Aaran Haspel’s Blog: “God of the Machine”

It’s time for a short entry about coming across, some time ago, another fellow who has been writing about Winters from time to time, Aaron Haspel, in his blog entitled “God of the Machine.” I have provided a link on my front page to Haspel’s blog. Of course, it’s important to see what other people who study Winters -- somewhere Haspel calls him “his main man” -- are thinking and reading, and I think Haspel is worth your time.

To consider a recent example of Haspel’s work, he wrote an entry on that newly discovered Robert Frost poem that made a small splash in the cultural news recently. In the midst of his discussion of the poem, Haspel states his opinion that Frost’s two best poems are probably “The Most of It” and “Spring Pools.” Now it just so happens that these atypical choices as Frost’s best work are exactly the poems Yvor Winters chose as Frost’s best in his controversial, very seldom read, and now almost completely ignored essay on Frost, originally published in the Sewanee Review in 1948 (republished in The Function of Criticism). Judging from this, I think we can safely assume that Haspel has been deeply influenced by Winters, as comes across in many of his discussions of poetry, as well as other matters.

On the subject of what’s best in Robert Frost, I should note that John Fraser selected those two poems for his New Book of Verse, which I have been discussing off and on in this blog (with lots more commentary on Fraser’s important anthology to come -- I also provide a link to it on my front page). As well as I am able to judge Fraser’s purposes (as so hazily set down in his long introduction), he selected poems that are superior or even great in that they best exhibit the stylistic qualities that Winters and some Wintersians find more sound and of more value than the usual fare in modern poetry. These are, presumably, qualities that Fraser and other Wintersians would and should like to see adopted more widely. Here are Fraser’s selections of very good or great poems from the work of Frost (with some brief comments from me):

“Acquainted with the Night” (“I have been one acquainted with the night”)

Comment: Winters believed that this poem is one of Frost’s finest achievements, but the poem has long been popular even among those committed to the Standard Canon. You can find a great deal of commentary on the poem across the web. Early in his career, Winters listed this poem as one of the greatest achievements in modern poetry. This was done in a 1930 letter (as I recall), though Winters described the poem in other letters as great or exceptionally good shortly thereafter. All these remarks were made in the period of transition in Winters’s career and life, when he was changing from imagist techniques to rational procedures in poetry. His opinion of the poem appears to have fallen quickly as he became more sure of his new critical principles in the 30s and 40s. Nonetheless, it’s a strong poem, I think, well worth knowing, but not quite deserving of the Winters Canon as one of the greatest in our literature. It is not nearly at the intellectual level of, say, Bridges’s “Low Barometer” or Jonson’s “To Heaven”. It is a fairly good example of a poetic procedure that Winters would come to call “post-symbolist,” a very useful term that few critics seem aware of and fewer still have put to regular use. It means, briefly, that the sense perceptions described are charged with abstract meaning, roughly as in an allegory.

It’s interesting to explore what readers get out of this poem. Most casual readers interpret the poem as an expression of Frost’s personal feelings of loneliness and depression, both feelings unmoored to any motivating event or concept. Most critics, however, interpret the poem as Winters did, as a metaphysical study, a description of the cosmic isolation of humankind in the universe and the emotional stance we should take toward the recognition of our metaphysical isolation. I think Winters came to see Wallace Stevens’s poems in this vein to be the greater, especially “The Course of a Particular,” which Winters later in his career declared to be one of the dozen or so greatest poems ever written in the English language. If you, my readers, would like to discuss this poem in greater depth, either to evaluate it or explicate it, I would be happy to do so.

“The Most of It” (“He thought he kept the universe alone”)

Comment: I quoted this poem in its entirety in a previous entry “Gratitude and the Winters Canon.” This is a poem Winters focused on much more closely and thought more highly of than almost all Frost critics. It’s another very good poem, similar in theme to “Acquainted with the Night,” and it is perhaps the finest in Frost. But it doesn’t have the emotional power of, say, Steven’s “Course” or the astoundingly great “Sunday Morning.” It is almost whimsical, so dry is its description of human solitude. The poem very subtly suggests the taking of a coolly stoic attitude toward the recognition of the cleavage between ourselves and the world we love. That attitude is probably what drew Winters’s close attention and praise. I would say that this poem is not one of the greats. It just doesn’t go into enough depth or adjust our emotions properly to the rational metaphysical concept offered. Frost settles for a rather simple exploration of difficult and somewhat disturbing subject matter. This is also a poem that I would be happy to discuss with you, my readers, in greater depth.

“Spring Pools” (“These pools that, though in forests, still reflect”)

Comment: This is another poem that drew Winters’s attention for its superior qualities. It is nicely done, but as Winters said, it is a minor work. I do not believe it is great, as fine as it is. Personally speaking, I don’t get much out of it, either. It seems to me to be more or less an appeal to carpe diem.

“Never Again Would Birds’ Song be the Same” (“He would declare and could himself believe”)

Comment: This is yet another piece that Winters drew attention to and mildly praised, though he little more than mentions it in his writings. I think this is as strong as the others already discussed. Winters thought it minor. I don’t see that it is any less minor than “Spring Pools” and many another nicely-turned Frost ditty. This does not belong in the Winters Canon, though it’s not a worthless poem, certainly.

Desert Places (“Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast”)

Comment: Sometimes considered a companion piece to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” this poem is a choice of John Fraser’s as a superior Wintersian poem. Winters never mentions the poem. I think Fraser is on to something. I have been pondering this choice for a while before I decide on my own vote, on a definitive judgment. Other comments are welcome. Off hand, I think the poem trades in a few too many sentimental phrases to be considered great. Frost appears to be indulging himself in some easy emotion rather than looking clearly at his subject in this one. The theme, as you see, is very similar to that of “Acquainted” and “The Most of It.”

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it -- it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Directive (“Back out of all this now too much for us”)

Comment: This is another choice of Fraser’s, which I reprint below. It’s a stronger effort among Frost’s work that run-of-the-mill critics have studied regularly down the years. Here’s a deeply spiritual study of the poem, though it makes no attempt at an artistic assessment of it:

http://www.quuf.org/sermons/renewal.pdf

On his web site, Fraser offers a long and valuable study of a poem I consider one of the very greatest in English, as Winters did, George Herbert’s “Church Monuments.” In theme, Frost’s poem, which I append to this entry, has various affinities to Herbert’s that are worth looking over carefully. Quite obviously, Herbert’s poem is a directive, too. The comparison reveals the weaknesses of Frost, I believe, his sentimentality in particular. Winters never discussed or mentioned this poem that I am aware of, though he almost certainly knew it. I’m not ready to make a final call, but for now I would say that the poem doesn’t belong in the Winters Canon, though it is a fine poem in many respects. Certainly, it is far from worthless. Another poem worth comparing with “Directive” is Philip Larkin’s “Church-Going,” a poem I intend to discuss in due course on this blog, since Fraser chose it for his New Book of Verse as a superior work of Wintersian art (or however we might interpret the choices made for Fraser’s anthology). I will have more to say on Larkin another time and put in at some point my two cents on whether any of his work belongs in the Winters Canon, which I believe we need to try to reassess and expand.

But getting back to Frost, I think there is more work that is worth close scrutiny in his oeuvre, though I am not sold that any of his work deserves to be part of the Winters Canon.

+++++++++++

Directive, Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Can Writing Be Dangerous?

I have been talking a great deal in this blog in its opening months about the relationship between Yvor Winters and Hart Crane, because that topic has been much in the cultural news of late (arising because of the publication of the Library of America edition of Hart Crane’s poems). The matter came up yet again in an essay by Adam Kirsch in the September edition of the journal Poetry on the anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginberg’s “Howl.” The essay is entitled, “Starving Hysterical Naked,” the last three words of the first line of the poem. Kirsch, who has written of Winters in a few of essays here and there, including in the New Criterion, wrote of Lionel Trilling’s reaction to Ginsberg’s poem in terms that have pertinence to the study of Winters:

This is the point at which Lionel Trilling's verdict on [“Howl”], that it was "dull," starts to look especially peculiar. Many sins might be laid at the door of Ginsberg and his poem, though it is impossible to separate the influence of the text from that of the period it inspired and came to symbolize, the Beat fifties and hippie sixties. The glorification of violence, the sentimentality about mental illness, the contempt for reason, the political self-righteousness, the waste of reformist energy in theatrical gestures, the confusion of narcissism with moral superiority: all that is worst about the counterculture is foreshadowed in "Howl" and Ginsberg's subsequent poems. But it would take a pretty jaded palate to find "Howl" dull.

