A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

May

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

5/1 - On Imagery

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

Marvel's chariot occupies a position somewhat between these two extremes, I imagine, but closer to Shakespeare's star than to Crashaw's cherub:

The logical propriety is real, and not merely conventional: the image suggests pursuit by an immediate, persistent, and supernatural enemy; the physical embodiment of the enemy is perhaps arbitrary, the chariot being chosen as much for its picturesque qualities as a chariot as for anything else. It seems to me very doubtful, however, that the chariot has any great vigor in itself and distinct from the idea of Time: if we change the phrase to "A winged chariot", we shall find that the irrelevancies are vaguely realized indeed; and if we examine the third and final section of the poem, we shall find that the images are much vaguer, both as irrelevancies and as functioning parts of the poem -- this in spite of the fact that the blurred writing of this section appears to receive the greatest share of Ransom's approval or at least the smallest share of his explicit disapproval. The poem has been overestimated, I believe, largely as a result of Eliot's admiration; Herrick's "Gather ye rosebuds", on the same subject and with no irrelevancies worth naming, is clearly superior.

** COMMENT: There have been few critics who more intently studied individual images and rhetorical figures in poetry or any of the literary arts than Yvor Winters. He could spend hundreds of words on his discussions of seemingly minor matters. But Winters held that any single image or figure can and must contribute to a poem's achieving greatness or it seriously detract from its achievement. To illustrate his points, Winters went into the kind of detail he gave to Marvel's winged chariot in this passage. He didn't do this for every image of every poem he discussed, or even for many, because these discussions were intended to demonstrate the general principle that each image or figure must bear a heavy burden: it must fully illuminate the theme of the artwork and be almost perfectly fitted for this task. Any "irrelevancy" within the image weakened the image and the total poem. A large amount of irrelevancy within an image ruins a poem, especially if the image is central to the understanding of its theme. Marvel's famous "To His Coy Mistress" is a poem that Winters believed was greatly weakened by an image that contains a great amount of irrelevancy. Ransom objected to the poem because it was logically structured, like a syllogism. Winters, on the other hand, objected to it because it used mannered language and weak imagery, as explained in this passage. The comparison with the Herrick piece, an oft-anthologized favorite of the Standard Canon that Winters also chose for the Winters Canon, is very instructive of Winters's theory and methods.

5/2 - On Romantic Irony

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

So far as the ideas in this passage [of Frost's dramatic poem "Masque of Reason"] are concerned, the passage belongs to the fideistic tradition of New England Calvinism; the ideas can be found in more than one passage in Jonathan Edwards, as well as elsewhere. The carefully flippant tone, however, is something else; it belongs to the tradition of Romantic irony which I have already mentioned, and is used to make the ideas seem trivial. The ideas and the tone together express the Romantic ennui and disillusionment which is born of spiritual laziness which is justified by the Romantic doctrine that one can best apprehend the truth by intuition and without labor. One can find the same ennui, expressed in various ways, in Henry Adams, in Laforgue, in Eliot, and in scores of others.

** COMMENT: The glib irony of modern writing in all genres has become nothing more than a tiresome tick. You can hardly read anywhere in any literary form nowadays without encountering this sort of irony. Frost cultivated it until it became for him a subtle skill, always present but never openly displayed. Winters's comments on the origins of the habit, which Frost played his major part in spreading, are interesting and suggestive. Much could be said about the sources and meanings of modern irony, but Winters appears entirely convinced that it is all simply another sign of the infestation of Romanticism in our literary culture. Romanticism and its effects are subjects deserving careful study within the realm of the history of ideas, and the writings of Irving Babbitt on the matter might be a good place to start if you are inclined to pursue the issue to see whether Winters might be right, in general. I tend to think that the issue of romantic irony is a bit more complex than Winters is willing to allow most of the time in his essays, despite his certainty that his simple, dismissive summary of the modern irony is accurate and thorough.

5/3 - On George Herbert - KP

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

Of George Herbert's poems, the best, after "Church Monuments", is certainly "The Pulley", and after this a few other anthology favorites: "Throw Away Thy Rod", "Sweet Day", and "I got me flowers". These poems have grace, but they exhibit a cloying and almost infantile pietism. This pietism is the characteristic mark of almost all of the poet's work, and in most of his poems it leads him into abject cliches. For the reader who shares Herbert's faith, or for the reader who is merely in search of easy emotion of any kind, these poems are likely to seem better than they seem to me. For this reason "Church Monuments" is not characteristic of Herbert's work; and because it is not characteristic, or so I suspect, it has been neglected by critics and anthologists. "Content" contains a few lines toward the end which are among Herbert's best.

** COMMENT: True to form (as you are surely beginning to understand), Winters chooses a poem of George Herbert's as one Winters's greatest of all time that almost no other major critic has seen fit to quote or discuss. The important thing is that Winters was completely right. "Church Monuments" is Herbert's best, and it is one of the five or ten greatest poems written in English, in my judgment. Herbert's other poems are mannered affairs, written in the religious cliches of his time. How could every other critic have missed this poem? How?! Yvor Winters was a critical, literary genius, and it is his advocacy of this poem, perhaps above any other that he discussed and advocated, in my view, that confirms his genius. (See the selection for 5/19 for the complete poem.) The choice of the others as the best of Herbert's remaining work, of which there was plenty, is also right on the mark in my opinion. It is such recommendations and insights that lead one to trust Winters above any other thinker or critic, for you soon realize that it was Winters ALONE who discerned and made a sound case for the greatness of "Church Monuments".

5/4 - On Fictional Narrative

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

In addition to having greater range, the novel of accident may have advantages over the dramatic novel which are perhaps too seldom considered. The author is less likely to be restricted to the exact contents of the minds of his characters, and so he may have greater opportunity to exhibit, directly or indirectly, his own attitudes, which, in most cases, may be more complex than the attitudes of his characters. Fielding, for example, would have been seriously embarrassed to treat Tom Jones from the point of view of Tom Jones. Melville accomplishes even more with his personal freedom than does Fielding. The superstition that the author should write wholly from within the minds of his characters appears to have grown up largely as a reaction to the degeneration of Fieldingese among the Victorians, notably Thackeray and Dickens, and perhaps Meredith, and perhaps in part as a result of the achievements in the newer mode by Flaubert and by Henry James. Flaubert is misleading, however, in that the perfection and subtlety of his style introduces an important element from without the consciousness of the character in a manner that may be overlooked; and James is misleading not only in this respect but because his characters are usually almost as highly developed as the author himself, so that the two are frequently all but indistinguishable. The superstition is reduced to absurdity in some of Mr. Hemingway's short stories about prize-fighters and bull-fighters, whose views of their own experience are about as valuable as the views of the Sunbonnet Babies or of Little Black Sambo.

