A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

April

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

4/1 - On New England Calvinism

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

The moral sense in question, however, might have been a much weaker motive, and certainly would have been an essentially American motive, had it not been intensified through the influence of New England. In New England, the Calvinistic theology denied the freedom of the will and the efficaciousness of good works -- that is, it denied the importance of the whole subject of morality, at least in formal doctrine -- but at the same time, as a result of its inner inconsistencies and of the practical struggles of the Puritans, as I have shown in discussing Hawthorne, it dramatized and intensified the moral struggle in an extraordinary manner. Throughout a relatively brief period, perhaps for less than a century, the moral sense of New England as a whole, and throughout a much longer period the moral sense of large segments of New England, was both simplified and intensified by Calvinistic ideas, at the same time that these ideas, because of their inner contradictions, and as they worked, under the emotional pressure of the period, in the minds of the subtler theologians, were literally proving self-destructive.

** COMMENT: The subject of the development of moral theory in New England during the colonial period and the period of the early republic drew Winters's attention in his great and seminal study of American 19th century literature, a set of essays that has yet to receive the praise due for its erudition, depth, and sapience. In his essay on Henry James, whose novels Winters studied so closely and were so tautly focused on issues of manners and morals, Winters zeroed in most intensely on this matter of the influence of Calvinism on moral theory and practice in American culture. This is not the venue in which to discuss this matter in depth, but I hope my readers will be inspired by this insightful passage to delve into the question and to read all the essays in "Maule's Curse" -- with the purpose of understanding the development of moral thought in early America. I consider Winters's work in this area first rate. You should also study some of Winters's sources, since many of the books to which his footnotes are extremely discerning and entertaining as well. Literature in America, as with every national literature, was heavily swayed by the struggles among ideas in early America, and these influences, in turn, continue to play themselves out in contemporary literature.

4/2 - On Scholarship

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

He [the literary scholar] has helped to educate us by doing his proper work, and we [the critical scholars] should help to educate him and his successors by doing ours, for the study of literature is extremely difficult, involves great and various ranges of learning, and will never be wholly mastered or clarified by any one man. Tate's final sentence in "The Present Function of Criticism" reads: "Literature is the complete knowledge of man's experience, and by knowledge I mean the unique and formed intelligence of the world of which man alone is capable." At the end of "Literature as Knowledge" he makes a similar statement. It is my contention that such a statement should have introduced an essay, and that the essay should have explored the implications of the statement fully. Had Tate written such an essay, he would have been performing his proper function as a critic, a function which he blames the historical scholars for not having performed.

** COMMENT: Winters saw a sharp divide between the historical scholars of literature, the people who set texts and resolve philological issues and difficulties, and the critical scholars, the people who arose in mass in the 20th century to evaluate the works of literary artists. He discussed this distinction a number of times in his essays. He did not disparage the work of the historical scholars, but he made it clear that he believed they were, generally, ill-equipped to criticize the texts that they studied historically. Allen Tate, the American poet and critic, was a frequent correspondent of Winters's in the '30s and '40s, and their discussions were often rancorous and at times almost petty. In several essays, some of which Winters commended early in his career, Tate was harsh on English professors and scholars. Winters, in print, tried to defend them from Tate's accusations, though he also, as here, tried to set clear limits on their role in literary study. How Winters saw the work of critical scholars (as thinkers and artists who make moral judgments on works of art), however, was certainly much different from Tate's and almost all other critics of our times.

4/3 - On Tuckerman's Influences

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

"The Cricket" is composed of five sections; the riming is irregular; the lines vary in length; the meter is iambic. The poem belongs in the tradition of the "great odes", of which "Alexander's Feast" by Dryden is the first well-known example, although "Lycidas" might be regarded as a precursor, for its principles are similar and its influence on later examples is obvious: these poems dealt with what purported to be an important subject, were of some length, and were associational in structure and in the use of imagery (and often loosely associational). Most of the odes of Gray (including the "Elegy [Written in a Country Churchyard"]), of Collins, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and other fall in the category. These poems suggest the structure of "The Cricket", although the structure of Tuckerman's poem is more controlled than is the structure of most of these. Tuckerman's poem has a background in English poetry of which he must have been conscious. As to its resemblance with later French and American poetry, he was obviously ignorant, and the French and American poets were obviously ignorant of him.

** COMMENT: Witter Bynner discovered the 19th-century American poet F.G. Tuckerman in the middle of the 20th century, and Yvor Winters quickly judged that Tuckerman had written one of the greatest poem in English, "The Cricket". His ranking of Tuckerman as one of the greatest American poets has seldom been endorsed by other critics and has often led -- when it has been taken into account at all, which is very seldom -- to his vilification for advocating a poet whom most critics judge as inferior, minor, or negligible. In a few articles about Winters's ideas since his death in 1968, critics have had the habit of saying that Winters had lots of good ideas but that we will just have to overlook his "sillier" judgments on the best poems and poets, which are obviously incorrect and thoroughly useless. But I challenge my readers of this Year with Winters to read "The Cricket". I agree with Winters with all my mind and heart. This poem is one of the great works of literary art in English and far outranks any of the odes by the poets mentioned here, all of which are, of course, in the common anthologies because they, not Tuckerman's, are considered truly great. I feel that it is necessary to state that there is someone alive and well and thinking who agrees with Winters on his evaluation of Tuckerman and this poem, as well as on the other poets mentioned here, whose work he disapproves of for various reasons. I don't feel that there is any need to hide or snicker at Winters's judgments on Tuckerman, for they were correct, and it is time that readers recognized the excellence of his mind. Perhaps such issues will doom Winters's work for years to come to the obscurity in which it rests. So be it. When the world of readers and poets can at last recognize the distinction of Tuckerman and "The Cricket", then Winters will enjoy his renaissance.

4/4 - On Melville's Judgments

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

Now despite the difference in plot and in subject matter, the idea of this book (Melville's novel "Pierre") is the same as that governing "Moby Dick", but with a shift in emphasis: it is the relationship of principle to perception, and the difficulty of adjusting principle to perception in such a manner as to permit a judgment that shall be a valid motive to action. In "Moby Dick", Melville assumed that such judgment, though difficult, was possible; Ahab sinned by disregarding the counsel of Starbuck (the critical intellect), by destroying his nautical instruments, with the aid of which he maintained his position while at sea (that is, in the half known) with relation to the land (the known), and by committing himself to his own unaided instincts. In "Pierre" and in "The Confidence Man" alike it is assumed that valid judgment is impossible, for every event, every fact, every person, is too fluid, too unbounded to be known....

** COMMENT: Against all the critical forces of his time and ours, demanding that work of literary art be ambiguous and open to many interpretations, Winters stood firmly behind his position of definiteness. He had great respect for the skill of Melville and considered his prose to be, perhaps, the best ever written in English. But he could not abide his indeterminate plotting and handling of ideas in "Pierre" and other novels. Winters believed and defended this massively unpopular doctrine to his dying day, that the literary art is founded upon clear communication of rational concepts. That doctrine is founded on the idea that the artistic judgment adjusts principle to perception -- that our principles enable us to make sense of and properly handle our perceptions and the communal experiences of our cultures. Melville couldn't seem to get his point across in "Pierre". For Winters, not to make a rational point about ambiguity, if Melville had such a point to make, (for the novel was subtitled "or the Ambiguities"), is an unconscionable error in aesthetic judgment. Melville might not have had a point he wanted to make, which, in Winters's view, was an even more egregious blunder, since the overarching duty of the good writer is to make a moral judgment adjusting principle to perception, as stated in this passage. The comparison to "Moby Dick" is important, since Winters considered that one of the greatest prose narratives of all time. Also, this passage contains a very neat and clear summary of Winters's interpretation of that great novel, though it is true that "Moby Dick" might contain a few more ambiguities than Winters was willing to allow in his magnificent essay on Melville.