Well, I don’t know. I don’t consider myself all that jaded, if I understand what Kirsch means by the term, but I find “Howl” a bore. It’s an unstructured, droning rant to my ear, and it quickly grows tiresome -- it even seemed dull in my earliest days in the serious study of literature, back in the mid 1970s. That I read it in the 70s might be important, since by the mid-70s weariness with the 60s had cured into a block of concrete in the heart. Kirsch’s piece gave me an itch to go reread the poem again, but I found it drudgery rather than an enlightening pleasure. There are a couple of nice turns of phrase, but the poem as a whole is a trainwreck of ideas -- a manic melange, to switch metaphors. You can pick little tidbits from the mass and sometimes find them interesting or even suggestive. But when you step back, there it is: a big, ugly trainwreck after all. I wouldn’t even say it is a poem, except by modern consent, and it isn’t very good prose, either. Kirsch then turns to the fears about writings like “Howl”, which he believes are of a species with Winters’s fears about Hart Crane’s dissolution, which, Winters believed, Romanticism engendered:

What Trilling really meant to communicate, I suspect, is not that "Howl" would fail to excite its readers, but that it would excite them in a way which Trilling himself, and many other imaginative people, had already judged disastrous. For while Ginsberg's belief in radical innocence and radical excess was new to the baby boomers, it was not at all new to Trilling, or to Modernists like Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, each of whom had experienced the suicide of Hart Crane as a parable of the personal cost of imaginative chaos. The antinomianism found in "Howl" was, in fact, one of the fundamental impulses of modern literature, and readers who were in their fifties when Ginsberg was in his twenties had wrestled with it long before. "It seems to me that the characteristic element of modern literature," Trilling wrote in an essay that was not about "Howl" but could have been, “is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it.... It asks us if we are saved or damned -- more than with anything else, our literature is concerned with salvation.”

Again on the shoulders of the principles underlying modern literature, as unsystematic as they are, a critic lays the suicide of Hart Crane. There, too, we read a rather severe, almost hysterical, word, “disastrous,” applied to a writing of just a couple thousand words. Using such words goes somewhat too far for me, as I have discussed in a couple of recent entries in this blog (see “Romanticism Leads to Madness, Reason to Evil?” and “Hart Crane and Connotation”). To my mind, it’s not that chaotic writing is so dangerous. It’s that it’s so dull, just as Trilling said. I don’t read serious literature in order to take a little dip into chaos or vicariously revel in someone else’s bad-boy shenanigans, but to discover truth on my own “quest for reality” (which was the title of Winters’s anthology of greatest poems). “Howl” is dull because it simply doesn’t offer much to think about, doesn’t take us into any human experiences and help us to understand them rationally, or aid us adjusting our emotions to a rational understanding of those experiences. The poem is a frenzied, overwrought mishmash, a pile of straining phrases and harebrained ideas that adds up to a loose compendium rather than a sustained meditation. It’s a rundown of the wild times Ginsburg and his friends had. Big deal. Is it “dangerous” to go through it all. It seems more just plain silly. It’s still surprising that anyone smart took this jejune stuff seriously.

Still, I suppose “Howl” is important historically and worth knowing for that reason, since it has had a significant influence on literature. (I think it’s worth knowing things in the Standard Canon just because the Standard Canon, as Harold Bloom said, is made up of those works that have had the greatest influence). It’s important to know it because of the insight it gives us into the times it concerns. And even a few ideas in the mountain it piles up might have slight value, like Goodwill trinkets found in a trash heap. But as a whole the poem is not much and not worth concentrating on too closely, except as an historical artifact.

Do you, my readers, think that it’s dangerous personally or corporately to write as Ginsburg wrote and read what Ginsburg wrote in the way he wrote it? I’m still not sold on that longstanding idea of Winters’s, to which Kirsch gives his implied assent. Is Romanticism, as spread by literature, a cause of some of the dire problems in our time? In reading Winters, and Kirsch hints at the idea too, one would almost think so. But such matters require careful thought.

Adrienne Rich on What Poetry Can Do

Adrienne Rich made a feeble, supremely vague, yet weirdly grandiose attempt at telling the world why poetry matters during the hardest of times in the Guardian (UK) last weekend. The short essay can be found here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1950812,00.html

After reading the piece I came away even less convinced that poetry matters much to living in a world of strife and troubles. Though Rich seems to have meant well, to be brave in showing the world that poetry can help us deal with such massive tribulations as genocide, she fails to make a sound case for poetry’s importance and offers not a single poem that could conceivably make any difference to genocide or to any currently serious, important, and collective issue in politics, society, or philosophy. Rather, near the end of her fogbound discussion, she wanders around to the suggestion that poetry is crucial to the development of a rich emotional life in men and women:

There's actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it's unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together -- and more.

Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and present: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses -- how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger. That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognise it or not. A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays on poetry and poetics, are written as if such pressures didn't exist. But this only reveals their existence.

But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum, "There is no alternative".

This is little more than blather, special pleading as vague as it is confused. Perhaps Rich, as Yvor Winters would have recommended, could have offered a telling example or two that would have helped us understand her. She should have given us a passage of “poetic language” or a whole poem that “quite literally” keeps “bodies and souls together,” since what those portentous phrases mean is just about nothing without a concrete example or two -- or a dozen -- to give them conceptual solidity. And she should have showed how poetic language can give us even “more,” since it’s impossible to guess what might constitute this “more” she’s talking about. She should have given us, too, a strong example of how poetry “imprints the life of the feelings” in some vitally important way that addresses an issue as daunting and colossal as genocide -- and perhaps an explanation of some kind for what she means by saying that poetry “imprints” feelings.

I’m just guessing (because one can do little more than guess about prose this nebulous) but what Rich seems to be saying is that the very best poetry can do when helping us through genocide and war and massive suffering is make us see the beauty or emotional resonance of the little details of our lives, as is shown in the appallingly vapid and trivial examples she gives of what poetry accomplishes: “how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger.” These are her examples of the best poetry can do in this world?!! Is this a summation of the best that can be said for poetry from one of modernity’s most decorated and applauded poets: that poetry shows us the beauty of little things. (To repeat, I’ll admit that I’m guessing that this is what she means, for she nowhere says what this affected drivel precisely signifies). This is pure Romanticism, friends, icky right to the bottom.

Rich’s examples of poetry’s best offerings to a world of woe reminds me of a widespread cliché found in many, many modern poems (to my mind, not a few of William Carlos Williams’s poems qualify) and of countless movies of all kinds -- especially so-called art films. To take one perhaps better known example that popped into my mind is from the film “American Beauty,” in which to show how magnificently sensitive the main character is, the film shows that character, a young drug dealer, showing his girlfriend the most brilliant piece of video he has taken in his short life: that of a colorful little garbage bag being blown about a sidewalk on a swirling wind. Now there’s a sight to meet the troubles of life -- something to get you through genocide! Have a friend dying miserably of cancer? Go out and watch a trash bag tumble on a breeze. Why wouldn’t watching a sewage spill spread in an alleyway work as well? That scene is the trite, icky equivalent of Rich’s “blur of smoke in the air.” Yet one more example -- there are hundreds of them -- I take from Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” an Iranian film: a man contemplating suicide is convinced not to do it by a fellow who reminds him of just that, the taste of cherries. Oh, please!

Rich pops in a little comment about imagination in the third quoted paragraph, but that doesn’t make sense or help in context, since all she appears to be saying is that you need imagination to see the beauty in shoes for sale or discarded garbage bags or the exquisite patterns sewage can make on the ground.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the sound of the rain and the look of many a shop window are nice and sweet. I do enjoy nice and sweet things, as most people do. But is the enjoyment of nice, sweet things what gives us strength or understanding to meet the great issues of life? Is this all poetry can do to aid us in finding the meaning of life and addressing the vast evils that confront us? Is this the most that poetry can say -- the best poetry can say?

Compare Rich’s puerile vision for poetry to what, say, Edgar Bowers accomplished in his great “The Virgin Mary,” from the Winters Canon, to see how truly great poetry can rise far beyond such foolish trivialities.

If Adrienne Rich in this piece says all that can be said for poetry, it’s probably inevitable and right that poetry plays no role in world affairs and has receded so far from public importance. Yet this belief that poetry at its best is the hyper-appreciation of details is spreading ever farther and wider in literary culture. It’s a cliché, my friends. Winters discussed this matter often, especially in his early writings, such as found in Primitivism and Decadence, in which he drew attention to the hyper-sensitivity to detail as a hallmark of the modern associationist writing style, which stems from Romanticism. Judging from Rich’s piece, it appears that those writing techniques are widely believed to be ALL that poetry can do in the face of the Big Issues: charmingly describe little things.

