A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

January

Selection and Comments by Ben Kilpela

Winters quotations used by permission of Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, copyright 1947, 1957, 1967, 1972, 2000

Commentary Copyright Bennett Wade Kilpela, 2002

KP = a passage reflecting a key point in Winters's thought

1/1 - On Meaning in Poetry

from the essay "Edgar Allen Poe" (1937) from Maule's Curse, republished in In Defense of Reason (1947)

The reader should note carefully what this [critical comment from Edgar Allen Poe] means; perhaps he will pardon me for restating it: the subject matter of poetry, properly considered, is by definition incomprehensible and unattainable; the poet, in dealing with something else, toward which he has no intellectual and moral responsibilities whatever ("Unless incidentally", says Poe, "poetry has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth"), should merely endeavor to SUGGEST THAT A HIGHER MEANING EXISTS -- in other words, should endeavor to suggest the presence of a meaning when he is aware of none. The poet has only to write a good description of something physically impressive, with an air of mystery, an air of meaning concealed.

** COMMENT: Perhaps nothing could be worse in the eyes of Yvor Winters than concealing meaning. We begin our Year with Winters, almost at random, with a passage on Winters's hard-nosed critique of Poe's theories of poetic composition, which is part of one of his most entertaining, enlightening, and harsh essays. Winters spent much of his career challenging the canon of American literature and creating an alternate canon of his own -- carefully explained and described. He chose none of Poe's work on the grounds of Poe's "obscurantism". In this passage, Winters attacks Poe's insistence in his writings on the etherealness, or meaninglessness, of poetry, whereas, as we shall see often during this year, Winters insisted that rational meaning is the most important feature of the literary arts.

1/2 - On Uncertain Experience in Poetry

from the essay "The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins" (1949) in The Function of Criticism

Hopkins' modern admirers have often assumed that the [sonnet "No worst there is none"] deals with a struggle to maintain they consider an irrational and unwholesome faith, that it deals with what they call the self-inflicted torture of the religious. There is nothing in the poem either to prove or disprove the idea of such a struggle. The emotion might result from such a struggle, might result as in Donne's sonnet from a sense of sin either general or particular or both or for the need of Grace, from the contemplation of any of several metaphysical propositions, from the death of a friend, from betrayal by a friend, from the desperation of personal loneliness, from a mixture of some of these, or from something else. We have passed beyond the limits of generalization; we are in the realm of uncertainty; and the mind cannot organize itself to share Hopkins' experience with any real feeling of security.

** COMMENT: A lack of security about the meaning of a poem, for Winters, seriously damaged that poem. The violent emotions of the famous Hopkins sonnet are, in Winters's judgement, "unmotivated", an important theoretical word in his essays; the emotions have no foundation upon which the reader can build a full and proper understanding of the experience and morally judge it with confidence. For Winters, a rationally definable human experience, however general, must stand behind any good work of literary art. It seemed hollow to him to indulge oneself in vague emotions, however passionate, though such poetry is written endlessly in our day. That the Hopkins sonnet lacks definiteness, despite whatever virtues it may have (Winters follows these comments with a long description of the interesting metrical inventions of the sonnet), makes it a very weak work of art, nearly a failure.

1/3 - On Blake

from the essay "The Sentimental-Romantic Decadence of the 18th and 19th Centuries" (1967) in Forms of Discovery

The poems [of William Blake] that can be taken seriously as poetry are few, short, and very faulty; I have referred to most of them. "The Tyger" is the only poem in which the style is in any sense vigorous. In general, the style is a refinement of the kind of poeticism that we find in "The Ode to Evening"; the emotional tone is that of the protestant hymn. Let the reader compare "The Tyger", or any other poems by Blake, with the two poems from other periods which treat of evil: "Down in the Depth" by Fulke Greville and "Low Barometer" by Robert Bridges. In these poems the nature of evil is understood and is treated with power and precision; the poems are great in conception and in every detail. To read them after Blake is like returning to sanity, the human condition at its most rich, after experiencing a vague and confused dream.

** COMMENT: Blake's reputation has surged forward in our day, and he is now regarded as a major poet; but Yvor Winters had, it is clear, little regard for most of his work. Only "The Tyger", one of most famous and highly regarded poems of English literature in the Standard Canon, seems to have drawn his esteem in this passage containing his late and final judgement of Blake. Winters found Blake's insipid poeticized cliches to be particularly irritating. These weak cliches were, in his judgement, a product of the Restoration and early Romantic ideas influencing English literature, which is perfectly illustrated by the Collins poem that he mentions in this passage. Winters cites that poem frequently in his essays for the purpose of execrating the period. The two poems he mentions from Greville and Bridges consistently made his oft-repeated lists of the most nearly perfect of the greatest poems ever written in English.

1/4 - On the Expression of One's Culture

from the essay "Wallace Stevens or the Hedonist's Progress" from In Defense of Reason (1947)

... Stevens appears to have slipped here into the Whitmanian form of a romantic error common enough in our literature, but current especially in Stevens' generation and espoused in particular by Stevens' friend W. C. Williams: the fallacy that the poet achieves salvation by being, in some way, intensely of and expressive of his country. A common variant of this notion is the idea that the poet should bear the same relationship to his time.... The ideas [in Stevens] are the attempt to justify a kind of extroversion: the poet, cut off from human nature, which is his proper subject-matter, seeks to find a subject in the description, or, as the saying goes, in the expression, of what is round about him. In practice, this results mainly, as in Williams, in a heavy use of the native landscape, sometimes as a legitimate symbolism or background, sometimes as the subject of mere description, sometimes as false symbolism.

** COMMENT: Winters considered the notions about the purpose of poetry described here, however unaware a poet might be of the theory or the practice, to be a form of irrational and loathsome gamesmanship. Though Wallace Stevens also wrote some of the greatest poems ever written, in Winters's judgment, his general Romanticism caused him to drift into bad poetry and worse thinking in much of his work. The kind of extroversion he practiced in his art, and other forms of expressing one's milieu, have become prominent and obnoxious hallmarks of contemporary poetry. But Winters might have missed an important way this poetry, if done properly and rationally, can contribute to our moral faculties. For surely the understanding of human culture should be considered an important and fitting a subject matter for poetry. Winters, if I were to challenge him on this point, would probably agree. What he objected to was the empty expression of one's national culture. To judge culture by understanding it rationally and emotionally is another matter entirely.