4/5 - On Dogshows

from a letter to ALLEN TATE (1948) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

As soon as I got back I was in a mess of dogshow business, three shows on three successive week-ends, which meant hours of work on my dog. On the first occasion my dog was first winners, his little brother (who beat him in San Francisco in February) was reserve winners, and their little sister took best of winners. The second time, at the big Airedale specialty shows in Los Angeles, my dog went to best of winners, beating 38 Airedales from all over the United States and Canada, his brother and sister among them, and under the judge who is reputed generally to be the best man in the United States. Last week-end, at a small show, a punk local judge knocked him down to reserve winners, and put a couple of lanky cow-hocked hounds over him. The last judge was an old woman, weighing about 300 pounds, and since she couldn't move very fast, she tried to make us show Airedales as if they were setters: set them up, cheek by jowl, pose them for five minutes, and so on. My dog, unfortunately, is an Airedale, and is as restless as if he were on a hot stove, and will kill any dog within grabbing distance; it was pretty hopeless. The life of art is a hard one.

** COMMENT: Winters showed Airedales most of his adult life and was particularly proud of his work with them and his success with their performances. He wrote about this avocation (Winters took up everything he did with great seriousness, so this cannot be called a "hobby") from time to time in his essays, mostly as a useful metaphor to the work of producing great literature, and he spoke frequently in his letters about his latest triumphs and trials. In this passage, one has to wonder how much interest Allen Tate had in the matter, until we come to the last sentence. Both Tate and Winters (though Winters to a much greater degree) stirred up a lot of trouble among critics and professors during the '20s and '30s and '40s. They were both thought to be cranks, and Tate was accused many times of having a blazing temper. Just as with his literary pursuits, Winters felt that many judges were simply not competent to judge his work in dog-showing. And as with poetry so with dogs: he was forced to suffer fools -- or so he thought. He always considered the life he led to be hard and lonely. He doesn't ever seem to have been puzzled by his loneliness, though. He knew what he was trying to achieve, perhaps better than any of his judges, and he always knew what sort of reactions he would get. By this time, when he was 48 years old, his reputation as a crank had solidified, and his standing in his field had, in my interpretation, embittered him to the world of letters in many ways. The animosity he felt keeps seeping out in all his later writings, especially after this date (which was shortly after his greatest critical work "In Defense of Reason" was published). How would he feel to know, now, that his work and genius have languished in greater obscurity since his death?

4/6 - On Shaftesbury's Romanticism - KP

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

Shaftesbury's view of the universe and of human nature is optimistic. As expounded by Shaftesbury and his followers, it teaches that whatever is, is right; that our impulses are good and can lead us only to virtue; that human reason is the principal source of error and of evil; that study and the effort to improve ourselves are unnecessary and in fact dangerous; and that whoever sees any contradictions among these ideas or between these ideas and experience is unworthy of refutation. Pope tells us that equal is common sense and common ease ("Essay on Man"); Emerson, that no man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations ("Spiritual Laws"). The work of more than two thousand years of painstaking effort to understand human nature, the conclusions of some of the greatest minds in the history of man, were discarded in favor of a few simple and irresponsible formulas. We are told that it is unnecessary to understand human nature, that in fact it is dangerous to try. But poets have always written about human nature, "faute de mieux", and one can write well only if one understands one's subject, only if one has a vocabulary which is relevant to the matter in hand. The new doctrines eliminated the precise understanding and generated the eighteenth-century cliché, and later the nineteenth-century cliché.

** COMMENT: It is a weird irony that the thinker who coined the phrase "the moral sense" was denounced 275 years later repeatedly by a critic who believed in the morality of the literary arts. The phrase was first used by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), whose writings reflect the optimistic tone both of the school of thought he founded and of so much of the philosophy of the 18th-century Enlightenment in England. It will surely do some good to go into Shaftesbury in some detail, for he is very important to understanding Winters. Shaftesbury believed that that famous philosopher of social power and brutality, Thomas Hobbes, had erred in presenting a one-sided picture of the selfishness of human nature. Selfishness is not the only natural passion; according to Shaftesbury, we also have natural feelings directed to others: benevolence, generosity, sympathy, gratitude, and so on. These feelings give us an "affection for virtue", which is what Winters was referring to in saying that Shaftesbury thought our impulses were good. Shaftesbury called this affection the moral sense, and he thought it created a natural harmony between virtue and self-interest. It was the fact that he called the sense an "affection", rather than a rational commitment to a sound principle, which surely alarmed Winters. Though Winters rejected his ideas in full, Shaftesbury was realistic enough to acknowledge that we also have contrary desires to those affections of virtue and that not all of us are virtuous all of the time. Virtue could, however, be recommended because the pleasures of virtue are superior to the pleasures of vice, as the Greeks once theorized. Shaftesbury now makes for rather difficult reading. He was a twisting, florid stylist, whose literary virtues now seem few. But if you can make it through, his work makes for some interesting comparisons to Winters's opinions of him, for he was not nearly so one-dimensional as Winters portrayed him here and elsewhere. I have seldom read a critique of Winters's judgment of Shaftesbury, probably because nobody reads either Winters or Shaftesbury -- or because few realize how extensive his influence has been on modern theories of literature -- but it would not surprise me if someone some day came out with an essay showing that Winters put up Shaftesbury as a straw man and so badly caricatured his ideas that Winters's judgment is beneath contempt. Still, I believe that Winters's views are partly justified. When pushed to their logical limits, the romantic moral concepts of Shaftesbury do lead to a nearly complete reliance on impulse rather than circumspect reason. And it was a turning to uncontrolled impulse that Winters feared most in the moral future of humankind and that he sought to control with his unwavering commitment to reason in thought and art.

4/7 - On Post-Symbolism

from the Winters poem "ON A VIEW OF PASADENA FROM THE HILLS"

** COMMENT: The passages from Winters's poems that I have been offering are meant to interest you in reading his poetry. One of the most common misconceptions about his poetry is that it is dry, abstract, and ultra-rational. True, there are a few poems that have a large measure of densely abstract language, but Winters gradually became much more interested in a style of poetry (the greatest ever devised, in his opinion) that he called Post-Symbolism, which he discussed frequently in his essays and which has concerned a number of our selections so far. This style and the theory behind it, it bears stating, have never caught on or been much discussed, if ever discussed, as a critical concept in the greater world of English literary culture. This passage of poetry, describing the scene from a hilltop overlooking the Pasadena Valley is a fine example of Winters's descriptive powers and a good example of the way he wrote in his mature work. It should be remembered, though, that each word in this description was intended to be part of a rational argument seeking understanding of an important human experience. Don't feel badly if you can't yet discern what he is talking about. I am not sure I do, so deep, dense, and demanding is this lyrical method. The passage is lovely just as description, but Winters intended so much more.

4/8 - On Eliot and Tradition

from the essay "T.S. ELIOT OR THE ILLUSION OF REACTION" from "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE"(1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Is Pound, for example, a man who possesses this historical sense, when he writes a formless revery loaded with quotations and literary reminiscences, but having no other discernible relationship to past literature? And is Eliot another such man, when he does almost the same thing with less skill? Or is [French poet Paul] Valery such a man, when he brings to bear upon problems of the modern mind and of the modern sensibility a mode of thinking and of writing, an entire moral, literary, and philosophical apparatus descended from Greek antiquity but heavily influenced by the tradition of his own country from the time of its greatest literary period, that of Racine, to the present? Eliot has praised both men in equally high terms, but, though he has pillaged a few lines from Valery, he has followed the method of Pound. If the view of tradition offered gives no reason for choice between two men so diverse, it is worthless, and if it leads us to choose Pound, it is vicious.