All this can make a Wintersian sigh with annoyance that so many writers think that all literature can give us in the face of the evil and suffering in modern times is a few winks of beauty or a swirl or two of sweet emotions. Of course, I think turning to Winters’s theory of literature is much more profitable, for poetry, for literature, for life. According to Winters, writers and poets make rational statements about human experiences and endeavor to conform the emotions properly to the rational understanding achieved. The proper adjustment of the emotions, unified with intellectual comprehension, is what separates poetry and fiction from prose discourse. We can only hope that more poets will take up the serious work that Winters believed poetry can do, as opposed to the insipid purposes poets like Adrienne Rich have for poetry.

Gratitude in the Winters Canon

In looking through the poems Yvor Winters judged to be the greatest (as collected in Quest for Reality [see http://www.msu.edu/user/kilpela/quest1.htm]), I see that there are very few poems that have any concern with the concept or feeling of gratitude, which American minds turn to at this time of year -- and one that I feel can be important to human spiritual soundness and strength. In the Wintersian great poems, there is some cursory exploration and expressions of joy, a few explorations of love too (though they occur mostly by implication), but very little that we could construe as a quest for the reality or meaning of thanksgiving.

It has often happened in literature that writings on gratitude have veered toward the sentimental, an emotional response that “indulges the sensibilities for their own sake, are artificially or affectedly tender, or are addressed or pleasing to the emotions only, and usually to the weaker and the unregulated emotions [American Heritage],” which is a bearing of the emotions that Winters deplored. The only extended discussion of Winters’s -- that I am aware of -- on a poet who had a recurrent attitude of joy toward the natural world and human life is the piece on Robert Frost, found in The Function of Criticism. Winters chided Frost for the easy-going, folksy sentimentality found in many of his poems (though Winters called attention to Frost’s tougher work), as appealing as these sentiments often are to readers in our current literary culture. The poem that Winters thought to be Frost’s best was “The Most of It” (though he didn’t consider it good enough to rate as one of the great poems, I hasten to add), which happens to make very few best-of lists among the typical Frost aficionados, critics, and biographers. (I have appended the poem at the bottom of this entry for convenience. It’s worth noting that John Fraser included this poem in his New Book of Verse, implying, as it seems, that the poem is exceptionally good and closely in keeping with Winters’s theories of literary excellence, a matter which I will get to some time soon.) In that poem, said Winters, Frost faced “his predicament,” which I take to mean that Frost faced up to the fact that the nature he had, at times, unjustly expansive feelings toward, sentimental feelings that is, was not Frost’s “friend” or ours. Winters wrote often of the ravishing beauties of nature and its endearing qualities and all that, but he often noted ominously that nature will turn on us in the end and cast us and all we care about, through death, into utter oblivion. In much of his oeuvre, on the contrary, Frost cultivated what Winters considered a sentimental attitude toward nature; and from time to time, he expressed or strongly implied feelings of gratitude that he was alive and able to enjoy and perceive nature. Winters had little regard for any of this without the qualifying, bracing recognition that death looms behind all nature’s offerings and rewards.

This was Winters typical stance toward the natural world, toward the universe that he loved so passionately, as his poems imply. Winters seems to have experienced joy in being alive and conscious. He even wrote poems about his thirst for complete and utter immersion in the natural world, some sort of mystical merging of a drop of water into the ocean, and even wrote about the dangers of such a thirst (which he thought entrapped Hart Crane). Yet his feelings of love and joy seldom aroused feelings of gratitude, at least that he decided to write about or sought to help his readers understand and properly adjust themselves to.

On the more general issue, I think that gratitude is an appropriate subject for rational study in an outstanding poem, and further that it is a profound concept that needs deeper understanding and the kind of proper emotional adjustment that a great poet can guide us to. Are there any Wintersian great poems on gratitude? Perhaps there are, and they need to be brought before us. Perhaps Winters’s stoicism hid these poems from him.

William Carlos Williams’s famous and much-discussed “Spring and All” seems close to such a poem (also appended at the end of this entry), though it more directly concerns hope, which is another theme that Winters seemed to think liable to the sentimental and is very seldom touched on in the poems of the Winters Canon or in his own poetry, except by very subtle implication. (I don’t think all that much of “Spring and All” as a work of art, nor do I get much rational understanding or emotional resonance out of it. I will come back to those two specific issues on this blog, in time, for Williams has been on my mind for a long time, since Winters discussed his work often in the early stages of his career and several of his poems made the Winters Canon.) But gratitude is a highly important theme, and there could and should be someone who has written on it with greatness, someone who can tackle it properly, if it hasn’t been done already.

Winters as a poet tended to a stoical position, sometimes to a severe stoicism, as his usual response to the joys of the world and of being alive. He was not given to feelings of thanksgiving, but of inculcating a courageous, austere, resigned resoluteness in the face of the knowledge that life and all human experience must come to an end, that all our joys and sorrows and pleasures and pursuits must end in the utter dissolution of death. You could say that he loved the world so much, that he so badly didn’t want to leave it, that he took the obdurate stance of the stoic toward all his experience, which is a position in philosophy that reaches back to the ancient Greeks. When reading his poetry, it seems to me at times that the thought of losing what he loved so much was outright horrifying. But is not gratitude also rational and acceptable as an emotional stance toward life, if it is guarded from sentimentality? I believe it can be. Comments on this are most welcome.

As I say, I find very little in Winters’s poetry that has any hint that he felt gratitude toward some one or some thing that he was alive and able to perceive the world and think about existence in general and his own existence in particular. The best hint is found in a poem that has been frequently discussed by critics who have taken an interest in Winters’s work, “Simplex Munditiis” (a phrase from Horace meaning, according to R.L. Barth, “plain in neatness”):

The goat nips yellow blossoms
shaken loose from rain -—
with neck extended
lifts a twitching flower
high into wet air. Hard
humility the lot of man
to crouch beside
this creature in the dusk
and hold the mind clear;
to turn the sod,
to face the sod beside his door,
to wound it as his own flesh.
In the spring the blossoms
drown the air with joy
the heart with sorrow.
One must think of this
in quiet. One must
bow his hand and take
with roughened hands
sweet milk at dusk,
the classic gift of earth.

This is a strong, sure, yet minor poem, published late in his time as a free verse imagist, just before he would turn, notoriously, to traditional forms and rational procedures. The poem contains the only mention I know of anything like its recognition that nature and life are gifts that have been given by some one or some thing. There are slight obscurities in the poem that weaken it, in my long-considered judgment, especially in that indeterminate word “classic”. I do not believe it is a great poem, but it is a fine one, as simple as it is. It employs Winters’s free verse technique, based on his complex theory of that once new-fangled metrical scheme, which you can read about in astonishingly great detail in Primitivism and Decadence in the first third of In Defense of Reason. (It’s suggestive to note that though this poem has received a moderate amount of attention from critics and scholars who have written on Winters, Winters himself did not include this poem in his choice of his worthiest work, the 1952 Collected Poems.)

Here’s a short and much more representative passage from another good poem “Moonrise,” which also very subtly implies, before these two stanzas, that the world is a source of joy and a gift:

So we must part
In ruin utterly --
Reality
Invades the crumbling heart.

We scarce shall weep
For what no change retrieves.
The moon and leaves
Shift here and there toward sleep.

This recognition, that life will be submerged in death, only hints at an implication that life is worth a great deal to Winters and should be so to us. Why bravely write of this “reality” as he does unless there is also something of great value in reality? Such is what we commonly get instead of gratitude from Winters’s poetry, the implication that the world is dear, but delivered subtly through seeing the sorrow in its loss.

Well, I must stop rather than close. I intended this entry to be short, but one thought has led to another and the result is getting long. There is so much more to say, so many more ideas that are occurring to me as I write, and I am grateful for the chance to say some of it.

**********************

I append the two poems discussed:

“The Most of It” - Robert Frost

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree–hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder–broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter–love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush —- and that was all.

***************

“Spring and All” – William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -— a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the rood the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines -—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches -—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind -—

Now the grass, to-morrow
the stiff curl of wild-carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined --

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
Entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them; rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Romanticism Leads to Madness, Reason to Evil?

One last time, I want to come back to Hilton Als’s review in the New Yorker of the handsome new edition of Hart Crane’s poems (and letters) in the Library of America. Als’s review draws attention to the issue of homophobia, suggesting that it played a larger role in Crane’s psychological difficulties than many once believed and that it influenced Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and others among Crane’s critics to some degree in their objections to some aspects of his work and life:

For readers like Tate and Winters, Crane’s suicide was the inevitable, artistically fitting conclusion to a deeply disordered life, and the chief symptom of that disorder was his homosexuality. In Tate’s major essay on Crane’s poetry, what was ostensibly literary criticism now appears as Freud-era homophobic code: Tate speaks of Crane’s “failure to impose his will upon experience,” his “locked-in sensibility [and] insulated egoism.” Winters, still more explicit, regards Crane’s sexuality as comparable to his alcoholism, a “weakness” that he “cultivated on principle.”

