Empty Churches

I was studying Philip Larkin's fine poem "Church Going" the other day as a consequence of having re-read the opening essay in Alan Shapiro's fine quasi-memoir The Last Happy Occasion, which focuses on this poem as one that has changed Shapiro's life. (As another of the essays in the book vigorously depicts, Shapiro was once a devoted adherent of Winters's.) Studying the poem brought to mind that John Fraser chose the poem for his New Book of Verse, that recent and very important online anthology that seeks to update the Winters Canon, which I have discussed quite a few times on this blog. And re-reading "Church Going" gave rise to the thought that modern classicists stand in much the same condition as those still willing to visit countryside Anglican churches. Just as many walk into empty churches, sense the decline in religious faith in themselves and their friends and family and in our culture, and yet still feel some twinge of attraction to the beliefs symbolized in the architecture and furnishings of the churches, so many seem to read poetry written in so-called traditional forms (or verse) and feel a tug of nostalgia for and perhaps attraction to literary styles and ideas of beauty that have long gone out of fashion. (I must put aside the issue of whether Larkin was right about the general decay of Christian belief in England, which, it seems to me, he was not, at least not entirely. Just last night on NPR -- the coincidence is amazing -- I heard a prominent British sociologist of religion claim that about 25% of the adult population of Britain is still strongly religious. That's decline from olden days, but not emptiness.)

Would many readers of modern literature feel something as Larkin says he did in the empty country church he stopped at if they were to look at the shelf of poetry in my musty basement library, with its dozens of obscure volumes of "formalist" poetry, elegant fiction, and modern classicist or "formalist" criticism of various sorts? It would be a small boon if some did. The closing stanza of "Church Going" holds out the same kind of hope I have, that some will see that there is "serious business" going on in the libraries and offices of us modern classicists. Maybe some will start, someday soon, coming back to "church" with us.

On the side issue of the achievement of Larkin's poem, I have strong doubts that Winters would have thought highly of it. I doubt that he would have considered it great -- or even close to great. But we should not be wholly constrained by his judgments, or our guesses at them. We have our own judgments to make. So what do my readers think? Is "Church Going" a great poem, as John Fraser suggests and Alan Shapiro seems to feel? I have my doubts, as well written as it is at points, but it is certainly worth knowing and appreciating, whether we judge it great or not.

By the by, if you find "Church Going" moving or insightful, you might look into two poems in the Winters Canon, as roughly delineated in Winters's 1968 anthology Quest for Reality, on similar or complementary themes to "Church Going": namely Edgar Bowers's "The Virgin Mary" from the 20th century and Thomas Traherne's "On News" from the 18th century. Both these poems, in my judgment, are far greater than Larkin's poem in just about every aspect. The most prominent difference between the two Quest poems and Larkin's might be Larkin's offhand diffidence, his unwillingness to say anything clearly or deeply serious about the "serious business" he seems to believe once went on or possibly could go on again in the empty country churches he liked to stop at. Compare that diffidence to the strong, clear assertions made in Traherne's and Bowers's poems. I must note, as I have before on this blog, that though John Fraser does include Traherne's great poem in his New Book of Verse, he makes a bad error in dismissing Bowers's from his anthology. "The Virgin Mary" is surely one of the greats.

By the by a second time, I note that Fraser has revised the "Critical Preface" to The New Book of Verse. The revision takes no note of my close study of the founding principles of Fraser's anthology published earlier this year on this blog.

The photo is my own of the courtyard of an Episcopal church in downtown Chicago on a snowy night.

A Consideration of the Theory Behind the New Book of Verse, Part II

THE CRITICAL PREFACE

I turn now to the longer and later essay, in which John Fraser wrote that his anthology The New Book of Verse (once again, NBV hereafter) sprang from his desire to find poems that simply “had to be” in an anthology of “good and great poems.” I quote those phrases from the “Unknown Flights” introduction (considered in "Part I"), though Fraser does mention this purpose in the “Critical Preface.” When I first read it a year ago, I deeply hoped that the preface would give us an account of the critical theory at the foundation of the NBV. Alas, it offers only slightly more help in understanding the nature of the NBV than the introduction.

