The Birds Begin to Sing

Have you taken any interest in Roger Scruton's new book, Beauty, which came out with some fanfare last year? One short essay among several that were published to promote the book drew my attention some time back, the piece on the desecration of the beautiful in the City Journal (spring, 2009). I had wanted to write about this short essay when it came out, but was distracted by other matters. The piece was entitled "Beauty and Desecration: We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness."

It's a hard-nosed look at the desire of artists to "throw dirt" on everything normally considered beautiful in life and thought, past and present. Scruton exagerrates quite a bit about how much dirt is being thrown and how often it's being thrown, but he appears to have at least a somewhat valid point. As we all know, a number of avant-garde artists have taken to desecrating anything and everything they can get their paint on (to mention just one artistic medium getting rather dirty nowadays). Scruton's answer to the problem, since the human desire to sense beauty remains strong, is not to return to the masters of the past who cherished the truly beautiful, however that might be determined, but to look anew for beauty in our lives, at least the kinds of beauty Scruton thinks are truly beautiful.

I have my doubts about Scruton's idea, however, since as laid out in the essay, and the book itself, the idea plays right into the hands of the romanticism that led to the break down in traditional conceptions of beauty in the first place — that led to the desire to make everything new, to break apart every trustworthy and trusted convention, to show that everything people thought was beautiful is dying or dead. Such general topics came up frequently, if obliquely, in the criticism of Yvor Winters. But before we get to Winters, though, here's Scruton on the ordinary beauties that have become commonplace in criticism in our age:

At the same time, philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke, Adam Smith, and Kant recognized that we do not look on the world only with the eyes of science. Another attitude exists — one not of scientific inquiry but of disinterested contemplation — that we direct toward our world in search of its meaning. When we take this attitude, we set our interests aside; we are no longer occupied with the goals and projects that propel us through time; we are no longer engaged in explaining things or enhancing our power. We are letting the world present itself and taking comfort in its presentation. This is the origin of the experience of beauty. There may be no way of accounting for that experience as part of our ordinary search for power and knowledge. It may be impossible to assimilate it to the day-to-day uses of our faculties. But it is an experience that self-evidently exists, and it is of the greatest value to those who receive it.

When does this experience occur, and what does it mean? Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.

Is this not tripe? A band of sunlight "trembles there"? A bird "bursts into song"? Can a man as thoughtful and learned as Roger Scruton be serious? As nice and sweet as all this sounds, I believe that Winters would have thought Scruton's now commonplace distinction between concept and feeling, which arose from romanticism, too wide and sharp. Winters didn't think there is any unbrigeable chasm between sensing something to be beautiful and gaining insight into it, or even putting it to use (putting aside my longstanding puzzlement, which I have oft discussed, at why in our age critics and artists consider the usefulness of art so horrible). Winters seemed to combine thought and feeling nicely in his artworks and criticism, both of which are deeply powerful. Winters believed that the final cause of the literary arts is understanding, in what we now call a holistic sense — that is, embracing both concept and feeling, thought and emotion. (That is a "use," by the way, and I don't think there is anything the least ugly or dirty about being useful in such a manner.) Scruton's defense against dirt, as tremblingly admirable as it might appear on the surface, gives far too much ground to the romanticism that helped breed, in our late decadence, the desire to exalt ugliness, the unending obession with breaking all traditions, which Emerson, Winters's one-time bête noire, did so much to help make, in the early days of American culture, the shibboleth of modern culture.

Incongruously, the ugly dirt-throwing art often seems stronger as art than the trivial, trembling, mostly decorative "thereness" or "thisness" that recent poetry has sought to express. At least the dirt throwing is trying to say something, to help us understand some subject, rather then to wallow in trivial experiences like birds singing in trees and sun-rays falling. Winters was sharp on this point, once again in the long-ignored essay on John Crowe Ransom from In Defense of Reason. (Let me pause to note that this wonderfully insightful essay has occasioned almost no comment at all from other critics, even those directly engaged with or inspired by Winters, in the past 70 years).

At this point I must interrupt again [concerning Ransom's comment that Winters thought the only kind of poetic experience is ethical experience] to comment. I believe, to be sure, that ethical interest is the only poetic interest, for the reason that all poetry deals with one kind or another of human experience and is valuable in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates that experience; but I do not believe that a descriptive poem is negligible or off the real line of poetry. A descriptive poem deals with a certain kind of experience, an extremely simple kind, but one of real value; namely, the contemplation of some fragment of the sensible universe. This is a moral experience, like any other, and the task of the poet is to evaluate it for what it is worth.

Roger Scruton believes that artists should once again adopt the goal of art as pure descriptive beauty (in his manifestly shallow sense). But this idea has slowly wrought the damage that has led to the greater and greater loss of beauty in the literary arts, down to the dirt-throwing desecrations of the present age, as ever more artists have refused to seek understanding as the final cause of their art — the evaluation of experience, as Yvor Winters put it.

Nonetheless, Scruton's piece is worth reading. What is the role of beauty in a classical, moral theory of art as Yvor Winters roughly sketched it in his criticism? Winters didn't have enough to say on that important topic — in fact, he sometimes irritably dismissed the whole matter, as in the opening paragraphs of the "Preliminary Statement" to Forms of Discovery. I believe that the subject of beauty, however, needs much deeper study among classicists as the field of aesthetics has become prominent once again.

Sloppy?

Late last year. Calvin Tompkins in the New Yorker. Sub-heading to an article about an artist:

"Urs Fischer's Inspired Sloppiness"

That could almost be a classicist's definition of the modern arts, from fiction to painting to sculpture to a lot of High-Cult music and, of course, obviously, to poetry -- even much of the so-called New Formalist poetry. The difference is that the classicist, and the Wintersian, sees the sloppiness as simply no more than that, sloppy, plain and simple -- that is, UNinspired sloppiness. (The photo is a shot of one of Urs Fischer's paintings at a recent gallery show somewhere.)