1/5 - On Frost as Classical Poet

from the essay "Robert Frost or the Spiritual Drifter as Poet" (1948) in The Function of Criticism (1957)

Frost has been praised as a classical poet, but he is not classical in any sense which I can understand. Like many of his contemporaries, he is an Emersonian Romantic, although with certain mutings and modifications which I shall mention presently, and he has labeled himself as such with a good deal of care. He is a poet of the minor theme, the casual approach, and the discretely eccentric attitude. When a reader calls Frost a classical poet, he probably means that Frost strikes him as a "natural" poet, a poet who somehow resembles himself and his neighbors; but this is merely another way of saying that the reader feels a kinship to him and likes him easily.

** COMMENT: Though Winters praised a few of Robert Frost's poems, and though he thought highly of his ability as a stylist, and regardless of Frost's becoming the single most popular and respected poet in the history of American literature, Winters rejected most every claim to Frost's greatness. Winters spent his career battling against anything to do with Emersonian Romanticism, and to tag Frost as an heir of that powerful literary movement was, coming from him, damning indeed. We shall encounter many more passages about this particular theory of art and life throughout our Year with Winters, since it interested him deeply. Winters also grew frequently impatient with the misuse of words, such as in his brief comments here about the word "classical". One might wonder, on another matter, whether there might be a place for the casual lyricist in our literature. Winters probably would have said there was, but that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that such an eccentric as Frost is one of our greatest poets. Though none of Frost's work made the grade in Winter's selection of the 185 greatest poems in English, the Winters Canon (published in the obscure, out-of-print, yet great collection Quest for Reality), it is unquestionable that Winters considered Frost and many another "minor" poet worth keeping and studying, albeit with the understanding that one is not reading or studying the very best.

1/6 - On Journalistic Diction

from the essay "Conclusions" in Forms of Discovery (1967)

These poets [the later J.V. Cunningham, the later Thom Gunn, and other minor modern poets] apparently try to achieve what they consider to be the quiet and honest monotone of prose; their effort is similar to that in much of the free verse of Eliot, Auden, and Robert Lowell. But like these three poets, they seem to have forgotten that prose should be at least as well written as poetry; they mistake the casual diction of journalism for the diction of whatever it is they seek, and their poems are dull.

** COMMENT: Saying someone writes like a journalist was a severe denunciation from Yvor Winters, and one that here -- very near the end of his life -- he delivered to two poets who Winters believed were among the greatest ever to have written in English, Cunningham and Gunn. Of course, he understood that expository and functional prose and journalism were needed for various purposes. But no poet who sought to write good or great poetry should ever, in Winters's view, stoop to writing lines that hardly rise above the humdrum writing of a newspaper or a business letter, which is true, I would argue, of the vast majority of the both first- and second-rate free verse poetry now published in English. Winters has lost the battle against casual diction, at least when we tote up the numbers of poems published in the style -- and it would be no exaggeration to say that he lost every battle he ever fought when we make any effort to quantify the popularity of his ideas. The most praised poets of our time almost all write in the casual, unadorned, flaccid prose of the news story. The colloquial, carefree, conversational style has become the goal of most poetry, even our most serious poetry, even the small movement that is committed to formalist poetry. (One might consider blaming much of this on Robert Frost, that masterful early user of the colloquial style. See yesterday's selection and comment.) That it was becoming ever more popular during his lifetime was not lost on Winters.

1/7 - On the Pacific Ocean from 30 Miles

from the poem "Slow Pacific Swell" (1945)

** COMMENT: Because Yvor Winters lived all his adult life in the American west and most of that on the Pacific coast (Winters was a professor at Stanford University most of his career), the landscape of California, as in this passage, often played a major symbolic role in his poetry. He also had a strong interest in and love for descriptive poetry and often in his criticism discussed passages of poetry that he believed held superb description -- some even found in poems that Winters considered less than satisfactory. His love for precise and moving description comes out strongly in his own poetry, one of the greatest passages of which is quoted here. In my judgement, this passage describing Winters watching the Pacific from a hill-top outdoes Wordsworth and many another Romantic poet in accurate and vibrant detail, and in concise and powerful diction. The landscape described is employed as a profoundly meaningful symbol in the rest of the poem.

1/8 - On Syllables in Meter

from the essay The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention, Section V: The Heroic Couplet and Its Recent Rivals" in Primitivism and Decadence (1937), republished in In Defense of Reason (1947)

... if the [metrical] system is based (as English verse is normally) on accent, then every syllable must be recognizably in or out of place whether stressed or not, and if out of place in a classifiable way; the degree of accent must vary perceptibly though immeasurably from a perceptible though immeasurable norm; quantity should be used consciously to qualify these conditions; in brief, the full sound-value of every syllable must be willed for a particular end, and must be precise in the attainment of that end. As language has other values than those of sound, this ideal will be always forced into some measure of compromise with the other values; nevertheless, the essence of art, I take it, is that no compromise should be very marked, and the perfection of art, though rare and difficult, is not unattainable.

** COMMENT: The intensity with which Winters studied and practiced the craft of verse is often astonishing. In this passage from a somewhat early essay, Winters describes his theory of the enormous role that every syllable of language plays in the literary arts. To know how such high objectives can be attained, you are encouraged to study this section of "Primitivism and Decadence carefully, for Winters lays out his theories of meter in great detail and with great erudition and insight. There is much to be learned throughout, more than most modern students of literature thought possible, and I believe that much of what Winters discusses in this section has applications to all writing. Also, this passage illustrates well how seriously Winters took the sound of language as part of the poetic art and as a tool in the accurate judgement of human experience.

1/9 - On Rational and Emotional Judgment

from the essay "Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature" (1956) from The Function of Criticism (1957)

Let me repeat first of all the assumption on which I invariably proceed as a critic. I believe that a poem (or other work of artistic literature) is a statement in words about a human experience. I use the term STATEMENT in a very inclusive sense, and for lack of something better. But it seems to me obvious that "The Iliad," "MacBeth," and "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time" all deal with human experiences. In each work there is a content which is rationally apprehensible, and each work endeavors to communicate the emotion which is appropriate to the rational apprehension of the subject. The work is thus a judgment, rational and emotional, of the experience -- that is a complete moral judgment in so far as the work is successful.