This last comment about Winters is accurate, but whether that Winters believed that the “chief symptom” of the disorder in Crane’s life was homosexuality, as Als implies, is questionable (I do not know about Tate, though I’d be interested to hear from my readers on what they might know about him in this matter). In the essay Als quotes from (a passage of “The Significance of the Bridge,” the last essay of In Defense of Reason), Winters does imply that homosexuality is a weakness of like kind to alcoholism. Yet in all my reading in Winters about Crane, including in his letters, I see little evidence that he considered homosexuality in itself to be sinful or evil or some sort of gross aberration. It is possible that his reference to homosexuality as a “weakness” was based on widespread assumptions about what we more recently have called the “homosexual lifestyle” -- that, to put it bluntly (for I see no other way to put it), the homosexual is commonly promiscuous.

I believe that this is most likely what Winters meant in pairing homosexuality and alcoholism in the passage. But whether this small distinction diminishes Winters’s fault or whether Crane’s homosexuality was indeed a significant element in his “dissolution,” which, Winters argues, led to his eventual suicide are matters that I will have to deliberate. Also worth pondering is whether promiscuity of any kind can or should be considered a symptom of dissolution. Addiction to alcohol is commonly considered to be psychologically and spiritually injurious, but Winters’s implied relationship between moral dissipation and Romanticism is certainly little better than tenuous. I note that Als doesn’t make a to-do about Winters’s apparent disapproval of homosexuality, assuming, it appears, that the censure of homosexuality was a matter of course in the 1920s.

On the larger question of the causes of Crane’s general dissoluteness (if his behavior can be characterized as such, which I concede is a wide-open question), it is very clear that Winters thought that Crane’s hyper-Romanticism was the final cause of his dissipation and moral difficulties, manifested in various “symptoms,” and finally bearing bad fruit in his psychic collapse. For Winters, Crane’s story became a singularly decisive test case of Romanticism, as many critics have pointed out recently. Yet is it true as well, as critics lately have been stating regularly and appears true, that mostly as a result of this one stark and massive failure of Romanticism in the life of Hart Crane, Winters damned Romanticism as a whole and extolled Reason? Perhaps putting it that strongly makes the case appear a bit overstated. Winters had many other reasons for opposing Romanticism than its outcomes in the life and death of Hart Crane -- though it is indisputable that Crane’s coming to such a bad end profoundly and decisively burdened Winters’s thinking against Romanticism. He referred to the Crane "test case" over and again, sometimes quite elliptically, in his writings.

But, accepting for the moment that Crane’s suicide can be attributed mostly to Romanticism, is Winters’s case against Romanticism on the grounds of its consequences in the life of this one man, Hart Crane, in itself reasonable? Can we rationally draw any firm, general conclusions about the value or truth of particular Romantic ideas or the general system (which is so diverse as to be almost indefinable) from the purported effects Romantic ideas had in the life of one person? Winters’s argument from Crane against Romanticism in itself constitutes a non sequitor, does it not?

Consider this: if Romanticism as a system of ideas (so wildly varied that calling it a ”system” appears to be nonsense) is damned because of its evil effects in the life of one man (laying aside for the moment the question of whether Crane's blood stains Romanticism’s hands alone), can Reason alike be damned because of its evil consequences in one instance? I ask this because another recent New Yorker book review illustrates an extreme failure of Reason. The review, by Adam Gopnik, concerns two new books about the French Revolution, one a new history specifically of the Reign of Terror and the other a new biography of Maximilian Robespierre, one of the Terror’s architects. This review is still available on line at:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/060605crat_atlarge

To me, it appears definite, judging from the evidence of the conduct of the Terror by the determinedly reasonable Robespierre, that even Reason can at times go wickedly astray. So what keeps Reason from destruction? That’s a central question for Wintersians. It’s something I will be pondering in the weeks ahead.

Here are the conclusions Gopnik draws about the final works of Robespierre, sobering thoughts for all committed to Reason:

The bloodlust of the time [of the French Revolution] makes the attempt to trace the Terror to any single intellectual source, or peculiar circumstance -— to Enlightenment rationalism gone mad, or to the paranoia of the encircled Republicans -— feel inadequate to the Terror’s essential nature, which was that it didn’t matter what the ideology was. The argument that a taste for the ideal and the tabula rasa leads to terror, after all, would be more convincing if its opposite —- a desire for an organic, authentic, traditional society -— didn’t lead to terror, too. The Red Terror led to a White Terror; Robespierre’s head had hardly fallen before the Gilded Youth were attacking the now helpless Jacobins. It sometimes seems as if history had deliberately placed Hitler and Stalin side by side at the climax of the horror of modern history simply to demonstrate that the road to Hell is paved with any intention you like; a planned, pseudo-rationalist utopianism and an organic, racial, backward-looking Romanticism ended up with the same camps and the same carnage. The historical lesson of the first Terror is not that reason devours its own but that reason cannot stop us from devouring each other.

To sum up Yvor Winters's ideas on a complex issue very simply, Winters enjoined a balance between Reason and emotion in works of literary art and in life, with Reason standing in control of the emotions. Late in his career, especially in his final work Forms of Discovery, he even carefully laid out the good Romanticism has done for literature, particularly in giving us examples and models by which to perceive the world more clearly and fully. Yet the dangers of Reason is a matter we must ponder carefully as we study the critical ideas of Yvor Winters and his case against Romanticism.

Literary Structure: Mix up the Lines and What Do You Get?

In a recent interview with Brit writer John Humphrys (the article is entitled “We will soon be lost for words”) in the Telegraph (UK) regarding Humphrys’s new book on language (which laments the death of social decorum and the humorous dumbing-down of classic texts), there came up a suggestive little story about modern art:

Whether or not we still have a firm grasp on the meaning of the word art was a question raised recently by the sculptor David Hensel. He made a piece, called “One Day Closer to Paradise,” of a human head frozen in laughter and balancing precariously on a slate plinth. He submitted it to the Royal Academy for its 2006 exhibition, but somehow the head and the plinth were separated in transit. Nonetheless, the academy accepted his submission and displayed it. The strange thing was, though, that they thought the plinth was the work of art, not the head, which was nowhere to be seen. As he put it ruefully: "I've seen the funny side but I've also seen the philosophical side."

Ain’t that just like so much modern art, poetry and novels inclusive? It doesn’t seem strange to me that the curators of the exhibit were confused, if confusion correctly describes their mental state. Rather, their decision seems almost inevitable in the modern age of haphazard art (which may be characterized as what the poet Joan Houlihan who writes for Boston Comment calls “post-avant, spat-up-by-a-spam-filter poems”). This story reflects a similar complaint that Winters made about modern poetry and fiction from time to time, even about older poetry, such as from what he thought of as the breakdown of English verse technique after, roughly, the time of Milton. He cringed over poems that were so written that the poets could put their elements in just about any order and come up with pretty much the same thing. Of course, Winters excoriated Ezra Pound repeatedly for a similar structural principle, which Winters called that of association, or, earlier in his career, qualitative progression.

One of Winters’s examples of this sort of structural failure or defect, an affair nowadays almost entirely forgotten, concerns a mix up in a famous Henry James novel, which Winters discussed in the essay “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature”, originally published in the Hudson Review in 1951. The problem was the transposition of two chapters of James’s The Ambassadors, which a student of Winters’s had discovered and wrote about (I heard from this fellow via email recently, by the by). Because of the “diffuseness and obscurity of the prose”, as Winters described James’s writing in that late novel, the transposition was not discovered for many years and the error repeated in a number of editions of the novel, which, so it is said, James considered his finest work. Winters concludes his consideration of the matter with an incisive summary of what the case of this unintended and long unnoticed transposition reveals: “[The] point [is] that the error should not have occurred, that, once it had occurred, it should have been not so hard to detect, and, if it was so hard to detect, that there was a flaw in the author’s method.” We could distill a rough Wintersian principle from this: if the parts of a work can be put in many different orders then something is seriously wrong.

