works can be studied, of course, but the very best works must provide the mainstays of our reading, our writing, our criticism, and our teaching. Whatever comes of teaching the best will bring about the best educational and social results, whether those works promote inclusion or multiculturalism or not. Of course, though this idea has similarities to the traditionalist position, it is theoretically distinct. It is a position that calls for a radical re-assessment of our canon, which Winters did much to accomplish, using fundamentally different criteria, the principles of modern classicism. For Winters, in my judgment, whatever is great, whether written three thousand years ago or three days ago, whether written by a dead white male or a young black female, belongs in the canon, defines our literature, and should play the central role in guiding our literature to the next phase of its realization.

Now, returning to the question of what to teach, what might Winters have wanted to achieve in canon-making as a pragmatic objective? That college teachers shouldn’t teach Wordsworth to freshmen and sophomores? Wordsworth came in for some roughshod treatment in Winters’s final book, for which Winters has been condemned over and again. Did Winters think Wordsworth shouldn’t be taught in basic literature courses? I can’t say for sure, there not being any direct discussion of the matter in his entire published oeuvre. But I think Wordsworth should be taught. Does a Wintersian position imply, nonetheless, that we should work toward the day when Wordsworth won’t be taught? That’s a real issue for Wintersians. It shouldn’t be so strange to think of the possibility of dropping Wordsworth, all in all. For the makers of the standard canon have already made and keep reaffirming decisions like that continually, as Winters pointed out repeatedly. Consider the 19th-century post Robert Southey, who wrote reams of jingly verse and was once exceedingly well known. He’s not studied in our basic literature courses, nor is his poetry a concern in our academic journals. Or think of Abraham Cowley, whom Samuel Johnson once paid close attention to. He’s not taught in basic literary courses, nor does he receive more than a pinch of critical attention. Consider also, from American literature, William Cullen Bryant, who wrote some fine poems in the 19th century (Winters mentions his work from time to time as very good). He’s not part of our basic literature courses. Do I and other Wintersians think Wordsworth should become a Bryant or a Cowley -- or even a Southey? I don’t know yet about other Wintersians because not one has yet come forward in all the years since Winters died, but as for me, no, I think that Wordsworth should be taught in our literature courses and be widely studied, though I would like to see him recognized as of lesser stature than the greater poets whom Winters tried to draw our attention to.

In light of all these issues and a number of others, I think the Canon Wars and the choosing of a winner and loser is something worth pondering in light of Winters’s career. For it is certainly my hope, and probably was his, that professors will some day regard the very best, the greatest of the great literary artworks, as the predominant concerns of the academy, or, at least, in more enclaves of the academy.

The Clever and the Profound: Paul Valéry

It has taken me more than three years to finally get around to mentioning the essay on French poet Paul Valéry that came out in the March, 2004 edition of the New Criterion. I don’t remember Valery ever being the subject of an essay in an American general-readership journal, but there it was, and it’s still worth your time.

Valéry’s art and thought hold great importance in the literary theory of Yvor Winters, mostly because Winters considered two of his poems to be among the greatest ever written and because Winters claimed him as a major influence on his poetry and, by extension, his criticism. One obscure poem in particular, “Ébauche d’un serpent” (“Sketch [or silhouette] of a Serpent”), Winters judged to be the SINGLE GREATEST POEM EVER WRITTEN. This monumental claim, first revealed in print in Winters’s 1956 essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature,” has, strangely, raised more eyebrows than ire. In contrast to exasperation aroused by many of Winters’s pronouncements, the declaration that “Ébauche” is the single greatest poem has usually caused writers and critics to stare in bewilderment rather than take up arms. Indeed, the baffling claim has generated very little comment -- no Wintersian of any sort, nor even any marginally sympathetic commentator on Winters, has saw fit to assess the claim in depth.