Yvor Winters had a good deal to say on what we could call sloppiness in his essay "John Crowe Ransom, or Thunder Without God" in In Defense of Reason. One interesting discussion that relates to the modern insistence on sloppiness comes in Part IX of that essay, "Meter and the Theory of Irrelevance." At one point in the discussion of a quotation from Ransom about "roughening" meter, which is, so Ransom said, pretty much pointless anyway, Winters enjoys himself poking at Ransom's ideas:

There is no relationship, then [in Ransom's theory], between meter and meaning; the meter, like the meaning, goes its own way, gathering irrelevancies to itself; but the two cooperate to this extent, that in interfering with each other they increase the irrelevancies of the total poem. Ransom at no point explains why we take pleasure in the irrelevancies of meter; he merely states it as axiomatic that we do so. He nowhere suggests the romantic theory that meter is a form of music, arousing the feelings by pure sound: indeed, his theory precludes the possibility of such an idea, for if meter can do this it is expressive of something. Ransom apparently assumes that we take pleasure in metrical irregularities for their own sake, as we might take pleasure (if we were so constituted) in the bumps and holes in a concrete sidewalk. Since the meter has no relationship to any other aspect of the poem, it is easy to see that the writing of regular meter will be merely a mechanical task and beneath the dignity of a true poet, who will take pains to introduce roughness for the mere sake of roughness:

"It is not merely easy for a technician to write in smooth meters: it is perhaps easier than to write in rough ones, after he has once started; but when he has written smoothly, and contemplates his work, he is capable, actually, if he is a modern poet, of going over it laboriously and roughening it." (quoted from Ransom's book The World's Body, p. 12.)

Things seem to have changed little since Winters's wrote in the 1940s. Sloppy irrelevance remains the goal, it appears. Most of the contemporary poetry I read nowadays (I follow Poetry and the New Yorker, and "Poetry Daily" and "Verse Daily" on the web) is so obstinately casual, so averse to formality, that "sloppy" hardly characterizes its lack of structure. I just read a bunch of Seamus Heaney's new book of poetry Human Chain, which William Logan rather generously reviewed in the New York Times last week. Like much of his "mature" work, this latest stuff from Heaney is just plain sloppy from end to end, though a nicely turned phrase does emerge from time to time amid the slops. Not many, alas, but a few.

Kirsch's Curse

Adam Kirsch's short piece on Yvor Winters, which first appeared in the 2003 Poetry Issue of the New Criterion, was back in the lit-news last year, since it became one of the principal essays in his collection of criticism, The Modern Element, which hit the shelves late in 2009. There were a few reviews of the book, most of which can be easily found through a search engine. Several of the reviews considered Kirsch's piece on Winters fairly closely and treated it as though it stands at the heart of the collection. That essay, entitled "Winters' Curse," makes most of the common charges against Winters's criticism: it's too narrow, too nasty, too reactionary, far too hard on Romanticism. I have long wanted to go through the short piece paragraph by paragraph, since its charges are mostly misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Winters's work, but haven't yet found the time, though perhaps the rather short essay is more important than I think. It keeps coming up in google searches as one of the top essays on Winters, and, therefore, could cause a good deal of trouble.

On the other hand, Kirsch is strongly appreciative of some of what Winters thought and practiced, and for that I was relieved. Like many other critics, he considers Winters's understanding of form and poetic meter to be consummate and well worth attending to, and I certainly hope that many more readers will take Kirsch's implied advice. He also takes the insightful view that whether you approve the results of Romantic theories in literature, no one can help you understand those theories and what happened in modern literature as a result of Romanticism better than Winters. Amen! So what is the Winters Curse? To be so right in so few areas but so wrong in so many others.

But Kirsch himself misunderstands Winters in many ways. For now, let me just say that narrowness is hardly a fair objection, since being narrow was the whole point of Winters's criticism. If you are a standard critic who accepts the "Standard Canon," as I call that very rough consensus on the great works of literary art, there is no purpose in being narrow. For your defintion of the canon is as shapeless and unprincipled as the canon itself, a mass of works misnamed "classics" for no reason but that they have become accepted in the consensus. But if you are a critic who is seeking to substantially revise the canon, to get a new canon adopted (or even considered), why would you not be narrow? Indeed, you would have to be narrow to properly define why a new canon should be adopted and what should be in it, wouldn't you? Of course you would.

Further, as Kirsch just can't quite understand, Winters was seeking more than a new canon, but to define near perfection, greatness of an order far above the kind of work most poets and writers ever achieve. Naturally such a search would lead to what is perceived as narrowness.

Even further, why does anyone think that because Winters did not consider various poets to have written great poems that he did not think they were worth reading at all, that he thought that what they had written should never have been written? The implication is ludicrous. Winters himself read widely in poets that he considered less than great and many he considered downright bad. Though he failed to say it clearly enough, he didn't think there was a clear and wide distinction between the great (and very few) sheep of literary heaven versus the great mass of goats consigned to hell. There was no narrow gate for Winters. But he was trying to make a true canon, by which he meant not books that remain "fresh," as Pound said, but works that are truly supremely great.

Naturally, these would be few, for a true canon is a measure, the supreme standard by which we judge other works. He concentrated throughout his public critical career on these very best of the best — to the point of trying at the end of his life, as he faced death from cancer, to rewrite the literary history of English poetry by way of the poems he thought had achieved near perfection. But all along he failed to make clear that he wasn't trying to be a censor or an inquisitor (such analogies have been made against Winters by many hostile critics through the decades), but a critic trying to define and discover near perfection. That he would make mistakes seems inevitable. Even Winters thought so. Several times he confessed his own fears of being wrong in his bold judgments. But the narrowness arises from the work he set himself to. I applaud that work and think he was often right.

