A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

February

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

2/1 - On Emerson

from the essay "JONES VERY AND R.W. EMERSON: ASPECTS OF NEW ENGLAND MYSTICISM" from MAULE'S CURSE (1938) republished in IN DEFENSE OF REASON

But we have not done with [Jones] Very so easily. Emerson at the core is a fraud and a sentimentalist, and his fraudulence impinges at least lightly upon everything he wrote: when it disappears from the subject, it lingers in the tone; even when he brings his very real talent to bear upon a thoroughly sound subject, he does so with a manner at once condescending and casual, a manner which the justification, such as it is, may be found in his essays, but of which the consequence is a subtle degradation of the poetic art.

** COMMENT: In the writings from the middle of his career, Winters took one harsh shot after another at Ralph Waldo Emerson, even though he never devoted a single comprehensive essay to this seminal American writer and thinker -- and never, in my judgement, fully explained himself on his opinion that Emerson is a fraud. Nonetheless, in his later extended essay on Hart Crane in "In Defense of Reason", Winters made it abundantly clear why Emerson's romanticism was unacceptable and dangerous. Winters's merciless censures of Emerson have rankled, and still rankle, most critics, since Emerson has long been held up, however little he seems to be read, as one of the canonical fathers of American literary art and culture, especially for his aid in founding our mythic doctrines of individualism. Winters had little regard for anything Emerson is said to have accomplished in literature or thought. He was certainly a casual pop thinker and writer, like an early Deepak Chopra or Norman Vincent Peale. Winters could not abide casualness in thought or literature. In Winters's later writings, the references to Emerson noticeably dwindled, probably because he focused more on poetry in the late stages of his career. In his final essays, even when discussing Romanticism, Winters had little more to say about R.W.E.

2/2 - On the Labor of Art

from the essay "THE AUDIBLE READING OF POETRY" (1951) in THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM (1957)

There will never be a first-rate poet or a first-rate critic who lacks a first-rate ear; and no one will acquire a first-rate ear without working for it and in the proper manner. Poetry, alas, like painting and music, is an art -- it is not a form of happy self-indulgence; and to master an art or even understand it, one has to labor with all of one's mind and with at least a part of one's body.

** COMMENT: Undoubtedly, much of contemporary popular poetry written since Winters wrote, and even a heaping portion of contemporary serious poetry, has been an exercise in self-indulgence. Winters would have been appalled by what has happened. He believed that the writing of great poetry required heroic efforts to develop one's intelligence, technical skills, and that nearly ineffable artistic ear he talks about many times in his essays. Acquiring that ear is, in Winters's judgment, one of the most difficult tasks of an artist or thinker, and the proper manner was to read the greatest poetry ever written -- and the greatest poetry was to found in the special Winters Canon, concerning which we will have much to say in the months ahead. Winters reveals a bit of sadness with that word "alas", which betrays a feeling that he wished it could be different, that the art of poetry did not require such labors, that we could simply indulge ourselves and achieve great art. But to write, as well as to live, requires painstaking work, and there is nothing to do other than to undertake that arduous task if one is to write and to live well.

2/3 - On Language

from the "INTRODUCTION" to FORMS OF DISCOVERY (1967)

Language, then, is essentially conceptual or denotative; and, since language was created by man in the course of his long effort to understand the reality of himself and his world, this fact regarding language would appear to indicate something of human nature and of general nature. If it indicates nothing else, it indicates the situation in which we live, from which there is no escape save self-destruction, and which we would do well to endeavor to understand.

** COMMENT: "Essentially" is the key word in this passage, from very late in Winters's career. This crucial essay discusses the starting points of Winters's critical theories. Though few modern critics or thinkers would deny that language is conceptual, its conceptual nature and the role of conceptuality in literature remain issues often debated -- and well worth debating. Because, in Winters's eyes, language is primarily or basically a tool of reason for understanding the world and gaining control in our lives, the finest works of literary art must emphasize the essential conceptual character of language with the greatest skill. For Winters, this was a matter of great importance, for it concerned dangers to human lives. If language is misunderstood and misused, mistakes are made in life and art. In great part, from the concepts discussed here spring all of Winters's distinctive theories of poetic excellence.

2/4 - On Feeling in Poetry

from the essay "THE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL IN AMERICAN THOUGHT" from "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Every line or passage of good poetry, every good poetic phrase, communicates a certain quality of feeling as well as a certain paraphrasable content. It would be possible to write a poem unimpeachable as to rational sequence, yet wholly inconsecutive in feeling or even devoid of feeling. Meredith and Browning often display both defects. Chapman's "Hero and Leander" is a rational continuation of Marlowe's beginning, but the break in feeling is notorious.

** COMMENT: Though Winters has been endlessly chided for his supposed over-emphasis on rational content in poetry, there can be no question that he fully understood and valued the emotional content of literature. Nonetheless, for him emotion and reason must be properly related. Poetry is dead without feeling, Winters stated again and again and displayed passionately in every literary judgement he ever made in print, as much as poetry is terribly weak without rational understanding. Browning might be his consummate example of a poet whose work lacks proper feeling, and Browning's work might be worth studying just for this reason. (Winters once boasted that he had read every line of poetry the exceptionally long-winded Browning ever published. If true, this would be an achievement of a singular saint of poetry -- or perhaps martyr.)

2/5 - On Winters's Imagism

from a letter to Allen Tate (1927) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

My belief is that it is possible to touch certain obvious physical facts of existence in such a way as to invoke -- or evoke -- or expose -- as by one single electric shock an entire existence or phase of existence. Emily Dickinson does this for me in such a poem as "The last night that she lived", Hardy in "The Darkling Thrush", Williams in the first poem in "Spring and All", or, in "Sour Grapes", "To Waken an Old Lady". This is what I am endeavoring to do. It is more exciting to me than whole libraries of Pounds, Eliots, or even Rimbauds. Perhaps I am all wrong.