** COMMENT: I suppose that for those of you who are new to the thought of Yvor Winters his judgment of Eliot in the final sentence is decidedly open to question. But this was indeed, as severe as the judgment is, how Winters appraised Eliot's skills and intelligence: Eliot's favoring of the emotional, romantic associationism of Ezra Pound to the intellectually charged symbolism of Valery (who wrote, in Winters's estimation, the greatest single poem ever written: "The Silhouette of a Serpent") can be judged nothing other than, simply, ignorant and foolish. This passage is a comment upon a passage from Eliot's most famous and most widely read essay (though I find it difficult to discern whether it has had any far-reaching influence in critical theory or literary practice), which is certainly one of the most famous critical essays in English, "Tradition and Individual Talent." In this essay, Eliot sought to preserve and strengthen the long literary traditions of the West in modern poetry. He believed that the new methods of modernism must be seen as a continuation of tradition, rather than a breaking of it. Winters would have none of this, and he attacked the essay acerbically and to great effect. He pointed out that Eliot did not even understand tradition or convention well enough to assess its importance to modernism, which was, for Winters, a simple extension of Romanticism into new verse forms. Finally, once again, note that it is the capacity of a critical system, at its center, to distinguish the bad from the good and the good from the great -- that is, the issue of the canon -- that brings Winters to so sharply condemn Eliot's views on tradition. Winters believed that Eliot's incapacity to see the difference between the great Valery and the weaknesses of Pound showed that his ideas are worthless, at best. These are very strong words, for which Winters has been vilified again and again.

4/9 - On the Death of Genres

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

However, let me call the reader's attention to this: if I seem to be attempting to instigate a revolution, it is merely in critical thinking and not in the practice of literature. The epic and the poetic drama, for example, have long been dead, and I did not kill them. I have merely tried to account for their death, and to express my belief that the fault is not with us but is in the nature of the form.

** COMMENT: This Winters essay was probably unique in English critical history, a study of the literary usefulness or effectiveness of the main literary genres. No one I know has followed up on this opening effort ever since. In his usual ground-breaking way, Winters was trying to determine the best ways for the literary artist to make moral judgments, the methods of writing that enable him to take advantage of all the powers of language in making the judgments that are the highest expression of literature. As you might guess, he decides in the essay that the short poem is the best way for the literary artist to make a judgment of human experience. But in this passage near the end of the essay, he makes it clear that he has no interest in stopping writers from writing in other genres. He simply wants us to understand the capacities and pitfalls of each. It is extremely astute, in my view, that Winters took account of and drew conclusions from the death, or the fall into disuse, of various genres, such as the epic and poetic drama (though he was wrong, to some degree, about poetic drama, for a few writers continue to use it, such as Yeats and Eliot). Winters believed that time, in some sort of evolutionary process, would make the weaker genres and forms unusable -- and, for that matter, would undo weak critical theories (as he said elsewhere). He seemed to truly believe -- perhaps in complete naivete, that, despite his obscurity and general neglect into which his work was falling in his own lifetime -- that some day his ideas would be acknowledged widely as correct. This has not happened in the last 30 years and more since he last wrote, and I do not see a single sign that it will happen soon or ever. Still, we few who are persuaded of his genius and the excellence of his ideas and achievement carry on. This Year with Winters is an effort to seek the help of others in the worthy cause of resurrecting interest in him.

4/10 - On Janet Lewis's Poetry

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

Janet Lewis has devoted most of her work to fiction, in which, if I may be forgiven for saying so, I think that she is one of the relatively small number of distinguished professionals of our time. By comparison, she has been an occasional poet; her "Poems 1924-1944" contains only forty-eight pieces, and of these six or seven are negligible. Her themes are for the most part domestic, but the domestic theme can be as good as any other. She is a stylist of remarkable native gift and possesses an unusual knowledge of song and ballad stanzas and rhythms; she has as fine an ear for poetic movement as one can easily find in English. Her weakness is domestic sentiment, which sometimes goes all the way to sentimentality. It appears not in her subjects, but in her diction and only fragmentarily; it ruins few poems, probably none, and her book as a whole is far more distinguished than most, but it weakens a good many poems and often her most ambitious.

** COMMENT: Janet Lewis was Yvor Winters's wife. They were married for about 40 years. They never collaborated, at least on their work for publication. Lewis was a fine novelist (she died in 1999 at age 99, 31 years after Winters died). She was a wonderful poet, and a number of her poems were included in the Winters Canon as codified in the book "Quest for Reality." She has never received the recognition she deserves as one of the finest American novelists, but she has received some recognition -- and certainly a good deal more than her husband. Winters was always reluctant to discuss her work, feeling that drawing attention to it in his essays was a form of nepotism. But in his final work he put aside his rule and discussed her poetry for a few pages. It is highly instructive to note that, in my experience, when I give a copy of Lewis's "Collected Poems" (which came out after "Forms" was written) to someone who I think might have a deep interest in fine poetry, the borrower almost always is drawn to those poems that Winters found negligible, charming little ditties about the woods and tennis players and kitchen duties. Lewis's poems of deep meditation on highly serious themes just don't draw the eye of most people who claim to be sympathetic readers of poetry. Finally, turning back to her fiction, I would urge you to get your hands on her novels any way you can. Many remain in print.

4/11 - On Indian Poetry

from the review "THE INDIAN IN ENGLISH" (1928) from "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The beats [of Indian music], however, are curious: there are points in certain dances where one has the feeling that the sound of the drum is being produced by drawing the stick away from the drumhead instead of by the act of striking it, and by drawing it away with considerable effort. It is probably a semihypnotic effect of some of the stranger changes in rhythm which occur. One might describe the rhythm of the transitions as being a rhythm based on a considerable degree on suspension of beats and on varying suspensions. If the reader will purchase the Victor Record called, I believe, "Pueblo Indian Dance Music" (the two songs are or were mislabled, but are authentic), he may be moved to accept the translators with less suspicion.

Frances Densmore, in her versions of the Chippewa (or Ojibway) songs, has, it seems to me, accomplished something far more beautiful than any of the versions of Japanese lyrics that have been made in recent years. These poems, so minute in appearance, shrill as the voice of a gnat dying out past the ear, are among the most endlessly fascinating poems of my experience. What they accomplish is beyond analysis. Thus:

Or the exceedingly and oft-quoted "Song of Spring":

** COMMENT: In this passage, Winters was first trying to help readers understand the difficult and unusual rhythms of Native American poetry, and then he turns his attention to a couple of short lyrics that particularly moved him and were illustrative of these rhythms. It is not well known at all, even among the very few Winters fans there are, that he was deeply interested in and admiring of Indian poetry. He discussed this poetry in just one essay besides this review, in a late piece in his last book, "Forms of Discovery", though he did mention it in passing in one or two other writings. He thought highly of this work throughout his career, it seems, and it presents something of a puzzle for both opponents and defenders of Winters, since little of this poetry appears to adhere, in any way, to the principles of his mature criticism. Note that this review was written right at the time Winters was beginning to change from imagism and formalism, revery to reason, and beginning to write scathing reviews of modernist romantic poetry and making lots of sidelong comments about it in his letters. I don't have a firm understanding to these issues. The two poems he quotes are lovely, but slight affairs, compared to the work Winters later championed as the greatest ever written. Winters was always drawn to the striking image, no matter what the structure of the poem was -- the image inscribed in perfect diction that made him "see" whatever it was the poet was describing. This kind of excellence seemed to him, he said many times in his formal essays, wholly mysterious. It is a matter of the literary "ear", as I have discussed before. Even in his most piquant essays in defense of the rational content of poetry, he never downgraded the importance of imagery, and he appeared to be strongly drawn to the clear, crisp, precise, exacting imagery of the poetry of the Indians, just as he was drawn to similar writing in the poetry of William Carlos Williams throughout his career, a matter which has always puzzled me.