Amused by his alledged "narrowness," Kirsch laughs at Winters with his neat little analogy of Winters as King of his tiny literary Monaco. But that's exactly what a Wintersian should hope for, or at least what I'm hoping for: an enclave for modern classicism, as I have discussed on this blog a couple times (search on the word "enclave).

Now, as to this charge of "brutality," which Kirsch, like so many before him, levels at Winters: I must object again, briefly. The charge is simply biased against Winters. First, his disapproving comments on various poems and poets are hardly "brutal," an extreme word of moral judgement that simply does not match what he wrote. Second, I have read many a criticism of a literary work just as harsh and condemning as Winters's from authors and critics of every stripe, experimental, postmodern, traditionalist, etc. I have a book on my shelf, Literary Quotations, that contains a lengthy chapter of witty and cruel put-downs from all through the history of English literature (most of them from the past 100 years), many much harsher than anything Winters ever wrote. Some are so harsh that they could be considered libellous. And what, for example, of Mark Twain's endlessly repeated comment on the style of Fenimore Cooper? Somehow this does not make Twain in general "brutal." Why? Perhaps, simply, because modern critics agree with Twain (though I must pause to note that Winters found a lot to judge highly in Cooper, recounted in his wonderful essay on him in Maule's Curse, as republished in In Defense of Reason). Judging from my reading, it seems that someone is considered brutal when he happens to disagree with the popular mid-Cult critics of any time, with, that is, the hoary consensus. Therefore, it's time to put this nonsense about brutality to rest (as I have tried before).

I must end by praising Kirsch for questioning the achievement of John Ashbery, who has enjoyed perhaps the most ridiculously elevated career in the history of literature. That his poetry is considered poetry at all, let alone ever more often praised as the finest poetry of the 20th century in American literature, is cause for embarrassment — though, incredibly, unlike the fairy tale, our critical courtiers still cannot see that Emperor Ashbery has no clothes. Kirsch gingerly tries to justify his doubts about Ashbery's god-awful work, but if he had taken his own advice he could have made quick work of it. Winters explains where Ashbery came from in his various extended comments on Romanticism throughout his writings, but particularly in The Anatomy of Nonsense (third book in In Defense of Reason). I suppose every generation has its blind spots (to keep mixing the metaphors), though the love for Ashbery seems more like a full eclipse of literary sanity. Do I need to go through this? I hope not. But I think I do need to go through all that Adam Kirsch gets right and gets wrong about Yvor Winters some time, since, obviously, Winters is now being seen through his interpretive lens more often than almost any other.

The Origin of Lists

I've written a good deal about the concept of the canon and lists of great poems and books on this blog, since the whole topic gets short shrift among those who study Yvor Winters nowadays. (In fact, the matter gets no attention at all. For example, the dozen or so authors of the erudite and thoughtful essays in the valuable 1981 "Yvor Winters Issue" of the Southern Review, edited by Donald Stanford, made not one mention of the issue of the canon or of literary evaluation.) I enjoyed and found insightful an article in the Independent (UK) some months back, "The art of the chart: How we fell in love with ranking the world," on the modern history of making best-of lists. The author, a fellow named Boyd Tonkin, sees its origins in the still massively popular Guiness Books of World Records, which often to this day easily outsells the most popular thrillers, mysteries, and romance novels.

Yvor Winters clearly saw great value in making lists of the greatest literature, though he did not make it sufficiently clear what he was trying to accomplish with these lists. Most writers who study or write about his criticism — almost all academics of one sort of another — soft-pedal his lists, claiming with some embarrassment that they are made up of mere "favorites" of his (in the hope, I assume, that that will help make Winters a little more palatable). But I agree with Winters, as I understand him, that it's very important to make lists of the best, however much list-making has become trivialized in the past 40 or 50 years, however close it is coming to fatuity with all these books about the 500 or 1001 books one should read or movies one should see, or restaurants to hurry to, or theme parks to visit (and so on). Is my judgment that lists are important to the study of Winters related to this phenomenon? After all, I loved the Guiness Books when I was a kid (which came about at roughly the same time Winters was making his lists). It's an interesting matter to contemplate.

Tonkin opines that the current pop-culture (low-cult?) mania for making lists is a "dream of reason," the hunger to make order out of chaos. That could have been the purpose of the lists Winters made — and of those I have been making as well. But maybe it's much more than a dream, but a just application of reason in a world of numberless (and growing) ideas and opinions and positions on matters of every sort to say what we think is greatest and on what grounds we make our claim.

Empty Churches

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imagism of Early Winters

I have been reading and greatly enjoying Laureates and Heretics, the new book by Bob Archambeau, a student of one of Yvor Winters's last students in the mid-1960s (Archambeau now teaches at Lake Forest College in Illinois). In his chapter on Winters, as canon-heretic, Archambeau places a lot of emphasis on Winters's imagist poetry and poetic theories. Yet I don't quite see how Winters's imagist beginnings have much to do with his eventual attainment of the status of heretic, but I found the discussion tangentially insightful and helpful in a number of ways. Archambeau's main point, that Winters has been rejected from the canon because his mature poetic theories and practice were not consonant with the much more frequent practices and much more frequently espoused theories of the prominent poets and critics of his times (and are dissonant with our times as well) is enlightening, if, perhaps, rather obvious. In general, I have appreciated Archambeau's emphasis on literary canons and their making, though I think Archambeau makes a big mistake in not defining what a canon (or "the" canon) is -- or at least what he thinks it is or ought to be. I admit, though, his defintion of canon, which is crucial to the study of Yvor Winters and the whole matter of classicism (Archambeau calls it Augustanism) and so-called traditional verse in our times, might arise cumulatively in the course of the book. I might study parts of this book in more depth on this blog in the months to come.

