Evaluating the Winters Canon: Conclusions on Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry

We have finished considering each of the six poems by Thomas Wyatt that Yvor Winters chose for Quest for Reality (which reprints the poems in chronological order). Before moving on to the next poem in the “Winters Canon,” it’s a good time to ask whether we can reach any conclusions about Wyatt’s work? More broadly, can we reach any early conclusions about this study of the Winters Canon?

First, it is striking how little very little poetry or criticism the artworks of Thomas Wyatt appears to have inspired among those with interests in Yvor Winters. None of the poetry from the past few decades that I know works with or out from the methods Wyatt employed. Not even Winters seems to have built out from Wyatt’s favored techniques. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, only J.V. Cunningham in the modern age has tried to use a plainly and overtly logical manner in modern poetry, though Cunningham’s methods betray little influence from Wyatt. It might be time for renewed efforts to study, learn from, and re-employ the techniques of Thomas Wyatt.

Second, Wintersian critics, if there truly are any, have not concerned themselves with Wyatt at all since Yvor Winters championed his work during his career. I wonder why this is. There is much to discuss, as I believe I showed in some of my personal reflections on the six Wyatt poems that Winters chose for the his canon. And there is much more in Wyatt’s classical body of work worth careful study. It appears, however, that Wyatt has not “endured” even among those tempted to agree with Winters that he wrote great poetry. Wyatt has been left to scholars. He doesn’t seem to have any influence or significance any longer. Indeed, his work doesn’t seem to have had influence for a long, long time. This is far from true of some other lyric poets from his era, generally speaking. Shakespeare is one obvious example, Donne the other. There is no reason why Thomas Wyatt’s poetry could not have drawn the same level of attention and generate the same personal interest that Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence draws. My guess is that Wyatt simply hasn’t inspired enough poets, critics, general readers, or even scholars in such a way as to generate some kind of momentum that would bring him a wider readership. Why is that so? That’s a matter for reflection and discussion.

The logical method, of course, is very, very little used in our times. Yet if you are drawn to and see the great value in poetry that is written in an overtly logical manner, J.V. Cunningham’s essay “Logic and Lyric” can help you study some of the possibilities of that kind of poetry. The essay can be found in Cunningham’s truly great critical collection Tradition and Poetic Structure: Essays in Literary History and Criticism. After briefly and generally laying out Romantic ideas about literary structure, which routed logical poetry from the field as much as 200 years ago, Cunningham studies a fine poem that exhibits such a structure:

But may the chain of propositions and reasonings [in a poem] be not merely plausible and specious but even sufficiently just and exact? May the poem be not merely subject to logical analysis but logical in form? May, to return to our point, the subject and structure of a poem be conceived and expressed syllogistically? Anyone at all acquainted with modern criticism and the poems that are currently in fashion will think in this connection of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” The apparent structure of that poem is an argumentative syllogism, explicitly stated. "Had we but world enough and time," the poet says, “This coyness, lady, were no crime....”

Later, at the conclusion of the essay, Cunningham suggests that the logical method might be much more valuable than recognized in our times. Consider these comments on Thomas Nashe’s “Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss” from Summer’s Last Will and Testament:

The experience of [Nashe’s] poem is the experience of syllogistic thinking with its consequences for feeling, attitude, and action. It is a mode of experience that the Renaissance practiced and cherished, and expressed with power, dignity, and precision. It is a poetical experience and a logical one, and it is both at once.

Though Cunningham doesn’t quite say so in this essay, he implies quite strongly, quite obviously, that the time was ripe (30 years ago) for some poets to adopt overtly logical methods once again, even to the point of poetic syllogisms.

On the broader question, I have received only one comment about any of Wyatt’s poems, and that was only a comment saying that someone would comment elsewhere on one Wyatt’s poems. I do not know how many people are reading this blog. It is probably not many. I know very little about how anyone perceives this blog. I do not have any answer why Wyatt has generated no comment, other than that less than a handful of people are reading these posts.

And so we move on in the Winters Canon from Thomas Wyatt to one poem by Thomas Lord Vaux, Winters’s next selection in Quest. I will get to that soon.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 6

“It Was My Choice”
By Thomas Wyatt

It was my choice, it was no chance
That brought my heart in others' hold,
Whereby it hath had sufferance
Longer, perdie, than Reason would;
Since I it bound where it was free,
Methinks, iwis, of right it should
Accepted be.

Accepted be without refuse,
Unless that Fortune have the power
All right of love for to abuse;
For, as they say, one happy hour
May more prevail than right or might;
If fortune then list for to lour,
What vaileth right?

What vaileth right if this be true?
Then trust to chance and go by guess;
Then who so loveth may well go sue
Uncertain Hope for his redress.
Yet some would say assuredly
Thou mayst appeal for thy release
to fantasy.

To fantasy pertains to choose:
All this I know, for fantasy
First unto love did me induce;
But yet I know as steadfastly
That if love have no faster knot,
So nice a choice slips suddenly:
It lasteth not.

It lasteth not that stands by change.
Fancy doth change; fortune is frail;
Both these to please the way is strange.
Therefore me thinks best to prevail:
There is no way that is so just
As truth to lead, through t'other fail,
And thereto trust.