4/12 - On Classifying Poets

from the essay "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" from "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

The more important poets might be placed in four groups: the second-rate, those whose gift for language is inadequate to their task, poets such as Byron, D. H. Lawrence, or Poe, and regardless of their other virtues or failings; the major, those who possess all of the virtues, both of form and of range; the primitive, those who utilize all of the means necessary to the most vigorous form, but whose range of material is limited; and the decadent, those who display a fine sensitivity to language and who may have a very wide scope, but whose work is incomplete formally (in the manner of the pseudo-referent and qualitative poets) or is somewhat but not too seriously weakened by a vice of feeling (in the manner of the better post-romantic ironists). The second type of decadent poets may differ from the second-rate only in degree of weakness. In this essay I shall endeavor to discover some of the implications of the terms "decadent" and "primitive" as used in this way. The nature of major poetry, and of the second-rate should be reasonably obvious, even though there might be disagreement over examples.

** COMMENT: Here's an unusual way to classify poets. Certainly, Winters's judgment of just who falls in the category "second-rate" caused him the widest trouble throughout his career. It is amusing to see whom he chose as his examples in this category: a revered but unreadable romantic; one of the canonically great early moderns whom an almost equally testy British critic (F. R. Leavis) considered our greatest novelist; and a popular American literary poet and story writer. It would seem that Winters must have been joking in that last comment, or perhaps he was just plain naïve. There was so much disagreement over his examples that he was black-listed, in effect, in American criticism and has remained so since his death in 1968. Winters attacked or dismissed nearly every major literary figure of the past three centuries, and his attacks have not been forgotten. But it might help to remember that this was written very early in Winters's career (it is actually a revision of his Stanford dissertation), and he had not yet become hardened to the battle he would wage his whole life on behalf of reason in literature. The specific terminology used here is not too important to understanding Winters; he seldom employed this specific classification system again in his essays, though it is true that the terms can be applied in even his very latest writings with pointed results.

4/13 - On Metrical Basics

from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLY HOPKINS" (1948) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

For purposes of the measure, only two kinds of syllable are recognized, the accented and the unaccented; the accented is recognized as such only with reference to the other syllable or syllables within its own foot; and different degrees of accent, since they do not affect the measure, can be infinitely variable and thus contribute to a flexible and perceptive rhythm; the poet is not bound to a simple drum beat, he can write poetry instead of jingles. When Mr. Whitehall [a Hopkins critic] states that the standard English meter is largely theoretical and does not lend itself to vocal reading, I can only think that he himself knows very little about the reading of verse.

** COMMENT: The infinite variety in the degree of syllable accent could make Winters's more detailed writings on metrics very difficult reading, but, at its heart, he considered the theory of English meter to be rather simple, and he stated this a number of times in his essays. Naturally, the subject would come up for some very detailed discussion in his essay on Hopkins, who was one of the most famous metrical experimenters in the history of the English language. But though simple at its foundation, Winters made it clear throughout his career that the work of creating a suitable and rationally proper rhythm was difficult indeed. He had little interest in simple meters, and jingles were abhorrent to him. The great subtlety of the rhythms he admired and championed is very difficult to fathom at times. Finally, Winters was a proponent of reading poetry aloud as often as possible, since this was the only way to fully perceive the art of language.

4/14 - On the Solace of Poetry

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

Then the vision of summer appears suddenly [in the Edgar Bowers's poem "Dark Earth and Summer"], but this is not a simple vision: it is eternal summer, "all radiant as a voice, deep as their oblivion", and this vision returns him to the grave, but the final image, that of the basilisk, is one of immobile light. This is a poem about death as death, and it offers no solace. But it is also a vision of the eternal, a vision of the magnificent emptiness of the eternal, a vision which offers no solace. This is the vision of the modern mystic who is also an intellectual men; it is not so different from the mystical vision of earlier Christianity as some readers may think, but it is more clear-sighted, is without a hint of subterfuge. The basilisk is one of the most magnificent images in our poetry, but the entire poem is magnificent and is without any flaw that I can discern.

** COMMENT: This poem made a few of Winters's short lists of the greatest poems among the greatest poetry, especially those later in his career after Bowers's work early had been written. Bowers was a student of Winters's at Stanford in the '40s, and he was one whom Winters ranked above almost all the other students he considered great poets. Make no mistake, Bowers truly is a brilliant poet. He received some recognition as such during his career, probably more than Winters ever did himself. I find these comments on the poem incisive and suggestive. That Winters considered the dark vision of the modern "mystic" somehow related to the writings of the Christian mystics seems on the face of it astounding. I see no connection whatsoever myself. Many of the great poems Winters explicates throughout his writings are on this theme, the emptiness of death, and our moral need to adjust our emotions properly to a rational and complete understanding of our condition. To Winters, stoic that he was, this was badly needed, for without this moral adjustment, the way lay open only to madness or suicide, even though our understanding offers no eternal solace whatsoever. It would seem, judging from his interpretations of a number of modern poems on death, that Winters was insistent with himself that he accept no consolation, and one wonders whether this stoic stance was simply his unreasoned passion. This would be a subject for a most interesting study of Winters's basic faith.

4/15 - On Rating Poets

from a letter to HOWARD BAKER (1929) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

The only poets in America since [Edwin Arlington] Robinson who have my unreserved admiration are, if I must declare myself, [Allen] Tate, yourself, and [Winters's wife] Janet [Lewis Winters]. I may be prejudiced in favor of the last two, and Tate would probably claim that I am, but I am reasonably confident that I am right. I have, God knows, no reason to be prejudiced in favor of Tate; he has nothing but his genius and basic integrity to recommend him; I have never had any contact with a more stubborn, deliberately perverse, and generally irritating individual, in my somewhat hectic career.... Anyway, all I am trying to do is vindicate my opinion that he is a great poet. So were Ben Jonson and [Walter Savage] Landor, both of whom I should have in all likelihood valued personally above all of their contemporaries and with both of whom I should almost certainly have fought.

** COMMENT: This letter was written when Winters was 29 years old, before he had finished his doctorate, well before he had become a tenured member of the Stanford faculty. It is astonishing that he had already decided that most of modern poetry was not going to make his Canon. Clearly, Winters showed signs early in his career of his affinity for explicitly rating poets and making wholesale critical evaluations -- and there are signs in letters written well before this one, actually. It is interesting to note that though Tate always received his admiration as a poet, Winters would never choose any of Tate's poems for the Winters Canon as laid out in the book "Quest for Reality", and he never mentioned any of Tate's work, despite the praise given here, in his short lists of the supremely best of greatest poems. Baker was a longtime friend and some time student, but though Winters was frequently accused of unethically favoring the literary work of his friends and students, Baker was the most prominent of the dozens upon dozens of his students whom Winters seldom discussed in his later essays and did not rate among the highest poets. He thought Baker had great talent and got close to greatness in a couple poems, but nothing from Baker finally made the Winters Canon. Jonson wrote several of the Winters Canonical poems, as well as one of the short-list poems ("To Heaven," which is one of the great achievements in the English language, consistently overlooked by almost all critics). Winters never discussed Landor in his essays and never mentioned him as one of the greats, though Janet Lewis spoke of him in her writings as a fine poet. The most important matter to take note of here is that Winters was set in his ways very early in his career as a critic and poet; he appears to have been destined for the conflicts and obscurity he would suffer in his life and has suffered ever since he died because of his narrow and harsh judgments. (Whether his narrowness and harshness is justified is another matter entirely. If you hadn't guessed by now, I happen mostly to agree with Winters.)

4/16 - On Poetic Judgment

from the essay "JOHN CROWE RANSOM OR THUNDER WITHOUT GOD" in "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

This curious variant comes of an attempt to reconcile in some manner Ransom's doctrines with Eliot's doctrine of autotelic art, that is with Eliot's theory that artistic emotion is generically different from the emotion of human life. In this connection, I should like to reiterate the distinction which I made in discussing this theory of Eliot: namely that the emotion created by the original experience is immediate, provisional, and confused; in so far as we succeed in clarifying our understanding of the situation and in modifying our feelings accordingly, we approach the judgment possible in the poem; but it is only in the poetic form that something close to a final and defensible judgment is possible, for in poetry we have a finer and more flexible language than we can find elsewhere, and in writing the poem we have an opportunity to fix the judgment in preliminary stages, examine it, and revise it.