Winters and His Last Students

Bob McLean sent me a note that Robert Archambeau has published a new book about Yvor Winters and some of his later students, Laureates and Heretics. Archambeau is the author of the "Samizdat" blog. The book studies the influence Winters had on several of the last graduate students he taught at Stanford University before he retired and died shortly thereafter in early 1968. Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck are the students, all of whom became poets -- one nearly famous, one well known, the others marginal. Hass and Pinsky served as Poet Laureates of the United States. The others have received much less recognition. None has been "canonized" (a term to debate endlessly, of course) as the amazom.com blurb says. Archambeau was a student of Matthais, if I recall correctly. The book's blurbs say it's about the "cultural politics" of literary and specifically poetic reputation in our times.

Frankly, I have never figured out why Archambeau is interested in Winters and seldom read Samizdat because of that. His blog doesn't seem to have any bend toward Wintersian classicism in any sense. Hass and Pinsky, as I have discussed quite a bit on this blog, have wandered far from classicism of any sort, and both have a tendency to misrepresent Winters's ideas to a greater or lesser degree. I have read the poetry of the other three and have found little of value in their writings. If anyone wishes to make a defense of their work, I am willing to listen and read again. I hope to get the book, but it sure is expensive.

Shhhh! Say As Little As You Can About Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Steele Poem

Though not forced to wear the shameful label of "Wintersian" -- like a scarlet W -- Timothy Steele has certainly drawn the attention of many Wintersians, such as the late Donald Stanford, who published a number of reviews and poems by Steele during Stanford's long years as co-editor of the Southern Review. (Steele's three books on prosody, by the way, are very learned and enlightening.) Steele has more frequently been thought as one of the "New Formalists," which, he has written, is a label that suits him well enough. I like his poetry and think well of it. But I can't say that any single poem has inspired me in some significant way, standing as some sort of monument worth reflecting upon often. The following poem, though, is one that keeps coming to mind for some pondering. I think it pays on close reading, on the act of critical contemplation.

The Library

Emerging through the automatic doors,
I feel the Santa Anas' gusting heat.
It's five o'clock. The grainy sunlight pours
Through eucaplyti whose peeled bark strips beat
The trunks to which they cling like feeble sleeves.
The campus lawns are eddyings of leaves
Viewed by day's milky, unassertive moon.
The sculpture garden has a recessed seat.
I take it, thinking of the afternoon.

And of the library. Cultural oasis?
Few would object to its conserving aims.
Still, tracking books by way of data bases,
I feel I'm playing Faustian video games.
And jotting notes down from computer screens,
I doubt our armories of ways and means:
Whether in books or trusted to a disc,
The written record may, as Plato claims,
Subvert and put our memory at risk.

Yet books consoled me when I was a child,
And seeing words and software joined and synced,
Even philosophers might be beguiled.
And if a relish verses nimbly linked,
Here flowing, there concluded with a twist,
It was Greek librarian-archivist
Who had an odd pedantic inspiration --
Make prose and poems textually distinct --
And first gave lyric measures lineation.

Banners on the Art Gallery's facade
Ripple and flap; in a collegial wrath,
Two birds dispute the rights to a carob pod;
A puffed-up brown bag somersaults a path
Where Rodin's Walker [ital] makes his headless stride.
Leaves spin up into coilings and subside.
This windy much-ado, arising from
The desert could well serve as epitaph
For Alexandria, Rome, Pergamum --

For all the ancient libaries whose collections
Have vanished in a mammoth wordless void.
And though I have the evening clouds' confections,
Thoughts of the art and science thus destroyed
Leave me a little empty and unnerved.
The consolation? Some things were preserved,
Technology now limits what is lost,
And learning, as it's presently deployed,
Is safe from any partial holocaust.

I could construct a weighty paradigm,
The Library as Mind. It's somehow truer
To recollect details of closing time.
Someone, as slotted folders on a viewer,
Tucks microfiche squares in their resting places;
Felt cloth's drawn over over the exhibit cases;
The jumbled New Book Shelves are set in shape;
The day's last check-outs are thumped quickly through a
Device that neutralizes tettle-tape.

And shelvers, wheeling booktrucks through the stacks,
Switch lights off at the ends of empty aisles;
Jaded computer terminals relax;
Above lit spaces of linoleum tiles,
The hitching-forward minute hands of clocks
Hold vigil still, but a custodian locks
The main door, and the last staff members go
Home to their private lives and private trials.
Still over us, the Santa Anas blow

The leaves about in rustling shifting mounds;
The long, rusty-colored needles pine trees shed
In broom-straw trios strew the walks and grounds;
Winding, as though along a corkscrew's thread,
A squirrel has circled down a sycamore.
The frail must, in fair times, collect and store,
And so, amid swirled papery debris,
The squirrel creeps, nosing round, compelled to hoard
By instinct, habit, and necessity.