If there is any perfection in the poems [in Winters's early book of poems "The Bare Hills"] it is, I fear, the product of labor rather than dexterity. It is only recently -- in the stuff I sent [Paul] Rosenfeld -- that I have felt myself to move neatly and freely. The rest is an infinitely slow and painful accretion -- I cannot begin to tell you how painful -- sheer agony. You seem to place me about where I place [the free-verse poet] H.D., -- though I think I like her less than you claim to like me. She has all the mannerisms of extreme concision and intense passion, and, most of the time, is verbose and cold. My intentions, at any rate, are about as diverse from hers as possible.

** COMMENT: Winters began his poetic career as a free-verse Imagist, which is very difficult for some readers to imagine, since many have met him through his controversial later poetry and criticism (which is often the case). He had left these early objectives entirely behind, rejected them as dangerous in fact, within three years of writing this letter. His early poetry is certainly interesting and sometimes powerful, but it seems, on the face of it, to have almost no connection to the later formalist work, until the reader begins to study him a little more deeply. Winters came to see his search in poetry for an electric shock of existence to be a morally perilous romantic practice in self-indulgence. Perhaps, in time, you can see how credible Winters's denunciation of Romanticism is in light of his own commitment to it in his early career. But though he radically changed his critical position once in his life, some things remained the same in his work to the end of his career. For example, his belief in the difficulty of producing great poetry, expressed in this passage, played a role in his criticism to his final writings (though his definition of greatness fundamentally changed). He seems to have labored as with a heavy burden at everything he wrote, both in poetry and criticism. Nothing came easily and smoothly, nor did he believe it should. He taxed himself to produce the best, and it appears to have been agonizing for him to keep at it throughout his life.

2/6 - On Poetic Images

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

The reader might object that we have something approaching the pathetic fallacy of the romantics, that [Henry] Vaughan is attributing a human experience to the lamp [in Vaughan's great poem "The Lamp"]. But the objection, I think, has only a very limited validity. The comparison is ingenious and deliberate rather than naïve, and the concentration throughout is on the experience of the speaker. We have a speaker who is confronting death, alone, in a remote countryside, and laboring, with the tools of his religion, to adjust himself. The labor, in general and in detail, is evidence in the diction and in the structure at every point. The poem is not as great as a few poems by earlier poets, but it is one of the great poems of the tradition.

** COMMENT: Though some might object to Winters's criticism on the grounds of its supposed "coldness" -- its lack of emphasis on poetic figures and images, its stern adherence to the strictures of Reason -- there can be little question that Winters deeply appreciated poetic language, imagery, and rhetoric. Whenever employed, in his judgment, images had to serve reason, to help readers adjust themselves to the hazards and difficulties of life; but imagery, for Winters, was certainly an apposite source of the power in artistic literature. In this passage on the English Renaissance poet Henry Vaughan, one of Winters's greats, Winters discusses the use of one such image. The image might at first seem jejune or forced. How Vaughan's image differs from the flights of rhetoric and imagery taken by the romantics, for Winters, was a matter of that almost indefinable critical ear we have already read about. Also, as stated here, imagery must be tightly fitted to the rational understanding, whereas the romantics usually employed images almost solely for the sake of fancy, without regard to how images contribute to the complete rational understanding and moral judgment of an experience, which is the primary goal of the best poetry. The use of imagery is a matter of taste to some degree, and the reader might wish to read the romantics again with the principles of Winters in mind to develop his taste.

2/7 - On Battling Experience

from the poem "HERACLES", by Yvor Winters, COLLECTED POEMS (1952)

** COMMENT: Winters wrote a few complex poems using the Greek myths as vehicles for his exploration of human experience. In a note to this poem, Winters says that the hero, Heracles, is in "semi-intuitive combat with experience". The poem as a whole is almost a direct allegory and very difficult both as vehicle and tenor. I will not claim that I understand it thoroughly, but the passage I have selected gives a fair sampling of the "post-symbolist", quasi-allegorical methods Winters employed in his later poetry and which he championed in his later criticism, especially in his final summa "Forms of Discovery". It also provides an example of his hard and weighty diction, at once profoundly conceptual and physically concrete; the carefully controlled, rhymed poetic line (which too often for my taste in Winters's poetry has the feel of a march); and the rational structure.

2/8 - On Automatic Writing

from the essay "THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 'THE BRIDGE' BY HART CRANE" from "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

In Whitman and his close followers there is occasionally a momentary approach to the kind of automatic writing here suggested [by Emerson]; but this ideal was most nearly fulfilled by another line of Romantic writers, and probably reached Crane by way of them, in the main: the line starting with Poe, and proceeding through Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and the lesser Symbolists to such Americans as Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. The concept of automatic writing is an inevitable development from the initial Romantic ideas; and it is bound to appear whenever the ideas long govern literary practice. Crane had almost no French -- I spent a couple hours one evening taking him through various poems by Rimbaud -- but his friends doubtless translated the French poets for him and described them, and he knew the later ones thoroughly.

** COMMENT: Crane's life and suicide, and their relation to his art, made for a great tragedy in Winters's eyes, because he believed that the romantic theories of art and life held by those who deeply influenced Crane's life and writings inevitably and logically lead anyone who seriously tries to implement such theories in all their folly and horror into death. In Winters's eyes, nothing could be further from excellence in poetry than to write automatically, to surrender one's reason and skill to some kind of mysterious, uncontrolled inspiration. Of course, in total ignorance of Winters's assessment, or any other critic's disapproval, of Romanticism, countless writers and poets of every sort and school in our time have given this kind of writing a whirl, and sometimes the results have been mildly interesting. I do not know whether I accept Winters's almost hysterical conclusions on the consequences of Romanticism -- that death and spiritual destruction lie in the balance -- but his arguments are certainly worth considering and evaluating carefully.

