Basic Definitions: “Classicism”

For quite a while I have been bandying the term “classical” about on this blog without defining it properly. The time has come for a definition to ensure that I am not misunderstood when I refer to Yvor Winters or any other author as a classicist, especially as modern version of one. The term denotes and connotes a variety of concepts and emotions. Critics, even advocates of Winters’s ideas, have not often referred to Yvor Winters as a classical poet, either in his lifetime or in the succeeding decades. But he was reckoned as one in one of the most important recent considerations of modern classicism, Donald Stanford’s all-too-short essay “Classicism and the Modern Poet,” which was published in the Southern Review in 1969 (a year after Winters’s death).

I will come back to Stanford’s definition of classicism shortly, but let’s start with a fairly recent book on the matter, In Search of the Classic (1994), by Steven Shankman, a scholar of ancient classicism who wrote an essay, collected in the book, on the “classical rationalism” of Yvor Winters’s poetry (the essay was first written for the 1981 Yvor Winters issue of Donald Stanford’s Southern Review). This valuable, learned book offers several close studies of relatively recent manifestations of literary classicism, but the definition of “classical” that Shankman offers in his introductory essay is one I consider far too elusive:

I should state, at the outset and as explicitly and concisely as possible, what I mean by a classic: in terms of what I call the classical position, a work of literature is a compelling, formally coherent, and rationally defensible representation that resist being reduced either to the mere recording of material reality, on the one hand, or to the bare exemplification of an abstract philosophical precept, on the other.

Though Shankman expounds this definition in great, multifarious detail throughout his book, the definition as such is much too imprecise to be of much use. A skilled critic could make a case for just about any literary artwork’s being classical using such a definition. Could not an adept critic characterize almost any writing as “compelling,” “formally coherent,” and “rationally defensible”? What serious writer sets out to write works that are NOT compelling, that lack coherence, and are indefensible (depending, of course, on what these concepts mean to each writer)? Classicism must mean something more exact and complete than this. Shankman’s essay on Winters carefully lays out the meaning of “classical rationalism,” which is a very complex issue that is much worth closer study. In this essay and several others in the book we soon see that that classicism means much, much more to Shankman than this hazy initial attempt at being explicit. To bolster his meaning, Shankman had earlier trotted out a definition of the term from Hans-Georg Gadamer that Shankman says comes close to his own meaning:

What we call classical is something retrieved from the vicissitudes of changing times and its changing taste.... [It] is a consciousness of something enduring, of significance that cannot be lost and is independent of all circumstances of time, in which we call something ‘classical’ -- a kind of timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other age.

That's all? Enduring? That helps very little. What serious writer doesn’t offer his writings as enduring? Every major modern experimentalist who ever put pen to paper, even the wildest members of the avant garde, believes that his writings should, and fervently hopes that they will, endure. I know I do. And there are many examples of very personal and private writings and odd experiments that have endured. Gadamer’s definition of classical is almost worthless. But not quite. It brings to mind many important points Winters made in his essays about the importance of poetry’s bearing on general truth, on Gadamer’s “timeless present” that some writings seem to inhabit. Yet Winters was dedicated to new literary ideas and modes in ways that can surprise those who have only read of his theories in the summaries of his opponents. Very little about his work betrays a slavish commitment to ancient or early modern models, such as from the English Renaissance, as has been claimed from time to time (for example, by Robert Hass and David Yezzi, who have made errors on this matter).

Now let’s turn to Winters, briefly, for he had little to say on classicism and never used the word “classicist” to describe himself, so far as I know. In his first book, his analytical study of the nature of literary statement, Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Winters mentioned classicism only a few times and did not define the term. There is, however, one pertinent and suggestive passage that concerns whether two modern writers can be admired by those who admire classicism:

A classicist may admire the sensibilities of [James] Joyce and [St. John] Perse with perfect consistency (though beyond a certain point not with perfect taste), but he cannot with consistency justify the forms which those sensibilities have taken.

This brief comment suggests that Winters thought of classicism as more concerned with the forms of literature than with its contents. The form a literary artwork takes, in itself, gives it a certain conceptual and emotional feel. It is this “feel” and its meaning that Winters endeavored to elucidate throughout his critical career. This is a suggestive point about classicists, well worth studying in some detail on this blog some time in the future.