The varying stanza form is one that could, and should, provide a model for our times. It is similar to the 10-line stanza Paul Valery used for a few good and great poems ("Palme" and "Ebauche d'un Serpent," for example); the rhyme scheme that varies yet remains similar stanza to stanza could give modern formalists who don't want to get too rigid quite a bit more freedom than the traditional poetic forms of English allow. (Loose rhyme schemes and metrical patterns appear to be a major need for modern formalist poets and could help turn a few poets from prosetry to poetry. For the bane of rigidity has been almost completely scorned in our times [though I am ever puzzled why even the word appears to elicit shrieks of horror], even among the New Formalists. I should write more about this, but I only have time to say that if it takes loose forms to get more a few more poets to write in some sort of credible poetic form, then bring on the loose forms. A little bit of form is better than none at all.) Steele's nine-line stanza is expressive and well worth imitating for anyone aspiring to write real poetry, not the almost mindless, slapdash prosetry that fills our journals and magazines. His iambic line is well turned, though some of the variations are too loose. His diction is casual, in the way of the New Formalists, who hold court in their small fief nowadays while imitating the prosetic musers who run the cultural kingdom at present.

As to theme and content, there is a lot in this poem, about the meaning of the intellectual life, about civilization, about the importance of poetry and reading, about books holding off the winds of destruction, while books themselves succumb to those same winds. (I was just reading in a history of the Jews in ancient times of a lost history written about Nero's and Vespasian's war against the Jews in AD 68-70 that was written in answer to Josephus's famed work on that same topic. It is crushingly sad that that work did not survive.) It makes me want to get over to the library and gather some nuts for the winter -- though I really don't need much encouragement to do that, summer or winter. The symbolism is strong and moving, almost Post-Symbolist, in Winters's definition, though it is really not much more than a plain analogy -- and there's not a thing wrong with that, I hasten to add. Some of the diction here is pure ornament, but most of this cake's icing is understated and well turned. Are these witty moments weaknesses, like the empty flashiness of a vibrantly decorative stylist like, say, John Updike? I would say that they are slight weaknesses in a good poem. But I dislike quibbling about something so good as this.

It's interesting that the poem is so thematically diffident. Right in the midst of the poem, Steele writes that he thought about writing of the analogy of the library as a place where, perhaps, "Mind" is fulfilled and preserved. But then he immediately sets any such grand theme aside for some further musings about leaves blowing about and squirrels gathering nuts. He seems as milky and unassertive as the moon of the first stanza. The turn away from the big theme seems emblematic of our age, when our poets feel, or seem to feel, a little shy of big ideas. Winters certainly had no such diffidence. The poems he thought greatest are all about big ideas, perhaps too big in some ways. (I think of those dense poems on subjects like "being" that Winters wrote, wrote about, and thought highly of.) Perhaps Steele, like many another writer, felt that he is simply not up to the task of speaking of something so profound as the "Mind" and consequently felt compelled to set his sights much lower, even though his premise led him to the brink of saying something big with his suggestive analogy. But these are for now mere reflections, things I will ponder in the years to come as I think of this poem.

Yvor Winters, if I were asked to make a guess, would not think all that highly of the poem's style. He would almost certainly consider large chunks of it "journalistic," which was a particularly damning adjective for him. This word seems to have meant to him "pedestrian," and much of Steele's writing in this poem is a touch -- in the dogged convention of our era -- pedestrian, perhaps arising in part from the diffidence I just mentioned, but perhaps arising too from the need to get published, since this sort of chatty writing reigns in our literary culture. As to Steele's ideas, Winters would probably have found them poorly developed and the poem as a whole structured rather sloppily. I would agree with that assessment to some degree. The poem is not great, perhaps 2 stars or so in my system. But it is worth taking time to contemplate. It is a bit of a musing ("take some interesting subject; look at it in several ways and from a bunch of angles; see what pops into your mind by association or otherwise; finish by tossing your best notions into a pile, which then becomes the poem"), but at least it muses upon important matters with moments of fine style, a few sharp insights, and a fairly strong poetic line.

Any thoughts from my readers are always appreciated.

Logan on Wallace Stevens

I offer a brief note to say that I did read William Logan's overview of Wallace Stevens's poetry in the New Criterion in October of this year, which I am sure you would expect me to have read, since I read Logan regularly and since Stevens is a poet whose work has a prominent place in the Winters Canon. The chatty, witty, balloon-busting essay is worth reading, though not because it has any affinities with Yvor Winters's classical take on Stevens's work. I like Logan's iconoclasm, which irritates plenty of fans of particular poets and wins him few friends (how he stirred the nest of Hart Crane fandom a couple years back with a few sharp pokes).

As we all realize, Stevens has become one of those much beloved central figures in American literature, one of the untouchables, the object of a protective fan-base, almost a celebrity of sorts. As you also may know as well, though Winters considered Stevens to have written some of the greatest poetry in the English language and several of the greatest poems of the modern era, Winters also touched the now untouchable Stevens quite forcefully. I would say that he punched him -- and pretty hard. For Stevens's poetry degenerated badly in the last two-thirds of his career as a poet, in Winters's judgment, and my own. (I have no idea exactly when Stevens wrote his poems. I presume he tinkered with them for years before publishing them. I refer to their order and time of publication.)

At the end of his essay, Logan includes a list of the poems he considers very good or great in Stevens's body of work, and some of these poems aren't too bad. But Logan passes over almost all the poems Winters considered great. Only "The Snow Man" makes the list of both critics. Logan even makes the colossal mistake of thinking "Sunday Morning" tedious (without explaining why he thinks so). Winters considered this, perhaps, the single greatest poem written in English in the 20th century, and I come close to agreeing (Winters's own "To the Holy Spirit" gets my vote, provisionally). Logan doesn't quite say so, but it seems that he finds "Sunday Morning" to be soaked in amateurish philosophy, a view with which, if accurate, I cannot disagree more.