2/9 - On History as Literature - KP

from the essay "PROBLEMS FOR THE MODERN CRITIC OF LITERATURE" (1956) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM" (1957)

But I would merely like to insist on certain facts: historiography, whether good or bad, is a form of literature, and the best examples are among the great works in our literature; yet the great works of historiography are almost never studied as literature in our universities, and are completely neglected by our literary critics. The study of fiction, on the other hand, occupies a place in the curricula both of our universities and of our literary reviews, which is vastly disproportionate to the achievement of our fictionists.

** COMMENT: Winters upheld the study of history as literature throughout his career. Though some historians and historical critics might consider his assessment of history disparaging, Winters obviously meant it as a great compliment. He strove in several essays, and this is one of the most prominent, to change our understanding of historical writing and to bring it into the academy as a proper subject of literary criticism. He found, frequently, that even our best fiction simply could not match the rational power, precision, and depth of understanding of human experience that were achieved in the great histories. His outlook on history makes sense in terms of Winters's critical theories, for he was often impatient with the particular and the concrete, as valuable as he considered them on one level, and, as we have seen, favored generalized rational statement as the supreme achievement of the literary arts -- a position with very few adherents in our day.

2/10 - On Yeats's Ideas

from the essay "THE TURN OF THE CENTURY" (1960) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY" (1967)

The simple fact of the matter is that Yeats (from "Responsibilities" onward, at least, and often before) was usually trying to say something clearly. His obscurity results from his private symbols (which resemble the medieval symbols in their intention), from the confusion of his thought, and from the frequent ineptitude of his style. From "Responsibilities" onward, in fact, he became more and more openly didactic. He quite obviously was deeply moved by his ideas and expected us to be moved by them. But unfortunately his ideas were contemptible.

** COMMENT: Winters took William Butler Yeats seriously, more seriously, it would seem, than almost any other critic. That is why he rejected him as one of our best poets, even though he had once -- very early in his career --rated him as one of the modern greats. (He had great respect for Yeats's writing talent to the end.) Winters's much later writings on Yeats, and especially the section on Yeats from this essay in "Forms", amount to a devastating attack on the mythic Irish poet. One simply cannot read Yeats with the same jejune acceptance one might have had when one finishes with Winters's analysis and assessment of his ideas. Those ideas were more than contemptible; they were downright bizarre. Taking his thought as seriously as Yeats intended it to be taken, Winters rejected his work wholesale, though he did think Yeats had literary talent and could turn many a nice poetic phrase. As I have mentioned already, Winters has been widely vilified for his judgements on Yeats's work.

2/11 - On Life in the University

from the essay "THE POET AND THE UNIVERSITY: A REPLY" (1949) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

Mr. Carruth apparently regards teaching as an odious drudgery. I have not found it so. I enjoy teaching, simply as a day-to-day activity. I should be lost without it, even if I did not have to earn a living. It is true that I teach in a good university [Stanford], one which draws a superior body of students, but there are other good universities, and a good man ought to be able to get into one. If I were to name the thirty most intelligent people whom I have met in the past twenty years, some seven or eight would be colleagues or former colleagues, close to fifteen would be students or former students, and the rest (perhaps) would be chosen from other groups. I have close to twenty students working under me at the present time who can write better critical analyses than any New York or Chicago book reviewer (or almost any New York or Chicago "critic"), and with whom it is a genuine pleasure to be in daily contact. And my contact with them is not merely a pleasure; it is also a serious professional activity.

** COMMENT: Winters frequently has been ridiculed for the lofty regard in which he held the writing of many of his students, and for his championing of the work of several of them as among the best poetry ever written in English. But it is clear that he loved his work as a teacher of writers and took it very seriously, as this passage well demonstrates. It is a matter of proper critical judgement whether Winters was right about the students and colleagues whom he so strongly praised as good and great. I have found his evaluation of these poets, writers, and critics to be mostly sound. His success at teaching his students and judging their work is one of the reasons I became a Wintersian long ago and an advocate for the preservation and wider reading of his work: Winters has proved himself trustworthy with his choices of the great writers and poets, and the students he judged great are, almost without error, in reality great. I know this statement will not win him, his students, and me any popularity contests, obviously, but I felt that I must clearly state my view. Finally, Winters several times in his writings defended the university as a proper place for a poet to earn his living while pursuing his art. This was an issue he had thought a great deal about, especially in contrast to the system of patronage that had prevailed in the world of the arts for much of Western history.

2/12 - On Cooper's Verisimilitude

from the essay "FENIMORE COOPER OR THE RUINS OF TIME" from "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Anyone who will take the trouble to acquaint himself with the works of [historian Francis] Parkman -- and anyone who will not is to be commiserated in general and distrusted in particular as a commentator on certain aspects of American literature and history -- or anyone who will read a dozen odd journals of life in the wilderness, will scarcely, I imagine, object very seriously to this aspect of Cooper on purely factual grounds. Cooper errs not in the plausibility of his facts, but in relying so heavily for the maintenance of interest on so limited a range of facts, and frequently in the sentimental and inflated redundancy with which the facts are rendered; and so far as the Indians are concerned, this redundancy is not without its verisimilitude, whatever we may think of its absolute merits as style, for the Indians in their more formal and heroic moments, as we find it recorded by those who knew them intimately and in their primitive condition, is not as remote from the redundant passages of Cooper as one might at first glance suppose.