But Winters was never clear on how form and classicism are associated. He used the word “classical” here and there, even capitalizing it at times. He discussed it briefly as a concept in relation to T.S. Eliot, who famously claimed to have become a classicist. (Winters’s severe and corrective essay on Eliot was reprinted in The Anatomy of Nonsense, and both books I have mentioned in these paragraphs have been reprinted in In Defense of Reason.) But he never defined the term in any way -- not even for the little known but important statement of allegiance to classicism in the opening “Statement of Purpose” to The Gyroscope, the little magazine that he and his wife Janet edited and published for a couple years in the early 1930s:

The Gyroscope will be a mimeographed quarterly journal publishing prose and verse and attempting to fix in literary terms some approximation of a classical state of mind. The Gyroscope will be opposed to all forms of spiritual extroversion: (1) to all doctrines of liberation and emotional expansionism, since they deprecate and tend to eliminate the intellect, the core of conscious existence....

And so on through seven more oppositions, all of which deserve study. My main concern here is the first, the journal’s proposed opposition to “expansionism,” what I would describe as emotion out of balance with reason. The proper balance of reason and emotion appears to be a central aspect of Winters’s understanding of classicism. Keep this comment particularly in mind as we consider Stanford’s definition in a moment. In a later issue of The Gyroscope, which lasted only a couple years and is extremely hard to find, Winters wrote an essay, “Notes on Contemporary Criticism,” that appears to express a strong affinity between his critical theories and classicism. Here is one deeply classical comment from that essay:

If it be objected that I propose no end for which a man should reduce his emotion to a minimum and then, if need be, thwart that minimum, I answer with the Stoics that the end is a controlled and harmonious life. Any man who gratifies an unjust desire, who indulges knowingly in a violation of equity, weakens his self-control by that much and opens the way to complete loss of it, to disintegration into pure emotionalism, which is pure mechanism: such a man is in danger of losing his humanity, or ceasing really to exist as a man.

What a fascinating passage from a striking and powerful essay. I cannot take the time now for all the attention it deserves. My central point is that classicism as Winters understood it involves the control of emotion in one’s writing for the sake of moral control, for the living of a harmonious life (however such concepts might exactly be defined). This is superbly consonant with many definitions of classicism in our standard reference works in the field of literature and hints at Winters’s own understanding of the term.

The passage from “Notes” leads me to Donald Stanford’s definition of classicism as given in his vital 1969 essay “Classicism and the Modern Poet.” It is this definition that I find the most reliable, and it is one that I employ, provisionally and rather generally, on this blog. Stanford’s essay discusses several modern writers who claimed to be classicists in some significant sense but who Stanford believed were not, among them Ezra Pound and Eliot. Rather, Stanford claims that Winters, Robert Bridges, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and J.V. Cunningham are true exemplars of modern classicism. At the outset of this essay, Stanford begins by rejecting T.S. Eliot’s well-known claim to be classical. In the course of this discussion, Stanford uses some of Eliot’s own words about classicism against him. The definition of classicism Stanford offers in the midst of this opening is what I find pertinent to our discussion here:

“Dignity”, “reason”, and “order” -- these are the impeccable ideals of classicism. But what have they to do with some of the men whom Eliot held up for emulation? We expect from the classicist, together with a sense of history, of tradition, a “serene and severe control of the emotions by Reason” [a phrase quoted from Eliot], a respect for the literature and institutions of the past, a desire for harmony and order in the arts, a recognition of the dignity of man.

That’s as close as Stanford comes to a full definition of “classicism.” The definition is useful, but also quite vague in the same ways that Shankman’s and Gadamer’s definitions are. For we see that many ways of writing could be called classical under this definition. Most of today’s experimental poetic musers believe their works defend human dignity, adhere to reason (at least new, experimental ways of being reasonable), and exhibit proper order (at least new kinds of order). Yet this definition serves well enough when we look at the artworks that qualify as classical in the judgment of those who employ the definition. At heart, it is definition by example, as accomplished in Winters’s own poetry anthology Quest for Reality, in which the defining principles and attributes of classicism and its modern manifestations are most clearly seen.

As you no doubt see, in quoting these various comments and definitions of classicism, I have raised many issues that I have either brushed past or not even mentioned. Much more can and must be said on the topic of the classicism of Yvor Winters and his advocates, the so-called Stanford School. From whence will the Wintersian arise to address these issues? For even I in this post have come to no firm and reasonable conclusions on what it means exactly and fully to call Yvor Winters a classicist.