** COMMENT: There, in that last sentence, is another of Winters's searing put-downs, and a nice one it is. Winters favored the generalized narrative method he discussed as the "novel of accident" in this passage over the first-person, stream-of-consciousness method -- as well as other assorted impressionistic and inner-mind techniques that have been lauded and employed "ad nauseum" in modern times. As we have seen, Winters on occasion chided critics for ignoring the artistic qualities of the sermon, expository history, and hortatory writing. He believed that generalized exposition is the much more economical and direct way to communicate both the artist's rational understanding of and emotional response to his subject matter. It is interesting, however, that Winters was willing to grant that there are some fine writers who employ inner-mind methods, and he mentions Flaubert and James as such. It is the choice between, as we describe it nowadays, telling a story and showing a story. Of course, as everyone who has any interest in writing knows, the showing doctrine has been sacrosanct in literary criticism for quite a while. It is always nowadays weak to tell and strong to show. Winters rejects all of this with his usual heretical bent. The problem of the "range" of the novel is, finally, an interesting one. If we are encouraged to tell AND show, then we have greater possibilities for portraying and understanding human experience, in Winters's view. This much seems obvious, but our contemporary critics have constricted the art of fiction to first-person navel-gazing and personal ambiguity to such a degree that "telling" seems impossible and the range of the novel has consequently narrowed badly.

5/5 - On Modern Writing

from a letter to LINCOLN KIRSTEIN (1932) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I vote against all the enclosed mss. unreservedly and regardless of what else does or does not come in. It is better to get out a smaller issue, or an all-critical issue than to run stuff like this.... These people are all symptoms of the same thing: the decay of the rebellion of 1912. They think they are in an advance guard: they are really a rear guard. They cannot organize their material into precise statements within a precise form, because they do not know what they are writing about. They are myopic marksmen shooting at an atmospheric blur with a shotgun. Young writers doing this sort of thing should not be published in order to encourage them. They need to be discouraged and to have sound models put before them.

** COMMENT: Winters was a fractious regional editor of the small literary journal "The Hound and the Horn" in the early '30s. Kirstein was the editor, and Winters had little good to say about his selections for the journal. In between the paragraphs of this selection, there are a half dozen paragraphs taking each submission in turn and pointing out its myriad deficiencies. This one sentence -- "They are myopic marksmen shooting at an atmospheric blur with a shotgun." -- might be considered a fair summary statement of Winters's attitude toward modern experimental and solipsistic poetry and fiction. Precision of content, statement, and form came to dominate all of Winters's thinking, just three years after leaving behind the imagistic techniques and content himself. Of course, note the early reference to the reading of "sound models", the discovery and study of which was the goal of all of Winters's criticism over nearly 50 years of work. Note also that Winters saw little value in encouraging the next generation to write according to the formulas of the once emerging and now dominant moderns.

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5/6 - On Wordsworth's "Greatest" Poem - KP

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

"Ode: Intimations of Immortality" is loosely associational in method: that is, the structure of the entire poem and of nearly every stanza, if one can speak of structure here, approaches that of revery. One thing suggests another. The poet endeavors to evoke emotion by the mere mention of natural details, a method which we have found common from early in the eighteenth century. Wordsworth is said to be the poet of nature, but his description of nature is almost invariably pompous and stereotyped; he SEES almost nothing. He calls our attention to nature in oratorical terms which would disgrace the average political candidate:

... There are very few lines better than these, but they are very little better. This is poetry of the country newspaper.

** COMMENT: There he goes again, offering one of most damning put-downs of a major English poet I have ever read. Wordsworth is one of our common greats, certainly considered by standard critics as one of the five most important poets in English. Winters dismisses him without much interest or effort in this late essay. Clearly, he wishes to spend little time studying or reading him, even though he read every word of Wordsworth in the hope, I suppose, of finding something of value. If you come to accept Winters's theories, you will also find little time for reading Wordsworth any longer. The passages chosen are very instructive, for they give a fair sample of the poet's endlessly vapid style. If you didn't realize, several of the lines quoted are considered some of the greatest in the history of English literature. If you study Winters you can never read them with the same regard again. Finally, note that Winters once again attacks the cliché forcefully. It is a sure sign of weakness because it openly shows that whoever wrote the cliché didn't see or understand anything he is writing about. Put this astute judgment of Wordsworth's best work with his astoundingly brilliant discovery of Herbert's best poem (see 5/3), and you have two leading reasons why I am a disciple of Yvor Winters despite his heresies.

5/7 - On Passion

from the Winters poem "JOHN SUTTER"

** COMMENT: This is a Winters poem that has not received its due even from Wintersians, in my judgment. The poem is a powerful exploration of raw passion overwhelming the deliberating mind or soul. I consider it one of the great moral statements of Winters's career. In this passage (containing 4 of the 9 stanzas) Winters, in carefully measured and emotionally charged verse, depicts the power of the desire for discovered gold as a symbol of all such objects of desire and impulse in our world; these objects gain control of our wills and minds and hearts. It is a frightening and accurate portrayal, as far as I am able to judge, of the consequences of our potential and sometimes real abandonment to our passions and obsessions. It is beautiful writing, dense, profound, penetrating.

5/8 - On the Themes of Novelists

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 fact of the matter is, that in reading most of the English and American novelists preceding James who are commonly conceded to be great, our estimate of the writers' genius is formed very largely on the quality of the incidentals of the works under consideration, and not on the quality of what in a drama or an epic would be the essentials. Jane Austen, who is inescapably one of the best, hangs her remarkably brilliant comment and characterization on frames of action so conventional as to be all but trivial; the same is true of Trollope; it is more obviously true of Scott. It is less true of such a writer as Dickens, but a plot by Dickens, and usually half of the attendant characters, will ordinarily be so corrupted by insufferable sentimentalism, that one turns hither and yonder infallibly to reap what profit one may from the details. The plotting of Meredith and of George Eliot is far more serious, but both writers fall very much below James in characterization and in the quality of their prose. The prose of James is sometimes obscure, and as a result of the obscurity it may sometimes be found diffuse; but it is always sensitive and honest; the prose of George Eliot is laborious, and the prose of Meredith is worse -- it is laboriously clever.