The New Criterion essay on Valéry was written by Joseph Epstein, a redoubtable critic who writes regularly for the NC nowadays. The occasion of the piece was the publication of the Cahiers, or Notebooks, of Valéry in English, the first such complete translation of this mountainous, if erudite, hodgepodge to be published. Epstein concerns himself almost entirely with the Cahiers and has next to nothing to say about Valéry’s poetry. But his essay does include many fascinating quotations from the Cahiers and an enlightening, though very general, discussion of what Valéry was striving for throughout his career in philosophy and the arts. The essay is still available online at:

http://newcriterion.com:81/archive/21/mar03/valery2.htm

Since Epstein’s piece follows the New Criterion format for thinkers it commends to us, I take it that Epstein and NC’s editors consider Valéry very much worth reading, perhaps even vital reading. But I must say that Epstein gives us no notion of what might be of value in the endless stream of short and snappy observations that flow from Valéry’s Cahiers. Epstein floats among the unorganized notebooks and reels in a few of Valéry’s sparkling comments and witticisms for us. But the brief overview does not cohere into a thesis about or a systematic understanding of Valéry. From his essay we gain almost no idea of what Epstein finds important about his art or thought, other than that it arouses reflection. For instance, Epstein speaks admiringly of Valéry’s quest to fathom the innermost workings of the human mind, but fails to tell us anything about that quest that suggests that Valéry discovered something that we might like to know, something that will make a noteworthy difference in how we might think or live or feel. As other critics have noted, Epstein admits that Valéry did not achieve his central goal. In trying to rethink thinking, to step back and study the mind afresh and to a much greater depth, Valéry never finished thinking and reflecting. But did his project accomplish anything? Epstein doesn’t clearly say. Valéry, as Epstein suggests, went into a laboratory of self-reflection to study reflection itself, but doesn’t appear to have come up any significant experimental results. Overall, Epstein is as enigmatic on Valéry as Valéry was on the mind:

And to raise the question of mind, of what is behind our thinking and how it really works, is, as Valéry knew, “to call everything into question.” In a brief essay called “I Would Sometimes Say to Mallarmé,” he wrote: “Why not admit that man is the source and origin of enigmas, where there is no object, or being, or moment that is not impenetrable; when our existence, our movements, our sensations absolutely cannot be explained; and when everything we see becomes indecipherable from the moment our minds come to rest on it.”

Those comments sound intellectually fashionable, don’t they? Amazingly, they’re still in fashion today. Yet, what’s truly significant about such thoughts? What about Valéry’s take on humankind’s inscrutability is truly insightful? Not much that I can see. The enigmas and difficulties of understanding ourselves have been observed and remarked upon with great frequency in the history of thought, even from the time of the first Greek thinkers. Turning to another matter, it seems weird to me that a journal committed to conserving the best in thought and art in our civilization should offer an essay that implicitly praises a thinker who is characterized as wanting to break away from all previous thought -- to start all over, to tear everything down, as if everything anyone thought for thousands of years has no value to what we might think of the mind or thinking today. Epstein, in context, seems to praise Valéry for leaving all that civilization has gained behind:

The task Valéry set himself was that of re-cognition -- to “re-cognate, to rethink things afresh,” and to work through them shorn of the conventional wisdom supplied by politics, history, and rhetoric. “‘Opinions,’ ‘convictions,’ and ‘beliefs’ are to me like weeds -- confusions,” he wrote. He claimed that he wrote “to test, to clarify, to extend, not to duplicate what has been done.”

Those also seem fine words nowadays, nicely in vogue in our profligate times, when every other day someone sets out to rethink things in some vast domain from the ground up. We have become fully accustomed to such sentiments. It has become almost damnable to say today that you agree in whole or in part with a thinker who wrote something yesterday, as though every idea conceived yesterday was conceived only to give those who think today an idea to discard, which means that the thought of today’s thinkers exists only to be discarded in turn tomorrow’s thinkers, and those of tomorrow’s on the day after tomorrow, and so on. Furthermore, very similar words to Valéry’s have been written by many other theorists who have sought to incite highly destructive revolutions in art and thought and society. Too many of these thinkers have wanted, irrationally, sometimes downright foolishly, to pitch overboard everything Western civilization has wrought.