NOTES:

in other's hold = under the rule of another

sufferance = suffering

perdie = par Dieu (by God)

than reason would = than is reasonable

I wis (or iwis) = surely

For as they say etc. - The meaning of these three lines seems to be "For, as it is said, an hour of good fortune is worth more than all the rights and obligations in the world. Hence when fortune is bad (lours) one's rights count for nothing."

go by guess = play it by ear

So nice a choice = so delicate and whimsical a choice (of lover), i.e. one that
is based only on fantasy

the way is strange = the means (of satisfying both fortune and fancy) is irrational and fickle

As truth to lead = as to lead by truth

thereto = in addition

WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 5 stars, or GREAT

“It was my choice” is seldom found in anthologies and can be hard to find. Winters drew more attention to this poem than any critic or scholar ever has, that I am aware of. He appears to have judged it a great poem, one of the finest ever composed in the English language, though his views are by no means certain. It is one of those judgments that when Winters was alive seemed and still seems a little perverse. Every other expert or scholar has missed it. How could that have been or still be so? If it is indeed great, critics and scholars would not have missed it to that degree, would they? (These questions come up time and again, like bells tolling, in any consideration of Winters’s career.) Yet it is one of those poems that is so expertly written that it can markedly increase your confidence in Yvor Winters’s judgment. For it was he who found it and properly discerned its excellence. Rather than thinking him perverse, you might, like me, think him brilliant for championing this poem. If his system yields judgments like this, your reasoning might go -- as mine has gone -- he must have known something other critics do not, had skills that others do not possess.

Winters discussed this poem a couple times in his writings. But he did not discuss it early, not even in the early essay “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” which was published in Poetry in 1939. This became his single most influential essay, I and many others believe. Judging from all his writings, I believe that he considered this a great poem, one of the summit works in English poetic literature. Yet he never clearly stated his specific reasons. His brief discussion of the poem came late in his career, in his extensive revision and expansion of the “16th Century Lyric” essay, which was published 28 years later as the first chapter in his final book, Forms of Discovery, and entitled “Aspects of Poetry in the English Renaissance.” My informed guess is that Winters considered this poem to be a supreme example of a rational statement under precise emotional control, which was the classical ideal that he strove to foster in his own work and in literary culture in general. The poem certainly exhibits a rational structure. It moves from proposition to proposition, in an obviously logical and rhetorical manner. Winters is clear that he thought the final stanza raised the poem to a level of profundity and greatness.

In the “Aspects” essays, he pointed to a couple lines that he considered especially important and well composed. The first line was one:

It was my choice, it was no chance....

This line struck him, it appears, as a powerful example of the aphoristic power of poetry, the summary statement charged with deep, general meaning. The other line is the second line of the third stanza:

Then trust to chance and go by guess;...

Winters apparently believed that this line carries an intellectual profundity and a sharp, condensed moral import of the kind that Winters valued very highly. As a meditation on the morality of making a decision of commitment in courtship (putting aside the specific circumstances found in the poem), the poem in its movement to these lines, and toward the powerful final stanza, becomes a weighty and insightful meditation on morality and its relations to truth, chance, and desire.

Some scholars have thought of “It was my choice” as probably written as a song for lute accompaniment. One can hardly imagine this densely argued, metrically complex poem working well as a song. It is often seen as a companion piece to the more familiar song “Blame not my lute,” which we have considered earlier in this series. It plays on many of the conventional courtly themes of early Renaissance poetry in England, themes that were prevalent across European high culture. The persona, a young lover wooing a mistress who, it seems, has first accepted and then rejected him, faces the continuing rejection of his love. He tries to persuade her to favor his suit with a logical argument and raises his reflections, as Winters believed and as seems quite evident, to a much higher plane of moral thought.

Finally, I must take note that John Fraser chose not to include this poem in his quasi-Wintersian New Book of Verse, which I have been discussing off and on. Fraser offers no explanation for his decision. I think the exclusion a mistake, however we might interpret the purpose of that book -- which I am still not sure of. (No one is pressing me for an examination of Fraser’s Preface, so I will let that broad, tangled subject wait for later study.)

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 4 stars, or SUPERB

There are not many poems like this in all English literature -- in any literature, in fact. I have run across few poems that resemble it, a love poem that considers love and courtship it as a matter of logical moral inquiry. Perhaps only Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress” in English approximates the structure, though Marvel’s poem is much more playful. (I would be glad to be reminded of other similar poems from my readers.) We have come so far in modern literature from poetry that is written in any manner like this that it is almost impossible to believe that poetry like this could be written again. Think of even the finest work of the Wintersian classicists. Very little of the poetry they have written has this linear style or takes this kind of baldly logical approach to human experience. Only the work of J.V. Cunningham seems to be truly comparable. (Yet, I hasten to note, there have been several interesting overtly logical poems similar in manner that have been written in response to Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress,” such as Archibald MacLeish’s “To You, Andrew Marvel.” Such poems have shown that some modern poets can think like a classicist, even with heavy modern irony, when they have a mind to.)

My judgment is that the poem is one of the greats of our language, but has several small, peculiar faults that damage it. Clearly, the premise that leads the poet into his examination of reason and truth is shaky -- that anyone is obliged to return love and intimate allegiance to another just because the other desires the same of her or him. Winters mentions this fault, but I believe it to be more serious than he does, though not ruinous. Also, the poem takes its persona, the speaker, to be of stronger character than is creditable. That the speaker of this poem is in some sense above fantasy or chance shows Wyatt to be distinctly unaware of his own predilections and limitations as a man. These two faults weaken the poem, though I still consider it very fine work, as my rating is intended to show. But I have little difficulty saying that it is a beautiful exploration of a broad human experience, expertly rendered and profoundly thought. It calls us to a life of intellectual meditation, a posture of great value to life. The poem exhibits supreme craft -- certainly it is one of the most skilled poems in the history of English.