** COMMENT: It would probably be easy to guess that Winters would choose Austen as one of our best fictionists. Her style was clean and classically measured, even though her plots were trifling affairs and her themes mundane. Winters generally considered the plots of most novels of the last 200 years to be foolishly shallow, at least among those trying to write high literature aspiring to true greatness and profundity. Of course, this is a matter of degree, since the Trollope did not invent his plots and characters, for example, to brood on the great issues of human thought, as Winters demanded of the highest literature. As I have said a number of times, Winters, in general, simply wanted readers to recognize the virtues, weaknesses, and flaws of all writers. Dickens might have fine qualities, but the matter of most of his work, in Winters's judgment (and I agree entirely), was essentially trivial. We might consequently judge Dickens to be a good minor novelist, but we should not, must not, extol him as great -- which is what I believe Winters to be arguing here and elsewhere about many canonical writers he supposedly disapproved of. He simply wanted their work judged accurately. Nevertheless, it is most interesting to compare Dickens or Eliot to the works of fiction Winters's theories favored, such as Edith Wharton's minor and obscure short story "Bunner Sisters" (which has been very seldom anthologized, despite the incredible resurgence in the study of Wharton in the 1980s and '90s), which Winters mentioned a number of times in essays and letters. This story, in my judgment, is a remarkably trivial affair to receive such high praise from a man committed to such critical principles. Thus, I believe that Winters, as instructive and helpful as his theories are, could be off in his judgments at times. George Eliot certainly explored very deep and momentous themes of human experience in her novels, particularly "Middlemarch", and I think she can measure up rather well against the critical standards Winters set. I don't see her prose as hardly any more labored than Austen's, and she deserved better than the curt dismissal given it in this passage.

5/9 - On the Structure of the "Cantos"

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

In our time we have had the "Cantos" of Ezra Pound, which may be an epic or not, according to your definition. The work has no narrative structure, such as that of "The Iliad"; it has no expository structure, such as that of "The Divine Comedy". It thus avoids a variety of difficulties. There are a few loosely related themes running through the work, or at least there sometimes appear to be. The structure appears to be that of more or less free association, or progression through revery. Sensory impression replaces idea. Pound, early in his career, adopted the inversion derived from Locke by the associationists: since all ideas arise from sensory impressions, all ideas can be expressed in terms of sensory impressions. But of course they cannot be: when we attempt this method, what we get is sensory impressions alone; and we have no way of knowing whether we have had any ideas or not.

The details, especially in the early "Cantos", are frequently very lovely, but since there is neither structure nor very much in the way of meaning, the details are details and nothing more, and what we have in the ghost of poetry, though I am willing to admit that it is often the ghost of great poetry.

** COMMENT: Pound's "Cantos" provide a fascinating test case for the study of Winters's critical theories, for, of course, Winters was perfectly right about the structure of this "epic" and its rational content. Pound didn't intend to write anything like what Winters considered good, but his work still touches Winters deeply. He frequently praised Pound's ability to "write" in his essays, but he was clear that the total effect of Pound's work is extremely weak and at bottom a failure. Still, Pound was writing according to entirely different ideas about the literary arts. Pound simply did not seek to follow a rational procedure in these epical poems or in any of his poetry. You will have to go further back in the argument to understand why Winters held that this was bad poetry because it was the ghost of great poetry. Finally, note that Winters insisted again and again that not all, or even many, ideas could be expressed through descriptive passages of poetry. Thus, by concentrating on such description, modern poets, in Winters's view, had cut themselves off from most of the best possibilities and forms of the literary arts, for the theories they chose to follow forced them to keep writing ghostly poetry like Pound's.

5/10 - On Stevens's Pigeons

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

Those pigeons [in the final lines of Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning"] are different from Shakespeare's lark in Sonnet XXIX. The lark was merely a lark, with the author's personal sentimentality imposed upon it arbitrarily. The pigeons embody an idea as well as a feeling, and the idea motivates the feeling. The pigeons cannot be separated from the idea: they are a part of the universe which the poet is trying to understand, and at this point they are an efficiently representative part. The rational soul and the sensible soul are united: we do not have the purely rational soul of Jonson nor the purely sensible soul of Pound; and there is no decoration. The universe which Stevens describes is ambiguous in its ultimate meanings. But there is nothing ambiguous in the style; ambiguity is rendered with the greatest of precision. And the universe is one which we can recognize as our own, even if we disagree with Stevens's philosophy. The physical details are not ingenious set pieces; we know where we are.

** COMMENT: Winters discussed the final lines of "Sunday Morning" several times in his essays. In this passage from his final book, his praise for the lines and the image they contain of pigeons flying in the sky at evening reaches its highest mark. In general, Winters considered "Sunday Morning" one of five or ten greatest poems written in English. It made his short list of the greatest of the great poems several times in his writings. The image of the pigeons illustrates the post-symbolist style that Winters himself employed in his late, mature verse. As we have discussed, this style and its terminology were first isolated and invented by Winters, though his work in this area has not led to any revolution in criticism. Nonetheless, when employed with excellence, the style is meaningful and exceptionally powerful, and the example of Stevens radiantly exemplifies the mean features of the style, the complete melding of sensory description and imagery with rational ideas, which Winters believed provided the modern poet with her finest method for the study of rational ideas and properly motivated emotions. The post-symbolist style has little to do with decorative beauty, which for Winters was a very low form of artistic achievement.

5/11 - On Pictorial Landscapes

from the essay "NOTES" (1924) from "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The poetic image is capable of actual motion, which the painting is not; and it is capable of taking the reader, as the painting is not, through a progression of vanishing images, thus achieving a complex series of superimposed moods. Moreover, in a painting a form is presented, not by its identification at any given point, with another form, but entirely by its method of juxtaposition to another form; whereas the reverse may be true in a poem; and in a poem a relationship of the entire form combination to the sound is involved. That makes it possible (especially, sometimes, by the aid of motion) for the poem to present a panorama entirely devoid of the painter's "significant form," but in itself and in its sweep beautiful and impressive; to present a landscape composed of minute and beautiful details, uncorrelated as regards the painter's forms; things which on the canvas could be nothing save banal. Furthermore, the literary landscape may contain the discoveries of all the senses, while the pictorial is limited to one. And lastly, the symbolic value of the parts of the landscape, although present to a greater or lesser extent upon the canvas, are enhanced in the poem -- or can be enhanced -- by the symbolic value of sound. These are the differences between pictorial and literary landscapes or imagery; although one landscape may be treated in both ways with equally great, if diverse success.

** COMMENT: Winters was 24 years old when this short essay on poetic imagery was published. It is fascinating to see him working with ideas that would remain with him throughout his entire career even though he would become a traditionalist poet within three to four years. He discussed the dissimilarities between the pictorial arts and literature many times in his mature essays, and he drew the conclusion that they were so many and so extensive that very few instructive comparisons could be drawn, even though literary critics frequently try to make sweeping comparisons among them. In this passage, though, Winters seems already to be aware of the added power of literary landscapes, the greater possibilities for meaning and emotion. These would become key concepts in his later criticism, though at this time he was applying them to the free verse imagistic poetry he wrote in his youth. He does speak much of reason in poetry yet, but the intensity of his study of poetic images is certainly shown here, and this intensity would remain a prominent feature of his critical work to the end of his life.