To summarize, the preface offers no clear, sharp, or detailed account of why Fraser selected the poems found in the NBV and not others. Even though the title of this essay implies that Fraser will discuss a literary theory in the preface, he is almost as vague and elusive in the preface as he was in the “Unknown Flights” introduction that he wrote four years earlier. In the preface Fraser offers no theory of literature, no system of evaluation, no take on the art of poetry, and no assessment, provisional or otherwise, of Winters’s literary theory or any of the concepts that form that theory. As in the introduction, Fraser seems to be saying that the NBV simply offers poems that he admires, which is what so many critics of Winters (even those few who generally or loosely approve of him) have thought Winters was doing -- mistakenly, I believe -- with his lists of great poems and his anthology of great or important poems, Quest for Reality (hereafter QR).

As in “Unknown Flights,” John Fraser’s “Critical Preface” offers no clear or sound account of his critical principles, despite his laying out several short and direct paragraphs about those principles. Let me turn first to some of the implied criteria, those varied comments that Fraser drops intro his discussion and that appear to describe, roughly, provisionally, his critical principles.

Early in the essay, Fraser mentions that one poem is “a fully realized poem,” which implies that full realization is a central criterion for the anthology. But such a phrase is almost entirely obscure. A critic could conceivably construe just about anything written to have met such a criterion. Later, when discussing how themes are treated, Fraser mentions “selves… engaged in realizing the being of other selves.” Again, the context of this comment implies that this activity is another important distinguishing feature of the poems of the NBV. The phrase has the appearance of profundity, but when you examine it closely, you realize how vague it is. Just about any poem ever written could be taken as meeting such a criterion, even the most privately confessional poems of the 20th century. My guess is that what Fraser means by these and similar phrases is that exceptionally good poems are not too personal, however much “personalness” might be judged too much or “publicness” too little. Returning later, it seems, to this idea of a poem’s being too personal, Fraser implies that a very good or great poem should be “free-standing.” But, again, he fails to make it clear what that phrase means exactly. How freely and in what ways does a poem have to stand free to be considered good or exceptionally good? Moreover, as it stands without further elucidation, a critic could construe just about any poem to have met this principle, which makes the principle only a whisker above meaningless.

This matter of “personalness” comes up again in passing when Fraser offers a very brief yet seemingly important discussion of certain poems by Philip Larkin. In this passage, Fraser returns yet again to this matter of poetry’s needing impersonality, in some way, to be judged good or great. Fraser mentions “personal” and “depressive” as being weaknesses of a certain Larkin poem, which implies in context that very good poems avoid being personal and depressive. But such adjectives are simply too vague to be of any help. Fraser adds that another of Larkin’s poems is “heavy-footed,” which implies that “heavy-footed-ness,” whatever that is, is a sign of weakness. Yet again, however, Fraser fails to explain this word. A critic could say any poem avoids these three adjectives that have apparently kept two good poems by Philip Larkin poems out of the anthology.

Among other minor criteria mentioned or implied, Fraser mentions that good poems offer “finer states of selfhood,” which, as noble a phrase as it is, could mean anything at all -- and is thus almost wholly meaningless. Fraser also implies that a poem is very good or great when its themes or purposes are “sustained” throughout the poem. That is more than vague; it’s meaningless, since the phrase could mean anything at all and since any critic could make a case that any poem meets the standard.

Late in the “Critical Preface,” Fraser does offer an explicit list of principles, to which I now turn. In this section, Fraser mentions that exceptionally good and great poems must use coherent metaphors and solid similes -- and not use them excessively. What makes a metaphor coherent and a simile solid? Again, we can have no idea because the criteria are unacceptably vague and left unexplained, though Yvor Winters discussed proper metaphors extensively in his writings. Fraser then mentions “generalizations that are obviously untrue or simplistic.” That seems sensible enough, but on its face, it means almost nothing in theory and could mean just about anything in practice.

Finally, among various other implied or hidden evaluative criteria in his list, that most important Fraser mentions are these:

1. “psychological substance”
2. “craft”
3. “not formalistic”
4. “a degree of ‘concreteness’”
5. “relative tautness”
6. “something ‘happens’ rhetorically”

This is not an exhaustive list, but these seem to me the main criteria. I see nothing in any of these words and phrases that helps us understand the principles behind the NBV or in any way develop, add to, or enhance the critical thought of Yvor Winters. Nor do they even mean much. Each phrase or word is frustratingly nebulous.