Donald Stanford’s Final Book

I have wanted to bring to your attention a book that was published a year ago but which has received no notice whatsoever in American literary circles. I have yet to find a single review of the book in an American literary journal of any size. Nor have I found a review in a British journal. The book is the work of the late Donald Stanford, poet, critic, LSU professor, and editor who was probably the finest modern classicist of the Stanford School, a term denoting the associates of Yvor Winters, in one way or another. Before his death in 1998, Dr. Stanford was at work on this final book in an effort to revive interest in four British writers whom he considered worthy of study and who each had been a confrere of the great poet Robert Bridges., and Stanford’s goal was to bring these four poet-novelists back to our attention, that is, I presume, to see them read and studied once again. Though very few critics have apparently yet bothered with this book, it is highly deserving of your consideration. Though its title is rather pedestrian, its contents are superb.

Before commenting on the book, it is important, I think, to review once again why I am devoting a long post to this obscure book of criticism. Donald Stanford was a student of Yvor Winters’s at Stanford in the 1930s. He published a distinguished book of poetry in the 40s, to which Winters contributed a short but striking forward. Stanford became a professor of English literature and eventually settled into a career at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He had a distinguished, if mostly overlooked career. In our gleefully heretical times, he was often too strict a classicist, too closely associated with Winters, and too much taken with the so-called Victorian poets to gain wide influence. Yet with Lewis Simpson, he became co-editor of the Southern Review, Second Series, which was a revival of the famed Southern Review of the 1930s. His editorial work in the second run of the journal was magnificent. He kept alive the study of Winters’s critical ideas (he even published a few of Winters’s final essays) and fostered the development of the Stanford School, to which Wintersians have been said to belong (because Winters taught at Stanford University), in many vital and constructive ways. But he also guided the journal in other directions not obviously associated with Winters’s work. I consider Stanford our finest Wintersian critic, an exceptionally fine formalist poet, and one of the most erudite and accomplished classicists of modern times. Setting aside his work on the Southern Review, the summit of his career is probably the publication of his study of modern literature, Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry (1983), which offers intensive studies of the poetic achievements of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (the revolutionaries), Wallace Stevens (who put one foot in each camp), and Edwin Arlington Robinson and Yvor Winters (the “conventionaries”). This book’s fifth poet often raises a dismissive smirk or two, since Stanford implicitly elevates Winters to the rank of those four much better known luminaries of modern literature. But the critics and poets of the Stanford School think the elevation is fully, indubitably warranted and only ask that it Winters’s achievement be given a judicious hearing, reader by reader.

And so now I come to Stanford’s book, his last, A Critical Study of the Works of Four British Writers, edited by R.W. Crump. Dr. Crump reportedly found the manuscript in nearly finished form among Stanford’s papers after his death and brought the book to publication. The four writers are Margaret Louisa Woods (1856-1945), Mary Coleridge (1861-1907), Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), and Robert C. Trevelyan (1872-1951). You can find information about Stanford’s book at the web site of Edwin Mellen Press:

http://www.mellenpress.com/mellenpress.cfm?bookid=6912&pc=9

The four authors are not wholly unheard of. You can easily find some of their poetry on the web, and a few of their works remain in print, in Britain and even in the States. I have found a book of Woods’s poems still in print and a few of her poems on the web, but none of her fiction. Newbolt’s best-known poetry seems to be widely available in anthologies and in a couple of published editions, but his novels are hard to find in print. I have found almost nothing of Coleridge’s work (the original cover of one of her works is pictured). Finally, I have found a few poems by R.C. Trevelyan here and there on the web, but very little of his fiction is in print. A few of the many novels written by these writers remain available at major academic libraries around the country, in addition to several editions of their poetry. Overall, then, these four are fairly obscure writers. They have been greatly overlooked or almost entirely forgotten. I have found very little evidence of their being objects of critical study in the U.S.

Stanford’s book seeks to bring Woods, Coleridge, Newbolt, and Trevelyan back to our attention and, presumably, assign an indefinitely higher place to some of their works in the literary canon. The long chapters concern the life and literary achievement of each author and are subdivided into sections that scrutinize each author’s writings, organized by genre: fiction, poetry, verse drama, and criticism (if applicable). The book focuses much less on poetry than I had been expecting. Rather, Stanford devotes much more space to the prose of these writers, often presenting quite lengthy overviews of the plots and themes of their fiction. Why do I find this mildly surprising? Stanford himself edited many essays about fiction and the short story, but focused much of his criticism on poetry.