5/12 - On Countrified Eccentricity

from the essay "EMILY DICKINSON OR THE LIMITS OF JUDGMENT" from "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

The problem of judging her better poems is much of the time a subtle one. Her meter, at its worst -- that is, most of the time -- is a kind of stiff sing-song; her diction, at its worst, is a kind of poetic nursery jargon; and there is a remarkable continuity of manner, of a kind nearly indescribable, between her worst and her best poems. The following poem will illustrate the defects in perfection:

The poem is abominable, and the quality of silly playfulness which renders it abominable is diffused more or less perceptibly throughout most of her work, and this diffusion is facilitated by the limited range of her metrical schemes. The difficulty is this: that even in her most nearly perfect poems, even in those poems in which the defects do not intrude momentarily in a crudely obvious form, one is likely to feel a fine trace of her countrified eccentricity; there is nearly always a margin of ambiguity in our final estimate of even her most extraordinary work....

** COMMENT: Miss Emily wasted her talents on such fare all too often, in Winters's opinion. Perhaps three-quarters of her poetry is filled with such cute writing on trivial subjects, which are perhaps her most popular kind of verse. Winters often found her work insufferable, but he also discovered in the great mass of silliness a number of pieces that achieve greatness and many very fine fragments. Several of her poems were finally selected for the Winters Canon as laid out in the book "Quest for Reality". The superficial differences between the best and worst work, however, might be too small for most readers to see clearly without some study and reflection. The tone and "feel" of the quoted poem does not differ all that greatly from some of the poems Winters decided were great. I have wondered whether Dickinson simply wrote mostly minor poetry on minor and trivial themes, and that we should appreciate her for what she achieved rather than deriding her for not writing with the splendidly high seriousness that Winters would have liked her to achieve. These are difficult and interesting questions for any student of Winters to ponder.

5/13 - On Elaborations

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

[Hopkins's critical ideas] will justify (within the limits mentioned) a perfectly romantic art: emotional intensity for its own sake, metaphor for its own sake, metrical elaboration for its own sake, repetition and elaboration of structure for their own sakes. The poem becomes at once an unrestrained indulgence in meaningless emotion, and an unrestrained exercise in meaningless ingenuity; the poet has no responsibility to understand and evaluate his subject truly. If one will consider such [Hopkins] poems as "The Wreck of the Deutschland", "The Loss of the Eurydice", Binsey Poplars", "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves", and "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo", to mention only some of the more obvious examples, one will find the perfect product of the theory. The paraphrasable content of all these poems is so slight as to be reducible to a sentence or two for each. The structures erected upon these simple bases are so fantastically elaborate that the subjects are all but lost and the poems frequently verge upon the ludicrous.

** COMMENT: Poetry in almost every culture that I have studied has focused on emotion, metrical elaboration, structural elaboration, and rhetoric for their own sakes throughout human history. Winters never directly addressed this issue, but it seems certain that for most of the history of world literature the chief purpose of verse has been language play -- in exercises of aesthetic ingenuity. Though Winters rejected it as a sound appeal, for most people there is a great sense of delight in the writing and reading of such ingenious works of art as Hopkins wrote, just as there are particular, if vague, delights in painting and viewing paintings that seem to offer no more than meaningless ingenuity, like much of Matisse. Of course, Winters was writing about higher literature, and he believed strongly that play or technique for its own sake could not be judged great poetry in any sense. It is very instructive to read the Hopkins poems mentioned in this passage, since they are just as Winters describes them, "The Wreck" being the most disappointing of all. But though Winters considered the poems to be nearly ludicrous, they have clearly earned the attention of readers and critics over many decades for the very reasons Winters derides them. For those who think that poetry need not be closely focused on rational concepts, these judgments might seem ludicrous in themselves and will continue to cause Winters to be exiled to the hinterlands of critical theory.

5/14 - On Pope and Dryden

from the essay "THE POETRY OF CHARLES CHURCHILL" (1961) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

The directly satiric and didactic are not invariably combined with each other, but we find them together in the most memorable poems. I will take [Dryden's] "Absalom and Achitophel" and [Pope's] "Epistle to Arbuthnot" as examples. Most readers -- myself among them -- remember these poems fragmentarily: the portraits of Zimri, Achitophel, and Atticus, and a handful of Pope's epigrams stay in the mind, but the poems do not. The reason for this is simple: neither poem has any really unifying principle. Dryden employs a dull narrative, which elaborately and clumsily parallels the biblical narrative, and he does this in order to praise a monarch who was a corrupt fool. One cannot take the whole poem seriously, but one can find interest in the brilliant details. Pope's poem is more honest, and for that reason more obviously fragmentary: nothing holds it together except Pope's exasperation with people who have exasperated him. They were doubtless exasperating, but so are most people; so is life. The form of each poem is an excuse for satirical portraits and epigrams, rather than a unifying principle.

** COMMENT: This judgment is similar tp Winters's harsh judgment of the whole period of the Restoration poetry, an era of fragments. As we have seen from other selections, Winters took the rational content of poetry much more seriously than these poets. They wrote at a time when Romanticism was beginning to take hold in the culture and quickly infecting the best minds of the day. But Dryden comes before the onset of the first syptoms, and Pope just at its beginnings. Still, Winters found little in their poetry, especially Pope's, to recommend it outside scattered fragments. It is true that Dryden could be stifling with his dullest writing, but occasional lines still sparkle. Pope is more readable in our day, but his overall structure is seriously decayed. Once again, in this, Winters's last book, we see his increasing crankiness in that comment about most people being exasperating. Winters had few friends, few supportive colleagues left, and generally felt beleaguered during these final, difficult years of his life when his emotional and physical decline had become quite steep.

5/15 - On Carl Sandburg

from a letter to MONROE WHEELER (1921) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

Sandburg did his stint here, and gave me one of the most curious and subtle shocks of my existence. Two and a half years have changed either him or me a vast amount. I have never seen a man so lost in his pose, so gently and yet so irretrievably overcome, so subtly wooden. His reading was rotten -- chautauqua stuff for the country-folk, learned, I am told, from Sarett. He cornered me for a ten or fifteen minute talk which I shall never be able to reproduce with any justice. I don't know just what he expected of me in this encounter, but probably not very much -- maybe an occasional terrified gasp of adulation. He eyed me sometimes in pauses much as a hen eyes a hole from which a worm ought to crawl at any moment, but the worm didn't crawl, so he went on again. I spoke occasionally, however, -- naively threw in the most commonplace politenesses, and my voice against his cosmic bass was the merest of quick, piping tenors. I was uncomprehending, which was sad, because some people would have understood him perfectly.... At each response he blinked and gulped a little, like a turtle, and started over.