Nonetheless, the profound themes are treated very generally. We gain little from it that could help us live day to day other than to inspire us to set aside fancy and fortune as motives for our actions and seek truth alone. I have known the poem for a very long time and consider it worth the study of a lifetime.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

As an exhortation to leading one’s life by reason and shunning fantasy and fancy, the poem is a profound and moving statement. But it can only go so far to help us fathom and properly address the specific issues and decisions we face in our personal lives. For we sense, nowadays, that we are not quite free to follow reason and truth as faithfully as we might hope -- and even not quite fully able to discern where truth lies or what reason might be urging us to follow. Our powers of choice are not wholly free, most of us accept nowadays. We are not fully in control of our choices. Those are commonplaces in our postmodern times, which seem vastly truer than they ever could have seemed to Thomas Wyatt. Chance is one powerful external force in our lives. But there are other external AND internal forces as well that Wyatt was unaware of or did not credit: genetics, environment, past experiences, and more. It is good to be called to commit oneself to living according to reason, to the truth, but we always face much work in discovering where reason is properly leading us, choice to choice and day to day.

Concerning the issues of choice and chance, I have enjoyed studying “The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website,” a strong and challenging collection of essays edited by the philosopher Ted Honderich. The site has many writings on the philosophical question of freedom and determinism, and the complex modern theories of compatibilism and incompatibilism, and the implications of various views on these abstruse matters:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm

Judging generally from the writings on Honderich’s fascinating site and elsewhere, I believe that determinism has become widely accepted among philosophers, and that near-total determinism has become popularly believed among the generally educated. (A sizable number of thinkers, judging from my reading, still hold out a small portion of life from complete submission to external and internal forces that are beyond a person’s direct control.) What does this mean to Wyatt’s exhortation? The question of how free we might be can haunt us, much more than it did the writers and thinkers of the English Renaissance -- though some of them struggled with it as well in other ways. For a very recent example of how it troubles and fascinates us, consider the American film that plays with an idea of fate and chance and choice, No Country for Old Men, directed by the Coen brothers (winner of the Academy Award last night). I do not consider this a good film, but it is pertinent to my discussion here in that a killer twice flips a coin to see whether someone will live or die.

Even more bothersome on these matters, the opening line of the poem, “It was my choice, it was no chance,” seems slightly facile. For even in Wyatt’s age it was recognized that courtship, sexual desire (passion), and love were somehow outside the complete control of a person experiencing them. It seems mildly foolish for Wyatt or his persona to claim that, unconstrained by any internal or external forces, he chose freely to desire and court the fictional woman of the poem. But we know that we do not fully or even mostly control our desires in many areas of life, though perhaps in some cases we do seek to and sometimes gain a measure of control over them. This is a fascinating subject worth pondering through this poem.

Further, Wyatt claims that “Fancy doth change; fortune is frail....” His case is that fancy and fortune are uncertain and, therefore, untrustworthy. They don’t last. They wander and waver. They’re downright fickle. So, Wyatt concludes, trust to truth, to reason. Sounds good. But reason and truth waver as well, do they not? Deciding how truth shall lead is often no less difficult and uncertain than acting upon fancies or trusting to the turns of fortune’s wheel. Reason can be fickle, too. My views on many momentous issues have changed dramatically over my lifetime. I was once a “born-again” Christian but left that faith, coming to believe it as doctrinally false (though mythically compelling in many ways). If we should distrust fancy and fortune because they do not endure and waver, then what better reason do we have to trust to “truth,” that star we believe to be fixed but that wanders in our sight and often seems to guide lonely barks far out on the sea so very differently? This issue, in my judgment, is one of the crucial challenges facing any classical conception of life and art.

To conclude, this poem has considerable emotional power, in the very expression of its moral concepts. This kind of writing was what Winters was talking about when he wrote of the power of meter and diction to deliver and adjust the emotion. It is difficult to describe the overall effect, as Winters himself said. I will surely return in time to try to define it more rigorously. Of course, all views on these matters are welcome.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 5

I have been remiss in getting to the next poem in the Winters Canon, but here it is:

“Varium et Mutabile”
by Thomas Wyatt

Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon that was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
So cruel intent,
So hasty heat and so soon spent,
From love to hate, and thence for to relent?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
To spy it in an eye
That turns as oft as chance on die,
The truth whereof can any try?
Is it possible?

It is possible
For to turn so oft
To bring that lowest that was most aloft,
And to fall highest, yet to light soft
It is possible.

All is possible,
Who so list believe;
Trust therefore first, and after preve,
As men wed ladies by license and leave,
All is possible.

NOTES:
3] “rate”: quality, pace
14] “as weather and wind:: proverbial
18] “die”: dice, with quibble on the verb "die"
24] “to fall highest”: being highest, in falling.
26-30] The punctuation and segmentation are editorial. Different interpretations may be obtained by pointing these lines differently. E.g., one might read
All is possible.
[For] Whoso list believe
Trust therefore first and after preve,
As men [who] wed ladies by licence and leave,
All is possible.
27] “Whoso list”: whoever please to.
28] “preve”: prove, find out if true.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, or SUPERB

Winters discussed this poem very little during his career. It is possible only to guess at his reasons for including it in Quest for Reality. Is it one of our greatest poems, or is it a particularly salient example of the rational, controlled style that he venerated and wished to foster in modern times? I cannot say for certain. No Wintersian has discussed the poem, at least that I am aware of[1]. John Fraser does include the poem in his New Book of Verse without explanation.