** COMMENT: In numerous essays, Winters found it important to restate, succinctly, his basic theory of literary art, since it was so unusual. He knew that most of his readers, then as now, would not understand his writings without first firmly girding them with a clear, brief review of his fundamental position. He made the fullest public statement of his "credo" in "A Foreword" to "In Defense of Reason," an essay published in 1948, but he had laid it out before many times, and would summarize it many times after. Obviously, if you wish to understand this creed fully, you must go to the essays themselves, and to the poetry Winters judged the greatest ever written. I will only say here that Winters throughout his career emphasized a rational approach to a subject that is properly adjusted to the emotions that OUGHT to be aroused by the rational understanding gained. A commitment to reason formed the core of his approach, but without the appropriate emotional "judgment", there is no art. This makes for the difference between philosophy and poetry. We shall be exploring these central and seminal ideas and their application to specific cases all year long. It is my belief that this critical creed can radically change the way you read and write for the rest of your life.

1/10 - On Plain Courtship and Poetry

from the essay "Aspects of the Short Poem in the English Renaissance" (1939, 1956, 1967) in Forms of Discovery

Wyatt was a believer in the plain style in both activities [poetic style and courtly love-making]. The relationship between these two activities is close and is not trivial. If poetry is, as I believe it to be, a form of moral judgment, then the poetic form, in regard to this matter, is merely a more refined and precise embodiment of the social form: poetry and morality are one. Wyatt, if we may accept his explicit comments, believed in an honest and permanent love and in a style which would deal with such a love in an honest and plain way: he was a disciple of what was known in the sixteenth century as the plain style.

** COMMENT: Style and the man -- a topic that drew Winters's attention throughout his life and career. He believed that the judgements one makes as a poet, and as a careful and intelligent reader, spill over into living life properly, better, more morally correct -- in the wide sense in which he uses that term "moral". Thomas Wyatt was a leading practitioner of what Winters called the "plain style" of the English Renaissance. His carefully controlled and logical lyrics were obvious candidates for Winters's admiration, and a number of Wyatt's poems made it into the anthology Winters edited of the greatest English poems ever written ("Quest for Reality"), a set of works I will call the Winters Canon. Wyatt's poems and all the others Winters culled out for this special Canon were meant to inspire their readers to lead better lives. Though often classed among the New Critics, Winters clearly was no proponent of art for art's sake. Life and literature go arm in arm in making better men and women.

1/11 - On Living Language

from the review "THREE POETS" (1948) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The two marks by which we most readily recognize a poet, I presume, are first an ability to grasp and objectify a particular subject so that it is rendered comprehensible both as an individual thing and as a symbol of general experience, and second a command of the potentialities of language, phrase by phrase, including the rhythmic potentialities. Neither of these abilities will ever develop very far by itself; the subject cannot be defined satisfactorily in general; unless it is defined well in detail, and the language, phrase by phrase, cannot be made to say much unless the poet knows what he is trying to say. Nevertheless, the gift of language can sometimes carry a poet a far distance without much support from thought: the poetry so achieved will always be in large measure unsatisfactory, but it may be memorable at least in part. Swinburne is an example, and so in somewhat different ways are Collins and Mallarme. When Valery writes "Masse de calme et visible reserve" ["Palpable calm, visible reticence"], when Stevens writes "Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon," when Tate writes "So blind, in so severe a place," we know that we are in the presence of living language and that if we master the whole statement we may conceivably find ourselves in the presence of great poetry. But without the gift of language, the best subject in the world will fall absolutely dead from the hand.

** COMMENT: Winters endeavored throughout his career to define, simply and clearly, what excellence in the use of language was. He seldom achieved complete success, however, at least in my opinion. He fell most often to illustrating his principles by example, and it is in those examples that his critical theories are embodied with great power and meaning. It is one of the great achievements of literature, his determined work of illustrating theory by example. Winters was charged frequently with being a cold rationalist. But his writings betray something quite different. He was a lover of language, words, word sounds, and the great poetic phrase. The works he considered the greatest always betray remarkable beauties of style and diction. Finally, the list of four poets in the examples used in this selection are rather interesting. Swinburne was seldom mentioned in Winters's criticism, and he had little regard for his poetry. Yet here Winters implies that he had a gift for language. Valery and Stevens were two of his greatest poets. Tate was a contemporary, friend, and frequent correspondent, whom Winters once considered to be verging on becoming one of the great moderns. But in his late writings, Winters down-graded him to secondary status as a poet. None of Tate's poems made the final cut for the definitive anthology of the Winters Canon, "Quest for Reality". One of the hallmarks of Winters's criticism, and a matter that he was often derided for in the world of letters was quoting single phrases of poetry to illustrate his ideas. It is difficult to call any of the three lines quoted great on the face of things. But this was a frequent practice of Winters's. Sometimes it works well; sometimes it seems forced and gratuitous; often it is just plain puzzling, until you read in him more deeply. I know why, after reading him for 25 years, he considers these lines great -- and I can assent fully to his assessment -- but this is usually lost on those who are uninitiated in his thought or just disagree with him. Winters seemed to know this, and it didn't seem to bother him in the least. He thought his work was for the very few in any case, so there was little need for extensive explanations of his sweeping judgements.

1/12 - On Baroque Poetry

from the essay "JOHN CROWE RANSOM" from "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

Of Crashaw's poem ["The Weeper"] as a whole, one can scarcely avoid the conclusion that it is foolish and displays in an extreme form an error of method. Much of the detail is bad, and some of it is good, though perhaps none is as fine as the cherub; but even if the detail were all perfect, the poem could be nothing but a chaos of irrelevancies not much better organized than a section of "Finnegan's Wake". The theory of the morality of poetry does not break down in the face of such a poem, for if any detail is successful it will communicate the feeling proper to its individual subject. The trouble is that one does not have a poem: one has a conventional occasion for irresponsible excursions, the result being an agglomeration of minor poems very loosely related to each other. This is what is called baroque, or decorative, poetry; and although a man of genius may sometimes engage in it with brilliant if fragmentary results, it is fundamentally frivolous.