** COMMENT: Winters states once again here the basic distinction, lost in most modern critical theorizing, between experience and art. It seems that the trend has clearly been toward art as a heightened experience or a reiteration of experience. Winters saw the kind of poetry that was bred from this kind of thinking, and he rejected it in total, arguing, as here, that literature is a judgment of experience, coming after and bringing order to the confusion and glut of experience. The highest literary art, for Winters, is achieved by those works that make such judgments rather than trying to recreate or intensify human experiences -- or to create new artistic versions of experience. This is because human language at its foundations is a tool for understanding and controlling experience. Both Ransom and Eliot were, by the way, deeply concerned with some of the same issues of the emotional power of art as Winters, though their theories and conclusions were, I might not need to say, much different. They are worth studying closely in comparison to Winters.

4/17 - On Action in Drama - KP

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

The important thing is not action in itself, but the understanding of action. And I respectfully submit that such understanding can be communicated in general terms, and without the details of a particular story. Life is full of action; we can see it about us and read of it in the newspapers; we are too much involved in it ourselves. It is the raw material of generalization. But I see no reason why the pet should not be as free to generalize directly from what he has seen as the theologian or the philosopher. Among the practitioners of various disciplines of abstract thought there has long been a tendency to regard the mimetic arts with contempt, and although I think that this contempt is due in part to insensitivity and to defects of theory, I think that it may be due also to a perfectly understandable boredom with the infinite repetition of the obvious. There comes a time in the lives of some men when the spectacle is no longer informative but the theory is packed with meaning. The master of the short poem is the poet who deals primarily with the understanding of action, and since his medium is verse he can render as fully as possible the total understanding, not merely the rational but the emotional as well. Since everything he had to say is important, not merely in relation to the whole poem but in itself, his materials will justify the use of verse throughout the poem.

** COMMENT: This is a profoundly important statement of the highest objectives of the literary arts, and it certainly bucks the overwhelmingly dominant trend of criticism through the 20th century. For our culture is fixed nowadays on the dramatic in every genre of literature. Often this penchant for the dramatic is a simple desire to see things in action, to get the thrill of "real" experience without bothering with any of its dangers to art or life. We see this everywhere, from high literature to the lowest forms of art, on television and in the cinema. Winters once again, as he did so many times, in his writings, calls us back to what he considers the true purpose of the literary arts: to aid us in understanding experience, NOT in having experiences. Literature and drama and film have become almost all spectacle in many ways, with writers seeming to hope that just by splashing a spectacle over us they can increase understanding. Simple mimesis has its place and produces powerful results, at times, but it must be used in the service of the rational understanding of experience, according to Winters -- and I agree with him very strongly on this point. This is truly one of the great observations in the entire body of Winters's criticism, and one of the finest observations in literary criticism from the last 200 years. It is a principle that can be applied in a vast number of situations to understand and evaluate literary, dramatic, and cinematic artworks. Lastly, at the end of the passage, in keeping with the subject of the essay, the comparison of literary genres, he returns to the question of the short poem and concludes that because the short poem can best aid us in this rational endeavor of understanding experience, it is a stronger genre than those that rely heavily on action, whether treated as spectacle or not.

4/18 - On Milton's Figures

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

"L'Allegro" is more charming in its details, but it is over-expanded and devoid of any real content, and essentially an exercise by a talented university student. There are pretty details:

These are platitudes of the worst sort. The mere reference to poetic details is supposed to be poetic; we find the same procedure in Walt Whitman when he merely mentions birds, trees, or rivers in North America. And we find the same procedure in Milton when he merely mentions mythological figures. We find the same procedure in popular songs which merely mention love and moonlight, or home and mother. There is the expectation of an automatic response. Milton, of course, is more scholarly and literate than Whitman and the writers of popular songs, but essentially he is no more serious. This is lazy associationism; the method is the same. "Il Penseroso" is similar, but weaker. The "pensive Nun" for example, is unimpressive at the descriptive level and does nothing to clarify the nature of melancholy. She is an example of the unrealized figure of speech: this kind of figure can be found occasionally in any period, but it is common in Milton and becomes more common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in our own time. We have a situation in which the tenor, the essential theme, is not clear in the poet's mind, and in which, therefore, the vehicle cannot be given precision.

** COMMENT: I suppose at the heart of the achievement of Yvor Winters is this kind of discussion, the comparison of two passages that on the face of matters don't look, to me, all that different. Is this a heresy? The Winters disciples are falling on their knees and weeping -- or perhaps taking up arms against me. For his essays are full of passages like this one. But to see the monumental difference between the two passages of Milton's poetry discussed here is often not so easy as one might think. Winters loved to drop snippets of poetry into his essays for praise or denunciation, and sometimes the snippets don't seem all that important or even to illustrate Winters's points. For Winters, I am sure, it all goes back to his concept of the poetic ear, the fine use of language and thought and image in poetry that can't be fully described or analyzed but which reveals itself by intuition to be great and profound and moving. The poems of Milton that Winters lays waste in this essay are some of the most famous in English poetry, by the way. Winters is dead right about their associationist structure, and once you see it, if ever you can, and once you realize that he was the critic who saw it, and that no other critic managed to see it before him and few after, then you will begin to trust him on all those snippets he keeps tossing into his essays, though, at first, the difference between the pretty passage and the inept passage might seem negligible. His insight into this form of loose, rationally empty, and automatic writing is important and incisive. You will find examples like these, sadly, everywhere in our literature, and even in many -- too many -- of our supposedly greatest works of literary art, once you learn from Winters how to spot it.

4/19 - On Death

The complete poem STILL-LIFE, by Elizabeth Daryush

** COMMENT: Winters loved this poem, though it is almost as obscure as any he ever lauded and advocated. He loved to read it to classes and to visitors to his home, often to surprise them with his judgment that it is among the greatest ever written and one of the top poems of the modern era. He loved to see whether someone who had never heard of it, which is just about everyone he met and everyone you will meet, could quickly discern its virtues. Winters took a lot of heat for rating the work of Robert Bridges's daughter Elizabeth Daryush so highly, above all the moderns of the what I call the Standard Canon. This poem alone demonstrates the reasons both why he has taken that heat and why he should be trusted to know the best. I will say no more, because so much could be said. Please read "Still-Life" again and again. Once you see that this poem is so much better than anything is Yeats or Eliot or Pound, you will begin to comprehend and to trust Yvor Winters. If you never do, then you are probably right to dismiss him for good from your mind -- more's the pity for you. To bring back to Winters's ideas a modicum of attention AND to recall to life those poems (and other literary artworks) he considered great is the purpose of this Year with Winters.

4/20 - On the Sufferings of the Lower Classes

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

We see the injustices and misfortunes suffered by the poor; we feel that much can and should be done to mitigate them, and although we have done a great deal, we feel that we have not done enough, for we see evils remaining and are embittered. That we have done a good deal, however, anyone may discover by a moderately attentive reading of such writers as Chaucer, Defoe, and Dickens. Dickens was a reformer, and so may be suspected of overdrawing his picture, but Defoe and Chaucer merely depicted what they saw, with pity, but with no indignation; and if we may trust them, and others like them, the life of most of the lower classes on the land and in the cities equally, and perhaps well into the nineteenth century, beyond all argument in the middle ages and in the Renaissance, was far more terrible than that of any considerable number of persons in North America or Western Europe during the twentieth century, even at the lowest ebbs of our social and economic life.