Though he doesn’t mention vividness in his list of attributes, Fraser, both in the preface and in other writings in Voices in the Cave of Being, appears to be mostly concerned with what I call “thereness,” by which I mean descriptions of certain objects or settings or events as being so vivid that they “live on the page” (yet another phrase left unexplained). At one point, in discussing some passage of description that he considers thrilling, Fraser writes that the scene is “there,” and puts the word in italics, as though this sense of vivid, living “thereness” is a central feature of the best poetry. But he fails to explain exactly what this quality is. He sounds no less fuzzy about “thereness” than Ezra Pound once sounded about “freshness” in his famous book The ABC of Reading:

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Well, I suppose so. But what’s fresh and what isn’t? How does anyone know? Anything could be construed as fresh by someone who happens to find it fresh -- anything!

For all these reasons, I find John Fraser’s implied theory of literature and literary evaluation to be seriously wanting. But even more disappointing than the vagueness of his critical discussion is what Fraser has neglected in his “Critical Preface,” especially since it purports to be a quasi-Wintersian anthology. Fraser does not define what poetry is, nor try to explain, develop, or strengthen Yvor Winters’s definition of poetry (admittedly vague in itself) as “a statement in words about a human experience.” Fraser does not discuss any of the central concepts of Winters’s theory, despite his various comments about Winters being the greatest critic in English (see "Part I" of my essay). Fraser offers no discussion of Winters’s ideas about connotation and denotation. He does not discuss didactic or hedonistic poetry, which Winters rejected as unsound. (Judging from his emphasis on “thereness,” by the way, Fraser seems to be something of a aesthetic hedonist, though that is a matter I will have to take up later). He offers nothing on Romantic aesthetics or philosophy that builds on Winters’s ideas about Romanticism or relates the NBV to Winters’s critical thought. Most strangely, he offers not a word on the morality of poetry, which was a central concept in Winters’s criticism and in his work of evaluation and the development of the QR anthology. Despite the importance of the concept of morality to Winters’s theory, Fraser seems to have no interest in the subject, as my brief run-through of his critical principles indicates. Rather, he seems to have been mostly interested, rather simply, in “realization,” in “thereness,” in vividness, which, in my judgment, all mean little more than “well written.”

Finally, concerning the neglect of Winters, though Fraser writes several times that the NBV focuses on formal poetry, poetry written in what are nowadays commonly called “traditional poetic forms,” he has nothing to say about the meaning or importance or value of form at all. We are left wondering why he focuses on form other than that he likes poems written in traditional forms (a phrase, to repeat, I distinctly dislike). Further, Fraser has nothing to say about Yvor Winters’s theories of form, neither to approve or disapprove or to develop those ideas. And it is most puzzling that he has not a word to say about Winters’s theory of meter, the part of Winters’s work as a critic that is most often begrudgingly praised by those who know of that work, though Winters’s theories about the meaning and value of meter are more often ignored, dismissed, or reviled. (I must add that I have my doubts about this aspect of Winters’s theory, too.)

As you see, John Fraser accomplishes nothing more on theory in his “Critical Preface” than he does in his “Unknown Flights” introduction, and it is a huge disappointment to me. Fraser has done something important through the NBV, given us some new poems to read, profit from, and consider. He has given his own stamp of approval as great or exceptionally good to many of the poems of the Winters Canon. But he has done almost nothing to advance the study of Yvor Winters or to develop his ideas with the NBV’s prefatory essays. Without a coherent and full-blooded critical theory behind it, including clear and sound tenets of evaluation, the NBV amounts to a book of personal likes and dislikes.

So what does it come down to, this anthology? I think we can derive a hazy system of evaluation from Fraser’s writings. The poems of the NBV are exceptionally good or great poems (4 to 5 stars under my system, I would guess) that are written in traditional forms (mostly), are impersonal in some unspecified manner and to some unspecified degree, concern general themes to some unspecified degree, contain vivid writing of some unspecified kind, and are well written in some unspecified way. (Being “well-written” is what most of Fraser’s criteria come down to in the end).

A telling test case for the value of this set of critical principles is whether the poems of John Ashbery should or even could be included in this anthology. I do not consider Ashbery a poet -- or even a good writer. Yet it appears obvious that a critic could claim that Ashbery writes great poems (as more and more critics, unbelievably, absurdly, have been claiming lately) that are personal reflections on impersonal general themes; that are vivid in some sense (as many have claimed); and that are very well written (as has also been claimed). The only lack in Fraser’s system in Ashbery’s badly written pseudo-poetry is traditional form, though it bears remembering that Fraser includes a number of free-verse poems in the NBV, such as several by Wallace Stevens, and considers them to be formal in some sense. (Many critics claim that Ashbery’s formless drivel has some kind of formality as well.)