Much of modern writing, of course, is written much like that head-on-slate sculpture was made, a jumble of impressions, which can usually be put in just about any order or configuration. Parts of modern poems and novels and short stories can almost always be left out or switched around, accidentally or not, without anyone even noticing -- which, I might add, works with Ezra Pound’s Cantos quite well. You can read Pound’s lines or groups of lines in any of dozens of orders. In general, Winters believed that the finest poetry and literature should be structurally sound, in the sense of the New Criticism (with various qualifications that apply to Winters’s criticism alone) -- that not a word could be changed, moved, or cut without some loss or damage to the work. Yet further, in Winters’s mind, the finest works of literature were those structured according to principles of Reason, or "rational progression," as we might call it, as defined and discussed throughout his critical career.

Hey, just for fun, I decided to try mixing up one of Pound’s Cantos, followed by a link to the actual Canto (I’ll admit that I changed a few punctuation marks to keep some kind of sense):

Canto XLIX: For the Seven Lakes

Behind hill the monk's bell
borne on the wind.
Sail passed here in April; may
return in October,
Sun blaze alone on the river;
Boat fades in silver; slowly.

Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes
a blurr above ripples; and through it
sharp long spikes of the cinnamon, against sunset

Evening is like a curtain of cloud.
A cold tune amid reeds,
Where wine flag catches the sunset
Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light

Comes then snow scur on the river,
Small boat floats like a lanthorn,
And a world is covered with jade
The flowing water closets as with cold. And at San Yin
The reeds are heavy; bent;
they are a people of leisure.

JITSU GETSU K O K W A
K E I M E N R A N K E I
T A N FUKU T A N K A I
K I U M A N M A N K E I

The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.
Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,
Clouds gather about the hole of the window and the
bamboos speak as if weeping.
Broad water; geese line out with the autumn
Heavy rain in the twilight, fire from frozen cloud.

Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Rooks clatter over the fishermen's lanthorns,
For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.

In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes.
A light moves on the South sky line,
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.
A light moves on the north sky line;
Imperial power is? and to us what is it?

State by creating riches should thereby get into debt?
Sun up; worksundown; to rest;
dig well and drink of the water.
This is infamy; this is Geryon.

This canal goes still to TenShi.
Though the old king built it for pleasure,
dig field; eat of the grain.

Here’s where you can read the actual Canto:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/canto-xlix-for-the-seven-lakes/

In a response to a previous blog entry, a fellow with the blogger handle Shawn R offered some sound insights into why narrative literature is often more readable than poetry nowadays (and throughout the last century or so):

I wonder if literature, by nature, is forced to be less obscurantist because most often it is telling a story that must be intelligible for the reader. Readers of prose are a bit hard nosed in their demand to comprehend the tale. On the other hand, it does seem to me that people in general have accepted the vision of the romantic poet who pours out his self-expression in words and allusions only the poet himself clearly understands.

It is obvious that we have become gradually more accepting of obscurity in poetry to an inordinate degree. There’s an understatement for you! Actually, it has become a common expectation that the poet be obscure. This is a leading reason, I think, poetry has receded so far as an influential form of literature in our time. People just don’t have time to figure out what purpose modern poems have, and if and when they do figure one out, it seldom adds up to much beyond a vague, disordered expression of the poet’s state of mind. That’s usually how I find much contemporary poetry, too, someone who loves poetry. Many of the poets Winters considered great are certainly difficult, but for other reasons than their obscurantist, associative style.

I keep knocking Pound, but he could write some moving lines, as Winters believed as well. Here’s a selection from the Pisan Cantos that is one of the few famous passages from that woolly work and has stayed in my mind a long time:

From Pisan Canto LXXXI

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well
shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is
thy true heritage
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee

This fragment from a generally messy Canto is a sweet, comforting sentiment, an exploration of one consolation for the “hellish” aspects of life, though it’s quite sentimental in its way, as well as a bit flabbily and loosely expressed -- and even trades, as is common with Pound, in a few unneeded obscurities and quizzical turns of phrase. It’s not even quite poetry, as I define it, but rather a lyrical, cadenced prose. But this “prosetry” sticks with me, rings true as an expression of a simple human hope. There’s not a whole lot to it, but there’s something. The Canto as a whole is a turgid, insufferably narcissistic, rambling, and aimless meditation on Pound’s ideas about his art (which the passage I have cited apparently refers to in specific), a subject I, frankly, have almost no interest in even if it might be worth the time and effort it could take to figure out what Pound is saying about it.

Compare that snippet from Pound with Robert Bridges’s deeply moving and highly intellectual poem, “The Affliction of Richard,” which contemplates one specific kind of consolation, the solace of religious belief, which has a long, vital, and important history in Western culture. Winters drew our attention to this poem many decades ago, and the poem is part of the Winters Canon (though I judge it to be greater than even Winters allowed). Also, I should pause here to note, John Fraser chose it for his New Book of Verse:

“The Affliction of Richard”

Love not too much. But how,
When thou hast made me such,
And dost thy gifts bestow,
How can I love too much?

Though I must fear to lose,
And drown my joy in care,
With all its thorns I choose
The path of love and prayer.

Though thou, I know not why,
Didst kill my childish trust,
That breach with toil did I
Repair, because I must:

And spite of frighting schemes,
With which the fiends of Hell
Blaspheme thee in my dreams,
So far I have hoped well.

But what the heavenly key,
What marvel in me wrought
Shall quite exculpate thee,
I have no shadow of thought.

What am I that complain?
The love, from which began
My question sad and vain,
Justifies thee to man.

Bridge’s depth of insight and the power of his exploration of the theme is highly meaningful and deeply moving. This poem, to be blunt, has so much more to offer than Pound’s flabby, foggy lines. Bridge’s is a poem to ponder with all one’s faculties for a lifetime, whether one stands in belief or unbelief or doubt. Pound’s lines are a vaguely moving, quickly passing nicety.

N. Scott Momaday Reviews in the Times

One-time Yvor Winters student and longtime writer of the greatest interest to almost all Wintersians, N. Scott Momaday, has published a review of a new book about Kit Carson in the New York Times Book Review. Momaday himself was featured in the Review's "Up Front" blurb. Mr. Momaday says a couple very interesting things about Yvor Winters. Here's the entire section from the Times:

Up Front

By THE EDITORS Published: October 29, 2006
When N. Scott Momaday was named a Unesco artist for peace in 2004, he was praised for his dedication to “the safeguarding of indigenous cultures.” Momaday, who reviews Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder, refers to the deprivation of American Indians’ land as “the theft of the sacred.” In an e-mail message, he elaborated: “The Indian considers the land to be possessed of spirit, and his identity is bound up in it. ‘Manifest Destiny’ implies that the land can and must be appropriated for the sake of expansion, empire building, profit. It is an enterprise without spirit, and not only Indians have suffered from its unchecked pursuit.”

Momaday, who has been called “the dean of American Indian writers,” said that Indian writing “has come into the mainstream of American letters. I have stated that American literature begins, not with the Puritans in New England, but with an anonymous man or woman incising an image on a canyon wall in Utah 2,000 years ago.” He counts among his influences “the style and rhythms of American Indian oral tradition (given to me first by my father); the example of several writers I admire, among them Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Isak Dinesen and Herman Melville; and Yvor Winters” — the critic was Momaday’s dissertation adviser at Stanford — “who introduced me to several important writers I did not know, and who taught me much of what I know about traditional forms of English poetry. My mother taught me to read and write. I cannot begin to estimate the value of that influence.”

Momaday has ever been wonderfully munificent in his praise for the art and thought of Yvor Winters, which, coming from a writer of such distinction, is alone enough in my estimation to demand that Winters's ideas and work be taken more seriously in literary culture. Among Wintersians, both Momaday's poetry and his fiction are held in nearly the highest regard. I highly recommend House Made of Dawn, a superb novel, and The Way to Rainy Mountain, a lyrical prose chronicle of the Kiowa of innovative form and style yet deep, quiet power. Comparisons of Rainy Mountain with Janet Lewis Winters's The Invasion can yield many insights into the meaning of the experience of Native Americans in American history. For more on Mr. Momaday, search on his name on google. He's well worth looking into. By the way, Lewis's superb Invasion from 1932 remains in print, through Michigan State University Press, the institution where I happen to work nine months of the year. I highly recommend that you pick up a copy before it goes out of print again (I own four copies). Yes, my friends, I hope to talk a great deal about Janet Lewis as this blog trundles on.

Charismatic Professors

Still on-line is a superb review article, "The Nutty Professors," concerning a new book, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, by William Clark, an academic historian from both American and European universities. The article, by Anthony Grafton, was published in the 10/23 edition of The New Yorker. This is just a quick note not to miss this article before it goes off-line or you throw away your print copy:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061023crbo_books

The review is full of interesting anecdotes about superstar professors from the nearly forgotten past and fascinating ideas about the ways and means of what Clark calls academic charisma. I think the whole subject is especially pertinent to the study of the career of Yvor Winters, a professor who had something "nutty" about him, even in the eyes of those who appreciate his art and thought deeply, and who so enjoyed disputation, so suffered the flabbergasted, repulsed scorn of academia, and so gloried in his bullheaded rebelliousness. It appears fairly clear to me that much in this history of the lure of "star" professors has direct bearing on the professor, poet, and man that Yvor Winters would become. I might offer some comments on passages from this article in the near future.