** COMMENT: I believe that this strong recognition of the difficulty of life in the centuries immediately preceding the modern era is one of the finest achievements of Yvor Winters, though such ideas certainly did not originate with him. But though he was not alone, he drew close attention to this issue and castigated those thinkers who thought that we of the modern age had been born into some kind of dark, decayed time. Henry Adams, in particular, gave himself over to this conception of human history, and Winters would have none of it, because none of it fits the facts of history. The recognition of the difficulty of life for most human beings also played a part in Winters's critical theories of the moral importance of art, for the comforts of the modern era have overcome a long time of suffering and pain for most people in history. Winters believed these comforts were developed through the use of reason. To give ourselves over to romantic impulse or relativism or any other modern experimental idea or thought-system was simply foolish. Winters had a heart that was intensely moved by the sufferings of simple people, as he expressed several times in his writings. His understanding of the difficulties of life in the past, however briefly expressed, have profoundly influenced my own study of history, and I believe they are vitally important to understanding not only the past but our own self-pitying and misguided age.

4/21 - On Thought and Civilization

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

I trust that I have not given the impression that I believe the occidental mind to be progressing by way of poetry or even by way of language in general to some kind of universal perfection. I am pessimistic about the human race. Few men are born with sufficient intelligence to profit by more than a small part of the tradition available to them. The practical mind, the mind which conquers, rules, invents, manufactures, and sells, has dominated every civilization and ultimately has destroyed every state. The great philosopher, the great poet, the great painter or musician has almost always lived precariously on the fringe of the state, sometimes as the servant or dependent on the "great," sometimes in poverty, sometimes in the priesthood, in our times as one of the most contemned members of the academic profession. But he has created and preserved civilization, often while working in the rubble of a collapsing state, Alexander of Macedon conquered the known world, but any mark that he left on later times would be hard to identify. Aristotle, his tutor and his father's servant, remains as one of the fundamental rocks on which our civilization is built.

** COMMENT: There have been few modern critics or thinkers who gave more praise to the achievements of the Western cultural tradition. In this important passage, written very late in his life, Winters delivers one of his final, concluding statements on the importance of the work of those thinkers and artists who he believed forged our civilization. In other passages Winters did credit the work of those inventors and manufacturers as important to the development of that civilization as well, but his point here is well taken nonetheless. Far from seeing his work as didactic or utopian or idealistic, Winters confesses, as he hinted many times before in his essays, that he is pessimistic about what he or any other artist or thinker can do to improve society. He seems to believe that some day soon the culture of West will burn to ashes in some conflagration, though that is suggested only in the tone of these comments and a few others scattered in his essays. But this should be enough to disabuse anyone of the idea that Winters help out hope that his lofty and austere theorizing about life and art could have wide appeal in ANY society, let alone in modern times. One wonders what importance it then can have to do what I hope this Year with Winters to accomplish: get Winters's ideas before the "public". For Winters believed that that was probably pointless. Such ideas and art are for the very few. He would probably even have said that I am one of those philistines who cannot comprehend the work of the best thinkers at the heart of our civilization. I guess I will have to plow on with the work I have given myself to do as I understand it, just as Winters did.

4/22 - On Connotation and Motivated Feeling - KP

from the essay "PRELIMINARY PROBLEMS" from "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Concepts, as represented by particular words, are affected by connotations due to various and curious accidents. A word may gather connotations from its use in folk-poetry, in formal poetry, in vulgar speech, or in technical prose: a single concept might easily be represented by four words with these distinct histories; and any one of the words might prove to be proper in a given poetic context. Words gain connotation from etymological accidents. Something of this may be seen in the English word "outrage", in which is commonly felt, in all likelihood, something associated with rage, although there is no rage whatever in the original word. Similarly the word "urchin" in modern English seldom connotes anything related to hedgehogs, or to the familiars of the witches, by whose intervention the word arrived at its modern meaning and feeling. Yet the connotation proper to any stage in the history of such a word might be resuscitated, or a blend of connotations effected, by skillful use. Further, the connotation of a word may he modified very strongly by its function in the metrical structure, a matter which I shall discuss at length in connection with the theories of Ransom.

This is enough to show that exact motivation of feeling by any concept is not inherent in any rational statement. Any rational statement will govern the general possibilities of feeling derivable from it, but the task of the poet is to adjust feeling to motive precisely. He has to select words containing not only the right relationships within themselves, but the right relationships to each other. The task is very difficult, and this is no doubt the reason why the great poetry of a great poet is likely to be very small in bulk.

** COMMENT: Here we have the essence of the genius of Yvor Winters, the singular concept through which his entire career can most be appreciated and judged. It is my opinion that this is one of the greatest ideas of literary theory in the history of criticism, on a par with Aristotle's discussion of catharsis in the "Poetics". This is not the place to defend such a seemingly audacious proclamation, but it is enough to put on record that someone out here in this culture believes that this is the case and is one of the principal reasons Yvor Winters deserves to be studied by every literary artist and reader. It is this contribution that will assure him such a status, if ever he is to achieve it: that the exact control of the connotations of words and images and rhetorical devices as they bring about feelings is the chief purpose of and the chief source of meaning and power in the literary arts. Winters saw, too, that poetry cannot be philosophy, for the prose statements of philosophy and all other fields are not dedicated to the precise adjustment of emotion to concept, form to content. The subjects of philosophy are often the subjects of poetry, and the most profound subjects of philosophy make for greatness in poetry as well. But it is only in poetry, and by extension all the literary genres, that the author can present, though the control of connotation, his emotional judgment of his rational understanding of human experiences and concepts. This is the standard by which the greatest art, in Winters's eyes, is to be judged, and this theory alone accounts for the great power of literature in human life and for the seriousness with which readers and writers write and study this art. I realize this all sounds plainly ridiculous to you readers who are only being introduced to Winters during this year. But study him -- and closely. If you reject his theories, in your best judgment, then so be it. I consider that at least this one idea one of the great achievements of human art and thought.

4/23 - On the Future of Winters's Critical Thought

from a letter to HAYDEN CARRUTH (1949) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

As a critic, I shall win out over my rivals in the next fifty years or so, mainly because of my teaching. I have had my hands on a fair number of very good people, who are going out into other universities, and as a teacher I have had a far better chance to explain things to them than I should ever have as a critic alone.

** COMMENT: Winters was involved in a brief, genial literary dispute with the poet Hayden Carruth in the '40s. The subject of the dispute is not germane to this selection, so I will not address it here. In this brief passage, Winters reiterated what he had said several times in essays from throughout his career: that he expected his theories, as radical as they were, to eventually "win out," which I take to mean widely adopted. It is hard for someone who so deeply respects, has gained so much from, and so deeply agrees with Winters's work to interpret this statement. It is almost comical, for not only did his theories never receive much public attention in his lifetime (and very little of that attention was favorable), but those theories have become so obscure that Winters's ideas sometimes makes almost NO appearance in basic poetic reference books and is accorded no discussion whatsoever in the so-called major works of literary criticism of the last 30 years. Nor do his theories seem to have infiltrated the work of any popular critic of the same time. This Year with Winters is a reverent attempt to get Winters considered and studied again, but I am not holding out much hope. (See the selection for 4/9.) His students have gone out in the world, but almost none of them has had any major effect on the course of culture. Perhaps the most prominent work was done by Donald Stanford, who became editor of the "Southern Review: New Series" in 1965. This is not the place to look at Dr. Stanford, but he did uphold and expand on many of Winters's key literary principles. Other students in whom Winters seemed to have put so much hope have drifted away from adherence to his tenets and practices or have been dismissed to the stagnant back-waters of literary culture.

4/24 - On Inexpensive Feeling

from the essay "EDGAR ALLEN POE, A CRISIS IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN OBSCURANTISM" from "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

In other words, the subject of grief [in Poe's poem "The Haunted Palace"] is employed as a very general excuse for a good deal of obscure and only vaguely related emotion. This subject is used exactly as we should expect to find it used after examining Poe's aesthetic theory. The poem is as surely an excursion into the incoherencies of dream-consciousness as is the "Larme" of Rimbaud; yet it lacks wholly the fine surface of that poem.