** COMMENT: Crashaw's "The Weeper" is a riotous, eerie poem and somewhat famous in English literature for its impassioned excesses. It is a clear counterexample to Winters's conceptions of the poetic art, for "The Weeper" exhibits little more than a maddeningly tedious series of fanciful and over-wrought analogies, comparisons, and descriptions. For Winters, not only must each line, word, and syllable of a poem work in itself, the whole of the poem and the parts must fit together rationally and emotionally to produce good poetry. Crashaw, of course, never intended to write something Winters might have approved of. But for Winters this simply revealed the decadence of his thought and the resulting poetry. The question for any reader of Winters is: is the poem Crashaw wrote about his ecstatic experience of the Virgin "frivolous", as Winters implies? Such is one important question in evaluating Winters as a critic and in deciding how much one is going to trust his theories and illustrations of great poetry.

1/13 - On Themes

from the essay "PROBLEMS FOR THE MODERN CRITIC OF LITERATURE" (1956) in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

The primary theme [of Valery's "The Silhouette of a Serpent"] is the descent from perfection to imperfection in the act of creation, and the plight of the intellectual creature whose desire is for the infinite perfection of which he is deprived and who realizes that his nature is evil by virtue of the privation; this provides the expository form of the whole poem.

** COMMENT: In this essay, Winters took the singular step of choosing the single greatest poem ever written, and his choice was the Valery's French poem "The Silhouette of a Serpent". It is a highly learned, densely intellectual, and lovely poem, almost ravishing in its language, despite the philosophical abstractions employed throughout. The task of choosing the one greatest poem was a culmination of Winters's commitment to evaluation. But the choice was a bizarre one in the eyes of most readers and critics -- and even unusual to Winters's own followers. Perhaps his students at Stanford knew of his love for Valery and this poem, but he had mentioned "Silhouette" only a few times in print before this essay was first published when Winters was 56 years old. It was also unusual because the poem is so lengthy, in all 310 lines in 31 rhymed stanzas. Who could have expected that the champion of the short lyric poem would choose as his best of all the greats such a long poem? It is a poem well worth knowing deeply, however. Many times in his essays, Winters summarizes the themes of the great poems he has set before his readers. This passage illustrates his method. One might well wonder whether the theme of the "Silhouette" might be much too lofty for the average person interested in dabbling in a little poetry. I have read the poem dozens of times, and I'm still not certain that I understand it or that it does or can have any bearing on my intellectual or spiritual life. I am not even sure that I agree with the theme, that creation is "evil" by privation. We shall delve into Winters's discussion of the poem and its themes later in the year.

1/14 - On Yeats

from the essay "THE TURN OF THE CENTURY" (1960) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

[Mr. Unterecker's book] accepts without question Yeats's ideas regarding the nature of poetry, ideas which in my opinion are unacceptable. And like almost every other publication on Yeats, it accepts without question the notion that Yeats was a very great poet and it merely substitutes exegesis for criticism. For example, Mr. Unterecker explains the meaning of an early poem, "The Two Trees"... then, with no explanation whatever, he refers to it as "so grand a poem." The poem is obviously a bad poem: it is sentimental and stereotyped at every point. Mr Unterecker is a split personality: on the one hand he is a careful scholar and on the other he is a critic with neither talent nor training.

** COMMENT: The reader should not be misled. Unterecker is of little abiding interest for Winters, despite Winters's comment about this obscure book. Rather, Winters's interest was in William Butler Yeats and the unstinting praise given that modernist poet throughout the last century. Winters probably was vilified more often for his opinion of Yeats's poetry than any other controversial judgement he made during his career. He frequently accused Yeats of sentimental and stereotyped writing. I leave it to you to see whether you agree with Winters, as I have. It is interesting to note that Winters, in the 1930s, occasionally put Yeats on his list of greatest poets of the century. One passage in his letters says that Yeats makes it as a great by the skin of his teeth. Clearly, by the 1940s, Winters had changed his mind, and his opinion of Yeats's work continued to sink until Winters sharply denounced his poetry and his ideas in this essay. Since it is for the evaluation of Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot that Winters suffered most in his critical career, and for which he has been relegated to obscurity ever since, we shall return many times to his writings on these three most famous moderns throughout our Year with Winters.

1/15 - On Fiction and Summarization

from a letter to Howard Baker (1930) in Selected Letters

It would seem more or less true that the psychological novel has tended more and more from its inception to the present to emphasize the content of the character's mind. That is, your modern fictionist tends to cover his narrative ground by means of trivial scraps of conversation, observation of the rain on the sidewalk, the color of a roof, etc., anything that runs through his character's head. Fielding would have considered this beneath his dignity: he would have summarized in two or three highly stylized and very carefully calculated paragraphs the content of two or three dozen pages from most modern fiction. He would have got over the ground just as thoroughly, and he would have done it more effectively because of the greater condensation, the greater degree of artistic transmutation (the material goes through Fielding and comes out art, instead of remaining raw material precisely seen through meticulously colorless prose), and he would got over more material as a result of being able to move faster.

** COMMENT: Winters wrote about fiction from time to time, but he didn't focus on it nearly as intensely as he did on poetry. Nevertheless, he offered some theories about excellence in fiction and offered many judgements on individual works of fiction in his essays. Several times in the essays, he pointed to Fielding as one of the finest fictionists in English, and this passage from his letters clearly explains what Winters found excellent in Fielding and fiction in general -- perhaps in greater depth and with greater clarity than anywhere else in the Winters's oeuvre. He clearly had little patience for all the "showing" that goes on in modern fiction and tended to favor the "telling". Of course, since Winters's day, the emphasis on the concrete in fiction has only become more pronounced and secure, to the degree that it is hardly possible any longer to publish fiction that offers long passages of exposition or narrative summation. The greatest fictionist of the concrete of them all in modern fiction, the later Joyce (one of my favorites as a college student), finally wearied Winters, even though he had praised his early stories and novels in letters from the 1920s.