Best Novel Lists and Winters's Three Great Novelists

There was a bit of fanfare in the New York Times for A.O. Scott’s article about the Best Book of the Past 25 years (best novel, that is), which appeared over the summer in the Times (search on google for the article if you wish to see it all). Though Winters was much decried among the “High-Cult” critics of his day for having stubbornly insisted on the practice of ranking and rating poems -– and, worse, for setting out what appeared to be a new canon of poetry -- the ranking and rating of books, and the making of best-of lists of literature, has become a widespread practice in American literary culture, as least in the “Mid-Cult” publications (to use the terms Dwight Macdonald proposed a couple decades ago in a famous and highly useful essay on “levels” of artistic enculturation).

Scott points out in his article that there has long been a desire in American literary culture to identify the one greatest novel, the single magnificent work that gathers in or sums up or rises above all other novels, that achieves a status similar to that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Did this desire to isolate and coronate the “Great American Novel” play some kind of role in Winters’s thinking as he strove throughout his career to discover and champion the very best works of literature, that is, those very few works he wished to designate as “great”? That is worth pondering. I think it might have.

Here’s a long, interesting passage from the Scott article:

It is perhaps this babble and ruckus -- the polite word is diversity… the urge to isolate, in the midst of it all, a single, comprehensive masterpiece. E pluribus unum, as it were. We -- Americans, writers, American writers -- seem often to be a tribe of mavericks dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own coherence and adequacy -- even, you might say, of its own existence. Such anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books.

To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply -- or not really -- to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here [in the Times poll]. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject. They are -- the top five, in any case, in ascending order -–

American Pastoral, Philip Roth, with 7 votes
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian 8 votes and
Updike's four-in-one Rabbit Angstrom, 8 votes
Don DeLillo's Underworld, 11 votes
Toni Morrison's Beloved, 15 votes

The list of voters obviously was small (the Mid-Cult elite?), and they were all from that guild Macdonald would have called “Mid-Cult” (though some of these writers and critics surely aspire to being considered part of “High-Cult” or believe that they already are in or close to it). I think this list of “great” novels is worth thinking about for Wintersians. Not a one of those top-five novels (considering the 4 Rabbit novels as one) achieves “greatness” in my judgment, in what I understand to be Yvor Winters’s sense of the term: a work of such distinction and near artistic perfection that it can serve as a model by which to judge all other works of narrative literature. It would be interesting to hear what Wintersians think of these novels and what they would propose as their own greats in fiction from the last 25 years, if any -- or greats of all time in American literature, for that matter. Choosing the great novels, in Winters’s sense of “great”, is a worthy project for the near future, a much-needed way to build upon Yvor Winters’s critical work, now that he has been gone for so long (he died in January, 1968).

The Times’ list of recent eminent novels calls to mind Winters’s relatively unknown judgment of the greatest novelists, a subject which he had little to say about in his published criticism. Turner Cassity, poet, professor and one-time Winters student at Stanford, reported briefly on Winters’s judgment of the greats of narrative literature in his reminiscence of Winters published in the excellent 1981 Yvor Winters issue of the Southern Review, edited by Donald Stanford. Cassity recalled that Winters told a student, who had asked him who he thought are the “great” novelists, that Cervantes, Melville, and Proust are the three greatest novelists. Does anything listed in the Times top-five come close to the finest work of these three?

Note, however -- in contrast to Winters’s commonly bewilderingly eccentric evaluations of individual poems and poets (which garnered him so much scorn in literary culture) -- that there is nothing the least peculiar in the choice of those three writers. They all now rank high in the Standard Canon, though Melville was not highly regarded until about 70 years after Moby Dick was published and Proust is a modern who started high and has been on the rise for the past 50 years. Cervantes’s Don Quixote recently made the very top spot, Number 1, in a list of the greatest literary works of the millennium (I can’t recall off hand where that was published or who was involved in the selection). Melville inspires practically a churning literary industry of his own in the US, though Britain and Europe are beginning to catch Melville fever, too. And Proust is generally regarded, alongside only Joyce, as the world’s greatest novelist of modern times, with dozens of books being written about his seven-part A la recherche every year.

There’s something a little disappointing in Winters’s judgment of the great novelists for me. Isn’t one of the chief joys of reading Winters the making of discoveries? Who can forget, if one is a Wintersian, those great lost works Winters guided us to, such as to that first reading of Ben Jonson’s long neglected “To Heaven”; or to Herbert’s astonishing and mostly forgotten “Church Monuments”; or to the haunting power of Stevens’s late poem “The Course of a Particular”; or the depth and brilliance of Tuckerman’s “The Cricket,” which was almost wholly lost to oblivion? All those great, truly great poems that the keepers of the Standard Canon entirely missed! That was one of the great joys of first reading Winters, those moments of discovery that came like bolts of illumination from some other realm, some higher plane that Winters alone seemed able to reach and traverse.

But there is little to be discovered in the threesome Winters chose as the greatest in narrative literature (though Winters did make a couple of stunning discoveries in prose literature, a subject which I will come back to in the near future in this blog). Winters, apparently (judging from how Cassity tells the story), was sure that there was something daring or extraordinary in his choice of these three greats, for he added to the student, according to Cassity, “And what do you think of THAT!” Well, nowadays, there is little in his judgment that is surprising at all.

As I say, the work of Winters in redefining the canon according to the principles of Reason should continue in the area of narrative literature. I would be pleased to see this blog begin that work. To what bolt-of-lightning discoveries can the Wintersians lead each other? I wait and hope.

Hart Crane and Connotation

Hilton Als, in his New Yorker review of the new edition of Hart Crane’s poems for the Library of America, quotes a famed passages in the history of English literary theory. The general ideas expressed in the quote that follows, ideas not original with Hart Crane, certainly, but which found a passionate champion in him, have now covered the literary culture as the waters cover the sea:

[A reply to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe] has become a key document of poetic modernism. Crane admitted that he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness... than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.” What Monroe saw as nonsense Crane insisted was a higher kind of sense. He wrote, “The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority.”

Do you not hear a lot of Mallarme in those words from Crane, as well as Winters’s incisive and valuable discussion of Mallarme in Primitivism and Decadence? (I should note in passing that Mallarme’s poetry has enjoyed a resurgence of interest of late as well. Search on google on Mallarme and you will find plenty of new commentary on his work. One article that was particularly insightful, from a couple years ago, was John Simon’s review in The New Criterion of a new edition of Mallarme’s poems. I think that’s still available on line.)

As a Wintersian, how might one reply to Crane? Here is how I would: A poet has the “right” to do anything he damn well pleases. A poet can write gibberish in dog doo for all poetry has to do with any concept of “rights.” A poet, too, can take as many liberties as he likes, throw away all conventions, abandon all principles; he has the “authority” to write in any way he might please. But though the poet can write as he pleases, the reader or the critic, especially the Wintersian, is not bound to approve or sanction, canonize or even publish, anything a poet writes with an intense emphasis on connotation.

As I have already written in this blog, I fail to understand what the hubbub about Hart Crane’s poetry is about. In fact, I fail to find this fascination in literary culture with loosey-goosey connotation to be mostly tiresome. Crane has a way of writing with great verve and breathless excitement and –- what shall I call it? -- mythic exuberance. But what he has to say, in my judgment, amounts to a thimble-full of understanding in a two-inch-deep puddle of emotions. For the furious emotions Crane expresses and evokes in his poetry, through his overemphasis on connotation, for me always immediately lose almost all their force when I lift my eyes from the page. The reason is that they are almost entirely unmoored to any motivating concepts, any experiences outside the fizzing of his own brain cells. He often writes like a madman, feeling emotions that are wildly out of proportion to anything that’s really going on around him -- in a way that seems similar to some forms of mentally illness. Reading Crane is much like trying to find one’s way in a forest by the intermittent light of fireworks going off in the sky above (to reuse a wonderful analogy of Dick Davis’s from a 2003 Wintersian essay in The New Criterion).