On the basis of this test case, I conclude that John Fraser has done little to advance the development of modern classicism with this anthology, as valuable as the NBV is for other reasons.

For I do not wish you to mistake my judgment. What John Fraser has done is valuable and important. He has given us new poems to consider, poems he appears to consider as part of the classical tradition. He has given a credible stamp of approval on the status of Yvor Winters. He has given us a variety of essays that offer lots of comparisons and contrasts to get a better feel for his vague ideas about poetry and literary evaluation. But despite all this, he has not given a full or even an outline of a classical theory of literature and literary evaluation -- and certainly no ideas that update or improve on those of Yvor Winters. The work he has done with the NBV is commendable. But much more is needed if classicism is to find many more adherents in the modern age.

John Fraser still has a chance to accomplish much more through the NBV anthology, for he is still working on his book and adding to the anthology. But it appears that he is content with the work he has done. I appreciate what he has accomplished, even deeply so, and have been studying it closely and reading it frequently. I have profited from the NBV and its associated essays a great deal. I have even truly enjoyed most of Fraser’s writings. But I see a great need for the next greats not only to be proposed but to be properly defended for Yvor Winters’s classical literary ideas to be properly developed and strengthened. This John Fraser has yet to do or even try to do.

If the deeper study and refinement of Yvor Winters’s ideas is going to occur any time soon, it must begin with what John Fraser has done, given us new poems that a critic supportive of Winters’s classicism considers great or very good. But someone must go on to show us why and how we know they are great by consistent, clear, and detailed argument.

A Consideration of the Literary Theory Behind "The New Book of Verse," Part I

I have made the assertion several times over the years I have been writing this blog that John Fraser has done some of the most important work advancing the study of Yvor Winters in the past 20 years. Most notably, Fraser has published on line an anthology of very good and possibly great poetry that began from an effort in the 1970s to publish together as many of the poems Yvor Winters apparently judged to be either great or very good in one collection. The anthology would include the poems Winters mentioned as, roughly speaking, good but left out of his controversial 1968 anthology, Quest for Reality (hereafter QR), which, in my judgment, Winters intended, in part, as a collection of the very best poems in the English language.

Fraser’s anthology became the New Book of Verse (hereafter NBV). It is on line and is linked in the right-hand column of this blog. In the following years, the NBV and its supporting essays have become part of a larger and distinctly valuable work on traditional-form poetry (how I dislike having to write such phrases), entitled Voices in the Cave of Being. In those same years, Fraser decided to add poems to the NBV, presumably poems that he judges to be as great or as remarkably good as the poems Yvor Winters had chosen for QR or mentioned in his essays as being extraordinarily good.

I use the NBV frequently and have wanted to assess its purposes and Fraser’s case for his selections to see whether they can advance the study of Yvor Winters’s classicist theory of literature or even play a major role in the development of Yvor Winters’s ideas beyond the point Winters left them. Sad to say, however, Fraser’s introductory and explanatory writings about the NBV make no detailed, systematic, or strong case that the NBV contains anything other than the poetry Fraser happens to admire. This short essay is my effort to understand and evaluate those writings.

There are two main pieces to consider, the introduction to the NBV entitled “Unknown Flights” and the “Critical Preface.” Before assessing these essays, let me state again and clearly that John Fraser’s extensive work in Voices in the Cave of Being is one of the most significant and valuable developments in the study of Winters and his critical theory since his death. Fraser once called Winters “the most important American man of letters since Henry James,” as Fraser quotes himself in his introduction to the NBV. On top of that, Fraser dares to recount his praise for Winters’s most reviled book, Forms of Discovery (1967), which Fraser once wrote was the work of a “great mind.” Indeed, building out and up from Forms and its companion QR anthology, Fraser writes that he set out with the NBV to make a “fat” anthology of the poems Winters thought excellent, especially good, or vital to the future of literature and modern classicism.

These comments lead us to believe that Fraser intended the NBV as a development of Winters’s critical ideas and practices, as an attempt to bring greater maturity, precision, and depth to Winters’s classicism. For these reasons, I believe we need to look closely at the introduction (dated November 2004) and the “Critical Preface” (dated February 2008) to try to comprehend what Fraser’s purposes for the NBV are, as well as what his theories of literature and specifically of the evaluation of poetry are.