Despite Winters's lack of comment, I think we can say that the poem appears to be a superior example of the classical rational structure that Winters highly approved in poetry. Let’s look at the progression of thought in this poem. It starts in stanza 1 with a general idea about differences of opinion. Stanza 2 moves to the passions of debate, which is a rational step in the development of the theme as we know it so far. In stanza 3 the poem turns to the waywardness of discussion and belief, an aspect of the theme which follows clearly and strongly from the discussion of the passions. Then the poem studies one aspect of human waywardness in stanza 4. This sharpens the central theme by illustration. In stanza 5 comes the first change in the lines repeated. Here the poet gives a general answer to the question he has posed in the opening stanzas: yes, human intellectual and moral waywardness is bound to happen. The poem then concludes with its “moral” in stanza 6: the poet gives sound, welcome advice that we should prove what we first believe.

The rational structure is lucid and sound. Though the poet could have explored his broad, abstract theme much more deeply, the sharp, condensed manner in which he covers the theme, rationally moving from idea to insight -- and concluding with a sharp and moving close -- is ideal, in Winters’s classical view.

Despite the taut form and the controlled, nonfigurative language, the poem expresses the emotions proper to the statement it makes through its tightly controlled diction and metrical movement. We feel the poet’s frustration, feeling even a hint of his longing to live according to the truth rightly and properly.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 3 Stars, or SOLID WORK

I mostly agree with Winters, as I suppose his position to be, that this is a striking examination of the mutability of human belief and action. It is a sound, moving warning that people can change their minds, sometimes greatly and often without rational soundness -- and sometimes very rapidly. The diction is strong, the metrical control superb. It is moving in the way of classical poetic statements. The thoughtful emotion does not burst outside the bounds of rational understanding.

However, I think the poem too general and abstract. It does not delve deeply enough into its theme, which is a common weakness of poems from the English Renaissance, as Winters pointed out several times in his essays on the period.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

The poem feels a little dull, far too abstract, until one fully concentrates on each word and line. Its moral import has struck me when I have attended closely to the meaning and the rational movement of the verse. The emotions are almost mute, but they gather great power because they are under such strict control. The emotions are expressed through Wyatt’s word choices and the metrical variations of the iambic lines. This style surely was a model for Winters of classical rationality, the proper control of the emotions, which he and all classicists prize. The lines in stanza 4 about beliefs turning as often as a die, as oft shown in the eye, gather considerable power after several readings. As Wyatt teaches, I acknowledge that I like all people wander in my endeavors to believe and live according to truth. Wyatt’s poem is an expression of the waywardness of intellectual and moral commitment.

“Varium et Mutabile” reminds me in style and thematic treatment of a number of poems that Winters judged as great. For example, the poem has echoes with “Church Monuments” by George Herbert (I agree with Winters strongly that Herbert’s is one of our greatest poems). In that poem Herbert similarly reaches a rational conclusion about preparing to face the circumstances of life that the poet has perceived -- in the case of Herbert’s poem, knowledge about one’s own death. To me, the Wyatt poem also feels similar in theme to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s two poems on human folly chosen for Winters’s anthology Quest for Reality, “Veteran Sirens” and “The Wandering Jew.” Both of these poems concern aspects of human folly, in particular our determined adherence to foolish ideas. Wyatt is exploring a different aspect of human intellectual waywardness, but I see important similarities in theme and treatment.

NOTES:

[1] I do not have the time to check thoroughly on whether anyone in the Stanford School has written about each of the poems published in Quest for Reality, as I hope you have understood. I do my best to examine the main sources on such matters, such as Grosvenor Powell’s Bibliography of Yvor Winters (which covers essays written to 1982), and to recall from memory. I hope people will send me additional information about Wintersians or classicists I might have missed who have written about the poems I am considering in this series.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 4

The Lute Obeys
(Note: Yvor Winters modernized the spelling.)

Blame not my lute! for he must sound
Of these and that as liketh me;
For lack of wit the lute is bound
To give such tunes as pleaseth me
Though my songs be somewhat strange,
And speaks such words as touch thy change,
Blame not my lute!

My lute, alas! doth not offend,
Though that perforce he must agree
To sound such tunes as I intend
To sing to them that heareth me;
Then though my songs be somewhat plain,
And toucheth some that use to feign,
Blame not my lute!

My lute and strings may not deny,
But as I strike they must obey;
Break not them then so wrongfully,
But wreak thyself some wiser way;
And though the songs which I indite
Do quit thy change with rightful spite,
Blame not my lute!

Spite asketh spite, and changing change,
And falsed faith must needs be known;
The fault so great, the case so strange,
Of right it must abroad be blown
Then since that by thine own desert
My songs do tell how true thou art,
Blame not my lute!

Blame but thy self that hast misdone
And well deserved to have blame;
Change thou thy way, so evil begone,
And then my lute shall sound that same;
But if till then my fingers play
By thy desert their wonted way,
Blame not my lute!

Farewell, unknown! for though thou break
My strings in spite with great disdain,
Yet have I found out, for thy sake,
Strings for to string my lute again
And if, perchance, this silly rhyme
Do make thee blush at any time,
Blame not my lute!

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4.5 Stars, or NEARLY GREAT

Like most of the other poems of Thomas Wyatt that Yvor Winters selected for Quest for Reality, he only mentioned this poem a couple of times in his essays. Like many others as well, Winters never discussed the “The Lute Obeys” in detail or made a case for its inclusion in what I call the Winters Canon. Further, as with Wyatt’s other poems, no Wintersian that I know of has ever considered whether the inclusion of this poem in Quest for Reality is justified (which depends on what each writer considers the purpose of Quest). I have seldom found the poem even mentioned in essays and books on Winters’s career. Once again, if Winters’s goal was to get the poems of Quest read and studied as exemplary models, he didn’t do enough to promote the excellence of this poem in print -- though he might have done much more to do so in his Stanford poetry classes. In general, the poem is rather infrequently chosen for anthologies or selections of Wyatt’s poetry.