At present I don’t have the time for a look at Valéry’s best work, but I wonder whether I should dare to give my own judgment of Winters’s judgment of “Ébauche d’un serpent.” Well, first, it might behoove us to ask again: Has any writer ever concurred with Winters on “Ébauche”? Not that I know of. Yes, most critics who have written on Winters have recounted the claim. But no critic, no writer, no Wintersian, no former Winters student, has ever said that he or she agrees, or disagrees, that “Ébauche” is the greatest poem, let alone re-assessed the poem at length. In 1977, it’s worth noting, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi published a dense, learned essay in the Southern Review comparing the poem with several poems of Edgar Bowers’s; yet though that essay offered an extended analysis of “Ébauche,” it does not evaluate the poem’s greatness. (I suppose that one could provisionally guess that Trimpi considered it an exceptionally fine poem since she paid such close attention to it, closer attention than it has ever received, at least to my knowledge.) That said, it seems to me that Winters could very well be right about this poem: it might very well be the greatest poem ever written, though the other poem of Valéry’s that Winters judged great, “Le Cimitiére marin (“The Graveyard by the Sea”), in my judgment, might rank right alongside “Ébauche.” I will consider this grand issue, which broadly encompasses many lesser questions and concerns, both of literary practice and principle, on this blog at some point. I have only discussed three poems in the Winters Canon so far, which means that we have 182 to go on before I might get to Valéry’s great works. Whew!

After discovering Valéry through Winters in college in the 1970s, I studied Valéry for a time. I didn’t unearth much else besides these two great poems, though I do think that “La Jeune Parque” plays, insightfully at points, with some of the same abstruse ideas contemplated in the poems Winters thought great. The playfulness of that beautifully composed, long, and famous poem (famous in France, that is) and its densely associational structure were probably too damaging in Winters’s judgment. But I find it still worth knowing. After going through some of the early work, I found out that, as a devotee of Stephan Mallarmé, Valéry's wrote his early poetry in the Symbolist manner. In my view, the early poems are mostly diaphanous exercises in ethereal evocation, more elegantly clever with their elusive insinuations of arcane experience than truly thoughtful or fostering reflection.

Later in his career, after a long break from poetry, about two decades long, Valéry became more methodical and adamant in his search for deeper knowledge of the fundamental meanings of existence, which is clearly seen in the purity and precision of his later poetry: "Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of ‘truth’ and the language of ‘creation.’" These words sound unpoetic, especially considering how poetry is understood commonly in our day and age. The result of this rarefied outlook was Charmes, the superb book of poetry that plays such a big role in Winters’s criticism and poetry. Yet much of the poetry in Charmes is almost as frustratingly gauzy as the earlier Symbolist poetizing. Still, Valéry did remain committed to breaking away from Romanticism, as stated in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas: “The distrust of inspiration, an enmity to nature, is the crucial point which sets off symbolism from romanticism. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry all share it....”

The fame of his poems led to Valéry’s becoming a popular public speaker. He became known for his sharp, aphoristic wit, with such renowned quips as, “Everything changes but the avant-garde.” That’s nice and sharp, but what true insight is it giving us? Not much, after all. Here are a couple more: “Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.” That’s clever, or perhaps merely cute, especially the final turn of phrase. But what insight is given? Nothing truly profound. “Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.” Now there’s a sharper observation, about the problem of power in a democracy. That encourages a bit of serious reflection. And so it goes with much that you will find in Valéry’s prose: lots of sharp observations, but they are seldom as insightful as they first appear to be.

Valéry was one who did much to change French poetry by decreasing the emotional and the quotidian in his late work. He appeared to think that a mathematical model was needed, one that yielded exact expression and searing clarity, arising from intensive self-analysis and thousands of hours of secluded reflection. He made a similar effort in the Cahiers: “I have sought to know the substratum of thought and sensibility on which one has lived.” But the results to that are a disordered mass. And I have yet to discover anything Valéry learned about that substratum that makes a substantial difference that I could point out to you. I’m not saying it’s not there. I’d love to hear from anyone who thinks they might have found it or knows of a thinker who thinks so. Joseph Epstein might have found something, but his rambling essay fails to say or even hint at what it is.