1/16 - On Excesses of Tone

from the essay "MAULE'S WELL" (1937) from Maule's Curse, republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

This passage [of Henry James's story "The Sense of the Past"] endeavors to make a marginal aspect of experience ("tone") carry vastly more significance than is proper to it... this phenomenon in James is distinctly, and nothing more than, an extreme development of a difficulty inherent in all his work and in the society which gave rise to his work, a difficulty of which he was in a considerable measure aware, but of which he was insufficiently aware to correct it. The obscurity of the moral problem, the development of the feeling in excess of the motive, is a familiar phenomenon of the romantic period, that is, of the period extending roughly from about 1750 to the present. The conscientious concentration upon this obscurity -- conscientious almost to hallucination because so seldom intellectual in spite of the conscientiousness -- is the residue of the New England heritage....

** COMMENT: This essay offers a lengthy and thorough study of Henry James and his exploration of morality and manners in his fiction. Winters judged that much of James's frequent moral obscurity was due to his concentration on developing a tone at the expense of developing sound plots and fully drawn characters. We shall return to this essay several more times throughout our Year with Winters. Here, it is most important to note that Winters had little patience with impassioned, excessive writing that was not firmly based on the principles of reason. Rational depth and clearness always came first in his criticism, and the setting of tone was something that should and must follow from rational clarity and intellectual depth, not stand separate from them. In general, James's narrative style is similar to that of "The Sense of the Past"; James endeavors carefully to establish a tone rather than to advance a plot, explicate a setting, or characterize a person, and Winters scorns this habit. Nonetheless, Winters did consider James one of the greatest novelists of the English language, though he had basic flaws.

1/17 - On Poetic Rhythm

from the essay "THE AUDBILE READING OF POETRY" (1951) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

Poetry has something, however, though relatively little, in common with music; namely, rhythm. Rhythm, with the other elements of sound which may be combined with it -- in poetry these other elements are relatively few and simple -- is to some extent expressive of emotion, and it may be used to modify the emotional content of language. The value of rhythm is not primarily in its power to intensify emotion, though it has this power; it is rather in its power to modulate and define emotion, so that a finer adjustment of emotion to thought may be possible.

** COMMENT: This is a key passage in the writings of Winters, for in it he succinctly defined, in part, how poetry differs from prose. He dismissed the comparisons, which became very popular in the early 20th century, between music and poetry and proceeds to rhythm. The purpose of this "musical" aspect of poetry is to gain greater control of the expression of emotion. This seems to be the very reason Winters became a formalist poet, to use tightly controlled literary forms and writing procedures to control emotion and adjust emotion to the conceptual understanding. Just how the rhythmic language of poetry might "define" or "adjust" emotion, or help control it in art and life, is a difficult and complex subject that Winters addresses in a number of essays. We shall come across these ideas many times during this Year with Winters. In my judgment, however, Winters never offered a fully satisfactory explanation for how the musicality of language defines emotion. Certainly, there is SOMETHING musical about poetical language that makes poetry extremely powerful and moving, when handled well, from the greatest poetry Winters focused to the casually jingling lyrics of the simplest popular love songs. It was Winters who tried to describe what that something was, and the achievement, however incomplete, is an astonishingly important beginning to the matter. It remains for an advocate of Winters to expand on his work and clarify the entire theory of rhythm and emotional expressiveness, in my view.

1/18 - On the Beauties of Shakespeare's Sonnets

from the essay "ASPECTS OF THE SHORT POEM IN THE ENGLISH RENASSIANCE" (1939, 1956, 1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

Whatever the faults of [Shakespeare's] sonnets as wholes, their incidental beauties are numerous. These beauties are often of the most elusive kind, and they are probably felt by many readers without ever being identified. Consider, for example, the line six of Sonnet XIX:

And do whater'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time.

There is a plaintive desperation in the line which it is impossible to describe but which any sensitive reader can feel. In what is being said there is a stereotyped but real and timeless fear, and this is expressed in part by the helplessness of the imperative and in part by the archaic cliché 'swift-footed'. It is expressed also in the emphases of the rhythmical pattern: the first three feet are all heavily accented, but each succeeding foot more heavily than the one preceding, so that we reach a climax on 'wilt', followed by the long pause of the comma, the pause in turn followed by a foot lighter and more evenly stressed, and this by a very heavily stressed foot. This is not an original line nor a great one; it is derivative and minor -- but it is moving.

** COMMENT: A few of Shakespeare's poems made Winters's cut of the greatest poems ever written in English (he gave lofty praise to the plays as well, especially the four major tragedies), but he held the Bard's short poems in much lower esteem than they enjoyed throughout the 20th century. Many modern critics have claimed that Shakespeare's Sonnets are indubitably the greatest poetry written in the English language; Winters clearly deferred on this judgement, even though four sonnets made the Winters Canon, as published in "Quest for Reality". Once again, Winters was willing to challenge every common critical judgment, even that of the immortal Bard, who seems sacrosanct in most modern criticism and popularized literary thought. Turning to the beauties of poetry, Winters often failed to find words to describe his responses to great poetry or great lines, just as he failed in regard to single line from Sonnet XIX. His analysis of the rhythm, as usual, is wonderfully insightful, but he knew that there was much more in that line than he could explain in words. Winters mentioned the idea of what he calls here the "sensitive ear" many times in his essays -- that quality of discernment in the critic or poet or reader that enables him or her to write excellently and with power and to discern great writing. The sensitive ear is apparently, in Winters's view, something very difficult to teach, if it can be taught at all. This attitude is in marked contrast to the other parts of his clearly explained theories on poetic excellence.