** COMMENT: Cooper has taken a load of abuse over the past century and has been demoted to the high school English class. Most of this came about because Mark Twain skewered Cooper for ridiculous writing and bad history in a famous essay on his novels that critics enjoy quoting. Fully aware of the Cooper's status, Winters even stood up to this trend in literary culture. Winters wrote a long and admiring essay on his work and praised several novels very highly (though, as one might guess, not the ones most commonly singled out by more well-known critics). In this passage, Winters is discussing the Leatherstocking Tales, but his comments apply to Cooper's many other novels. Cooper was carried away by his love of language and his thirst to write a full and rich prose that would equal Shakespeare's teeming dramatic poetry. Winters strongly recommended the historical writing of Francis Parkman in several passages, and that he defended Cooper using Parkman, who wrote so much on the northern Native Americans, was a clear and strong sign of his approval for Cooper's work in the Tales. As charming as Twain's put-downs are, Cooper might yet enjoy a resurrection in his reputation, and Winters's criticism on him might play its part in rescuing him from Twain's stinging and influential reproofs.

2/13 - On Renaissance Prose

from the essay "ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY" (1955) in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM" (1957)

The prose of the [English Renaissance] period is even worse, vastly inferior to the Spanish prose of the same period, for example, though some great minds forced their way through the barbarous medium without improving it greatly (Hooker is one, Bacon another). If one compares the prose and the verse of the most remarkable men who used both mediums, such men as Gascoigne, Nashe, Sidney, Raleigh, and Greville, the difference is striking -- and baffling. These men were highly civilized poets, but their prose, regardless of the value of the ideas expressed, is clumsy.

** COMMENT: As you realize by now, Winters's focused mostly on poetry in his critical writings. He considered the work of the poets of the English Renaissance to be one of the great artistic achievements of humankind. But he several times commented on the clunky prose of the period. The weakness of Renaissance prose is a fascinating question to consider, if one has the time, energy, and intellect. Winters spent quite a bit of time trying to understand why such literary movements come and go. He hoped, I believe, to understand how he could bring about a contemporary movement in which his theories would be adopted and employed by more and more writers. The causes of the waxing and waning of literary movements, especially the poetic ones, in Winters's opinion, can tell us a great deal about the consequences to poetry and life of faulty conceptions of literary art. Though Winters achieved great distinction in understanding why poetry achieved such greatness in this period (it is perhaps his only recognized triumph in literary thought), he never satisfactorily answered the question of the causes of the startling overall weakness of 16th-century prose.

2/14 - On T.S. Eliot's Poetry

from the essay "CONCLUSIONS" in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY" (1967)

Except for the poems in quatrains in his second collection, [T.S. Eliot's] method has been associational, for the most part, and rather loosely so. [Ezra] Pound seems to have been the chief influence, but there are important differences. Both men borrow compulsively from earlier poets: Pound seems to borrow these passages merely because he likes them and cannot get them out of his head; in Eliot they are usually employed ironically, but almost always, so far as one can judge, because of some sort of thematic relevance -- the relevance is likely to be far-fetched, however, and the exegetes make very amusing reading, [literary critic Cleanthe] Brooks in particular. The texture of Pound's detail is very poetical, laid on with very thick oil; Eliot seems to be looking for the prosaic, the matter-of-fact.

** COMMENT: Winters's judgements on Eliot have played a large role in the obscurity that his writings have descended into in the years since he lived. Eliot is one of the most highly regarded poets and literary critics of the 20th century, and nearly every major critic pays him what is presumed to be his due. He has written the 20th century's greatest poem, in the judgment of the Standard Canon, "The Waste Land", and its greatest critical essay, "Tradition and Individual Talent". He is quoted, it seems, nearly everywhere, by writers of every position, and there are few major poets and critics who have not spent some time deeply scrutinizing his thought and art. For Winters, Eliot's associational methods -- meaning that Eliot did not follow a rational procedure in his poetry -- were highly suspect, as he said of similar poets over and again. For a poet deemed so great by so many, Winters paid him little attention in his final work -- and paid him even fewer compliments. Was he right about Eliot? Is Eliot vastly overrated? I agree with Winters, though this position might condemn Winters to an even deeper and longer obscurity than he has suffered already. We will discuss Pound in other selections to come, and Eliot will also come up for comment whenever we turn to Winters's earlier essay on Eliot's criticism.

2/15 - On Facts

from a letter to Donald E. Stanford (1933) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

Next year at Harvard, take as many solid historical courses as you can get. Fill your head with facts; never mind the appreciative stuff. The scholars who appreciate heavily usually do it badly, and you can do that for yourself. You need history, philosophy, and language, and need them badly. For God's sake prepare yourself to teach; get good grades so that you can get a job. There is nothing more pathetic and in a way contemptible than the free-lance writer who tries to live by writing and actually lives by borrowing from his more provident friends.

** COMMENT: Winters disparaged the English professor often in his writings, even though he was one himself. He thought that English professors, in general and as a class, were a sorry lot. Few of them ever adopted his views or sympathetically taught his theories in their classes, even during Winters's years of modest standing in the literary community. Donald Stanford, who became a fine poet and critic, was one of Winters's graduate students at Stanford in the '30s. Typical of Winters, he recommended to Stanford that he ignore English teachers and delve deeply into the study of the history of ideas, which Winters believed was the only avenue to escaping the corruption wrought by Romanticism in the literary arts. There probably has never been a poet and literary critic more strongly committed to understanding history and philosophy than Winters. Who can write good poetry without understanding these disciplines well? This is another of his great achievements as a thinker. On the other hand, he believed that poets and critics need academia, since the old system of patronage long since passed away. He was telling Stanford to guard against the corruptions of the system while he prepared to provide himself a living so he could continue to practice his art. It was sage advice.

2/16 - On Adams and Decay

from the essay "HENRY ADAMS OR THE CREATION OF CONFUSION" from "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

The Revelation [described in Henry Adams's essay "A Letter to American Teachers of History"] discloses that Energy is being dissipated steadily in a godless universe: the origin of Energy in a godless universe, and the question of how this process, which must end in time, has had no temporal beginning, but has been undergoing a steady process of diminution from all eternity -- these difficulties are never met. The end is certain; the beginning does not matter. The principle explains why heat ends in cold, life in death, motion in station. And the principle once established, it follows that each succeeding manifestation of energy is inferior to the last. Man is thus inferior to the early animals, and civilization is a process of decay. The emergence of human reason during this process does not trouble Adams in the least: Reason as we have seen leads only to confusion and inaction and is of no help in the attainment of truth; this in spite of the fact that Adams probably believed that he was using his own reason in arriving at the truths which he elucidates.