But, overall, Logan's is a provocative read and worthwhile for being that. And that's what William Logan is often after, a little provocation (though I do think that he truly holds the opinions he uses as sticks to poke nests). Regrettably, however, he doesn't sum up Stevens well. We hardly get any sense of why to read his poetry other than that it sparkles from time to time with some elegant lines, vivid diction, and passages that have little or no meaning or importance or substance. There is much more in Stevens than that, even in the weak later poetry. Logan seems to get nothing out of Stevens that I can tell from this piece. I see in his work a desperation that arose from a loss of meaning in life, the result of a flustered effort to find some purpose for modern humankind, which has lost all confidence in past truths. This overarching theme, for me, makes Stevens one of the truly representative modernist writers, even though his work declined so much in the later years as he treated his theme in ever more bizarre ways. I recommend for a summary of Stevens, if only it weren't so obscure and hard to find, the discussion of his work in Donald Stanford's Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry, in addition, of course, to Winters's essay on Stevens in In Defense of Reason and his later reconsideration in Forms of Discovery. By the way, though Logan discusses a passage of it at length, I find R.P. Blackmur's study of Stevens nearly worthless.

On a side note, I wanted to say that I was very appreciative of a reader who sent the recommendation of the poetry of Australian Stephen Edgar, whose work I have been reading lately (and you too can find a few of his poems on the web). This is what I was hoping for a lot more of on this blog. I repeat my call for comment: please send me your recommendations for new classicists we can all consider. I will post a note on Edgar some time in the near future.

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

THE CRITICAL PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* UNKNOWN FLIGHTS *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Obscure George Herbert Poem Well-Known to Wintersians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOVE (III)

by George Herbert

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

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

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

Look to the Poets!

I was sent a notice over the summer that Poetry had published two previously unpublished letters from Yvor Winters to a new student and that student’s father. The letters originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry and can be found on line at:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=237082

The letters are certainly fascinating, both for their tone and for their audacious opinions. Surely, the tone will a bit shocking to those who haven’t read much in Winters’s essays or in his letters (the first edition of selected letters came out just nine years ago). He can seem discourteous, inappropriately direct and honest, too sure of his own judgments, even somehow almost brutal in the way he assesses the work of individual young poets. I would hate to read an assessment of my work from him. Thank goodness I will never have to (or at least never have to in this life -- perhaps some unpleasant fate awaits me in another).

The opinions about the importance of poetry and of university departments of English will undoubtedly be a bit shocking or bewildering as well. Winters explains in these letters, especially the second to the young poet’s father, his extremely elevated estimation of the work of the finest poets. Their work serves as the chief guardian of our civilization, the sine qua non of the intellectual and spiritual health and vitality of the West, in Winters's judgment. I’m not certain I agree with a view of poetry so exalted, as much as I appreciate reading in and studying the art. Does anyone out there stand with Winters on this, that poetry forms the heart of civilized life? It doesn’t seem that any Wintersian I know of, not even such devoted classicists as the late Donald Stanford or John Fraser, comes close to agreeing with Winters on this towering view of poetry.

Searching Reason

Ah, summer is here. I have found it difficult to find the energy and passion needed to write for this blog. But I want to continue reflecting on many poems I have been thinking about over the past few months. As some may remember, I live in summer in Copper Harbor, Michigan (the state's northernmost town), to run, with my brothers, a passenger ferry across Lake Superior to Isle Royale National Park. Any family business can be time-consuming, of course, and the business takes time away from my work on this blog.

With that in mind, I offer a poem this week from John Finlay, who was an exceptionally fine poet who died young. Though almost entirely unknown in American literary culture, a number of poets have taken and keep taking note of his achievement, including the late Donald Stanford during his days as editor of the Southern Review, Second Series. Finlay was deeply interested in Yvor Winters and wrote a dissertation on his work and a couple essays on Winters as well. You will have a lot of trouble finding his poetry and essays, though David Middleton edited a small edition of Finlay's collected poems in the 1990s. I own that book, but I do not know whether it is still in print (it can be purchased as a used book at various web sites). There is plenty of excellent poetry in Finlay's body of work to choose from, but here is one that I admire a great deal:

The Case of Holmes

The scientific searcher scans the blood,
The objects in the room, the tracks of mud,
Thickest around the pathos of the corpse.
He doesn't let instinctual grief that warps
The vision cause him not to find that fact
Which later hangs the murderer. Abstract
And lean, he seems emotionless cold thought,
Almost at times as sexless, always taut.
He has to drug a mind that will not cease
Once a case is solved -- cocaine's release,
Or trance before the chemical blue flame.
And there are states of mind he cannot name,
As skulking in the fog, urban night-wood,
He feels compressed, erotic brotherhood
And for the hardest criminal. But these
Are freakish states and disappear. He sees
Himself as whole in this: revulsion for
The great malignant brain who wages war
On those who break an ego's brutal dream.
He matches brain to brain in the extreme
Of hot collected nerves and cold reserve.
Fear also makes him whole; he must preserve
One being in the conflict with that brain
Or else, at one mistake, he will be slain.

This is dense stuff, poetry crammed with ideas. Written in expertly managed heroic couplets, Finlay's iambic line is nicely controlled. The themes are pertinent to much in our present society: the fascination with the killer and the mass killer; the interest in deviancy; the trust in science; our frustration with a lack of answers on crucial questions about the mind; the risks of studying the mind closely. The poem's approach to these themes is similar to much in modern free-verse and experimental poetry, such as one might fnd regularly in The New Yorker. Many poets nowadays write in Finlay's manner in this poem: take a subject or object from popular culture and then treat it seriously, though with wryness and wit. The technique often becomes cloying and leads to bathos and prosetic musing of the worst sort. But some poets are skilled enough to handle the technique well, as I believe this poem does. I know I really should explain what's good and bad in the use of the technique, but I do not think I have the time now for an extended discussion of the matter.