** COMMENT: This letter was written from Sante Fe, where Winters was still recovering slowly from his battle with tuberculosis in his youth. Carl Sandburg, a much more famous American poet and writer at the time than today, obviously conducted a reading that Winters attended. As you can see from the passage, Winters was not highly impressed with Sandburg, even though he was one of the country's most highly respected men of letters in 1921. It is amusing that Winters started his career as a heretic against the literary powers-that-be at a very early age, in this case when he was just 21 years old. At this time, Winters had already read a great deal, but he was turning to free verse poetry and the imagism of the early 20th century as his models. He never had very high regard for Sandburg throughout his career. In passing, in his mature writings, he occasionally took a moment for a subtle jeer at his work, and this negativity toward the poet seems to have been formed early on.

5/16 - On French Romantics

from the essay "WALLACE STEVENS OR THE HEDONIST'S PROGRESS" in "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

And Rimbaud, in the version of "Bonheur" which appears in "Les Immuniations," informs us that the beatitude of which he has made a magic study has made his speech incomprehensible, has caused it to take wing and escape; and earlier in the same poem he states that he has eliminated rational control from his life as well, for the same beatitude has taken possession of his life, both body and soul, and dispersed all effort. Just as the first great English romantics released the new subject matter, these poets, who were in rebellion against the stylistic looseness of their immediate predecessors in France, released the method which was, essentially, the proper method of romantic poetry. They released it, that is, within the bounds imposed by more or less traditional forms and by their own considerable talents and training: in their less fortunate successors we can observe the rapid progression toward "le surrealisme." Mallarme, like Gray, is a scholarly and sophisticated enemy of Reason; the body of his work, like that of Gray, is small; and similarly its generative power is very great. Mallarme and his coadjutors seem to have played a part in the career of young Stevens similar to that of Gray and Collins in the work of the young Bryant.

** COMMENT: Winters read deeply in French poetry and chose several French poems and poets for inclusion in the Winters Canon. He declared a French poem by Paul Valery to be the greatest single poem ever written, which we have already discussed and will discuss again. He saw the same forces tearing French poetry apart as were damaging English literature, however, and the chief culprits, as in English, were the general doctrines of Romanticism. Winters believed that Artur Rimbaud was a fine poet, and that Stephan Mallarme was, like Ezra Pound, the ghost of a great poet; but neither wrote great poetry nor anything nearly great because they had given up any desire to inform their poems with rational content. This was antithetical to their purpose, of course, and one must wonder whether Winters was wrong somehow for condemning them for not writing poems or the kind of poetry they did not intend to write. This issue is one that continues to surround any study of Winters's critical theories and deserves careful study that is beyond the scope of this compendium. Not many Winters supporters have directly addressed the question, however, so it remains a frequent charge against his work among the more popular and renowned critics who have addressed themselves to his ideas. If you have read much in Rimbaud and Mallarme, nonetheless, it is not surprising how Winters evaluated their work, for it is dream-like, surreal, emotionally cool, and anti-rational.

5/17 - On How Poets Read - KP

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

The poet, as poet, tries to write as well as possible. Every moment of his poetic life is thus concerned with exact and minute literary judgment, with evaluation, and he reads other poets as he reads himself, to discover what is really sound, to discover what might be improved, and in this way to improve his own intelligence and his own composition. If he has real poetic talent, reasonable scholarship, and the power of generalization, this interest may lead to the formulation of valid critical principles, more or less general and inclusive, depending on his intellectual powers. These principle may in turn free him from the tyranny of historical fashions (for we are determined by history only to the extent that we fail to understand it), may aid him to choose sounder themes and sounder methods of structure, and by virtue of these to achieve greater precision of detail.

** COMMENT: It was in the attention paid to every minute detail of poetic diction, structure, and rational thought that greatness was to be achieved by the poet. The project seems daunting, at best, and there are many who have simply become paralyzed at the thought of trying to attain the standard of greatness that Winters set. The intensity of his devotion to poetry, as we see in this passage, is at the heart of his striving to improve his life. So much of his critical thought lies in that parenthetical comment about how history determines us. Winters implies that there is freedom in understanding and working according to the correct critical principles -- freedom in writing and thought, and freedom in life. Literature, thus, was for Winters and should be for us a serious business.

5/18 - On Thinkers 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 of 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 has 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: Probably Winters wrote no more stoic words than these in his career. It is a sad passage, and surely reflects Winters's emotional response to the condemnation his critical theories and his own intelligence received throughout his career. In my opinion, he steeled himself against the onslaught, which reached a high pitch in the 1950s, by persuading himself that the true defenders of civilization were few and far between and generally relegated to the back alleys of history and culture. Plenty of poets and critics of the modern age would, no doubt, disagree, claiming that they were and are the defenders of that civilization. But, as we have realized from this Year with Winters, he gave no quarter to their beliefs. He thought that he and a handful of students and colleagues were the true defenders, battling as a small, pitifully obscure, and massively scorned platoon of writers for the work of Aristotle and the other great thinkers, writers, and poets of Western Civilization. He sounds almost like Marcus Aurelius in this passage, written so near the end of his life, when he was suffering from a variety of ailments and from a general fatigue that had been weighing on him for almost 20 years. What are we to make of this? How is it to be interpreted? Was Winters right? I believe he was, but this makes me a loner similar to him -- and Winters probably would have rejected me in my own turn. There was very little idealism to Winters's career and efforts on behalf of literature and civilization. He had resigned himself, long before his major critical work began to be published, that few would listen and many fewer still would heed his call to reason in literature and in life. It probably needs no restating, but to be clear, Winters believed that modern Romantic theories of poetry were part of a trend that he feared would bring about the downfall of civilization, which is why he took its effects in literature so seriously.

5/19 - On Fitting Thyself - KP

The complete poem CHURCH MONUMENTS, by GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1633)

** COMMENT: This great poem often made Winters's short lists of the greatest among the great poems in English, lists which he set down many times in his essays. It has been seldom anthologized, infrequently discussed by major critics, and generally ignored to so great a degree that one wonders whether the "major" critics have even been aware that it exists. Yet it is unquestionably one of the greatest poems ever written, and it fully illustrates Winters's critical theories about the plain style of the late English Renaissance. Once again, if our much-better-known literary critics missed and continue to miss this poem, how can we trust them above Yvor Winters, who not only found it but championed it his entire career? This, it seems to me, is one of the principal reasons that my readers of this Year with Winters should earnestly consider spending a great deal more time studying Winters and profiting from his achievement.

5/20 - On the Discipline of Free Verse

from the essay "THE INFLUENCE OF METER ON POETIC CONVENTION" from "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

This discipline is arduous and on the face of it is not particularly tempting: there are so many other things that one can do instead. In the few years past, the discipline has been almost wholly abandoned save by the few poets of the Experimental Generation whose sensibilities were largely formed in this discipline. The most distinguished poets of the Reactionary Generation who have attempted free verse -- Hart Crane and Louise Bogan, for example -- have been wholly unsuccessful in their brief and rare excursions into the medium. The Experimental poets who mastered the medium, it is worth observing, were those who for some years were more or less fanatical on the subject and gave themselves over to it wholly or almost wholly. Wallace Stevens is perhaps the only poet living who has practiced the new and old meters simultaneously and at a high level of excellence. Very few readers, even professionally literary and academic readers, will give the subject the attention necessary for even a preliminary perception of it, but I am certain of the soundness of my scansion and wish to set it on record, for it will be of value to students here and there as time goes on.