Thus, I suggest that Valéry was a mixed bag. Yvor Winters appears to have thought so as well. But because of Valéry’s achievement in two poems and a handful of other moments in poetry and prose, Winters thought him one of the finest minds of our civilization, as he implies in this passage from “T.S. Eliot or the Illusion of Reaction” (which, I should note, was written more than a decade before the essay in which Winters announced his judgment of “Ébauche d’un Serpent” as the greatest poem):

On the face of it Pound and Valéry appear to have almost nothing in common save native talent: Pound's relationship to tradition is that of one who has abandoned its method and pillaged its details -- he is merely a barbarian on the loose in a museum; Valéry's relationship to tradition is that of a poet who has mastered and used the best of traditional method, and has used that method to deal with original and intelligent matter. Valéry is a living and beautifully functioning mind; Pound is a rich but disordered memory. [That comment on Pound the barbarian, I should pause to note, is one of the better-known and best put-downs in Winters, though it's most often quoted to put Winters down.]

I will come back to Valéry and the many issues surrounding the connections between his work and Winters’s some time soon on this blog. For example, what does it say that scholars and critics, French and English, have written about “Cimitiére” a thousand times more than they have about “Ébauche”? That’s an issue, among a number, that needs discussion. Yet I think I will forego further comment on Epstein’s piece. It just doesn’t have much to say. Still, it’s a good place to start if you’d like to get a quick, readable overview of this thinker and poet before, more importantly, you give Valéry’s poetry some careful study. “Ébauche d’un Serpent” especially deserves your sustained attention, if you can find the poem, which can be difficult. Only major libraries appear to carry Valéry’s work, naturally. A new translation of Charmes by an English poet named Peter Dale, who has been an able translator of French poets, I have yet to find anywhere. But I did find Dale’s recent translation of “Ébauche d’un Serpent” in an short anthology of some of his French translations entitled Narrow Straits: Poems from the French (1985). Also, I noticed on the web that a new translation of “Ébauche” has been written by the poet James McMichael and published in a journal of Mormon thought named Dialogue. I have found no access to this journal. I hope to seek permissions to post the poem on this blog so that “Ébauche d’un Serpent” can be much more easily read. Perhaps I'll do my own rough translation.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 3

“To His lute”

or “My Lute Awake”

or “The Lover Complaineth the Unkindness of His Love” [as titled in Tottel’s Miscellany]

by Thomas Wyatt

My lute awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute be still, for I have done.

As to be heard where ear is none,
As lead to grave in marble stone,
My song may pierce her heart as soon;
Should we then sigh or sing or moan?
No, no, my lute, for I have done.

The rocks do not so cruelly
Repulse the waves continually,
My suit and affection;
So that I am past remedy,
Whereby my lute and I have done.

Proud of the spoil that thou hast got
Of simple hearts thorough Love's shot,
By whom, unkind, thou hast them won,
Think not he hath his bow forgot,
Although my lute and I have done.

Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain
That makest but game on earnest pain.
Think not alone under the sun
Unquit to cause thy lovers plain,
Although my lute and I have done.

Perchance thee lie wethered and old
The winter nights that are so cold,
Plaining in vain unto the moon;
Thy wishes then dare not be told;
Care then who list, for I have done.

And then may chance thee to repent
The time that thou hast lost and spent
To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon;
Then shalt thou know beauty but lent,
And wish and want as I have done.

Now cease, my lute; this is the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And ended is that we begun.
Now is this song both sung and past:
My lute be still, for I have done.