Furthermore, I notice that John Fraser has cut this poem from his quasi-Wintersian anthology, A New Book of English Verse. I wonder why. Fraser does not mention the poem in his lengthy introduction, so we can only guess at his reasoning, unless Fraser were to take some time to write to this blog (which is unlikely). As you will see in a moment, its removal is, in my view, wrong-headed (1). For I hold that this might be Wyatt’s greatest poem.

The few comments Winters made about “The Lute Obeys,” in accord with the main currents of his literary career, suggest that he did not consider this poem one of the greatest poems, though he did judge it to be a particularly good one -- hence the star-rating I believe Winters would have assigned to it (had he not been appalled at the concept of ratings). He did NOT mention the poem in the first published version of his influential essay on Renaissance poetry, “The Sixteenth Century Lyric in England” (Poetry, 1939), which was expanded, revised, and retitled decades later as “Aspects of the Short Poem in the English Renaissance” (Forms of Discovery, 1967). In the second version of the essay (considered by many to be his finest work), Winters quotes this poem in full and comments on it briefly, though the comments are somewhat odd. Concerning the poem’s themes, Winters wrote in “Aspects” that Wyatt was advocating a plain style of love-making through his use of the plain style in his poems about love. Now, this might be accurate to some small degree, but this is hardly the central theme of the poem, which concerns the Petrarchan convention of the unfaithful lover, once again. (Wyatt, like many Petrarchans, beat this theme to smithereens, which is a literary-social issue worth studying.)

As with other poems by Thomas Wyatt, Winters seems to have thought that the WAY Wyatt composed this poem is salutary: the regular meter, the rational shape of the argument, the controlled diction. Though the content of the poem is, again, strictly conventional, the treatment is expert. But these are only my informed guesses, as they must be with all of Wyatt’s works. I can file no petition for other views, since no member of the Stanford School, the so-called Wintersians, has ever bothered to scrutinize the poem in detail -- I’ve never seen it even mentioned.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 5 Stars, or GREAT

Though I have read almost no literary artworks that emulate this poem in the history of English poetry, I consider it a superior model for poetic composition in almost every way.

The overt subject matter, the paraphraseable content, is again indefinite as to the specifics of the moral circumstances, since we cannot discern the exact moral relationship between the speaker of the poem, a courtly lover it seems plain, and the woman who allegedly has wronged him and wants to keep him from proclaiming her transgressions -- that is, singing of them with his lute. It remains unclear what kind of relationship the speaker had with the woman, a sexual union only or a marriage -- or possibly some other kind of relationship. The poem’s speaker, whether we see him as Wyatt or not, is a man who wants his betrayer and the world, it seems, to know of the wrong the woman has committed against him in her unfaithfulness. Interpreting the poem in the light of Thomas Wyatt’s lusty life, the speaker’s treatment of this subject seems a touch juvenile to me, wishing the worst on a woman who has rejected him. Since the poem does not specify or delineate how the woman was unjust or immoral, how she betrayed the speaker, we have no adequate means to judge the moral rightness of his claims against her and must try to see the poem as a general statement upon the experience of being wronged.

Yet the poem, even more so than “My Lute Awake,” successfully rises above the specifics of courtship to concern itself with a general and timeless moral principle. (Dan Savage, whom I have featured before, offers a funny look at the blame-game.) With a steady thematic focus and gathering force, the poem line by line deepens our understanding of the importance of the public recognition of immorality. This poem deserves greater study. No member of the Stanford School has bothered with it. That is a sad commentary.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

This poem has been on my mind for decades. I wonder whether that has been so for anyone else. The poem is a powerful expression of the need for social sanction as one of the central keepers of morality, which is the subject of countless artworks in literature and cinema. One might compare the poem to a massive array of fine novels and films, such as, to choose just a few quick examples from the modern era, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Wharton’s Age of Innocence and, in film, Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Kobayashi’s Hara-Kiri, and Peter Mullen’s recent Magdalene Sisters (2). I have reflected long on its main ideas, on the emotional power of its rational treatment of its concepts, and on its sharp, controlled, profound style.

Several lines stand out with great force in context. The sudden turn to the positive imperative in the lines from the fifth stanza, which begin “Blame but thyself” and “Change thou they way,” strike with great power and meaning. Up to this stanza, Wyatt’s diction and syntax have slowly gathered momentum, before suddenly sounding on the strong accents of the two lines and the change in syntax from the negative to the positive imperative. This draws considerable meaning from these lines with great emotional power.

Also forcefully, yet very differently, the poem ends on a much softer note, the high emotions of the discussion of betrayal having been spent in the first five of the poem’s six stanzas. But the quiet ending is also quite emotionally striking, following upon the stately build-up to the ringing fifth stanza. “Yet have I found out, for they sake” stands out as a superb line in context. By slowing and quieting the stern, riotous emotions embodied in the diction of what has come before, even in the immediately previous lines, this one line embodies a righteous anger and a thirst for justice that still seethes.

We are forced to assume, of course, as I have mentioned, that the woman is truly to blame, for it is only her transgressions that the poem focuses on. But I am an advocate of removing the speck from my own eye before trying to remove the plank from my sister’s. For this reason, in the application of the poem to my life (as contrasted to the interpretation of it), I see it as a call to me: “Blame but thyself, Ben...” and “Change thou they way, Ben...,” as it were. These are just and good commands, to be seen as responses to the wrongs I have committed against others, for the times that I have been the betrayer.