I should note that "The Case of Holmes" does not stand in close line with Finlay's usual style or approach. He was a much more serious poet than is suggested here with the wit he put on display in "The Case of Holmes." Nor is this a great poem -- though I do believe that John Finlay, as obscure as he is (certainly more obscure than even Yvor Winters and nearly all the poets of the Winters Canon), wrote a few great or near-great poems (4- or 5-star poems, in my system). But this poem is a striking example of what top-knotch verse focused on ideas can still accomplish, even at this late stage in the decay of poetry.

As I noted concerning the George Turberville poem I discussed in May, many of the poems in the Winters Canon directly concern this matter of the power of the mind and the province of reason. Much in Winters's own writings concern this matter, and I believe that Finlay was deeply influenced by Winters in his own poetry and criticism. One Winters poem I think of is the very fine poem "John Sutter," Winters's equally dense and ideational poem about the power of emotion to derail the processes and powers of reason. That poem was chosen by Ken Fields as part of the anthology Quest for Reality, the book that I call, somewhat loosely, the Winters Canon. (Fields chose Winters's poems for the anthology after Winters died in early 1968 before the anthology was finished.

There They are -- Some Olympians!

For decades, writers and critics have been bashing or dismissing Yvor Winters for trying to make a new canon, at least when they pay attention to him at all. Even those who have strong interests in or affinities with his critical work are so vexed by -- perhaps even ashamed of -- his classical canon-making that they refuse even to acknowledge that evaluation and revising or renewing the canon stand at the center of his critical thinking. As you certainly know if you read this blog, I harp on about this compilation I call the Winters Canon and the philosophy of canon-making to counter this refusal. Yet recently, I came across yet another suggestive indication of the importance of canon-making in the general literary culture. It came in an issue of The American Scholar, the Winter 2009 issue, in which some writer I’ve never heard of entitled an essay:

“Lunching on Olympus”

Well, there you go. That’s what the the making of canons is all about: deciding who the "Olympians" are, those artists wose works are so well written and so important that they are literary gods. The essay can be found at:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/lunching-on-olympus/

The title, and the essay that follows, reveal, by implication, that the author believes (and, by deeper implication, that we all should believe) that among the "gods" of modern literature reign W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson, for these are the four authors he writes of lunching with "on Olympus." The essay is a casual one, offering no discussion or assessment or even praise of the four writers' work. In fact, the essay is a simple recounting of four mundane conversations, almost in the manner of an old Esquire bio-essay. The essayist treats the four writers mostly as celebrities, not overtly as "gods." But the implication is clear: by giving these writers this kind of rapt attention, by implying that their humdrum lunchtime quips and quotes are worth laying out in detail, by giving all that title, we are meant to see these men as four of the Olympians, Gods of literature!

Now, what does this symbolism of Olympus mean? The essayist wishes or expects us to see these four writers as canonical -- that is, the writers whose work we should pay attention to, read often, ponder frequently, write and read criticism about, teach in class, expect educated people to know of, consider the best. Again, the choice of the word "Olympus" and the tone of the casual essay make the view plain and clear.

None of these poets, in my judgment, qualifies as an “Olympian” in this sense (though, I should note, John Fraser includes poems by Auden and Larkin in his New Book of Verse, which has led me to reassess my evaluation of their work). But many people will no doubt continue to read these writers in part because of what the author of this American Scholar essay -- and most other critics -- say about them, that these writers are worth paying the closest attention to, as though their artworks were nearly scripture or revelation. (I say "most other critics" with the probable exception of Empson, whom few writers consider one of the greats of literature as well as I am able to determine.)

That, my readers, is what making canons is for: declaring whose work should be read, which of their works should get the most attention, which should get the highest praise, which should serve as models and standards, which should be considered as supremely important -- and studied and contemplated as such. Should we pay more attention toi T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" or to Elizabeth Daryush's "Still-Life"? To discover the Olympians, and to delineate how we can and should identify them, that is almost exactly what Yvor Winters was trying to achieve in making what I call the Winters Canon, those lists of greatest poems (and the anthology Quest for Reality) that so embarrass even those who have affinities with Winters's work nowadays. (The photo is of a sculpture depicting a fight among the Olympic gods.) Yet Winters realized, wisely, that evaluation stands at the heart of the work of criticism -- even among those who deny its centrality. In the "Forward" to In Defense of Reason (1947) he explained the matter wisely and succinctly:

The professor of English Literature, who believes that taste is relative, yet who endeavors to convince his students that Hamlet is more worthy of their attention than some currently popular novel, is in a serious predicament, a predicament which is moral, intellectual, and in the narrowest sense professional, though he commonly has not the wit to realize the fact.

Our professors identify or accept designated Olympians. Much of the very loose and vague system of canon-making in the general literary culture is built on, importantly, selecting what will be taught in class, but also on what will be written about in journals and, perhaps most importantly in our day, what will be said about particular literary works and authors in popular magazines and web sites. One example of the large role of popular media is Ron Rosenbaum's short essay on Slate last year claiming that Keats's "Ode to Autumn" is the greatest poem in English, a matter which I have already discussed on this blog and on Slate.

Hence, don’t listen or cower the next time someone bashes or dismisses Yvor Winters for canon-making. Writers and critics and even readers of all stripes practice it -- mostly implicitly, but occasionally explicitly as well, as shown in this essay about lunching on Olympus.