Many of the obscure novels Stanford discusses are historical fiction, a genre that Yvor Winters never focused on in particular, though his wife Janet Lewis was a distinguished author of several superb novels of historical fiction, which Winters greatly praised. Many of the historical novels Stanford discusses are set in medieval times (a popular subject matter at the turn of the 19th century). There are even some works of fantasy and early science fiction, which Stanford has made me think might be worth reading. Stanford’s general assessment is that the fiction of these four novelists is worth reading and studying, though he does not judge every novel or story as supremely excellent. In reading Stanford’s enlightening summaries and provisional appraisals, I don’t get the impression that he considered any of these novels to be great, on a level with the finest fiction of English literature, that of Austen, James, Melville, or Wharton. Rather, Stanford leaves the impression that many of these works are moderately successful while some few are especially fine.

Though the book’s publicity suggests that Stanford sought to set these four writers back into the canon (whatever that might mean exactly), there is little in the book that makes Stanford’s position clear on how accomplished these writers are. Nowhere does he state exactly how good he judges the work of these writers to be in comparison to the greats of literature (the Wintersian greats, that is). Further, nothing that has been published in the past year suggests that Stanford has been successful in bringing any of these writers “back into the canon” (again, whatever that especially vague phrase might mean). He does not explicitly set the work alongside that of any major writer, either of the Standard Canon or of the Winters Canon in prose (a much more amorphous assembly than the one Winters endeavored to form in poetry) in order for us to be able to know how Stanford judges each separate work. He doesn’t even clearly assess their artworks in light of the achievement of Robert Bridges, who was the subject of Stanford’s superb critical study, In the Classic Mode (both Winters and Stanford considered Bridges to be one of the greatest poets of the English language). In general, the impression that Stanford’s commentary leaves is that Woods, Coleridge, Newbolt, and Trevelyan are worth our time and study, but just how good they are, how diligently we should seek out their works, how much effort we should put into studying them, is left indefinite. I will give some of their novels and poems closer inspection some time, even though I had quite a time trying to find Stanford’s book, let alone the authors’.

Poet David Middleton, of Nicholls State University, one of our finest living formalist poets, wrote the strong introduction to the book. It recounts Stanford’s career, not the writers’, to prepare us for this study. Middleton is a little breathless about Stanford’s goals, writing,

...Stanford brings together in his final book two of his central concerns as scholar, critic, editor, and poet: the assignment of a rightful place in the literary canon to poets wrongly forgotten or marginalized....

Once again, Stanford is not as clear on this matter as Middleton implies that he is. I would say that the tone of the book suggests that Stanford wanted us to “give these writers a chance” rather than that we consider them “must reads.” I don’t think Stanford hoped for much more. As I say, it doesn’t even appear that he thought that they could stand with the greats, though he certainly considered their work superior. What he was trying to accomplish concerning these four writers, it seems, is what I’ve been trying to do with this blog and the study of Yvor Winters: put out commentaries on Winters’s ideas and work in the hope that they will inspire people to read Winters. I think this is what Stanford was mostly trying to accomplish concerning these authors.

Middleton also feels that the new book makes “a defense of reasonable poetic experimentation that does not discard [the] essential defining characteristics of poetry.” This issue plays a small role in the book, as I read it, but Stanford only sketches such issues as he runs through each career. As I have said, he spends much less time on the writers’ poetry than I had expected to find.

By the way, Middleton states that he considers poetry “a regularly repeated rhythmic or syllabic patterning.” Now there’s a suitable definition for us of the Stanford School, SOME KIND of pattern defines poetry. And not an ersatz pattern, I would add. A poet can’t just mill a thicket of prose into stanzas of four lines of roughly equal length and call it a poetic pattern -- though that seems to pass muster for thousands of poetry critics and so-called poets nowadays. Stanford, as Middleton puts it, hoped that more poetry would keep to the “significant and longstanding practices and inclinations of English writers, especially poets, including the use of classical myth, the evocation of natural beauty, the deliberate employment of an elevated poetic diction, and the presentation of subjects from history.” True, true, and well said. Overall, Middleton’s "Introduction" is not so much an opening for this study of the four Victorian authors as it is a general overview of the achievement of Donald Stanford. It deserves thoughtful reading.