1/19 - On God - KP

The complete poem "TO HEAVEN", by Ben Jonson

** COMMENT: This poem has seldom been anthologized and has drawn embarrassingly little attention from critics of the Renaissance or English poetry, not to mention very little discussion even among specialists in Jonson. It consistently made Winters's lists of the greatest poems and was almost always chosen for his repeated short lists of the five to ten greatest of the English greats. It is a consummate example of Winters's poetic theories: intellectually dense, rationally conceived and executed, metrically expressive, coolly but clearly emotional, founded on profound and generalized statement, written in perfect diction. When I discovered this poem, led to it SOLELY by the writings of Yvor Winters, it occurred to me with the force of a light from the heavens that many of our most prominent critics and thinkers and poets did not fully understand poetry. It was Winters's championing of this poem, and several others on his short lists of the greatest of the great, that converted me into a Wintersian. For how could such a great poem be overlooked by anyone who called herself a trustworthy critic? That Winters found it, discussed it in detail, and correctly judged it as one of the greatest poems in English made him, for me, a significant critic -- perhaps THE single critic -- most worth trusting. I hope the poem will, in turn, draw your attention to Winters's work, as well as to all of Jonson's finest poetry.

1/20 - On the Best Poetry and Reasons

from "A FOREWORD" to "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

Certain poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries approximates most closely the qualities which seem to me the best. It seems to me, as it has seemed to many others, that there has been a general deterioration of the quality of poetry since the opening of the eighteenth century. Like many others, I have endeavored to account for this deterioration. It would surprise no one if I stated that Collins' "Ode to Evening" was an imperfect and secondary poem if judged in comparison with all English poetry; but it arouses antagonism when I give reasons, partly because there is a general dislike of reason, and partly because my reasons are not complimentary to the orthodoxies of our time. I regret the antagonism, but since I believe my reasons to be sound and the matter in general serious, I must maintain my position and take the consequences.

** COMMENT: The modern temper has always felt, at best, uncomfortable with any proposed connection between reasons and art. Art seems beyond rational judgment because it is so incredibly intricate, a matter of in-born or assiduously cultivated taste, even though most critics and lay readers would agree that there is an ever-developing Standard Canon and there are reasons for the selections to and rejections from this canon other than whimsical swings in popularity. In keeping with his critical (and philosophical) absolutism, we may say that Winters was passionately and fundamentally opposed to ANY sociology of criticism, or that any society of critics determines excellence in literature. Winters was determined to explain the reasons behind his theories of excellence in the literary arts, apply them scrupulously, and display openly his evaluations of individual works of art -- that is, to illustrate by example his theories. The last, in my opinion, is his greatest achievement and one of the great achievements in the history of English literature and thought. But even Winters changed his mind during his career, many times, on matters major and minor. As we shall see at some point in this year of selections, late in his career Winters gradually came to consider 16th- and 17th-century English poetry, though surely great, to have been surpassed by the great poets of the 20th century (note that this means Winters's great poets, not those of the Standard Canon). Some few nearly reached perfection writing a kind of poetry Winters called "Post-Symbolist", and we shall meet Winters's theories about this kind of poetry often during this year. Finally, Winters certainly antagonized many critics, poets, and thinkers during his life. In his career, I think after years of studying him as a writer and a man, he was motivated, in part and for whatever reasons of personal character, to CULTIVATE this antagonism. He was, in his soul, as I guess, a defiant contrarian. Like Luther, nevertheless, he could see no other way than to abide by the creed by which he had chosen to abide. How much his inability or refusal to see another way, or a qualified way similar to his own, resulted from his mere personal desire to be an antagonist I am unable, as yet, to judge, though, as I say, I believe this propensity played a distinct role in his thought. Simply put, he appears to have loved to antagonize and play the heretic, despite his protestation in this passage.

1/21 - On the Retreating Artist

from the essay "THE PLAIN STYLE RE-BORN" (1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

During the Romantic movement a great deal of sentimental nonsense was written about the isolation of the artist, and the nonsense usually verges on self-pity; there is a trace of self-pity in Cunningham's poems "Envoi" and "Forgiveness". The fact remains, however, that the artist, if he is really an artist, is really isolated, and his personal life in this respect is a hard one. There are few people with whom he can converse freely without giving offense or becoming angry. It is no accident that so many great writers have sooner or later retreated from society; they retreat because they are excluded.

** COMMENT: Winters discussed his personal artistic isolation and the general isolation of the literary artist several times in his essays. He seemed troubled by the reputation his work has undeservedly earned. But he was also stoical and somewhat elitist about what had happened to him as well. The tone he took at times in discussing the matter put off many poets and critics, and it still rubs readers the wrong way. He believed that the deep intellectual skills needed to understand and properly profit from literature were granted only to very few, and that group included him (and, perhaps, he considered himself its leader). He didn't worry about the results and felt that the difficult skills he had developed set him and all true artists far above the average society. Obviously, he did not appreciate the Romantic poets discussing this issue openly and sentimentally, but he clearly was aware of the matter. This might be one prominent reason he would disapprove of this project of selecting from his writings. Very few in the "general" public have the skill or knowledge to study great poetry and profit from it morally. It will come as no surprise that I am more open-minded about the general public than Winters, even to the point of thinking that more people ought to know this great thinker and writer.

1/22 - On Puritans and Quakers

from the essay "JONES VERY AND R.W. EMERSON" from Maule's Curse (1938), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Whereas the Friend [or Quaker] taught the importance of the submission to the Divine Will, the Puritan taught the inevitability of the submission; the private will, either way, is stricken from the conscious life of the intensely devout; and when the Holy Spirit bears witness to the beatitude of the Puritan, as it bore witness in the heart of Jonathan Edwards, that Puritan lives much as does as exalted member of the Society of Friends.

** COMMENT: Winters intensely studied and expounded a general theory of the religious cross-currents of early American society, especially the culture of colonial New England, which was a trend-setting society in the early colonies. This cultural and religious history has enormous importance to his study of the greatest 19th-century American writers, on whom he wrote a number of essays in Maule's Curse, which makes up about one third of In Defense of Reason. The theological ideas of Puritans and the Quakers had deep influence on the writings of Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Henry James, and others. They also influenced the moral character of those men and their societies. The problem of free will, and the various solutions devised to it, in Winters's opinion, caused a great deal of moral confusion and uncertainty and has had lasting effects on American writing and, through that writing, on American life. In general, Winters's cluster of ideas on this matter is highly suggestive and is a profound statement of his belief in the importance of art to life. I do not feel competent to judge the quality of Winters's theory, but he certainly derived it after studying the finest historical minds of his time in this sub-discipline.