** COMMENT: Winters's once well-know discussion of free verse in this book makes the writing of free verse seem anything other than "free". In common parlance, however, and in contrast to Winters's thoughts on the matter, free verse means to most writers and readers the absence of verse, the complete freedom to write poetic lines in any way one likes as long as, it would seem, there is some kind of mysterious or indefinable rhythm or musical excellence to the writing. Winters offered a rigorous theory of the metrics of "free" verse elsewhere in this essay, and this passage warns his readers of the rigorousness of his theory. His ideas are unquestionably enlightening, but they perhaps miss the point of free verse entirely. Winters himself wrote in free verse in the first phase of his career and gradually came to put into practice the difficult theories that he espoused in this book. You will certainly learn a great deal about the finest points of metrics, finer than you ever thought possible, from Winters in his discussion of free verse. In general, Winters was nearly certain of most doctrines of his critical theory -- and he stated many times that he was, even though he knew that 99 percent of literary critics would disagree with them nearly in whole.

5/21 - On Intelligence in Poetry and Its Future

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

Finally, let us beware of saying that the best poets of our time deal with the subjects which are most important to our time. This would be a rash thing to say of the poets of any period, but it is infinitely rash in speaking of the poets of our own. This fallacy will mean in practice that we shall praise poets who write of those subjects which seem most important to us, in our ignorance and stupidity: Anglicanism, Whitmanism, Agrarianism, Rosicrucianism, Communism, or something else. It will be easy to be moved by the poet who writes badly of our own emotions; in fact this facility has generated most of the criticism of our time. Five hundred years from now the subjects which will appear to have been most important to our time will be the subjects treated by the surviving poets who have written the most intelligently. The best poets have the best minds; ultimately they are the standard. When that time comes, my distinguished reader, his favorite poets, his favorite subjects, and all of the members of his elite group will have turned to dust.

** COMMENT: This is the final paragraph of Winters's published career, the last paragraph in his last book, the summa of his oeuvre. Once again, he decries the expressive theories of the literary arts, and some of the many forms these theories have taken. He looks to rational content, emotional propriety, and moral judgment in poetry, and believes that his theory will last. But just as surely as Wordsworth and his general ideas (if such they can be called) have endured in our common literary culture some 275 years after he wrote, I think it is probably almost certain that Winters's theories will be entirely forgotten in 500 years -- unless this compendium and some few other writings endeavoring to keep his ideas alive have their desired effect. I hope you will give Winters, at least, a chance. I have profited intellectually and spiritually in so many ways from his work, and I want to see others profit as well. But he will survive only as more and more readers and writers come to benefit from, appreciate, build on, and defend his achievement or parts of it. I do not hold out much hope that this will happen, but I do have hope that this compendium can help keep Winters's work alive now and perhaps faintly flickering in the world 500 years hence.

5/22 - On Macauley's Style

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

The prose remains heroic, but has ceased to be grandiloquent; the stereotyped phrase is rare; there is no difficulty in rendering the dagger left sticking in the body or the dungheaps beneath the windows of the country gentleman. These few lines from the account of the execution of Monmouth represent a revolution in the practice of historical prose:

This is near the end of one of the greatest pieces of narrative in Macauley's history, and indeed in English literature, the account of Monmouth's rebellion. The men, the country, the mud, the weather, as well as the blood and disaster, are rendered unforgettably, and this passage is followed immediately by the magnificent meditation on Monmouth's burial, a meditation worthy of Shakespeare. But no detail damages the prose. The prose is quick as well as intricate. It changes pace rapidly, and moves easily from subject to subject, but it never loses its identity. Whatever Macauley's defects as an historical scholar -- and he resembles most scholars in this, that his errors appear to have been many and serious -- his contribution to the development of historical prose was one of the greatest.

** COMMENT: Macauley received the highest praise from Winters several times in his career for the excellence of his prose style and literary artistry, if not his overall record of historical scholarship. Winters seemed to think historical "accuracy" a secondary matter when we come to Macauley, but Winters's ideas on this subject are sketchy at best. We can perhaps make inferences from various comments, especially his discussion in this passage on the art of history from a superb essay. In Winters's eyes, it would seem, Macauley's artistic achievement was so great that the "truth" of his history stood on a higher, literary, artistic level than any mere presentation of the facts of history could stand, though Winters believed that facts have unquestionable importance. The passage quoted from Macauley, as it stands, does not seem so revolutionary or even remarkable, until one compares it carefully to the prose styles of his time. Still, Macauley's greatest art is probably cumulative. Passage after wonderfully vivid and meaningful passage radiate with power and profundity in the pages of his "History of England". Winters believed that the art of summary and expository meditation were sadly put out of bounds for the critic in most literary circles. He strove in various ways in many essays to correct this error. Note that Winters praises the simple rendering of scene and setting in this passage, whereas he tried in many other passages (and some we have already selected) to downplay the importance of vividness in fiction and non-fiction. Of course, we are on the ground of matters of taste, and one person's notion of "unforgettable" surely can be widely different from another's. This is an issue on which Winters, sadly in my view, did not elaborate enough, for it calls for much deeper study.

5/23 - On Political Leanings

from a letter to ALLEN TATE (1949) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I have never attended one of [Phi Beta Kappa's] meeting. The current vice-president is one of my oldest friends, Virgil Whitaker of the English department; and I have long been suspected in these parts of being pretty leftish, and once was suspected of being pretty red; so the whole thing will probably strike the boys as somewhat grotesque. About the time Gregory was calling me a fascist in the "New Masses" (because I liked the poems of Robert Bridges, which resembled Hitler's early Paintings), old Percy Martin of our history department called me into his office one day for a little friendly advice: he said that I was known as something of a red, and that if was a red I ought at least to be pretty discreet about it. Anyway, I am getting tired of this nonsense.

** COMMENT: Winters endured a number of political accusations during his career. Though he found himself tagged as a "red" from time to time, it was much more often that he found himself branded as a "fascist" or some other charged epithet applied to reactionaries, conservatives, or extreme right-wing sympathizers. The unfounded allegations seemed to have troubled Winters at times, but he also seemed to be able to dismiss the entire matter out of hand most of the time. He probably thought he would have to spend his whole life suffering idiots and stupidity in any case, so why should the name-calling of political opponents matter any more than the scurrilities of his literary opponents. In studying Winters, readers have seldom been able to suppress the sense that he has some political or social agenda behind his critical theories. In general, it seems that Winters was a liberal democrat who supported the usual causes associated with the Democratic Party. During the Second World War, he served his community in civil defense, and he seems to have been highly "patriotic", though always recognizing that every nation has serious faults and flaws. His political leanings, as often as it was hinted at or brought up by Winters's opponents, however, was plainly of little interest to Winters.