In "The Raven", that attenuated exercise for elocutionists, and in "The Sleeper", the general procedure is identical, but the meter in the former and the writing in both are so thoroughly bad that other considerations appear unnecessary. "The Sleeper" is a kind of Gothic paradoy of Henry King's imperfect but none the less great "Exequy": a comparison of the two poems will show the difference between moral grandeur and the sensationalism of a poet devoid of moral intelligence. It is noteworthy that King is commonly and justly regarded as one of the smaller poets of his period.

In [Poe's] "The Conqueror Worm", the desire for inexpensive feeling has led to a piece of writing that is, phrase by phrase, solidly bromidic.

** COMMENT: Comparing the poems by King and Poe is highly instructive. Winters is exactly and completely right about them, in my judgment. But Poe has long been regarded as one of the great American poets, and the poems Winters mentions are generally rated very highly in the Standard Canon of American literature. They are facile and foolish, almost childish. If you are going to continue with Winters and learn as much as you can from him, you will need to leave your taste for Poe behind, because he was a bad poet by any measure derived from Winters's thought. On another matter, Rimbaud was often mentioned in Winters, though never discussed at length. Winters never gave Rimbaud the status of a great poet nor selected any of his poems for the Winters Canon, but Winters seemed to have considered him a very fine talent who had significant limitations. On many occasions, Winters praised Rimbaud's use of language and image, despite his non-ratiocinative procedure in poetry, which Winters highly disapproved of. Once again, that Winters could recognize important virtues in the verse of Rimbaud and many another poet of the Standard Canon whom he generally disapproved of speaks to me that he did not come to poetry, ever, with blinders on. He considered all poetry carefully and tried to see the good in every line and stanza. He was not some blind authoritarian, for which he has all too frequently been accused and summarily dismissed both during his lifetime and afterward.

4/25 - On Cultural Deterioration

from the essay "ROBERT FROST OR THE SPIRITUAL DRIFTER AS POET" (1948) in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

The principles which have hampered Frost's development, the principles of Emersonian and Thoreauistic Romanticism, are the principles he has openly espoused, and they are widespread in our culture. Until we understand these last and the dangers inherent in them and so abandon them in favor of better, we are unlikely to produce many poets greater than Frost, although a few poets may have intelligence enough to work clear of such influences; and we are likely to deteriorate more or less rapidly both as individuals and as a nation.

** COMMENT: In the battle he waged for his critical theories and for the future of literature, Winters believed that there was a great deal at stake, as this passage makes clear. He never explicitly explained what he thought would happen if Romanticism continued to grip our culture (which it has), in what specific ways we would deteriorate, but we can probably guess. He thought that the doctrine of trusting one's impulses could lead to tragic errors and unwitting evils, for the impulses are not naturally good, as many Romanticists have maintained. It is almost beyond question that Romanticism holds sway at almost every level of our culture, and that its theories have become truisms in so many spheres of life as to be incalculable. Winters's most complete and cogent discussion of the effects of Romanticism is to be found, I believe, in his essay that concludes the book "In Defense of Reason", "The Significance of Hart Crane's 'The Bridge', or What Are We to Do with Professor X". We have already had selections from that essay, and we shall see more as the year goes along. I would say here that, in general, Winters has turned out to be prophetic on the quality of poets this culture can produce, for it is probably true that Romanticism cannot do better than Frost. Most American poets who have followed him have had the same defects but less talent to make up for them. Note, finally, that though nothing of Frost's made the Winters Canon, he did consider his work to be best possible writing when the writer is a romantic. This is, surely, some sort of compliment to Frost's achievement.

4/26 - On Winters's Influence

from a footnote to the essay "ASPECTS OF THE SHORT POEM IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE" (1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

The most interesting case [of Winters's influence on the study of English Renaissance poetry being overlooked] occurred in 1963, with the publication through Anchor Books of "English Renaissance Poetry, a Collection of Shorter Poems from Skelton to Jonson," edited by John Williams. From Wyatt through Jonson, Professor Williams' selections are almost nine-tenths my own, as I listed them in 1939, and his introduction follows my 1939 essay very closely much of the time, sometimes almost verbatim. This might seem less remarkable were it not for the fact that my selection of poems and my treatment of the century were largely new, almost revolutionary. At my request, the publishers asked Professor Williams to write a note of acknowledgement; it was written and inserted as a loose sheet in the front of the book. It does not give a precise statement of the debt, but it will do. In the first chapter of the present book ["Forms of Discovery" that is], I also follow my old reading list. I mention Professor Williams, because I do not wish to give the impression that I am borrowing a large part of my book from him. His anthology will be useful to the students reading this book, for many of the poems to which I refer are hard to find....

** COMMENT: The book mentioned is a very fine one, but it is sad that Winters never received the proper recognition he was due for the great essay that was published in three successive issues of "Poetry" in 1939 on the short poem in 16th century England, an essay which he revised a couple times and eventually became a chapter in this, his last book. Far from being his usual harsh self, Winters seems very gracious in this passage, perhaps reconciled, at the very end of his life, to the obscurity that his critical theories and practices would cause him to suffer despite his obvious accomplishments, most prominently, in the study of Renaissance poetry and American 19th-century literature. Of course, as we have seen often, most of Winters's greatest achievements have long been overlooked almost completely, so, perhaps, what happened with the great 1939 essay should come as no surprise. By the way, in my judgment, Winters is right: the Williams anthology does follow his work very closely and the note of acknowledgement is sadly, perhaps grudgingly, weak in giving Winters his due (the note is bound in the paperback edition). Many of the poems that Winters discusses in this essay remain, almost tragically, hard to find, though, I am happy to say, some have made their way into the popular anthologies because of his work, the influence of which has remained suppressed. You will see that I have found many of the poems of this period in the Winters Canon on line and have provided links to them on that web page. It would be a stretch, however, to say that Winters's ideas on this period are still strongly influential. I have noticed that most recent discussions of Renaissance poetry have returned to the shopworn conceptions that Winters undid in 1939. It looks as thought it is time for us to return to the 1939 essay and put it before students and poets and critics once again (my hope is to put it on line at this web site). Finally, some critics argue that the 1939 essay is better than the revised version found in "Forms". But this is the usual calumny against Winters's harsh judgments of poets, such as Milton, whom he didn't discuss in the '39 version.

4/27 - On William Carlos Williams and Ideas

from the review "POETRY OF FEELING" (1939) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

[Williams] distrusts the entire range of feeling which is immediately motivated by ideas, for he is in no position to distinguish good ideas from bad, and hence, in this realm, sound feelings from false. In "A Poem for Norman MacLoed," he writes: "The revolution/ is accomplished/ noble has been/ changed to no bull." Any feeling arising from the contemplation of an idea, whether moral, metaphysical, or religious, appears to him merely sentimental: this is a defect, but he at least displays the virtue of his defect and almost wholly eschews the realm of experience which he does not understand, so that his poetry, though in certain ways limited, is at its best not confused or sentimental. He distrusts traditional form, as a kind of restraint or inhibition: since he fails to grasp its significance, it appears to him another mechanical sentimentalism; and he desires that the theme create its own form. But in this desire he has in part fallen short of his ambition, for his own excellent ear has made free verse a complex accentual meter, very difficult to control, and creating very binding conventions of feeling.

** COMMENT: Williams is in my opinion the strangest single case in all the critical writings of Yvor Winters. Williams was in NO sense a rationalist or a formalist, and yet Winters chose a number of Williams's poems for the Winters Canon and praised his work and many individual poems in many essays. Winters seems to have considered Williams a poet who accidentally stumbled into excellence, and even greatness, on talent alone, in spite of his literary theory and his procedures, which were heavily influenced by the Romanticism and associationism that Winters fought against his whole career. It still seems incredible to me that Winters stuck by Williams right to the end and defended his work in his imposing and irascible final work, "Forms of Discovery." This passage gives a couple hints why. Williams had a great ear, that indefinable, mysterious literary sense that Winters mentioned frequently. Also, he blindly composed in a sort of complex formalist verse, thinking he was writing free verse. I will make a confession here: I have studied Winters on Williams, and I am not yet sure I get it. I don't think Williams embodies many, if any, of the virtues of Winters's critical theories, though he did have a way with simple, plainspoken, yet incisive, description and with rhythmic lines. But so did many other modern associationist, free-verse poets whom Winters condemns one after another after another, such as W.B. Yeats. Perhaps it merely suggests that Winters was open to anything that works excellently on any level of his theoretical system, even the lowest kind of poetry possible. Williams fails on all but one or two of the lowest levels, it seems to me, but his success on those levels was enough for Winters to classify some of his work as great. Finally, to cover an important point, the case of W.C. Williams should be enough evidence for us to dismiss FOR GOOD the idea that Winters would not give a fair hearing to those who adhered to other theoretical systems or employed other literary methods.