Footnotes:

(1) Another project I have for this blog, as I mentioned in just my second post, is a study of Fraser’s anthology, as lengthy as that will have to be. (So much to do, so much to do!)

(2) I have been at work for some years on a study of cinema through a Winters-influenced critical system. In my judgment, these films turns out to be several of the finest works of cinematic art when studied from a Wintersian perspective. There are many other films worth study, though, and some day I will publish the results of my labors in this vein.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 3

“To His lute”

or “My Lute Awake”

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

by Thomas Wyatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES:

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

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, or SUPERB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, SUPERB

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

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

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

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

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 2

The second poem printed in Quest for Reality is “Tagus, Farewell,” a.k.a. “In Spain,” by Thomas Wyatt (the poem has been variously titled). Let’s set this short poem before us for study:

Tagus farewell, that westward with thy streams
Turns up the grains of gold already tried;
For I with spur and sail go seek the Thames,
Gainward the sun that showeth her wealthy pride,
And to the town that Brutus sought by dreams,
Like bended moon, doth lend her lusty side.
My king my country, alone for whom I live,
Of mighty love the wings for this me give.

NOTES:

1. “Tagus” [pronounced TAY-gus]: A river that flows west into the Atlantic from Spain through Portugal. Wyatt served as a diplomat in that country until 1539. The wide mouth of the river is pictured in the photo.
2. “grains of gold”: The sand at the bottom of the Tagus was celebrated by, among others, Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400) and John Skelton (1460–1529) for its resemblance to granulated gold.
3. “Gainward the sun”: against the sun. The Thames, in contrast to the Tagus, flows "gainward" the sun, or eastward.
4. “Brutus”: a mythical Trojan supposedly descended from Aeneas. Diana, the goddess of the moon, was said to have appeared to Brutus in a dream, in which she ordered him to travel to Albion (ancient Britain) and found a city, which was supposed to have been what came to be called London.
5. “like bended moon”: the bend in the Thames River through London is in the shape of a crescent moon.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION: 4 Stars, or SUPERB

Winters listed this poem a few times as one of Wyatt’s very best, but he never discussed the poem in detail or made any case for its inclusion in the Winters Canon as one of the greatest poems of the language. I have posted an image of one page of Winters’s once well-known and highly influential essay on Renaissance poetry, “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” which was published in the journal Poetry in three parts in 1939, and marked on it the passage in which Winters calls “Tagus” minor (the poem is in the same list of poems on the previous page). This suggests that he chose the poem for Quest for Reality because of the excellence of its style and structure rather than for its overall achievement. Judging from the fragmentary evidence, I believe Winters ranked this lower than many other great poems and did not consider it to be part of what I am calling the Winters Canon, the very greatest poems.

No Wintersian has written on the poem, at least that I know of. (For that matter, no Wintersian I know of has written in detail about Wyatt’s poetry, generally or poem by poem.) There is no way to judge how other critics and poets who could be considered at least sympathetic to Winters’s critical theory might judge this small poem. John Fraser does include it in A New Book of Verse, the quasi-Wintersian anthology I have studying on this blog.

Terry Comito, who published a fine study of Winters in 1986, In Defense of Winters, had little to say about Winters’s judgments of Wyatt’s work and nothing to say about “Tagus” specifically. But he did comment briefly on the Winters’s important elucidation of the Renaissance English Plain Style, which “Tagus” appears to exemplify aptly:

Unlike the more highly ornamental “Petrarchan” style of Sidney and Spenser, the plain style eschews both impassioned oratory and the pomp of public ceremony. Its norm is a man speaking to other men in the ordinary world. Its vision is not utopian. The poets of the plain style do not build the “golden worlds” of which Sidney dreamed, but speak in the sober tones of those on whom (in the [Renaissance poet Fulke] Greville’s phrase) the “black ox” of experience has trod. Their poetry is a poetry of direct statement, the language almost wholly abstract, the organization generally logical, the themes broad, common, proverbial. It is a poetry, as Winters wrote of “Truth that is bare and old, / Worn plain with being told.” And it is saved from platitude, and often narrowly, by the poet’s skill in reanimating the emotional truth in the truism -- in persuading the reader, through the precision of his statement and the rhythmical inflection of his voice, that he speaks not by rote, but in the true accents of the experience whose authority he claims.

As you will see as we work through his poems from Quest for Reality, Wyatt employed what Winters called the Plain Style with great but subtle beauty.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION: 1 Star, OF LIMITED VALUE

This is a decidedly minor poem, in my judgment. It is not up to the standards of the greatest poems in English as we will try to lay them out in the months, and probably years, ahead. The subject matter is almost trite and its treatment is thin and very vague. It adds up to almost nothing. Scholars and the occasional critic of the poem have erected out some magnificent scaffolds of interpretation, however iffy they might be, upon the barest of hints. The key to most of these readings is Wyatt’s mention of Brutus, who was concerned in the myths of the founding of Rome. I consider these interpretations to be quite overblown, nearly pretentious. They read far too much into a couple of words.