5/24 - On Critical Theories

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

There have been various ideas regarding the nature and function of literature during the twenty-five hundred years or so that literature has been seriously discussed. One might think, off-hand, that the possibilities were limitless; but they are actually limited and even narrowly limited -- the ideas are all classifiable under a fairly small number of headings. I shall not attempt an historical survey but shall merely attempt a brief classificatory survey. The theories in question can all be classified, I believe under three headings: the didactic, the hedonistic, and the romantic. I am not in sympathy with any of these, but with a fourth, which for lack of a better term I call the moralistic. This concept of literature has not been adequately defined in the past so far as my limited knowledge extends, but I believe that it has been loosely implicit in the inexact theorizing which has led to the most durable judgments in the history of criticism.

** COMMENT: It was Winters's regular practice to analyze ideas into their simplest components to lay bare the foundations of his own thinking. This important passage shows the he was ready to go to battle against some of the most powerful and longstanding theories of the literary arts in Western culture. It is particularly valuable to note that he didn't consider his own theory as a kind of didactic theory, which was a frequent charge against it. He tried to counter that charge many times in his career. He certainly had sympathies with didactic theories, but he felt that, in general, they fell short of accounting for the full power of the literary arts. It is also important to realize, as we have seen before, that Winters thought that there wasn't much new to his moral theory of literature, because the theory was implicit in the finest thinkers of Western history. This, of course, is a highly debatable matter that no one has taken the time to study carefully yet. I myself do not see whether the great thinkers of the West support Winters clearly after many years of somewhat desultory investigation. Though Winters seemed to think it was an important point because it protected him from charges of being a revolutionary, I see no problem with his being considered a brilliant innovator. But that was apparently troublesome to Winters. Again and again, he fought to have himself judged as a thinker who came at the end of a long line of our finest thinkers. This may be so in philosophy, but in literary theory, Winters's ideas still seem wholly new to me. His battles over his reputation also seems to have been intended to protect himself against the charge of being a crank, for if the great thinkers of the West were already presenting some sort of moral theory of the literary arts, how could the modern romantics be hard on him for rejecting their ideas. This point didn't seem to stop them, and they continued to charge Winters with being both an innovator, a crank, and a didacticist throughout his career.

5/25 - On Imitative Form

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

We have here [in the dagger speech from "Macbeth"] what I have described elsewhere as the fallacy of imitative form: the procedure by which the poet surrenders the form of his statement to the formlessness of his subject-matter. You may reply that imitative form, as I have here described it is an essential part of the drama and is so justified. Let us rather say that it is an all but inescapable part of drama, at least as the Elizabethans conceived the drama, and stop with that.

** COMMENT: Winters discussed this so-called fallacy a number of times in his essays, though the discussions were always brief. The form, structure, or language of a literary work does not have to and should not follow, in some way, the idea or theme of the work. This has been, however, a common and much-lauded approach, as I can attest from my training in literature and my reading in literature and criticism. It would appear natural that Winters would oppose such a notion, and not only on the grounds of its cleverness. The form of literary art, to be successful, he thought, must not deviate from the rational principles he discussed again and again in his writings, regardless of theme. The fallacy seems to be a particular modern phenomenon and will take decades to root out, if even it is possible to root out something so rapturously praised in our literary culture. Whether Winters was right in calling this a fallacy is another issue well worth study, and I hope some Wintersian critic, if not me, will come along to probe more deeply into the matter than Winters chose to do during his career.

5/26 - On Evil

from the essay "THE POETRY OF CHARLES CHURCHILL" (1961) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

This passage -- the first part of the third paragraph -- deals with a theme familiar in the sixteenth century and earlier: the corruption of the world and the hollowness of its shows. One will find the same subject, for examples, in "Gascoigne's Woodsmanship", Raleigh's "The Lie", and Ben Jonson's "A Farewell to the World". But the subject is more complex here and is handled with greater finish: we have not merely an account of the corruptions of a man. Churchill says that Warburton is innocent of the sins in question, but by this time the indirection should be evident: Warburton is guilty, and the panegyric is a slow, careful, and ironic account of his guilt. This is not satire in the eighteenth-century tradition: it is epigrammatic and it does not endeavor to make stupidity ridiculous. Stupidity is the result of privation of being; privation is evil; and when a stupid man rises to power he becomes pompous, hypocritical, and dangerous. The phenomenon is common; I have seen it a good many times in the academic world, but here the evil man is operating on a national scene and becomes a major representative of evil.

** COMMENT: Once again, fairly late in his life, Winters brought forward and hailed as great a poem almost entirely overlooked in the history of English criticism, "The Dedication" of Charles Churchill. This poem and Dryden's "Macfleknoe" are the only poems of the satirical tradition of the Restoration era to make the Winters Canon. This passage points to the source of Winters's admiration for the poem, outside the rational structure and the well-suited language: its serious themes. The poem is a difficult one to judge in light of Winters's essay for many reasons. The differences between this poem and the many more famous poems that Winters trashed or dismissed from the same era do not sound much different, to my ear, from "The Dedication". It remains an open question for me whether this one poem rises so far above the other more highly regarded poems of the period as to be considered great. Certainly, it is intelligent and closely focused on a satirical study of a strange and dangerous man, at least as Churchill has portrayed him. But are its structure and its diction so much better than Pope or Dryden offered in their usual fare? This remains a matter well worth further study.

5/27 - On J.V. Cunningham

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

And my third and final quotation is an untitled epigram, the last piece in the book:

These three poems, and fifteen or eighteen equally fine in Cunningham's two books, will not appeal to those who consider poetry to be a "revery over remembered sensory impressions." Neither will they appeal to those who share what is popularly regarded as the modern temperament and who have little experience with the modern (or any other) mind. These are not the work of an unhappy adolescent; they are the work of a mature scholar, thinker, and craftsman. And I believe that they will stand the most rigorous comparison with the finest short poems in English.

** COMMENT: At various times in his career, Winters declared Cunningham to be the greatest poet in English in the modern era. Cunningham is a little better known than Winters, but this is not to say that he is famous or even popular, even among modern critics, writers, and reviewers, who very seldom refer to Cunningham or discuss his literary or critical work. The judgment stands as a challenge to all who would seek to understand and appreciate Winters's theories and evaluations. Read Cunningham and see whether or not you can agree. I do -- just to make it clear that there is, indeed, someone who sides with Winters on this crucial matter. The quoted epigram is certainly one of the greatest poems of its kind in English, if not any language, and has to be rated among the best five or ten poems of the 20th century. It has intellectual depths and emotional power that would seem impossible in six lines of poetry unless those lines were standing right before you. Too much of modern poetry falls so short of this, wallowing in an extended romantic adolescence that our culture has yet to emerge from. It would seem that this period of our intellectual history is going to last a long, long, sad time.