NOTES:

line 2: labour: work, and petition.
7: lead to grave: lead to engrave (lead is not hard enough to cut marble).
17: thorough: through Love's shot: Cupid's arrow.
19: his bow forgot: Cupid's bow, still a danger for the lady.
22: makest but game on: only makes fun of.
24: Unquit: unrequited, not subjected to pain. plain: to complain.
26: wethered: withered (possibly weathered).
28: plaining: complaining.
30: who list: who likes.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, or SUPERB

Winters mentioned this poem a couple times in his essays, but he never discussed it, briefly or at length, or made a case for its inclusion in the Winters Canon. Further, no Wintersian that I know of has ever considered whether the inclusion of this poem in Quest for Reality is justified (setting aside the issue of what he or she considers the purpose of Quest). I have seldom found the poem mentioned in essays and books on Winters’s career. Further, no Wintersian critic has ever discussed or more than mentioned Thomas Wyatt’s poetry in general. (I will have to give a little more thought to what these facts say about Wyatt’s poetry and Winters’s views of it. If Winters’s goal was to get the poems of Quest read and studied more often as exemplary models, it doesn’t seem that he has achieved that goal to any degree concerning Thomas Wyatt’s poetry.)

The comments Winters made about “To His Lute,” judging in accordance with the main course of his literary career, suggest that he did not quite consider this poem one of the great poems, though he did regard it as an exceptionally good one -- hence the star-rating I give it. I surmise from various indications that Winters thought that the WAY Wyatt wrote this poem is so salutary that it deserved a spot in Quest for Reality, though the content of the poem is conventional -- indeed, almost ordinary. But this is only my informed guess. I can’t appeal to other views, since no Wintersian I know of has ever bothered to scrutinize the poem in detail -- or even to mention it.

The occasion of the poem, the back-story we might say, is indefinite, since we cannot discern exactly the moral relationship between the speaker of the poem, a courtly suitor it would seem, and the woman who has rejected his suit or been unfaithful to him in some way. It’s not clear what the speaker wanted of the woman he is addressing, a sexual relationship, marriage, or something else. (By the way, take note of the funny cartoon on unrequited love.) The poem’s speaker, whether Wyatt himself or not, condemns this unfaithful woman and wishes for justice (“poetic” justice, it seems) to be served on the one who has wrongly spurned or been unfaithful to him.

Yet setting this puzzling and troublesome matter aside, which weakens the poem in my judgment, what Wyatt gives us in this work is a study of moral consequentialism, which is the overt subject matter of the poem, what Winters and others of his time called the paraphraseable content. The poet’s judgment of this subject matter is found in the manner in which the “back-story” is treated. Wyatt’s style and structure, Winters probably believed, make this poem deserving of the Winters Canon. What is particularly admirable in Wyatt’s manner is that he reasons his way through the experience at hand and carefully controls his emotional response to the understanding that he reaches. The speaker almost sublimates his emotions by addressing his lute (one of the Petrarchan conventions according to which that the poem was composed) and shows that he is taking a reasoned moral stance toward the subject matter. His judgment is clear: people should reap what they sow. Those who are faithless should reap the consequences of faithlessness. Those who unjustly spurn should, by a just turn, feel the loneliness of being spurned. With his abstract, controlled language, Wyatt generalizes the principle, calling implicitly for us all to suffer the consequences of our wrongful actions, to know the sufferings of blindness if we have taken an eye, to feel the pain of loss if we have toyed with a lover or violated the ethics of love-making, and so on.

For these reasons, the poem provides a nice example of the approach Winters believed to be most valuable in the study of literary artworks, for the poem’s style and structure speak to the crucial ideas it conveys to us. This is how Gerald Graff, critic, educator, and one-time Winters student, describes this way of understanding poems in his reminiscence essay, “Yvor Winters at Stanford” (from Masters: Portraits of Great Teachers, 1981):

To [Winters] every literary work necessarily advances or presupposes some “rational understanding,” plausible or not, of its subject, and this understanding “motivates” the emotions and valuations that the work communicates through style and technique. Thus such devices as poetic meter, rhythm, and syntax are more than mere technical apparatus; they are a kind of spiritual grammar which, like a person’s characteristic gestures and facial expressions, reflects his whole disposition toward the world. It followed from this that literary form is “moral,” in Winters’s sense -- a judgment as to how the world is to be understood and dealt with.

Graff’s is an incisive description of Winters’s basic literary tenet. Winters, it would seem, saw in Wyatt’s approach to the surface subject matter of this poem a deeper subject, the taking of a rational stance toward the moral implications of courtly love. Winters, I believe, found this approach highly salutary and worth setting as a model, both literary and moral.