You can read some reviews of the book at the Edwin Mellen site, which are, naturally, glowing, in the nature of blurbs. William Bedford Clark’s blurb (he’s from Texas A&M University), is almost rapturous in its praise:

By any measure this is an important and commanding work... [I]t represents the judicious ‘last testament’ of Professor Stanford... [His] acute sense of how poetry works and how it derives from a dynamic interpretation of literature and life is evident on every page... [T]his posthumous contribution... to our understanding of modern literature will prove a lasting one.

My goodness! But as much as I respect the literary achievement of Donald Stanford, these comments are somewhat misleading. This book is hardly Stanford’s “last testament,” which implies that the book somehow sums up his career. Moreover, the book, as I have already suggested, contains little on Stanford’s modern classical theories of poetry. Finally, the book has little to say to “modern literature,” mostly since the four authors have no standing in modern literature in any sense I can think of. I can only hope Stanford and the four authors will find some readers, but it seems that it will take a long, long time for it any of them to receive ANY recognition, let alone become “lasting” (whatever that might mean). More’s the shame.

Finally, with a $120(!!) price tag in the U.S., I don’t know how soon I’ll be getting my hands on this book. I managed to track it down on the interlibrary network in the State of Michigan. One library had it on the shelves, praise be! Now it’s time for one of these libraries to get Donald Stanford’s Collected Poems, which was the subject of a previous post on this blog.

To conclude this post, I want to mention that I have been reading some of the poetry of Woods, Coleridge, Newbolt, and Trevelyan and would be happy to post some observations some time if anyone is interested (please let me know). In the meantime, if anyone else knows some of their work well enough to comment on it, I will be pleased to post your observations on this blog. For starters, here is Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem entitled “Clifton Chapel,” which Stanford commended:

This is the Chapel: here, my son,
Your father thought the thoughts of youth,
And heard the words that one by one
The touch of Life has turn’d to truth.
Here in a day that is not far,
You too may speak with noble ghosts
Of manhood and the vows of war
You made before the Lord of Hosts.

To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe that comes with fearless eyes;
To count the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave you birth,
And dearer yet the brotherhood
That binds the brave of all the earth.—

My son, the oath is yours: the end
Is His, Who built the world of strife,
Who gave His children Pain for friend,
And Death for surest hope of life.
To-day and here the fight’s begun,
Of the great fellowship you’re free;
Henceforth the School and you are one,
And what You are, the race shall be.

God send you fortune: yet be sure,
Among the lights that gleam and pass,
You’ll live to follow none more pure
Than that which glows on yonder brass:
‘Qui procul hinc,’ the legend’s writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
‘Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.’

This is a well-wrought poem on a conventional theme, at least for the times -- near the opening of the First World War. The conceptual treatment of the theme is a somewhat trite, almost clichéd, but the diction is superb and the metrical control is strong. The iambic tetrameter is managed nicely, even though it is so very regular that you would think it might become dull. I have my reservations about the poem as a statement. What the poem is saying to us makes me quite nervous, for the poem is a call to military sacrifice, seeking to inspire other young men to make wasteful sacrifices like those made in the terrible, wasteful, foolish war that stands in its background. I think of William James’s great essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” as a counter to such sentiments: if only most of the energies of sacrifice were to be spent on peacemaking.

For another starter, here is Margaret Woods’s “Genius Loci,” which Stanford singled out for its excellence. This poem can be found in many anthologies and appears to be well known in some circles:

PEACE, Shepherd, peace! What boots it singing on?
Since long ago grace-giving Phoebus (1) died,
And all the train that loved the stream-bright side
Of the poetic mount with him are gone
Beyond the shores of Styx and Acheron,
In unexplored realms of night to hide.
The clouds that strew their shadows far and wide
Are all of Heaven that visits Helicon (2).

Yet here, where never muse or god did haunt,
Still may some nameless power of Nature stray,
Pleased with the reedy stream's continual chant
And purple pomp of these broad fields in May.
The shepherds meet him where he herds the kine,
And careless pass him by whose is the gift divine.

1. Apollo or God the sun
2. abode of the muses and sacred haunt of Apollo

This is very strong work, nearly as good as some of the finest work of Robert Bridges. The metrical scheme is brilliantly executed, and the diction is profound and powerful. This poem is worth knowing well. The subject is a typical one for Romanticism (even for ever more Romantic times), but it is a fine example of a more intellectual treatment of such a theme.

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.)

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.