I will consider the introduction “Unknown Flights” first, which was posted on Fraser’s web site some years before the “Critical Preface.”

* UNKNOWN FLIGHTS *

This introduction explains that Fraser was influenced by Yvor Winters through the late Don Stanford, the modern classicist who was editor of the Southern Review, Second Series, till 1982. (I have mentioned or discussed Stanford numerous times on this blog.) In addition describing how the anthology came into being, Fraser gives us a few hints about its varied purposes. However, I must be candid in saying that the critical principles that inform the NBV are left extremely vague in the introduction. The literary theory behind what Fraser has chosen for the anthology and what he has left out, if he has any such theory, is left a mystery, at least in this piece. I was going to write that the introduction leaves Fraser’s theory “a little fuzzy,” but he is much more vague than that. His critical tenets are almost entirely lost in mists.

A central problem for the introduction is that, despite his strongly implied approval for Winters and his critical ideas and practices, Fraser doesn’t state openly or precisely why he wanted to publish this anthology, on line or otherwise. He does quote his own comment that Winters had a “great mind” and was a highly important man of letters, which imply that Winters’s selection of very good and great poems (published not only in the 1968 QR anthology but in the various lists of great poems he made throughout his career) is to some degree consonant with Fraser’s own views. Near the end of the introduction, Fraser even writes that Winters “was the greatest critic of poetry in the language”. Those are words of high praise -- perhaps the highest praise possible (assuming that Fraser meant “is” the greatest and has not changed his mind or found another critic who has superseded Winters).

Nonetheless, from this introduction, we get no sense of why Fraser thinks Winters is the greatest critic in English, nor what his case for his claim is, nor how his claim accords with his anthology or accounts for his additions and subtractions. Further, Fraser writes that the overview of poetry discussed in Winters’s final book, Forms of Discovery, which most critics disdain (when giving it any attention at all), was an “exhilarating experience.” But Fraser does not explain or elaborate upon why it was exhilarating. We can suppose he is hoping that his readers will find the NBV anthology equally exhilarating, but why should they? Fraser fails to explain or elaborate upon these opinions or even seek to justify them in any sound or significant way in “Unknown Flights.”

Still, the introduction does make a number of offhand, sketchy comments that seem intended to explain and substantiate his opinions of Yvor Winters’s critical ideas and practices and to help us make sense of the NBV anthology. Let’s take a look at the main comments. Fraser writes that the poems he has chosen for the NBV are “well-made and clearly individuated.” These two phrases appear to stand as criteria of the finest poetry. But, as you surely see, the phrases are exceedingly vague and provide almost no help in understanding a classical or Wintersian critical theory that might underlie this anthology. Later Fraser writes that his additions from the 20th century are “strong poems.” This seems to be a criterion, too. Obviously, though, the limp adjective “strong” is of no help whatsoever. Just about anything can be -- and just about anything has been -- called a “strong” poem. With a tone of approval, Fraser once mentions that the work of another scholar has helped to keep “the Wintersian tradition of verse alive.” This comment implies that keeping that tradition alive is part of Fraser’s purpose in compiling this anthology. But Fraser doesn’t define the tradition in this piece, which makes the comment of very little help in understanding the theory of critical evaluation that informs the NBV.

Yet along his way, Fraser keeps dropping in more of these comments, which appear to tell us what makes the poems of NBV particularly admirable. He writes that some of the poems provide “richness of experience” and a bit later “magnificence.” In passing, Fraser also mentions that the poems exhibit “splendor of language,” “intelligence,” and “craftsmanship.” But Fraser explains none of these words and phrases, even though they are so nebulous as to be nearly meaningless.

Finally, in section XXIV of the “Unknown Flights” introduction, Fraser brings out a list of attributes of the poems, an inventory which promises to give us some sound insight into his critical principles and might build in some significant way upon the literary theory of Yvor Winters. As he begins his list, Fraser gives us the sense that in it we will find, at the least, an outline of his critical theory. He implies that the listed attributes justify the selection of the poems and stand as the evaluative criteria behind their selection.

So what is in this list? Fraser writes that the poems of the NBV avoid “versified autobiography or philosophy or social commentary.” They are dedicated to poetry as “expressive form.” They are different from the poems found in best-selling anthologies. They are “some of the best poetry,” written in “living language.” Fraser lists a few more attributes in much the same vein, but I consider these to be the main items. They are enough to see that every one of Fraser’s criteria is far too imprecise to help us understand Fraser’s views or see how they might improve on, refine, deepen, or advance Yvor Winters’s classical ideas -- or help us find the best poems or aid us in making discoveries of good or great poems on our own.