** COMMENT: As we will see later in this Year with Winters, Winters rated some of Adams's historical writings as some of the greatest ever written in English. But his works comparing the purported medieval synthesis and our modern intellectual chaos received from Winters an incisive critique that, in my judgment, calls into serious question our regard for Adams's ideas on this issue and his abilities as a cogent thinker. In this passage, Winters displays the rational contradictions at the center of Adams's puerile and meandering philosophical and historical theories. That Adams disparaged Reason, as well as the modern emphasis on the scientific and the rational, was sure to draw not only the criticism but the fury of Yvor Winters. For all their interest, fame, and influence in American cultural history, one must struggle to regard Adams's writings on 13th- and early 20th-century thought with anything more than contempt after reading Winters's erudite critique -- and wonder about the intelligence of critics who have kept on defending Adams's inane ideas to this day. Such ideas are part of the corruption that continues to molder in literature today.

2/17 - On Expression of Emotions

from the essay "PROBLEMS FOR THE MODERN CRITIC OF LITERATURE" in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM" (1957)

Literature has been regarded in [the modern] period as essentially an "expression" of emotion, has been so regarded by poets, professors, and critics about equally, and consequently that is what it has been in the main; and poets and other writers have been expected to be temperamental and irresponsible and consequently have often been so; and a great many temperamental and irresponsible people, who in more fortunate ages would never have thought that they were artists, have been led to believe that their personal weaknesses were signs of genius.

** COMMENT: Winters stood firmly against romantic conceptions of the literary arts throughout his career, which almost in itself accounts for his obscurity. Since he wrote, the doctrines of Romanticism have only so gained in strength and many now stands as axioms of literary theory. One has to wonder, though, if one is drawn to Winters's ideas, just why so many thinkers of such education and erudition disagree with Winters so completely on this and other major doctrines of literary criticism. Winters seemed to love to stand alone against the world and its leaders, and it seems that we who study and follow him will have learn to live without the esteem of the dominant literary community of Western culture, for I do not sense, contrary to Winters's oft expressed hopes, that the standing of Winters's theories will change any time soon, if ever. One feels Winters's near contempt for expressive and emotive writers in his brief side comment on the general direction of literature in modern times.

2/18 - On Influence

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

For the past three years [Edgar] Bowers and [N. Scott] Momaday have been well acquainted; otherwise, no two of these poets have known each other personally. [Frederick Goddard] Tuckerman, because of the nature of his publication, could have influenced none of the others; even Momaday, when he writing the poems herein discussed, had only a slight acquaintance with him. Miss [Emily] Dickinson was known to all four of the subsequent poets, but it would be hard to prove an influence. It would be easier to make a case for the influence of [Wallace] Stevens on the poets who followed him, but this influence, if there was one, was of the most general sort.

** COMMENT: Among the hundreds of poets of the last 125 years, Winters picked out only a handful who he believed were part of a movement that he called "Post-Symbolist" -- a movement to which most of them never knew they belonged. Winters claimed that most of the later poems of his career were part of this new tradition that he had discovered. Post-Symbolism has received very little discussion since Winters first described it in detail in his final book, published more than 30 years ago, and that discussion has occurred only among Wintersians. No well-known critic or poet has ever discussed this "tradition". It is a paltry movement indeed. Yet, obscure as it no doubt is, it is one of the great movements in the history of our literature and deserves careful study. As discussed in this passage, the poets who almost inadvertently practiced this stylistic method seldom influenced each other, though certainly Winters himself played a role in the development of the poetry of Bowers and Momaday, who were students in his graduate program at Stanford at different times. The Post-Symbolist method combines the sensory detail of the Romantic movement with the intellectual rigor and intensity of the English poets of the Plain Style, particularly those who wrote in the English Renaissance. Its methods have had unrecognized influences on the work of many poets who have written since Winters lived, probably mostly because of the considerable influence of Stevens.

2/19 - On Diction

The Complete Poem "There's a certain slant of light" by Emily Dickinson

** COMMENT: Emily Dickinson, though she led a now-famous sheltered life, was a poet who practiced what Yvor Winters came to call late in his life the Post-Symbolist method. She achieved greatness in several poems, and this one made Winters's list of the greatest ever written in English as collected in "Quest for Reality". Interestingly, this poem has received a good deal of attention from our more fashionable critics and is generally considered one of Dickinson's best in our literary culture. This poem, in fact one particular word in this poem, came up for a good deal of discussion in Winters's writings and the few critics who could be considered his followers. The word is in line three: "weight". Dickinson's poems went through several posthumous editions, and the differences among these editions are extensive. In one edition, "Heft" replaces "weight", and Winters considered this a gross error. Consequently, he chose the version selected here for "Quest". I have, of course, studied Winters's discussion of the damage done to this poem by the word "Heft". I suppose the weakness of this one word, in Winters's view, is a matter of the artistic "ear" that Winters talked about so mysteriously in his writings, the taste or foundational talent that makes a person a good poet or critic. I still do not know whether I accept that the word "Heft" is so damaging to this poem. It seems a small matter, but it was a large one to Winters. Perhaps I still don't have the ear and can never hope to have it. This seemingly small matter would be well worth extensive study if you decide to read more deeply in Winters after our year with him. (See selections for 2/18 and 2/27 for more discussion of Post-Symbolism.)