4/28 - On Hawthorne and Allegory

from the essay "MAULE'S CURSE OR HAWTHORNE AND THE PROBLEM OF ALLEGORY" from "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Hawthorne is, then, essentially an allegorist; had he followed the advice of Poe and other well-wishers, contemporary with himself and posthumous, and thrown his allegorizing out the window, it is certain that nothing essential to his genius would have remained. He appears to have had none of the personal qualifications of a novelist, for one thing: the somber youth who lived in solitude and in contemplation in Salem, for a dozen years or more, before succumbing to the charms and propinquity of Miss Sophia Peabody, and making the spasmodic and only moderately successful efforts to accustom himself to daylight which were to vex the remainder of his life, was one far more likely to concern himself with theory of mankind than with the chaos, trivial, brutal, and exhausting, of the actuality. Furthermore, as we shall see more fully, the Puritan view of life was allegorical, and the allegorical vision seems to have been strongly impressed upon the New England literary mind. It is fairly obvious in much of the poetry of Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Bryant, Holmes, and even [Jones] Very -- Whittier, a Quaker and a peasant, alone of the more interesting poets escaping; Melville, relatively an outsider, shows the impact of New England upon his own genius as much through the use of allegory as through his use of New England character....

** COMMENT: This is one of the opening paragraphs of a book that makes a lengthy and comprehensive argument about the development of early American social and literary culture. It is a fascinating argument, for which Winters drew on a number of the most prominent scholarly resources of his time. A discussion of Hawthorne was the natural way to open this book, for Hawthorne most clearly exhibited the complex traits of the Puritan culture that Winters believed led to the defects and difficulties of the major prose works of the 19th-century Americans. The allegorizing tendency of the Puritan culture has, according to Winters, played an important role in the way each of the great Americans he considers handles moral issues, as well as in the formation of our society. The text behind the veil of experience is what mattered to our finest American thinkers and writers for a long time, and it seems to hold true to this day to some degree. Nevertheless, it seems as well that we have become enamored of the brutal and exhausting actuality, the world of pure, unconsidered experience. Winters saw dangers on both sides of this question, which for him was the foundational moral issue of modernity. Allegory led to great moral and literary difficulties for our major writers, but the later plunge into pure experience in the modern period became what Winters would call a trivial literary habit.

4/29 - On Hopkins's Biography

from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLY HOPKINS"(1948) in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

What, conceivably, are the reasons for the kind of poetry which we have observed in Hopkins? As to the biographical reasons, we can merely surmise, and although I confess to some distaste for biographical surmises, which are invariably both inascertainable and in the nature of argument "ad hominem", nevertheless certain guesses are hard to lay aside. Whatever the reasons may have been, Hopkins in his later years passed through a period of psychological crisis in which his mental balance, if he really preserved it at all times, was precarious. The reasons for this crisis are hard to guess, and perhaps are not important, but the crisis appears to have been real. There was, however, a trace of effeminacy in Hopkins, which one can see in his portraits, in his letters, and in his poems, which may well have been at least in part the cause of the matter. The conflict between such weakness or some other weakness and his faith and vocation may at times have been acute, though I suspect that his faith and vocation were his chief source of strength, and not, as some writers have supposed, a source of weakness. Whatever the nature of his difficulty, his struggle with it, so far as we may judge, was desperate, and, in spite of its lack of intellectual clarity, little short of heroic. The difficulty seems to have been real, and Hopkins at the same time did not deal with it intelligibly in his poems, though his poems appear to have been affected by it. There is in a large portion of his verse an element of emotional violence which is neither understood nor controlled.

** COMMENT: Despite the tone of harshness in his essays, Winters wrote frequently as though he had great sympathy for the writers he discussed and criticized, as is shown with great precision and power in this passage from the end of his essay on Hopkins. Winters understood the difficulties and sufferings of private life, and he believed they were good subjects for poetry, if a touch solipsistic and narrow. Nonetheless, his quarrel was over how poets and writers used the raw materials of experience to shape art and shape and augment our moral understanding of human life. It was rare for Winters to delve into the biographical background to a poet's work, even though in one of his great theoretical essays he did say that such study MUST inform our final critical judgment of any writer and his work. In the case of Hopkins, what he achieved, in Winters's evaluation, is emotion for the sake of emotion -- the modern literary disease. Our understanding of human crises or private difficulties or sufferings is not increased one whit in Hopkins or through his procedure, the familiar formula of modern literature. His poems, thus, evoke empty, untethered emotions, and Winters could not abide such work. At least, he felt it a duty to make it clear that such work cannot be called great art and is in actuality dangerous to the human mind and spirit.

4/30 - On Yeats's Myth - KP

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

This brings us to the final difficulty [of Yeats's famous poem "Leda and the Swan"]: the vehicle of the poem is a Greek Myth, and there is no harm in this if the tenor is serious; but the tenor is a myth of Yeats's private making, and it is foolish. That is, if we are to take the high rhetoric of the poem seriously, we must really believe that sexual union is a form of the mystical experience, that history proceeds in cycles of two thousand years each, and that the rape of Leda inaugurated a new cycle; or at least we must believe that many other people have believed these things and that such ideas have seriously affected human thinking and feeling. But no one save Yeats has ever believed these things, and we are not sure that Yeats really believed them. These constitute his private fairy tale, or an important part of it, which he sometimes took seriously and sometimes did not. I see no way to make up one's mind about this poem except to decide that it is one of two things: an "aboli bibelot d'inante sonore" or an "aboli bibelot de betise sonore." I feel sure that it is the latter, but wish it were the former, for the former would at least be inscrutable and would call for greater skill on the part of the poet. The sonority is real, and I can appreciate it as well as the next man, but it takes more than sonority to make a great poem. Pure sonority eventually comes to seem pompous and empty.

** COMMENT: As I have said, after Winters has finished with this much discussed and oft-anthologized poem, generally rated one of the greatest poems of modernity by the standard critics, and his entire discussion of Yeats's work, one cannot read Yeats the same way ever again. He is virtually ruined, for his literary virtues seem so thin as to be diaphanous. And I believe Winters was dead right. He took Yeats as seriously as it appears that Yeats wished to be taken, as the creator of a modern and revolutionary mythology that explains human existence. No critic has ever pushed Yeats as hard as Winters on Yeats's own terms and claims. As lovely as the poem discussed here is, Winters makes it laughable for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to think. For those who still persist in believing that Winters was coldly rationalistic, I quote again these two sentences from this passage as a testament to his love of the language of poetry: "The sonority is real, and I can appreciate it as well as the next man, but it takes more than sonority to make a great poem. Pure sonority eventually comes to seem pompous and empty." This would almost seem to be a central doctrine in the Winters critical theory as applied to weak modern poems of the Standard Canon. Many modern poems employ exquisite language, as lovely as "Leda", but ever so few are exquisite, intellectually profound, and morally satisfactory at the same time. I, too, have found lovely poetic language in our contemporary age, but so little of it has any deep or lasting meaning or importance. "Leda" is lovely language wretchedly wasted on silly ideas. In my judgment, this is why poetry continues to have little influence in our world. Almost all modern poetry is written in similar fashion.