1/23 - On Life and Poetry

from a letter to Howard Baker (late 1929) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

As to my claim that poetry is a "moral discipline" in the light of these facts, it is perfectly sound if you stop and speculate on the complexity of human nature. [Hart] Crane is specifically and profoundly moral in certain respects and situations; he is as definitely the reverse in others. His limited range of moral soundness (and within that range he has "disciplined" himself) can be seen in "Repose of Rivers" and "Voyages II". His unsoundness can be seen in any of his love-poems, and the mixture and inter-crossing of the two in nearly anything else. Do not get the idea that Tate has, and that my possibly dogmatic prose may give, that I am a blind bigot; I do not mean that the composition of one good poem indicates a fundamentally sweet moral nature, and that three in a row makes one a candidate for canonization. I simply mean that the poetic medium has certain definite possibilities as a means of studying and extending the spirit and of fixing for future reference what one has found or achieved. Very few poets realize those possibilities on more than a very limited and almost paltry fashion.

** COMMENT: Hart Crane, the famous American poet who committed suicide in 1930, corresponded with Winters in the late 1920s. Some have said that Winters betrayed Crane when he published a scathing review of Crane's famous last book of poetry after they had carried on an intense but friendly correspondence for many months. We shall return to this topic later in our Year with Winters. For now, it is enough to notice that Crane was a frequent example for Winters of the connection between poetry and life, a connection wrongly de-emphasized in modern art and criticism. Winters clearly believed that poetry can make one's life better, more moral, in the complex sense he used the term. Good poetry can make for a good life. Bad poetry can destroy our moral understanding and damage our lives. He saw no other way of comprehending the literary arts, since they are founded on words and words are distinctly and primarily rational and communicative (see selection for 1/31).

1/24 - On Meaning and Understanding

from the essay "T.S. ELIOT" from The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

It is possible, of course, as Eliot somewhere else remarks, to admire a poem deeply without wholly understanding it; but such admiration must rest on an understanding at least imperfect, and the idea that this admiration is adequate as compared with that which comes with full understanding is mere nonsense. Dante's visions, with their meaning obscured, are dreams, as Praz points out; though in Dante, at least, and in part by virtue of the meaning which helped Dante to see them, they may be dreams of unusual clarity. If the meaning is important in the creation of the poem, at any rate, it is foolish to suppose that one can dispense with it in reading the poem or that the poet did not take his meaning seriously.

** COMMENT: To understand is the first critical step of writer or reader. Feeling follows understanding and is subordinate to it. Winters frequently chided poets and critics for not paying adequate attention to this proper and necessary order (necessary because it is founded on the nature of language, the medium of the literary arts). Though he considered Dante's "Divine Comedy" to be one of the great achievements of world literature, he believed it had many defects, mostly of the kind he speaks of in this passage. Poetry is a very serious matter, one of life's crucial matters, for Yvor Winters, and it is its seriousness that accounts for his theories of the morality of literary art.

1/25 - On Macauley's Prose

from the essay "PROBLEMS FOR THE MODERN CRITIC OF LITERATURE" (1956) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

Macauley's account of Monmouth's rebellion, in Chapter V of the "History of England", is a relatively short example. Both Monmouth and James II were mediocre men, at the most charitable estimate, and had either been born into a mediocre estate he would probably at most have provided the material for comedy and James for low comedy. But James was the king of England, and Monmouth aspired to be king. Their actions involved the fate of England: they were public actions, not private, and they really happened. Macauley's prose is in the heroic tradition, yet is capable of irony; it is rapid, exact, flexible, and deeply moving; the paragraphs dealing with the execution and burial of Monmouth have a grandeur almost equal to that of great Shakespearean verse.

** COMMENT: Winters discussed historical literature from time to time in his writings. In this passage from a long and detailed essay comparing and evaluating the forms and genres of literature -- probably unique in the history of criticism -- he came to Thomas Babington Macauley, the famous British historian of the 19th century who wrote one of the masterpieces of prose literature and narrative historiography. Macauley drew a good deal of praise from Winters, and he grandly praised as well the great narrative historians of other times, such as Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Prescott, and Parkman. He clearly believed that novelists could improve their art if they would employ some of the rich generalizing and expository techniques of the best historians of the English language, and particularly Gibbon, Macauley, Henry Adams, and Prescott.

1/26 - On Milton

from the essay "ASPECTS OF THE SHORT POEM IN THE ENGLISH RENASSIANCE" (1939, 1956, 1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

Milton has certain great and pervasive defects; first, a pompous redundancy, a tendency to expand every subject which he touches beyond the justification of the subject in the interests of an elaborate rhetoric which sometimes loses all connection with comprehensible syntax; second, a dependence on literary stereotypes which becomes extremely tedious.

** COMMENT: Milton gradually sank in Winters's judgment during his career. Early in his career, he regarded Milton as perhaps the greatest English poet and "Paradise Lost" as one of our great achievements in verse. But as the years passed and Winters's theories matured, his opinion of Milton, predictably, dwindled, until this final assessment in Winters's last book, an evaluation that has angered many critics who were still bothering to pay attention to Winters's assessments (there certainly were not many who did pay attention). The decline was predictable because Milton does have exactly the defects Winters discussed in this passage. Winters could not overlook such defects for the sake of harmony or the standard judgement of Milton. Still, his virtues were many, Winters know them well, and we shall encounter some in Winters's discussion of Milton later in this Year with Winters.

1/27 - On Anti-Intellectualism

from the review "ROBINSON JEFFERS" (1930) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

Self-repetition has been the inevitable effect of anti-intellectualist doctrine on all of its supporters. If life is valued, explored, subdivided, and defined, poetic themes are infinite in number; if life is denied, the only theme is the rather sterile and monotonous one of the denial. Similarly, those poets who flee from form, which is infinitely variable, since every form is a definite and an individual thing, can achieve only the uniformity of chaos; and those individuals who endeavor to escape morality, which is personal form and controlled direction, can, in the very nature of things, achieve nothing save the uniformity of mechanism.