Near the end of the introduction, Fraser implies that the NBV contains some of the exceptionally good and great poems of the English language, but this comment only leaves us wondering how Fraser makes the distinction between the two, what those other good poems are that have been left out, and, further, which poems in the NBV are good and which great. But no deeper explanation of “good” and “great” -- nor any critical theory at all, for that matter -- is forthcoming in “Unknown Flights.”

When I first read, it, the introduction to the NBV left me more than a little deflated. But it was not to be the end of the story. I was highly pleased when I saw that just last year John Fraser had published an additional “Critical Preface” to the NBV. I hoped that that newer piece would give us significantly deeper insight into what Fraser is trying to accomplish through the anthology. To that essay I will turn in the second and last part of this essay.

Let me add as well that rather than focusing on what is missing from these two essays, I will consider more fully what John Fraser has achieved with the NBV and its attendant materials at the end of Part II.

An Obscure George Herbert Poem Well-Known to Wintersians

Robert Pinsky continues to put out some valuable short articles on poetry at Slate. Just a couple weeks back, he offered a very brief overview of the great poem “Church Monuments” by George Herbert, the 17th century Anglican priest who wrote a lot of top-notch classical poetry. Pinsky, as you might recall, was once a student of Yvor Winters’s at Stanford University in the 1960s. Though some have labeled him a Wintersian, of some sort, I have opined on this blog that he can hardly be so construed. Still, Pinsky has written well about poetry written in traditional form down the years, and even recently, and some of the poems he has focused on are works that Yvor Winters thought great or highly important.

I know I’ve been hard on Pinsky at times, especially for his poetry, which has descended into trivialities and downright bad writing in recent years, but I do appreciate Pinsky’s efforts to focus attention on some of the poems and issues that Winters thought crucial to the future of literary culture. Pinsky’s article on Herbert’s poem can be found at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2226655/

If you wish to dig deeper into this one poem, I also recommend John Fraser’s wide-ranging and sometimes very personal discussion of it in his on-line book Voices in the Cave of Being (which contains the anthology I have often touted on this blog as a highly significant, if not the single most important, development in the study of Yvor Winters in the past 20 years, the New Book of Verse). Fraser’s essay on Herbert’s poem can be found at:

http://www.jottings.ca/john/voices/church_mon.html

Why all this emphasis on one 24-line poem? Clearly, Pinsky and Fraser deeply admire Herbert’s stellar achievement in this one poem, which has been overlooked or forgotten almost throughout the entire course of English literary history (most books and web sites offering selections of Herbert’s poetry do not include this poem). Having introduced both Pinsky and Fraser to the poem, as they both mention, Yvor Winters considered “Church Monuments” to be one of the half dozen greatest poems ever written in the language, as he made clear in several of those short lists of the greatest great poems that he put out from time to time in the midst of his essays. It was the only poem of Herbert’s that Winters considered to have achieved greatness. The poem is simple to find on the web, so I won’t reprint it here. In fact, it is reprinted at both sites I have linked to in this post.

My judgment on “Church Monuments”? I agree with Winters. It’s surely one of the greatest of the great poems, though it is still infrequently anthologized or discussed or paid attention to in literary culture. Because it is so great and because Yvor Winters “discovered” it are two chief reasons why I believe he is to be largely trusted and looked to as one of the greatest literary critics in the English language. This poem was one of the main reasons I became a Wintersian.

By the way, another modern classicist poet, David Middleton, who once studied with Donald Stanford at LSU, wrote in the 1980s that Winters failed to see the excellence of Herbert’s “Love (III),” which Middleton considered a great poem on a par with or perhaps greater than “Church Monuments.” Of note, John Fraser has mentioned not “Love (III)” but “Affliction” as Herbert’s other great poem. Winters, it is evident, did not judge either of these poems to have achieved anything near the canonical standard that “Church Monuments” and the other greatest great poems of English set. What do you think? For now I will forbear to reveal my own judgments concerning these poems. Here’s Middleton’s choice:

LOVE (III)

by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
. Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
. From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
. If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here";
. Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
. I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
. "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them; let my shame
. Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
. "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
. So I did sit and eat.

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.