The Crane quote brought to mind Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, a book which seems to have influenced Yvor Winters quite deeply, especially early in his career. In reading Crane’s declaration again, I thought of a small passage from the chapter “Romantic Irony” that has always stuck with me:

The romanticist is constantly yielding to the “spell” of this or the “lure” of that, of the “call” of some other thing. But when the wonder and strangeness that he is chasing are overtaken, they at once cease to be wondrous and strange, while the gleam is already dancing over some other object on the distant horizon. For nothing is in itself romantic, it is only imagining that makes it so. Romanticism is the pursuit of the element of illusion in things for its own sake; it is in short the cherishing of glamour. The word glamour introduced into literary usage from popular Scotch usage by Walter Scott itself illustrates this tendency. Traced etymologically, it turns out to be the same word as grammar. In an illiterate age, to know how to write at all; was a weird and magical accomplishment, but in an educated age, nothing is so directly unromantic, so lacking glamour, as grammar.

For Crane, as for so many writers in modern times, the disciplines of Reason lost their gleam, their romantic allure.

But as always, I would be happy to hear from others on Crane’s work in light of Winters’s discussions of it.

New Edition of Hart Crane's Poetry

A Library of America edition of the poetry (and letters) of Hart Crane was released recently, an event which has given rise to a number of reviews and essays about Crane in major American magazines and journals. Some of these essays have mentioned Yvor Winters, in regard to perhaps the most famous role he has played in American literary history so far: his friendship with Hart Crane. The New Yorker review of the new edition of the poems, by Hilton Als, is well worth reading and mentions Winters several times, and without rancor or condemnation (thankfully!). Als offers some valuable insights into the poetry of Crane. The essay can be found at:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061009crbo_books1

Here’s a few quotations from Als’s review, with some comments from me:

The interpretation of Crane’s life as a dire fable of the age has shaped his reputation ever since. Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, two of his best friends and two of the best critics of modern American poetry [Comment: there’s a wonderful endorsement of Winters coming from the finest and most important magazine in US literary culture], saw his story primarily as a warning. For Winters, he was a noble spirit destroyed by false principles, “a saint of the wrong religion”; for Tate, his poetry had “incalculable moral value,” but mainly because “it reveals our defects in their extremity.”

Comment: I have trouble seeing the incalculable moral value of Crane’s poetry, though I do see that he could turn a string of magnificent phrases at times. Indeed, I see little moral value in his work at all. To be honest, I consider his poetry of little value in any area of life, though it does have its incidental pleasures, the grandiloquent mythical effusiveness of it. But I cannot think of one Crane poem that has given me any deep insight into any significant human experience, not even the love poem Winters praised so highly as Crane’s finest work, “Voyages II.” Further, I’ve never read a commentary on Crane’s poetry, including Als’s smattering of comments on the importance of Crane’s work, that gave me any clear indication of what readers find to be so valuable in Crane. I’d be interested in the opinions of my readers on what they find significant in Crane’s poetry.

At last, however, Crane has been given a place, the most unassailable one in American letters: a volume of his own in the Library of America. Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, edited by Hammer, can be seen as a conclusion to the long debate over Crane’s stature. Still, the question of what Hart Crane “stands for” in American literature is difficult to answer. His work resists the complacency of canonization, blazing with qualities that are the opposite of classical: precocity, obscurity, and verbal recklessness.

Comment: I have read a study of Crane, in contrast to this last claim of Als’s, that argues that Crane’s work stands in the classical tradition, a modern flowering of English Renaissance verse, principally Shakespearean verse. I think, however, that the last three nouns in that passage accurately summarize the character of Crane’s poetry and are the reason I do not rate it highly and do not get much from reading it. I notice that John Fraser chose a couple Crane poems for his New Book of Verse, a matter I shall return to some time later as I continue to evaluate Fraser’s choices for that highly important anthology. Winters certainly praised a couple of Crane’s poems in the loftiest language, even to the degree of calling “Voyages II” nearly perfect. I will need to come back to that matter, I think. After years pondering the matter, I do not think Crane’s work deserves praise anywhere near so high.

Many twentieth-century poets were heavy drinkers, but Crane was almost unique in preferring to write while he was actually drunk.

Comment: This has become a commonplace of Crane biographers, to go into details about his alcoholism and his personal difficulties, particularly with his parents. I wonder how much more booze -- and his psychological defects and social troubles, particularly with the apparent homophobia he faced -- had to do with his suicide than his Whitmanian beliefs about the value of intuition or impulse, which Winters so forcefully argued was the principal cause of his suicide (the argument is found in “The Significance of the Bridge, or What Are We to Think of Professor X” from In Defense of Reason). I tend to think, after much reflection on the matter, that Crane was probably driven to suicide, in significant part, by demon rum and the incidental cruelties of homophobia, rather than his hyper-Romanticism. Does this invalidate Winters’s argument? That’s something to ponder. I think it likely that Winters’s case is not as strong as it once seemed to me.

I believe I will have more to offer on Als’s essay.

More on Dickinson’s Spider

After thinking about the Emily Dickinson poem I quoted in my last blog entry, I came to the conclusion that though it is not a great poem, it is at the least not marred by Dickinson’s worst mannerisms, as Winters discussed at length in his essay on her in Maule’s Curse (In Defense of Reason). This poem employs a steady diction and a cool, sharp style that is close to her best work in her great poems. Thinking about these things brought to mind Dick Davis’s recent essay “Poetry, A Prognosis” from a 2003 number of The New Criterion:

I think it’s a fair bet that if you asked most people on this side of the Atlantic who claim to enjoy reading poetry who their favorite pre-twentieth-century English language poets are, they’d say “Donne and Emily Dickinson”: on the other side of the Atlantic the odds are they’d say “Donne and Hopkins.” Much as I like a lot of the verse of Donne, and a fair amount of Dickinson, and even a bit (a very little bit) of Hopkins, I think this indicates where the trouble with modern poetry lies. All three are eccentrics: their poems are hard to comprehend and seem to stand in need of explication, though their habitually excited tone makes even the uninitiated feel that some kind of genuine feeling must be there, even if we can’t quite paraphrase it; and their technique is to some extent both experimental and sui generis. They’re odd-balls, whose verses can be hard to paraphrase...

Does this seem true, too true, David's points about the attractiveness of eccentrics, to those who can be called Wintersians? (Judging from my casual surveys of literary culture over the past 25 years, the diversity of opinion in the world of poetry [and every area of human endeavor] is so astonishing that I don’t think there is any generalization one could make about people who like poetry. People “who claim to enjoy reading poetry” appear to come in every imaginable variety.) Davis has written some trenchant pieces studying what is happening in and to contemporary poetry. As Winters noticed so long ago (concerning a poet even as traditional as George Herbert), it is the eccentricities of poets that grab the attention of so many poets and readers of poetry. As part of the ascendancy of Romanticism across our literary culture, the writing and reading of poetry have become the pursuit of almost pure individuality, as shown, for example, in many poetry blogs on blogger.

How much does Dickinson’s little ditty on the spider exhibit the repeated eccentricities of her verse that remain in nearly unquestionable favor in our dominant literary culture? I think it winks at them, but it keeps its distance. Nonetheless, this poem is more obscure than it should be because, it appears, she chose not to say exactly what she means and adjust her tone properly to whatever it was she wished to say. Her once-unusual habit of playfully obfuscating her meaning has long become a common and highly praised practice of modern poetry, a matter which Winters discussed extensively in Primitivism and Decadence back in 1937.

Spider Webs and Winters

I was cruising among the poems of Emily Dickinson recently when I came across one that could aptly describe the literary world’s treatment of Yvor Winters. The poem is from the Collected Poems, as published in 1924 (an edition that Winters strongly supported, by the way -- he hated all those dashes used in another popular edition that can be found everywhere). The poem comes from “Part Two: Nature”:

XCV

The spider as an artist
Has never been employed
Though his surpassing merit
Is freely certified

By every broom and Bridget
Throughout a Christian land.
Neglected son of genius,
I take thee by the hand.

Surely, as always in this wide world of boundless opinion and endless disagreement, there are many who would contest that the spider’s artistic merit is freely certified, if I understand Dickinson aright -- that is, that the beauty of a spider web is obvious to anyone and everyone. Putting aside that nettlesome question, I think the poem describes acutely what I and some few others have done with Winters, an artist and thinker of obvious and neglected genius who long ago was swept from just about every wall by brooms throughout the land. Still, two new and very fine editions of selected Winters poems have come out just in the past three years, R.L. Barth’s and the late Thom Gunn’s. How many readers have “employed” them? I wonder. That might be too discouraging to take the trouble to find out.