Nonetheless, there are a number of thorny issues that arise as we ponder this poem. First is the matter of context. How does or should our understanding of the poem’s vision of morality change in the knowledge that it was written as the private compositional exercise of a courtier from a distant time? Second is the matter of convention. How can we fully tap into the meaning of a poem that follows specific, narrow conventions in an aristocratic culture in a distant time and place, in this case the specific conventions of the Petrarchan complaint in the English Renaissance? I do not wish to delve into either of these important matters, but they await fuller exploration. Setting aside such intricate questions as these and assuming that Thomas Wyatt was trying to make a general, indeed timeless, statement about morality rather than about the specific experiences of courtship and love, I believe that Yvor Winters believed that Wyatt was making a statement that men and women should -- and need to -- reap what they sow. In the abstract, the woman addressed in the poem is a representative of us all. Her unspecified deeds stand as a synecdoche for human faithlessness. The specific justice Wyatt’s speaker seeks is a call for each of us to suffer the consequences of our wrongful deeds.

On a side matter, it’s interesting to note and reflect upon the fact that Wyatt’s plain style has had very few imitators, a matter which I might come back to at the end of my consideration of the Thomas Wyatt poems chosen for Quest for Reality. Have anyone worked, as it were, out or up from Wyatt, to build upon Wyatt or put Wyatt’s approach to new uses? If not, what is the Winters Canon for to those who say that Winters considered it a set of models for poetic composition?

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, SUPERB

I agree with Winters, as I understand him. The poem exhibits an almost perfect classical style. The treatment of the subject matter is very generalized, which makes it difficult to sort out the justness of the suitor's complaint against his lover. Wyatt wrote so often about unfaithfulness that his poems on the topic seem a touch puerile. But there is enduring value in exploring the principles of moral consequentialism, such profound and important subject matter, through this story of a spurned lover. Still, I would remind you that, though it is facile, it is also utterly true that there are two sides to every lovers’ quarrel (and sometimes more sides than two), and I can only wonder what the woman might have had to say about the behavior of the speaker of this poem or in answer to his charges against her. (We might suspect, too, knowing what we do about the libidinous Thomas Wyatt, whether his desire for this woman was anything more than boundless sexual appetite.) Still, the rational treatment of this subject does not directly concern itself with what might have been, as it seems, a childish spat between two lovers.

Yet was it childish? No one can be sure, and this also weakens the poem slightly. We do not learn anything definite about the wrongs about which the poem was written to be able to judge the specific case of the woman in the poem and thus to properly or more fully judge the general principle: whether, if she were unfaithful in the way the speaker hints that she was, she is deserving of the “curse” that the speaker calls down upon her. Though we might agree to the general moral principle that the poem commends to us, that of reaping what is sown, the poem does not give as much insight into that principle as it could have because it does not inform us about this specific case, which would help us see better how vital the general principle is.

And if we interpret the poem in the light of Thomas Wyatt’s randy life, the speaker’s understanding of the subject matter seems almost juvenile to me, little more than another case of a spurned suitor behaving childishly, wishing the worst on a woman who has rejected him or who he thinks has been unfaithful to him. Without knowing just a few more details, we have no adequate means to judge the moral rightness of his claims against her. Also, this poem might provide another instance of a weakness in Wyatt’s poems that Winters briefly alluded to in one essay: that it is not morally just to expect a woman to accept a man’s suit just because he made one, a topic that we shall return to concerning a poem to come.

Nonetheless, the poem certainly has high conceptual value. It offers a sustained argument about a morally significant human experience. I think this poem belongs in the Winters Canon as one of the great poems of the English language. I consider it a model of poetic craft and moral statement.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

Despite its excellence, I can’t say that I have ever gotten anything of great importance to life out of this poem. The poem hasn’t greatly changed my understanding of morality or justice or significantly enriched my emotional response to the concept of a moral code. I have known the poem well for a long time, but it has not given me a significantly deeper understanding of morality either through its content or its style.