2/20 - On Discarding Weak Poetry - KP

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

One criticism which has been made of me repeatedly is this: that I wish to discard every poem to which I make objections. This is not true. Probably no poem is perfect in the eye of God. So far as I am concerned, a good many poems approach so nearly to perfection that I find them satisfactory. But there are many poems which seem to me obviously imperfect and every very seriously imperfect, which I have no wish to discard. Some of these I have analyzed both in respect to their virtues and to their defects; others, because of the nature of my discussion, mainly with reference to their defects; but I have dealt with few works which do not seem to me to gave discernible virtues, for to do otherwise would seem to me a waste of time. If we were all to emulate Hart Crane, the result would be disastrous to literature and to civilization; it is necessary to understand the limitations of Hart Crane, which are of the utmost seriousness; but when we understand those limitations, we are in a position to profit by his virtues with impunity, and his virtues are sometimes very great. If we are not aware of his limitations but are sufficiently sensitive to guess in some fashion at his virtues, he may easily take possession of us wholly. This difficulty indicates the function of criticism.

** COMMENT: This is a very important passage in Winters's writings, since it addresses the most common objection, heard again and again, to Winters's theories and specific critical practices evaluations (the way he judged poets and poems). Winters never wanted to throw out, ignore, or censure everything -- or even hardly anything -- that failed to make his lists of the best poems ever written. This has been charged against him many times during and after his career (though few say it now only because so few read him). The charge recently was made again, for example, by Wayne Booth in "The Company We Keep", one of the very few books of ethical literary criticism in recent years. This passage is a perfectly clear statement of one of the central concepts of all his criticism, using the recurring example of Hart Crane, who was so deeply influenced by Whitmanian Romanticism and the ubiquitous modern bent toward the poetry of associationist revery. If one is to understand Winters at all, I would think, one had better face this issue of how Winters judged works that didn't make his Canon. He simply didn't think they are the best. That doesn't mean that they are worthless, the repeated and erroneous assumption of nearly every critic and thinker who has bothered to investigate Winters's theories. It is high time this misconception was permanently laid to rest, though I don't hold out much hope that it will be. On the matter of Hart Crane, one had better study Crane to understand better how Winters took this matter, since he thought Crane a writer of great virtues who wrote weak poetry and which Winters actually considered dangerous to civilization itself. That is an extremely strong assessment of the work of a poet now considered one of the masters of the early modern era. If you are to assent to or profit from Winters's ideas, then, you must confront the issue of Hart Crane. But, most importantly, don't think that Winters wished Crane's work to be banished from the world of print or forgotten and censured. And never think that this is what he wanted to happen to any of the work of canonical poets he derogated and disfavored for a variety of reasons: Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Stevens, Williams, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, etc.

2/21 - On the Plain Style

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

The best discussion of [Thomas Nashe's poem "Adieu, farewell earth's bliss"] with which I am acquainted is by J.V. Cunningham. Cunningham demonstrates the logical structure of the poem, with the principle of repetition within each stanza. The poem deals with a standard theme, that of the vanity and transitoriness of human life; but the theme is intensified by the immediate presence of the plague. Each stanza save the next to last employed familiar stereotypes but employs them brilliantly. The next to last introduces the personal experience of Nashe and his dissolute but brilliant generation, and this raises the poem above the talented commonplace of so many of the poems of the century:

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death's bitterness;

Hell's executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply.

We have here the plain and bitter truth in the plain style at its best.

** COMMENT: Nashe's beautiful, concise, stately poem frequently made Winters's greatest poems lists and finally the Winters Canon, as published in "Quest for Reality". Winters was a champion of the plain style throughout his career and lauded and supported poets who tried to reinvigorate it, such as the great modern J.V. Cunningham, who is under discussion here. Winters wrote a number of fine poems in the style. The tradition has received little sympathetic criticism other than Winters's (though a few of its practitioners are still considered great in the common literary canon, such as Ben Jonson). Tipping his hand on his opinion of the tradition, for instance, C.S. Lewis called it the "Drab" style. You can see in this passage that even though Winters might find the rational content of a poem thin or worn, if the content was beautifully and appropriately presented and the rational and emotional content resulted in understanding of important human experiences, the poem could be a great one, as is the case with Nashe's.

2/22 - On Melville's "Billy Budd"

from the essay "HERMAN MELVILLE AND THE PROBLEMS OF MORAL NAVIGATION" from "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

[Captain] Vere can see only one solution to the situation [of Billy's provoked murder]: to act according to established principle, which support public order, and, for the margin of difference between established principle and the facts of the particular situation, to accept it as private tragedy.

The solution, with certain modifications, is the solution of [novelist Edith] Wharton for the same moral problem, as it was later posed by Henry James; the moral principle, in the better works of Mrs. Wharton, however, is usually incarnate in a code of manners, and at times appears less defensible than in Billy Budd, because of the tendency observable in codes of manners to become externalized and superficial, to become insulated from the principles informing them with life. The solution, in terms as bald and absolute as the terms of Melville, was likewise the solution of Socrates.

** COMMENT: A great deal of philosophical thought is packed into this passage, more than anyone new to Winters could possibly fathom. Winters considered Melville's last work, the unfinished novella "Billy Budd", one of Melville's greatest works, one the greatest works of fiction, and a key to and culmination of Melville's moral ideas. According to Winters's lengthy and incisive essay on him, Melville had struggled with the conundrums of private and public morality across his whole literary career; these difficulties found their resolution in the ideas portrayed in "Billy Budd". Since Winters believed that the ideas of most of the 19th-century American novelists arose from the same source, the moral difficulties surrounding American Puritanism, he compares Melville's solutions with those of Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book of which this essay is part offers fascinating reading in the history of ideas in American literature and the important issues of life that Winters believed 19th-century American literature tangles with. Giving one's very life to and for rational principles, in Winters's eyes, was the supreme act of intelligence for the brave soul adjusting his thoughts, words, and deeds to reason rather than unbridled emotion.