Out, Out, Alien Reason

Let's reach back into the English Renaissance for a poem from a literary era that Yvor Winters held in such high esteem (so high that many have thought that he wished to return modern literary culture to its conditions, which is a thoroughly misinformed view). Winters chose none of the sharp, short, witty, poems of George Turberville for the Winters Canon, but he did use one of Turberville's shortest ditties as the epigraph to the Quest for Reality anthology. His work is all in the Plain Style, which Winters so ably delineated during his critical career -- and I would certainly like to see more modern poetry written with this approach: dense, abstract, focused on ideas and wit. As to theme, Turberville's work is mostly conventional for the times, concerned with time passing and the challenges of love, as much of English and French lyric poetry of the time. Though I do not judge the following poem great, I find it thought-provoking and very well written:

To His Love, That Sent Him a Ring Wherein Was Graved, "Let Reason Rule"

Shall Reason rule where Reason Hath no right
Nor never had? shall Cupid lose his lands?
His claim? his crown? his kingdom? name of might?
No, Friend, thy ring doth will me thus in vain;
Reason and Love have ever yet been twain.

They are by kind of such contrary mold,
As one mislikes the other's lewd device:
What Reason wills Cupid never would;
Love never yet thought Reason to be wise.
To Cupid I my homage erst have done;
Let Reason rule the hearts that she hath won.

Notes:
by kind": by nature
"lewd": common

One would have to dig deep to understand fully what Turberville intended here. Is he bucking himself up to make or keep a commitment to some babe, or his wife, with this mythology of Reason and Cupid? From what I know of him, which is quite modest, he meant what he seems to have meant by the first and last lines, that he wishes to exclude Reason from matters of love. But to what purpose he wishes to indulge himself in such a construct, as we might now put it, I do not know.

Yet despite the sharp excellence of this small poem, I find the central premise to be almost entirely untrue. Reason and Love do not hold sway over seperate realms, and Love rules no province in which Reason has no right. (The very idea of rational thought having rights of any sort within the precincts of the human soul or spirit is very strange.) Reason can, does, and should control activities in the land of Love to some degree, sometimes small, sometimes quite large -- perhaps most often as an Inner Check on the promptings and demands of Cupid.

So why, we may ask, did Turberville wish to tell himself these little myths (if myths they are, which is wide open for endless debate, of course)? He doesn't seem to be proferring these ideas insincerely or satirically, from what I know of his life and work. But it is clearly obvious, and was so in Turberville's day, I believe, that human beings often do employ reason in the business of love. So why would the poet defend his myth? We can only speculate about Turberville, while trying to survey the lands where Cupid and Reason vie in our own souls to see what application his ideas might have. For we in this age are deeply taken with this same myth, that the ways of Love cannot and should not be controlled or influenced by Reason. Indeed, so much does the poem express notions that are widespread in modern times that it feels almost romantic in its implications, though, of course, Romanticism would not come to full flower until more than two centuries later.

Many poems of the Winters Canon are concerned with issues that are central to "To His Love," which we might generally call the province of Reason. Yvor Winters's own "John Sutter" is one of the great studies of the power of desire or passion in human experience. One phrase from the poem, "grained by alchemic change," strikes to the heart of the matter. The phrase refers to the "madness" for gold that overmastered and led to destructiveness the prospectors on Sutter's land. The poem speaks to the power of the passions nearly to transform our nature, at least for periods when we give in to their sway, though Winters held that Reason can and does and often should hold sway over such passions.

But what came to mind more readily is Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, one of the great novels of all-time in the judgment of Yvor Winters (I concur), perhaps the first prominent critic to judge it so highly. The Age of Innocence concerns, in part, the ways in which Reason and other forces check Cupid. I think that novel stands above this poem as a more true and complete evaluation of the relationship between them because it more accurately portrays the psychic landscape where Reason and Cupid and moral codes and competing desires jostle for control. Also, I might add, Martin Scorsese's film of the novel is worth seeing as well. I consider this film to be one of the finest ever made, judging it apart from the novel it adapted so well and so thoroughly as I am able. Though off the subject, I note that the film uses the symbol of sumptuousness more forcefully than the novel, with insightful results. But that's a subject for another post.

Turberville's poem also brought to mind a passage from William James's famed speech "Remarks at the Peace Banquet," which he gave in Boston on the closing day of the World Peace Congress in October of1904:

Reason is one of the very feeblest of nature's forces, if you take it at only one spot and moment. It is only in the very long run that its effects become perceptible. Reason assumes to settle things by weighing them against each other without prejudice, partiality or excitement; but what affairs in the concrete are settled by is, and always will be, just prejudices, partialities, cupidities and excitements.

Turberville goes beyond this. However feeble it might be, he seeks to exclude Reason, though, as I say, what he fears from Reason malingering in Cupid's supposed realm is uncertain.

Of course, the Renaissance is littered with poems on or related to the subject. One I thought of is Christopher Marlowe's famous lines from "Hero and Leander":

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight.
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

There's the expression of a myth that reigns in hearts to this day, as Hollywood shows us again and again. Lastly, I must note that William Shakespeare also had much to say on the subject of the relationship of Reason and Cupid. "Sonnet 147" from his famed series is particularly complementary to Turberville's concerns:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,
Desire his death, which physic did expect.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Note, however, the much different tone -- Shakespeare seeing love in this instance as a hellish disease. In contrast to this sonnet, Turberville's poem expresses no lament over Reason leaving him. Rather he insists upon Reason's departure -- to the point of denying its rights in the lands of Cupid.

Ah, well, now we have much to reflect on. In sum, George Turberville's little poem brings up a questions that I have pondered a lot in my days. For me, the principal one is why we tell ourselves -- and often deeply convince ourselves -- of little myths, like Turberville's, by which to live our lives. I believe Turberville is mostly wrong, as sharp and sure as his verse is. But, perhaps, his myth is valuable, maybe even essential, for some purposes. Perhaps we can only love truly and fully by believing that love has no truck with reason. How I wish J.V. Cunningham had studied this subject of Reason and Cupid in English Renaissance poetry.