But I must admit that with that mention of a mythical hero Wyatt did hint at a huge theme, the imperial desires and dreams of the English nation. But does this hint tell us something vital about imperialism or nationhood or a person’s place in his nation or the meaning of homeland or any similar topic? I don’t think so. The language of the poem is simply too vague and abstract to draw much meaning or emotional power out of it. A few exceedingly vague hints at something more, that mention of the mythical Brutus, the very vague talk of “mighty love,” give us no significant insight into or understanding of the experience of the desire to return to one’s homeland. I see little of value in this poem other than the general skillfulness of the verse and the diction.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

I cannot say that I have gotten anything out of this poem. What I mean by that -- and what I will mean when I will use similar phrases during this series on the poems of the Winters Canon -- is that the poem has given me no crucial or exceptional insight into some issue or problem or concern in human life, nor given me some crucial understanding of some aspect of an important human experience. I have long failed to see why Winters included “Tagus” in Quest, as nicely turned as it is. Knowing it as well as I do has added very little understanding of England, Spain, nationhood, the feelings for homeland, or any other issue to my life. Does anyone else have another view? I’d be very interested to hear it.

Evaluating the Winters Canon: Poem 1 (Definition of 5-Star Ratings)

This is the first in what I hope will be a long series. There will perhaps more than 200 posts in this series concerning those poems Yvor Winters evaluated “great.” I have mentioned several times that one of my chief purposes for this blog is to begin a re-evaluation of what I call, somewhat playfully, the “Winters Canon,” on which I recently posted a basic definition.

Very briefly, my purpose in this series is to draw attention to and open discussion of the poems Winters believed to be the greatest in the English language by studying those poems, offering my evaluations of Winters’s evaluation of them, and offering a few personal reflections as a Wintersian reader.

For this series, I will use a star rating system. I have been writing, very slowly, a book of film criticism using a 5-star system for rating films that I think can be employed for this series on the poems in the Winters Canon.

Higher-brow critics don’t like star rating systems, but I think they’re helpful. (I will have to make a case for them some time.) For this series I will use the following star ratings. Only a poem with the highest rating of 5 stars do I think belongs in the Winters Canon, the very best of the best ever written.

5 stars: great, or canonic

(I mean “great” as Winters appeared to understand the term. I will have to post a definition of that tricky word some time soon.)

4 stars: superb

3 stars: very fine

2 stars: has redeeming facets

1 star: of limited value

0 stars: not a serious work of art – or, thus, everything else, from works of entertainment down to deeply flawed or totally worthless poems

To be clear but brief (for now), any ranking above 0 stars should be considered a poem worth knowing for some reason. Everything ranked 0 stars just isn’t worth taking seriously as a work of art.

So, with fear and trembling and using this star system, I begin with the first poem reprinted in Quest for Reality. It’s by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who lived from 1503 to 1542 and had a rather interesting life in the court of Henry VIII. Here is the poem:

Remembrance

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart how like you this."

It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

YVOR WINTERS’S EVALUATION:

Why is this in Quest for Reality? It appears evident that Winters considered this a great poem. I believe that he would have rated it at 5 stars in the 5-star system I am employing in this series. He never discussed the content of the poem in his essays and never put it on one of those short lists of poems that he thought nearly perfect (though he did list it among the best of Wyatt, whom he mentioned as a “great” poet from time to time). Winters’s one extended discussion of the poem did not appear in print until the last year of his life. This comes in the opening essay of Forms of Discovery, in which Winters used a couple pages to study the meter of the poem. This discussion is quite educational, on poetic meter in general and on Winters’s methods in the study of metrics in particular.

Guessing from how he discussed other Wyatt poems and from his moral theory in general, I would opine that Winters thought that the FORM of this poem expressed a certain highly valuable attitude toward human experience, which, throughout his career, Winters defended and wished to see fostered and advanced. This attitude is one of moral seriousness and rational control. But, that said, I must add that Winters spent no time considering the themes of this particular poem or its bearing on life. No Wintersian has commented extensively on the poem that I know of, nor offered any reconsideration of Winters’s judgment of it as one of the greatest poems of the language. John Fraser includes the poem in his New Book of Verse -- however we might interpret the purpose or meaning of that quasi-Wintersian anthology.

As a significant examination of a human experience, the sexual inconstancy of women, the poem seems to turn on the final two lines, which elevate its purposes into the realm of morality. Winters, I would guess (for he never discussed the poem’s themes, as I say), saw in these lines that the poet was taking a certain moral stance toward the issue at hand, a kind of stance that Winters fervently admired and approved (and which I admire, too). Most professors whom I have read on this poem, however, generally treat it as a historical document, a way into the ways and means of courtship in the English court at a certain time in history, the reign of Henry VIII. Seldom have critics, in what I have read, treated the poem as having something to say to us today, as Winters thought (as I would again have to guess). This approach to the poem as history is much like that described in a recent essay in The American Scholar on postmodern critics (such as Derrida), whom Louis Menand called the “greatest generation” because they insist on “difference”:

The insistence on difference, on refusing to see similarities, inhibits dialogue and the chance to learn from, understand, and appreciate others. This is particularly disturbing in the case of art and literary studies. Menand writes that “a 19th-century novel is a report on the 19th century; it is not an advice manual for life out here on the 21st-century street.” So all those who have read Pride and Prejudice in the 20th century and since and felt that it showed something about the dangers of first impressions and the error of equating social ease with merit and social stiffness with coldness or disdain have been wrong? (from “Getting it All Wrong: Bioculture Critiques Cultural Critique,” by Brian Boyd, The American Scholar)

Winters, as you might guess if you’ve been reading this blog, insisted that the finest poetry and literature do and should serve as some sort of “manual for life.” But the service is as much in the way a work of literary art is written, its form, as in what it overtly said, its content, that Winters, I believe, saw a poetic “discourse” like Wyatt’s having meaning for us today, giving us, in this case, valuable insights into the meaning of courtship and its moral implications.