2/23 - On Ethics

from a letter to Howard Baker (1930) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

As to a "belief in existence", I am unable to envisage any notion of ethics that does not start from it as a hypothesis at the very least. Ethics is the science of conducting existence; insofar as one concerns oneself with ethics one believes in existence, for the time being at any rate. In one's moments of skepticism about existence one is equally skeptical about the value of ethics. Tate complains in one letter that I ought to doubt his existence and ought not to doubt his honesty. Practically all epistemological problems lead to contradiction and confusion, and may very lead one to despair of the absolute logical justification of such a belief. But the ethical problems are nonetheless pressing for all that.

** COMMENT: Very wise comments are found here and throughout this long letter. Winters later came to found his whole critical system on morals and ethics; he believed that poetry can, does, and should play a major role in the development of morality, though not necessarily of any specific code of ethics. Rather early in his career (this letter was written at the time he was switching from imagist to traditional poetic structures), he was absorbed by the moral questions that would lead to him laying the foundation for that system. Winters passed quickly by the philosophical skepticism and epistemological hand-wringing that were already the hallmarks of the modern age in 1930 and absorb much of our attention still, unwisely. Rather than wasting time on these issues of knowledge, he squarely faced the ethical issues of his time. No matter the problems of knowing and truth, he seemed to be saying, we still must live and properly adjust our thinking to successful living, tasks in which good literature can provide great assistance.

2/24 - On Henry James's "The Awkward Age"

from the essay "MAULE'S WELL OR HENRY JAMES AND THE RELATION OF MORALS TO MANNERS" from Maule's Curse (1938), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

It is a remarkable evidence of the genius of James that though most of the important actions in the story are either flatly incredible or else are rendered so subtly as to be indeterminable, yet the resultant attitudes and states of mind of the actors are rendered with extraordinary poignancy: the obscure, slow, and ugly withdrawal of Vanderbank, the final scene between Mitchy and Nanda, the final departure of Nanda and Mr. Longdon (even though one is none too certain of the exact nature of the relationship to which they are departing) are, for myself, among the most haunting memories which I retain from my fragmentary experience as a reader of novels. Yet few memorable novels are less satisfactory.

** COMMENT: Henry James was always problematic for Winters. He had difficulties with the themes of his stories and novels and disapproved of much of his excessive subtlety. But he thought James had impressive virtues, especially in the creation of characters and the plotting of powerfully dramatic scenes. Though Winters claims here to have read little in fiction, he read most everything in our Standard Canon and a good deal more -- he even made a few discoveries of his own in fiction. In many novels, he found James particularly tiresome and troubling, probably because Winters thought James had wasted his considerable skills as a novelist. Yet James was always struggling with clearly resolving the moral quandaries into which he placed his characters and which he thought illuminated the basic moral issues of life. Thus, there was much for Winters to approve in James. In the end, Winters considered his art mostly, and sadly, obscure and most of his novels and stories to be failures to one degree or another because of their moral obscurity.

2/25 - On Art for Art's Sake

from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS" (1949) in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

Thomas [Aquinas] is guilty of one confusion, for example, which is common among aestheticians: he appears to find a common quality in which we call the beauty of nature and what we call the beauty of art. A beautiful natural object, however, is not in itself an act of human judgment; it is outside of the moral order. And although a man's apprehension of such an object, and evaluation of it, is an act of judgement and within the moral order, this apprehension and evaluation can occur only in an act of criticism or in a descriptive work of art. If the artist, however, is conceived as one who creates comparable to natural objects, he is working outside of the moral order, and this notion will result in one form or another of a doctrine of art for art's sake, of art "ad bonum operis." From my own point of view, the natural object cannot be viewed as a work of art, for it is not a work of human judgment; but as a part of human experience, and like any other part of human experience, it is a legitimate subject for art.

** COMMENT: Aquinas was the greatest thinker who ever lived, according to Winters, and he influenced Winters deeply (a matter that we will return to several times during this Year with Winters). But for all that, Winters believed that some of his ideas about art have caused trouble for centuries, ideas which culminated in Romanticism and the various later theories that we call "art for art's sake". Winters's battled for the recognition of reason as central to art, and of intelligence and thought and understanding to beauty. He never made much progress in his lifetime toward this goal, and his ideas have failed miserably ever since to find wide support. To get this concept back on the table for discussion is one of the principal goals of this Winters web site. The ideas expressed here are important theoretic foundation stones to Winters's entire philosophy of art. The literary artist, even in the contemplation or pursuit of natural beauty, works within a moral order. Even artists using other mediums must, because art is connected to life and human communication, work within that order. This is a profound and revolutionary concept, at least in our times. Winters believed that the concept goes back to the origins of literary study in Aristotle. Beauty in literature is found not in simple "beautiful" objects: rather, it is found in the proper rational and emotional evaluations of human experiences, which control human responses to beautiful objects. I hope the readers of this collection will continue to delve more deeply into these pioneering ideas as a result of this web site.

2/26 - On Questioning the Standard Literary Canon

from the essay "THE SENTIMENTAL-ROMANTIC DECADENCE OF THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES" in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY" (1967)

This essay will win me few friends. The readers of poetry and the poets whom I have been discussing have been corrupted by the same ideas and the same models. I understand the nature of this corruption, I think, because my own critical taste was corrupted in the same way; I once admired the "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Dover Beach" as much as anyone -- it is odd, when I think back to it. On the other hand, the "reading public" is tired of the styles to which I have been objecting, for, when traces of these styles appear in a poet of our century, the poet is damned. But the poets of the nineteenth century and earlier have become sacred; they are accepted without question; they are not examined with caution; it is sacrilegious to question them.