** COMMENT: This review was written very early in Winters's career, at the end of the years he was changing from an imagist, experimental, free-verse poet to what we now call a "formalist" poet. It is astonishing how deeply the change in the form and content of his criticism and poetic practice had grown roots into his mind and soul. This passage is a beautifully succinct, almost poetically intense, statement of the basic issues that drove him to formalism in poetry and a renewed understanding of morality in literature and life. To the end of his days, Winters believed that there are clear moral dangers to chaotic writing, even to writing that seeks to explore chaos. The procedures of reason and of affirmation seemed to him the only way for men and women to gain control in their lives and live as they ought. For Winters, poetry played a major role in the moral adjustment of life, and he believed it could play that role in anyone's life, though the work was difficult and results elusive.

1/28 - On Ranking Poems - KP

from the essay "PRELIMINARY PROBLEMS" from The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Is it possible to say that Poem A (one of Donne's "Holy Sonnets", or one of the poems of Jonson or of Shakespeare) is better than Poem B (Collins' "Ode to Evening") or vice verse?

If not, is it possible to say that either of these is better than Poem C ("The Cremation of San Magee", or something comparable)?

If the answer is no in both cases, then any poem is as good as any other. If this is true, then all poetry is worthless; but this obviously is not true, for it is contrary to all our experience.

If the answer is yes in both cases, then there follows the question of whether the answer implies merely that one poem is better than another for the speaker, or whether it means that one poem is intrinsically better than another. If the former, then we are impressionists, which is to say relativists; and are either mystics of the type of Emerson, or hedonists of the type of Stevens and Ransom. If the latter, then we assume that constant principles govern the poetic experience, and that the poem (as likewise the judge) must be judged in relationship to those principles.

** COMMENT: Here we encounter the First Principle, the crucial starting point, of the critical thought (as well as the philosophical theories) of Yvor Winters. The importance of this brief passage from one of Winters's most famous essays, a short, concise summary of his basic theory written in the middle of his career, to our understanding of Winters and our evaluation of his critical achievement cannot be overstated. The concept of the Canon, of finding the very, very best poems (and not to the exclusion of those that are not rated great), is the cornerstone of his entire thought. For he follows from this plain and simple issue with the question of just what reasons we are to give that one of Shakespeare's better sonnets is better than the best doggerel of Robert Service -- and in giving reasons, Winters was led to defend Reason in literature.

1/29 - On Dowland's Spondees

from the essay "THE AUDIBLE READING OF POETRY" (1951) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

The author [John Dowland] likewise does certain strange and ingenious things with his spondees. The first line, for example, goes as follows:

Fine knacks for ladies, cheap, choice, brave and new!

The first foot is spondaic, the second iambic; the third foot, consisting of the second syllable of 'ladies' and of 'cheap', is likewise iambic, but the caesura, reinforced by the comma, in mid-foot, throws the accent onto 'cheap' with unusual force, and 'cheap' is then followed by the spondaic foot consisting of two syllables which are almost exactly equal to it, and which are likewise set off by commas, so that we have the illusion of a foot consisting of three accented syllables, or an English molossus.

** COMMENT: You had better prepare yourself (and perhaps have a glossary of poetics terms at hand), if you are to read Winters's criticism, for extended and intense discussions of the mechanics of meter are found throughout his essays. This poem of John Dowland's is one of the greatest in English in Winters's judgment, and it's adventuresome metrical scheme drew his close attention on several occasions in his essays. In the end, we must judge the poem, however excellent, an anomaly, for very few poems in English have ever sought to imitate or build on the brilliantly executed experiments of this poem. Still, for Winters, this one poem provided an excellent illustration of many of the principles of English verse. As I have told many people, you will learn more about the workings of English verse from Winters than any other writer who ever wrote, including the great Shaftesbury. Winters knew this stuff better than anyone else and could explain it with greater clarity, assurance, and enthusiasm than any critic or poet I have ever encountered. These discussions of meter are among his greatest achievements as a critic. Also, Winters's students have repeatedly testified to how much they learned about verse from him in his Stanford classes.

1/30 - On Themes in Wallace Stevens

from the essay "THE POST-SYMBOLIST METHODS" (1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

If we eliminate the poems on the Imagination and the miscellaneous exercises in foolishness, Stevens appears to have one central theme: the situation of the isolated man in a meaningless universe. In the great poems this is almost his single theme. In "Sunday Morning" the universe, though meaningless, is beautiful; there is mitigation by hedonism. In "Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds", the universe is still beautiful but is appalling; the only mitigation comes from speech, poetry:

** COMMENT: Wallace Stevens always puzzled Winters, for Stevens had written several great poems, but he had also written reams of weak and prolix rubbish -- a mountain of inane poetry. Winters's powerful and incisive description of Stevens's themes, both here and in other essays, draw one to reading this poet with a more careful eye. I have found other virtues in Stevens's poetry, and even some of Winters's students have blanched at his dismissal of nearly everything Stevens wrote outside the youthful poems Winters chose for the Winters Canon and "Quest for Reality". Perhaps Winters simply didn't have the patience to wade through the mounds of silliness to get to the best writing in the late Stevens, though certainly his choice of Stevens's obscure and late poem "The Course of a Particular" as one of the top dozen poems in English suggests that he read everything Wallace ever wrote.

1/31 - On Meaning in Poetry

from the essay "PRELIMINARY PROBLEMS" from The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

If the poem, as compared to prose, pays especial attention to feeling, are we to assume that the rational content of the poem is unimportant to its success? The rational content cannot be eliminated from words; consequently the rational content cannot be eliminated from poetry. It is there. If it is unsatisfactory in itself, a part of the poem is unsatisfactory; the poem is thus damaged beyond argument. If we deny this, we must surely explain ourselves very fully.

** COMMENT: All poetry, all artistic literature, must emphasize rational content, and to the degree that reason is minimized or ignored or sidestepped the artwork based on such a procedure is damaged, and often ruined. This is the central concept of the Winters's moral theory of literary art. The justification of the concept hangs on the idea expressed in the first clause of the second paragraph quoted: "The rational content cannot be eliminated from words." This statement is another of the foundation stones of Winters's analytical theories. Language is founded on conceptual thought, rational content -- because words are used in human communication and in meeting the problems and issues of human life -- and any art based on language must fully employ as its primary task the conceptual, rational nature of words to be even nearly successful.