But let me change the subject a bit. Because I am not especially well studied in Dickinson, I can only speculate that this poem hints that it is concerned with the problem of evil. It might be that it is almost impossible nowadays for someone reasonably well educated to read this poem without thinking of Robert Frost’s later and much more famous spider poem, which directly concerns the problem of natural evil. Was Dickinson being ironic in this poem, pointing out the beauty of webs that are used to kill? In light of her many other poems on death and evil and the woes of human life, and in light of that reference to a “Christian land,” I can only conjecture. If this irony exists, then how should the final line be construed? That she embraces or accepts and allies herself with death, or evil, in some fashion? Is this comparable to Winters’s brand of stoicism?

John Carey's "What Good Are the Arts?"

Debate has been whirling in cyberspace about a recent book by the reportedly well-known British critic and Oxford don John Carey, What Good Are the Arts? The New Criterion recently published Anthony Daniels’s review of the book,

(found at http://www.newcriterion.com/archives/25/10/higher-destruction),

which finds itself jumbled in an already large pile of reviews on the web. Search on google on the book’s title and author and you’ll find plenty more reflection on Carey’s book. I have skimmed it myself and a number of the reviews besides the New Criterion review. The book contains discussions of critical matters that are of importance to Wintersians, since Carey is out to debunk every attempt at a definition of art and all ways of evaluating art. The first half of the book does the debunking, though the second half, quite strangely and inconsistently, abruptly offers up a peaen to literature.

Carey conducts his snide attack on all answers to the question raised in his title with a consideration of a number of sub-questions: What Is a Work of Art? Is High Art Superior? Can Science Help? Do the Arts Make Us Better? Can Art Be a Religion? Summarizing, he answers thus (with cantankerous bravado -- and elegance and wit, too):

1. Anything (yes, ANYTHING!) can be a work of art.
2. No, science doesn’t help (despite the efforts of recent critics to work up a evolutionary theory of art).
3. High art is not superior by any measure to low art.
4. Arts do not make us better, except in some minor, restricted conditions.
5. Art cannot be a religion.

One might wonder how this author can rationally and consistently answer questions 2-5 after having so answered question 1, since he mindlessly pitches away any means by which to argue about evaluating art, assessing its effectiveness, or studying its spiritual meanings when he denies to art -- and any particular art or work of art -- any definition, purpose, or meaning (or, as Winters would say, any final cause). Does the answer to question 1 make the rest of this book futile? Nearly, perhaps.

It’s probably not very difficult for anyone acquainted with the critical work of Yvor Winters to imagine what his take on Carey’s answers to these questions most probably would be. Carey’s answer to question 1 would, in my view, unquestionably befuddle and perhaps enrage Winters. Carey’s problem, it seems to me, remains the same as the problem R.S. Crane and Cleanthe Brooks faced in their criticism, as Winters discussed so eruditely in “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” (republished in The Function of Criticism) 50 years ago. Carey’s incomprehension of what art is arises from his refusal or inability to define art’s final cause. Here’s how Winters puts it about Brooks and Crane:

If we are to have any kind of critical guidance, we shall have to have some kind of critical method or methods that are really applicable to the business in hand. If we are to have any kind of critical method, we shall have to understand two topics with more or less clarity: the potentialities of different kinds of subject matter and the potentialities of various literary forms. Any understanding of these topics, in turn, will depend upon our view of the purpose, or final cause, of literature. In general, our critics have been afraid to commit themselves to any theory of a final cause, or if they suggest one have been afraid to state it clearly and to endeavor to implement it, and thus have been crippled from the start.

Similarly, Carey unwittingly cripples himself from the start. How can he offer us any theoretical insight into art or the art of literature when he cannot see that any study of art or any specific art begins with a definition of its final cause?

(This problem, by the way, appears also to trouble John Fraser, though no doubt less deeply, in his nebulous and elusive attempt to say in his Introduction to his New Book of Verse what he’s up to with the selection of poems for that anthology. Even a critic as well read in Yvor Winters as Fraser appears to have been unable to bring himself to say just what he conceives the final cause of poetry to be, a conception which would enable us to better evaluate the important anthology he has published.)

In part two, Carey blithely tosses aside everything he has said in part one, almost as though the second part was written at some other time and he wholly forgot what he said in the first part. The work of debunking evaporating like a thin mist on a sunny morning, in part two Carey makes a modest case for the advantages of literature over the other arts, implying that one of the arts, at least, is good for something.

Perhaps we shall have occasion to discuss Carey more specifically again in this blog, if it seems to me that he has something to add to our ruminations on Winters’s thought. In the meantime, I think the book is worth looking into, if only to follow yet one more literary thinker to the dead end that much of postmodern criticism has reached, even at Oxford.

Fraser’s New Book of Verse and “Personal Selections”

I’ve been studying John Fraser’s New Book of Verse closely for the past few weeks (and, to repeat, will be commenting upon it from time to time in the months to come). Lately, I’ve been looking at one remark that I find to be contrary to my understanding of Yvor Winters’s purposes in publishing Quest for Reality, the anthology of the greatest poems in English that Ken Fields finished off in 1968. In this post, I’m going to focus on one sentence from Fraser’s lengthy introduction to his new online anthology and compare its ideas to Winters’s. Fraser writes:

…no single term (remarkable, interesting, great, distinguished, perfect, important, excellent, estimable, best) could in fact have covered the highly personal result [in which poems were selected for Winters’s anthology] or been helped by the addition of the qualifying phrase “some of the.”

Now, Fraser, often in this long introduction, I’ve noticed, is very careful not to say exactly what he means. He uses vague and roundabout phrasing that partially masks his meaning, and this quotation is another case of his odd and sometimes annoying circumlocutions. The first part of this sentence appears to mean that no generic term of high or highest praise can apply to the selection of poems Winters made for Quest (not even the rather tepid adjective “interesting” can be applied to them, in Fraser’s view, it appears). If that is what Fraser means, I wholly disagree. I believe it is quite clear, agree or disagree with the picks, that Winters selected most of the poems of Quest because he considered them “great” -- in his sense of the term, a sense that he hoped literary culture would adopt as its norm. (Exactly what the term “great” meant to Winters and whether any of us can or should agree to his definition, as well as whether we should agree to his judgments on which poems best match his definition, are matters we can discuss at length in this blog. I cover such issues in several entries of my book A Year with Yvor Winters http://www.msu.edu/user/kilpela/ywywint.htm).

In other earlier essays, Winters wrote something to the effect that many of very greatest poems that were to be chosen for Quest are “nearly perfect” or “as perfect as can be imagined.” A small percentage of the poems (10-15% perhaps) found their way into the anthology because Wnters considered them, though not great, supremely excellent and deserving of much more attention from poets and critics for one reason or another. This means to me that Fraser’s suggested terms of praise, “estimable,” “excellent,” and “important,” could all be applied to these very good poems that are slightly less than “great.”

To consider other possible meanings Fraser might have had for the first part of the quoted comment, we might think that the comment applies to himself, and if it does, then Fraser is welcome to his opinion that none of these words of praise can be applied to the poems of Quest. I disagree with his judgment, but if this is his opinion, I’m glad to know it. Another option is that we might construe that first clause to be speaking of us -- all readers, writers, and critics, as a consensus. But if this is what Fraser means, I must state my disagreement that such a consensus exists and that I belong to it. For I side with Winters against this implied consensus, if such Fraser intended to imply, that the poems of Quest cannot be called “great” or “estimable,” etc.

The second part of this sentence states that the result of Winters’s selection of the great poems is “highly personal.” Once again, I am not sure exactly what Fraser is driving at here, but if he means that Winters believed that the poems he had chosen were just his personal all-time favorites, I must wholly and strenuously disagree. Winters clearly believed that he objectively chose these poems as the greatest, as thoroughly as any critic can be objective. They were
certainly NOT in his view a mere personal selection of "best-loved" poems. He believed that the poems he judged as great and chose for Quest are great for all people at all times, not just for Yvor Winters at one period of his life (again, regardless of whether we agree or not). The idea that Winters made a “highly personal” selection for Quest is clearly antithetical to just about everything he taught and wrote about evaluating poetry. The anthology is far more than a personal choice of favorites. Winters believed, however hopelessly, that the future of literature and culture depended on critics and poets seeing how great these works are.

Finally, to consider other possibilities, Fraser’s second comment about the selection being highly personal” might refer only to Fraser’s own opinion of the picks for Quest, in which case Fraser means that the selection appears to himself as “highly personal.” Again, if this is so, he can believe as thinks best. But I don’t share this view and will remonstrate against it. Or Fraser might have meant that we as a consensus of readers and writers should now regard Winters’s selections as highly personal. I do not agree. They should NOT be so regarded. Winters demonstrated to my satisfaction that his selection of great poems was as objective as possible -- and the selection is compelling. Moreover, I agree on the choices, almost across the board.