** COMMENT: Not surprisingly, most readers who come to this Winters essay for the first time (they will probably never be many) are stunned. Nearly every major poet of the period often called the Romantic Period, each poet we were taught to think of as great in high school and college, is dismissed as intellectually corrupted, artistically weak, morally dangerous, or all three. Winters's stance on the Romantics, who have long enjoyed great favor in the Standard Canon, has been in turn dismissed as foolish. Winters seemed to rely on the fact that people grew tired of the conventions of syrupy poetic language, such as employed by Keats and Wordsworth, to give him hope that his theory and judgments would in time help replace the foolish canon that has held sway for centuries. The readers of poetry would come to their sense, return to reason, and, he believed, eventually recognize the greatness of those rational poets and poems he championed his whole career. It was not to be and will not probably happen in many generations, if ever. Poetry and criticism have left Winters far, far behind. He has very few "followers" or disciples any longer -- and had very few in his lifetime, despite the excessive opinions of some Wintersians that Winters founded one of the largest and sturdiest poetic movements in US literary history (this view is easily refuted by simply looking at the number of citations of Winters in the Literary Criticism section of any large bookstore: perhaps one citation in a hundred books). The stylistic conventions of the 19th century have given way to new stylistic conventions in the modern period, but our new conventions are every bit as firmly tied to the main theories of Romanticism as were Wordsworth's. The Romantic modes of revery, association, confession, personal expression, natural description, etc. have not been abandoned; they have been strengthened, expanded, and enhanced in many ways, and Winters was naïve to think the tides would turn against them and toward reason. Our poetry, if we are to judge by Winters's theories, is almost entirely corrupted -- almost ENTIRELY! For nearly every major poet of contemporary times writes romantic poetry. "Dover Beach", it is interesting to note, once made an early list of Winters's great poems. It never came close in his later revisions of his Winters Canon.

2/27 - On Post-Symbolism - KP

from the review "THE POETRY OF EDGAR BOWERS" (1956) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

Bower's style is at once as modern and as rooted in history as his subject matter. "The Virgin", which I have quoted, might so far as style is concerned have been written between 1595 and 1620; it offers a justification for the publisher's reference to Greville on the slipcover. But a large part of the poetry -- probably the great part -- belongs to a relatively modern tradition. In the seventeenth century, the rational structure of poetry, which had characterized the work of the Renaissance and which had had its origins in medieval writing, began to disintegrate; and the ethical formulations of Shaftesbury, aided by the critical formulations of Addison and subsequent associationists, hastened the disintegration. From here onward there is less and less command of "abstract" language, that is, of precise ethical and metaphysical thought, and more and more concentration on sensory detail and on progression governed by revery. In the [18th-century Collin's poem] "Ode to Evening" things have gone so far that syntax itself has almost disappeared from about half of the poem. In the best work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- for example, in some of Blake, Mallarme, and Rimbaud -- this concentration results in a sharper and more fascinating sensory perception than one can easily find in the earlier poetry, but the gain is an insufficient compensation for the loss. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few poets, at least a part of the time, endeavor to recover the older intellectual integrity and at the same time to retain something of the newer sensory acuteness: among the more obvious examples -- and these are probably the main influence on Bowers -- are Baudelaire, Leconte be Lisle, Valery, Sturge Moore, and Stevens. The result is sensory perception not for its own sake and not in the form of the traditional metaphor or simile, but sensory perception offered as sensory perception, yet charged with perfectly explicit meaning by the total context.

** COMMENT: Though the term does not occur in this passage, it is concerned with what Winters would come to call "Post-Symbolism", a small, diffuse literary movement of which Winters himself was the chief proponent and practitioner. The passage does more, however. It provides a neat summary of Winters's understanding of the overall drift of poetic theory and style since the 16th century. Bowers was a student of Winters at Stanford and became a first-rate poet (though unrecognized as such by almost all critics and poets outside the Wintersian camp). It is interesting that Winters praised several poets here whom he disfavored strongly throughout his career (see 2/20 selection for more on how Winters treats those who don't make the grade), such as Blake and Rimbaud. These two visionary poets never earned much applause from Winters, but he did laud them for the limited virtues they displayed. It is unquestionable that Winters thought that Romanticism, as dangerous intellectually as it is, cleared the way for the development of the most significant poetic style yet developed in English, the Post-Symbolist style, through the rapt concentration on sensory imagery that Romanticism fostered in literature.

2/28 - On Hedonism

from the essay "JOHN CROWE RANSOM OR THUNDER WITHOUT GOD" from The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943) "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

It is natural that a nominalist should be a hedonist, provided he is not, like Ockham, a voluntaristic Christian; and it is natural that he should endeavor to justify a hedonistic philosophy, and it is natural that he should fail in this attempt at justification. For if one cannot understand, one can at least hope to enjoy; it is in human nature to offer a rational defense of one's way of life, real or imagined, even if that way of life is anti-rational, as we can discover to our weariness and confusion by reading almost anywhere in the critical literature of the last three hundred years; and it is impossible to devise a philosophy which will show us how we can enjoy a universe from which all distinctions have been eliminated.

** COMMENT: Winters seemed to see no rational problem with these comments. He was entirely untroubled by what I call the "problem of disagreement", which refers to the fact that well-thought and well-read men and women have adopted and adhered to widely diverging truth-systems around the world and throughout the history of humankind. Why is there so much disagreement if we have the means to the truth? Winters's answer, it seems, was that he thought the world was mostly filled with fools and oafs -- or, at best, those deluded by their cultural surroundings, their philosophical milieu, which is one reason he spent so much effort on trying to convince readers to shun Romanticism. Hedonism was another intellectual position that he judged to be utterly foolish and irrational, though it has had its prominent adherents and defenders among major thinkers for millennia and poets through all of literary history. He believed that the man without a means of moral judgement, the nominalist, inevitably and quickly stumbles into abject hedonism. But it did not surprise him or bother him that intelligent writers adopted such a system. He seemed to expect that most would -- just as most would reject his theories in favor of the follies of Romanticism. The cold harshness of such words as we find in this passage has long angered Winters's readers, since he is plainly accusing the writers of 300 years of criticism of weakly rationalized stupidity.