Shhhh! Say As Little As You Can About Winters

At "Slate," Robert Pinsky keeps publicizing the Winters Canon, this time by offering a brief look at and an audio reading of Ben Jonson's poem "Ode to Himself":

http://www.slate.com/id/2237012/

It's a wonderful thing to see, of course. In the current convention, naturally, Pinsky has to take Jonson's poem down many notches before he can praise it. Deflating revisionism is all the rage in our times. If you can't haul some work or person down a good long way, what critical good are you? In this case, Pinsky makes "Ode to Himself" sound like a simple, childish compaint, a kvetch, as he says, that rises, seemingly accidently, to profundity. He makes it sound as though Jonson might have described how he wrote the poem something like this: "I was just bellyaching like mad on paper the other day, as I usually do, and all of a sudden I noticed that I had all written a lot of pretty good stuff, you know that high and mighty writing that makes it sound like you're a deep thinker. So I put it in my book. Why not?" It's an interesting take on the poem, worth considering, at the least.

Whatever his critical position and opinions, Pinsky is the only nationally known writer or poet with connections to Yvor Winters (Pinsky was his student at Stanford University in the 1960s) who is doing anything to revive interest in Winters's work. Though what the nationally known give, the nationally known can easily take away just as quickly. For Pinsky keeps failing to mention Winters, as in this case, or downplaying Winters's ideas when he discusses the classical poems that Winters pretty much rediscovered for our era. It doesn't make me particularly angry, just sad that Pinksy doesn't make it clear, concerning Jonson's "Ode," that it was Yvor Winters who first championed this poem as one of the greatest in the language.

But this is not unlike Pinsky's reticence about Winters on other occasions, such as in his discussion of Herbert's "Church Monuments" on the same site some months back. In that piece Pinsky did mention Winters, at the least, but I found the mention a little odd. Pinsky left out that he was Winters's student and that Winters taught that poem for decades and, further, that Winters considered it one of the greatest ever written. This downplays Winters's ideas to the point, perhaps, of silencing him. I wonder why. It might be that it's entirely innocent. It could very well be that Pinsky is embarrassed by his association with Winters. I can't say. But it looks suspicious.

Finally, Pinsky's audio readings of the "Ode" and Herbert's poem are disappointingly weak. See what you think. Is "Slate" or Pinsky at fault for this very bland reading? I can't say. But they won't do much to help great poetry gain more attention.

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.

A Single Poem Reaches the General Culture

Rarely has a single poem garnered so much attention in the general intellectual culture. The poem is entitled “Poem of Disconnected Parts,” which is the work of Robert Pinsky (pictured), whose recent widely-reviewed collection is entitled Gulf Music. Pinsky was a student of Yvor Winters’s in the 1960s, in the last years of Winters’s life, when he was getting, it has seemed, even more crotchety than he had been for most of his life. I have commented a couple times on Pinsky on this blog. Some consider him a Wintersian, a follower of Yvor Winters in some sense, though I do not. He certainly doesn’t write anything even close to what I would consider classical poetry.

In major publications on the web, you can find at least a dozen reviews or essays on this poem and the collection that it appears in. Google or another search engine will help you find them. Just this week, the New York Times Book Review came out with its review of Gulf Music and devoted considerable space (two long paragraphs, which is a massive amount for one poem in that paper) to “Poem of Disconnected Parts.” You can find the poem in several locations on the web as well, though I intend to reprint it when I consider it.

That a poem by a one-time student of Winters has generated so much comment is an important event. Hence, I feel that I must offer a consideration of the poem, which I will have ready shortly. You can probably guess, if you have spent any time reading this blog and have read the poem, that I think this poem is very far from a good poem, though it isn’t worthless junk, certainly. Pinsky does appear to have made a serious effort at understanding and trying to inspire us to do something about the injustice of wrongful imprisonment by the U.S. government. The title of the poem is clearly -- and rather unfortunately -- ironic, in that all the poem’s disheveled parts are indeed connected, though in a very loose way. In the meantime, you can find my previous brief comments on Pinsky through the search box at the top of this front page and find the poem by searching through Google.

It’s worth noting that the discussion of Pinsky’s poem has provided the occasion for one of the funniest comments on Yvor Winters I recall in recent decades. Poet and critic William Logan (whom I have also mentioned on this blog) reviewed Gulf Music in the New Criterion recently. He received a letter objecting to his review, and his reply to the letter has been published in the most recent New Criterion. In that reply, Logan goaded the letter-writer with the claim that he would rather watch Yvor Winters break-dance than Robert Pinsky try to use playful nonsense words. Just that one flash of Yvor Winters -- a jowly, thickset, gray-suited, pipe-puffing, furrow-browed professor -- break-dancing was thoroughly amusing.

I probably won’t go into detail on William Logan’s take on Gulf Music, though I do want to take a moment to comment on one general aspect of criticism that I find irritating and unwarranted. Logan complains of Pinsky’s earnest tone. Critics often complain similarly about some general feel of an artist’s work that doesn’t appeal to them. They often imply, as Logan does, that no poem should be written in such a tone. Such a tone, they imply, SHOULDN’T appeal to anyone. But I think there is room enough in the vast world of arts and letters for earnest writing (even for preaching and didacticism, God forbid), as much as for experimental play and downright childishness, among many other styles and tones. Though I favor classicism, though I believe classicism to yield our finest artworks, I try to stay away from thinking that everyone must write in a single way or single set of ways. If Robert Pinsky wishes to write with a politically earnest tone rather than in an engagingly playful manner, he is welcome to do as he thinks best. We already have masses of poets who are playful aplenty. Some earnestness can be good, no? Maybe a lot of earnestness[1]. Now, let me be clear, I’m not LIKELY to think the playful great art or fine writing, the best that can be done -- but playful has its place. Critics need to back off on extraneous points.

Footnotes:

1. This raises the issue of expectations, what we look for when we take a poem in hand. In general, readers no longer look to poetry for political comment. We tend to think overt political comment or advice or opinion is inappropriate to poetry. Further, modern critical theory across the arts and letters disapproves, generally, of what is called “preaching,” overt counsel, recommendation, or exhortation. It is even generally thought inartistic, bad form, to “preach” in ANY way. This rather large theoretical issue needs some close study, for Winters spoke on occasion about the matter in his essays.