BEN KILPELA’S EVALUATION:

I wish to start my assessment of Winters’s assessment of this poem by noting that it has long been a frequent choice by editors of the most well-known, standard anthologies that have covered English Renaissance poetry. Indeed, it is ranked as the 39th “best” or “most important” poem as listed and reprinted in The Top 500 Poems, that entertaining and enlightening anthology that ranked poems by how frequently they have been anthologized. The poem is often discussed in scholarly journals, and there are many web essays, short and long, that offer studies of it -- some of them with great intensity. Nearly all these studies of this poem rather concern its content, its themes, than its form, metrical or otherwise.

All that said, I find it to be a very well executed, but minor poem. I would rate it at 4 stars, or superb. Thus, to be clear, I don’t believe it belongs among the greats of the Winters Canon, though certainly it is a very skillful and strong poem that is worth knowing well. Further, it is well worth imitating, and I would certainly like to see much more poetry written like it in structure and style. But Wyatt, to my mind, seems to have delighted in contemplating his subject matter, at times, without sufficient seriousness or depth. Sexual politics and the morality of courtship are fundamental issues of human experience, but Wyatt gives us no truly profound insight into these matters in this poem, as finely executed as it is. The poem, in my judgment, offers a vague, incomplete, and perhaps unacceptable understanding of the inconstancy of women. For the poem seems not to recognize the hypocrisy of its speaker, which I consider a serious defect. Still, the poem’s emphasis on the moral issues of sexuality, though hardly new even 400 years ago, is moderately enlightening and much needed in every age and ever society. As I say, I consider the poem very well worth knowing.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS:

Let me say that any personal reflections from my readers are most appreciated, even if such readers are loath to offer an evaluation of Winters’s evaluations.

Wyatt’s “Remembrance” has never done much for me, I must admit. It hasn’t stuck in my mind, a work of art that I keep coming back to and pondering over and again as I have encountered new situations in life concerning the morals of courtship or the politics of sexuality. In reflecting upon the poem’s lack of importance in my life, I searched back, in my mind, through all my reading to find a poem or writing that has stuck with me much more powerfully than this poem. What I recalled was a passage from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, one also about, in general, the morality of sex. I first read this bestselling book of Christian apologetics when I was in high school in the early 1970s. I was engaged to a Baptist girl and considering becoming a Christian under her influence. I would soon be “born again” at a revival at the Masonic Temple in Detroit some months later. I have long since converted away from Christianity, but I have pondered Lewis’s discussion of sex in Mere Christianity, and its implications to wider issues in morality, for more than 30 years, in contrast to how infrequently I have thought of Wyatt’s “Remembrance,” despite having read the poem several dozen times. I have taken one particularly important section of Lewis’s discussion that I keep pondering for decades and broken up Lewis’s prose into lines to compare it to Wyatt’s exploration of sexual politics. Why? As an experiment.

Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us,
And all the contemporary propaganda for lust,
Combine to make us feel that
The desires we are resisting
Are so 'natural', so 'healthy', and so reasonable,
That it is almost perverse and abnormal
To resist them. Poster after poster,
Film after film, novel after novel,
Associate the idea of sexual indulgence
With the ideas of health, normality, youth,
Frankness, and good humour. Now this association
Is a lie.

Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth -–
The truth that sex in itself (apart from
The excesses and obsessions that have grown round it)
Is 'normal' and 'healthy', and all the rest of it.
The lie consists in the suggestion
that any sexual act to which you are tempted
At the moment is also healthy and normal.

Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart
From Christianity, must be nonsense.
Surrender to all our desires obviously
Leads to impotence, disease, jealousies,
Lies, concealment, and everything that is
The reverse of health, good humour, and frankness.
For any happiness, even in this world,
Quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary;
So the claim made by every desire, when it is strong,
To be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.

Every sane and civilised man must have
Some set of principles by which he chooses
To reject some of his desires and to permit others.
One man does this on Christian principles,
Another on hygienic principles,
Another on sociological principles.
The real conflict is not between Christianity
And 'nature', but between Christian principles
And other principles in the control of 'nature'.
For 'nature' (in the sense of natural desire)
All have to be controlled anyway, unless you
Are going to ruin your whole life.

Note, first, that this passage of prose broken into lines doesn’t sound much different from or ANY less poetic than tens of thousands of published poems written in free verse over the past 50 years. (The sparkling, chatty prose of contemporary poetry is becoming an ever stronger convention. Follow "Poetry Daily" at http://www.poems.com/ for a month if you doubt me.) Second, despite the evident poetic skill of Wyatt’s poem, I consider my transformation of Lewis’s prose into a prosetic musing the more important, more worthwhile, “poem” -- though poem it is not, of course, and regardless of whether I agree directly or fully with Lewis’s ideas or not. The Lewis prosetry tackles the subject matter of sexual politics with considerable literary skill and reason; it offers steady, rational, and deep insight into the subject matter; and the clear picture of what Lewis is telling us has wide and profound implications in many areas of life, in my judgment. I cannot say the same of Wyatt’s poem, despite the undoubted brilliance of its execution. “Remembrance” is a strong poem, in my judgment, as I wrote above, but it has never done much for me. If skillfulness is the reason we must rank it great, then what is greatness for? This is a question we will keep trying to answer more and more deeply as our discussion of the Winters Canon continues over hundreds of posts to come.

Of course, in response to this post and every other in the series, I am interested in every reader’s evaluation of the particular poem under discussion and highly interested in personal reflections on each individual poem: how it is important in a reader’s life, what other poems or writings on the same topic have been more important, etc.

We will be with Wyatt for some time in this series, since Winters judged more than a half dozen of his poems to be great.