Rather, knowing something about Wyatt and his many poems on unrequited love and unfaithful lovers, I have often thought it possible that he had a mental sickness, which he failed to address or even to recognize, considering his circumstances. Inadvertently, this poem might reveal how human beings become stuck in their illusions. Wyatt’s writings of this sort might be expressions of some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder or sexual addiction -- or perhaps even an unrecognized lust for power and control (perhaps in more areas of life than sexuality). The poem also might reveal unintended ideas about the moral perils of excessive wealth, since it is probably true that he would not have been able to form or indulge his obsession with the sexual mastery of women had he not had wealth and power.

But all these matters are tangential to the poem’s explicit purpose. I do not believe that Wyatt intended to explore any of these matters when he wrote this poem (or the following poem in Quest for Reality, “Blame Not My Lute,” which I will turn to next in this series). Still, he does inadvertently hint at many things about himself and his society by writing such poems, and these matters, extraneous though they are to literature considered as an art form, could be fruitfully studied. As a work of art, however, as an expression of a crucial moral principle, I don’t get much out of it. I don’t even agree that it is just or spiritually healthy in all cases to hope or wish that the suffering one person has endured from another’s hand should be visited upon that person. There are times for justice, yes -- and times for mercy, too.

By the way, if you wish to study the topic of unrequited love more deeply, the occasion of “To His Lute,” a useful place to start is Wikipedia’s entry on the matter, which I found enlightening:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrequited_love

Finally, I wish to repeat my general disclaimer for this series on the Winters Canon that I offer these analyses to encourage discussion on the fine poems that Yvor Winters commended to us, not to bring discussion to an end. Minds can change, mine included, about this poem or any other I will be scrutinizing in the months ahead.

Someone on a Quest Finds “Quest”

Another blogger has written of his discovery of the seminal poetry anthology Yvor Winters edited in the final years of his life, Quest for Reality. I have mentioned this blogger before, a fellow named Patrick Kurp, author of the blog "Anecdotal Evidence." I have mentioned or discussed Quest for Reality many times on this blog and on my Yvor Winters web site. Krup's discussion of his discovery of this anthology can be found at:

http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2007/07/that-sweet-accord-is-seldom-seen.html

Quest was not published until 1968, some months after Winters’s death, as a companion to his final work of criticism, Forms of Discovery. As fine as it is, Quest gets little attention because Forms is probably the least admired of Winters’s major works of criticism -- which is saying a lot, since almost nothing he ever wrote is widely admired or broadly influential. Naturally, it is always nice to see someone making the discovery I made myself so long ago, back in the mid-1970s when I was in college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Quest is a selection of 185 English language poems written from the mid-1500s to the mid-1960os, but it is a downright bewildering selection if you know nothing of Winters’s critical ideas. Many almost wholly unknown poems appear in it, and many of the poems written by well-known poets seem obscure as well. And yet, there are a few rather famous poems in it as well. What does this selection mean and what were its criteria? It makes almost no immediate sense whatsoever without the introduction, written by one-time Winters student Ken Fields, who is still a professor at Stanford University, where Winters was a professor for more than 30 years.

Fields wrote that Winters and he considered these the most “remarkable” poems in the language (a characterization of the selection that I must discuss on this blog some time soon). Fields’s explanation of what that word “remarkable” means is less than perfectly clear, in my estimation, but his discussion serves well enough for those new to Winters’s literary thought. To fully appreciate the anthology, you should read it in tandem with Forms of Discovery, which makes much clearer what this truly oddball collection is all about. Click on the definition of "Winters Canon" in the right hand column of this blog for a bit more information on my understanding of the purpose of Quest for Reality and the role the anthology plays in the study of Winters.