5/28 - On Loose Emotions

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

A common romantic practice is to use words denoting emotions, but to use them loosely and violently, as if the very carelessness expressed emotion. Another is to make a general statement, but seem to refer it to a particular occasion, which, however, is never indicated: the poet thus seems to avoid the didactic, yet he is not forced to understand the particular motive. Both these faults may be seen in these lines from Shelley:

The poet's intention is so vague, however, that he achieves nothing but stereotypes of a very crude kind.

** COMMENT: This sort of poetry, which is rife through Shelley and many others, is extremely popular among readers and critics. Shelley is one of the top poets of the Standard Canon, but he is loose and careless poet in Winters's eyes. The important matter to take note of here is that Winters was very disturbed by looseness, by emotions not having "proper" motivation, as he explains many times elsewhere. We must understand, rationally, what is causing the violent emotions that the poet is endeavoring to make us feel if any poem is to be judged good or aspire to being considered great. But so much of Shelley and Byron and Wordsworth, not to mention modern poetry, is full of loose and violent emotion. Once you understand Winters's conception of such writing, it is natural to see why Winters objected to nearly all of it.

5/29 - On Winters's Critical Theory - KP

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

The theory of poetry may be summarized briefly as follows. A poem is a statement in words, and about a human experience, and it will be successful in so far as it realizes the possibilities of that kind of statement. This sentence may seem childishly obvious, but it states facts of which we must never lose sight if we are to understand poetry, and facts of which sight is very commonly lost. When we are discussing poetry, we should not beguile ourselves with analogies drawn from music, sculpture, architecture, or engineering; a poem is not a symphony, neither is it a structure made of bricks. Words are primarily conceptual: the words "grief", "tree", "poetry", "God", represent concepts; they may communicate some feeling and remembered sensory impression as well, and they may be made to communicate a great deal of these, but they will do it by virtue of their conceptual identity, and in so far as this identity is impaired they will communicate less of these and communicate them with less force and precision. It is the business of the poet, then, to make statements in words about an experience; the statement must be in some sense and in a fair measure acceptable rationally; and the feeling communicated should be proper to the rational understanding of the experience.

** COMMENT: This is one of perhaps a dozen restatements of Winters's basic critical creed, with which he often opened his essays (because his readers then and now would have been supremely puzzled by the judgments he reached). This restatement of the creed is noteworthy because it draws clear attention to the medium of the literary arts: language. Winters was not simply being heretically perverse in insisting on rational content in poetry. He believed that literature must emphasize rational content because conceptual, rational communication was at the core of the nature of the very medium, human language, in which the literary artist chooses to work. As the architect works with steel and concrete and must build in certain ways in order to make art of that material, so the literary artist must work with language and MUST employ its denotative power to the fullest extent possible, since language is - obviously -- primarily denotative. To say that poetry should not have rational content or should de-emphasize such content, for Winters, was like saying that the architect should fill his fountains with concrete and urge those who come to his buildings to swim in them. It simply doesn't work. It isn't art, and certainly is not good or great art, because it cuts the artist off from the principal characteristics of his medium. I consider these ideas some of the most important in Winters, and even though they have drawn little attention, they deserve to be explored even more deeply than he studied them in his essays.

5/30 - On Yeats's Diction

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

The fifth line [of the second stanza of Yeats's "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"], however, is bad in other ways: the words "up upon" make a crude combination, and the whole line, "And quarrels are blown up upon that head," gives us, like the two lines preceding, a dead metaphor but a mixed metaphor as well. Unless we are imperceptive of the possibilities of language, we visualize something being blown up on top of a head. This kind of thing is common in newspaper writing and in other vulgar writing. I remember a freshman composition from many years ago, in which the student wrote: "This line of study is basic to my field of endeavor." The line by Yeats is the same kind of thing as my freshman's effort, and no apologetic reference to the virtues of colloquialism is an adequate defense.

** COMMENT: Once Winters helps you to notice the infelicities of Yeats's poetry, you find them in line after line and stanza after stanza. Yeats did turn some good phrases, and he wrote a few sound poems that should be read for a long time, but so much of his work was foolish and poorly written that one must wonder about the intelligence of the hundreds of critics who keep pushing it at readers as some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century. Winters's heretical study of Yeats, one of the essays that most damns him in the minds of most common critics, will make you not only wake up to the weaknesses of Yeats, but to the trustworthiness, depth, and power of Winters's critical theories. As I have said before, for Winters, calling someone's writing similar to newspaper writing was almost the most severe and damning rebuke he could offer.

5/31 - On Analogies of Poetry to Other Arts

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

I discuss the matter in terms of poetry not out of prejudice against the other arts but because I understand their principles insufficiently well. For reasons already given, I refuse to discuss questions of painting or music in any serious fashion, and I refuse to be bound by any apparent analogies between these arts and poetry. But Ransom is bound by his own analogies, and what he has said of painting we may fairly assume that he means of poetry. And when we come to poetry, his doctrine of imitation unmistakably collapses, for poetry is composed of words, which are primarily abstractions. No combination of abstractions, however fine their subdivision or ingenious their arrangement, will reproduce a unique experience, and if we endeavor to violate their nature in using them we shall merely use them badly.

** COMMENT: Winters has lost his long and hard-fought battle against the poetry of pure experience, the kind of poetry, now so rife as to be sickening, that seeks to recreate human experience rather than to understand and judge it. His Ransom essay was the principal venue he chose for his discussion of these foundational issues, and this piece is full of Winters's caustic polemic against the modern doctrines of "imitation." Once again, Winters insists on the true nature of the medium the literary artist employs to present and study human experience: language. Since language is primarily denotative and abstract (in the very nature of things, all of language is abstract), the good or great poet, or literary artist of another genre, MUST take full advantage of the primary characteristic of human language, its denotative and abstract nature, if he is to write well. Obviously, countless poets of the modern period have chosen to downplay the rational content of language, and one might ask what is so wrong with excluding the leading part of language's nature. Winters might not have had much of a problem with this, if the artist were to admit that he was suppressing the central nature of language. And calling the literature that results "great" is foolish, because only the work of the artist who shows consummate skill with the full measure of language can be called great. These issues deserve much greater study. I believe that Winters is right, but the foundations of his position and the implications of his theories must be explored much more fully for his theories to reach a wider audience. He began a work that no one has continued, and this is much to be lamented.