It might be good here to reprint what I wrote on amazon.com about Quest for Reality back in 2000:

The Greatest Poems of All Time, November 28, 2000

Reviewer:
Ben Kilpela

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) decided to illustrate by example what he thought are the greatest poems ever written in English. So here they reside, 185 of them. A few, very few, will be well known to readers of poetry; most are puzzlingly obscure. All but a handful (in my view) are so great that it takes one's breath away to read them. Reading them almost makes for mystical experiences. Among the poems that the common critics have missed but Winters found and championed to his dying day are Jonson's "To Heaven," Herbert's "Church Monuments," Very's "Thy Brother's Blood," Winters's own "To the Holy Spirit," and Bowers's "The Astronomers of Mont Blanc." There are many, many more, but these five are probably the greatest of the greats. This is, simply put, the greatest book of poetry ever published in English. If you love poetry, you must find or own a copy. Don't be surprised though. All but a few of the poems are in metrical verse, and they have almost nothing to do with modern "expressivism", the solipsitic "emoting" that passes for good poetry in the tiresome modern age. Here, not a word is wasted, not a phrase is trivial. Every syllable, every beat of every line, counts toward the rational understanding of the human mind and spirit and the proper adjusting of our emotions to that rational understanding. The book contains an excellent introductory essay by a Winters student, Kenneth Fields, who lays out the principles of selection briefly and incisively. In itself, that essay is one of the best introductions to poetry ever written and alone will be worth all the effort you make in finding this out-of-print book. Winters has done something here that every critic should: show us the results of his theories. What a great work of poetic literature.

That remains a fair summary of my views. Perhaps I worked myself up a little too much for that review, but my judgments generally still hold. The five greatest poems I selected then might not ride quite as high ABOVE many of the others in Quest as I once thought, but this requires no more than a minor adjustment to what I wrote. I judge each of those five poems as great and would still say that the Winters poem is the greatest in English, as I have posted on a British poetry site. But these five are not significantly greater than several dozen poems in Quest. My opinion of Fields’s “Introduction” is a little lower, too.

Overall, the issue still stands, even among Wintersians, as to how exactly these poems as a group should be taken. Are they notable examples of excellent poetic style? Examples of a highly admirable approach to poetry, or perhaps even the “best” approach to poetic composition? Are they Yvor Winters’s greatest poems? Does anyone agree that they should be pronounced THE truly great poems of our language? I am at work, step by step, on a broad discussion of this issue on this blog, especially in my effort to re-evaluate all 185 poems found in Quest, one by one. Here I will say that it appears that I stand almost entirely alone on taking these poems as Winters’s greatest poems -- and alone also in judging most of them to be, truly, our greatest poems. Even dedicated Wintersians, of which there are very few, have generally sided with the view that these poems are no more than supreme examples of poetic style.

I should mention John Fraser’s objection to my take on Quest. Fraser is a fine critic who wrote soundly about Winters in the Southern Review a few times in the 1970s and published online in the 2000s a new Wintersian anthology of poems I have discussed several times on this blog, A New Book of Verse (a link is in the right hand column). Fraser has corrected me with good reason that Winters did not consider some of the poems he chose for Quest to be “great” as such, but rather as very good poems of exemplary style that have been ignored or almost totally forgotten. Winters wanted to make sure these poems were remembered, studied anew, and perhaps imitated (in the broadest sense of that word). In my judgment, Fraser is right about this, and I am trying in my ongoing study of the Winters Canon on this blog to lay out which poems Winters judged great (most of them) and which he judged so good but so long forgotten that they need rescuing from oblivion (as most of them still do).

Concerning those pronouncements of greatness, Winters had big objectives and made big claims. And now I’m making them again, or at least giving them a good hearing, for the first time by anyone, professional critic or not (whatever “professional” might mean), since Quest was published. Yet I’m making such claims on the Internet, which is cause for concern, I know. As Mike Royko, the newspaper columnist, has said, "It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies." I know online endeavors like this blog are questionable just because of the venue, as opposed to paid and peer-reviewed publication. I could very well be a babbling loony, unknown as such even to myself. But at least my views are fully open to debate, questioning, and challenge by anyone who wishes to weigh in. The number of people who have wished to do so in the one year this blog has been online is exactly... drum roll, please...

ZERO.

You can make of that fact what you will.

More on Blurbing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Edition of Donald Stanford’s Poems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cartesian Lawnmower

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

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

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

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

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

The Bee

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Reading for Wintersian Classicists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Recent Study of Recent British Poets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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