A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

June

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

6/1 - On Hawthorne's Late 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"

We have in [Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance"] all of the machinery and all of the mannerisms of the allegorist, but we cannot discover the substance of his communication, nor is he himself aware of it in so far as we can judge. We have the symbolic footprint, the symbolic spider, the symbolic elixirs and poisons, but we have not that of which they are symbolic; we have the hushed, the tense and confidential manner, on the part of the narrator, of one who imparts a grave secret, but the words are inaudible. Yet we have not, on the other hand, anything approaching realistic fiction, for the events are improbable or even impossible, and the characters lack all reality. The technique of the novelist nor of the allegorist was available to Hawthorne when he approached the conditions of his own experience: he had looked for signals in nature for so long and so intently, and his ancestors before him had done so for many generations, that, like a man hypnotized, or like a man corroded with madness, he saw them; but he no longer had any way of determining their significance, and he had small talent for rendering their physical presence with intensity.

** COMMENT: Leaving the reader so confused was, for Winters, one of the most damnable sins an artist could commit, for the act violates the principles of reason in the literary arts. Hawthorne's later allegories are just as ethereal and uncertain as Winters describes them in this passage. Scholars have labored for decades to fathom the origins of the stories and symbols and wild emotions to be found in "The Blithedale Romance" and Hawthorne's other late works, but there can be NO certainty -- or even probability -- in such matters, because Hawthorne was simply unaware of what he was trying to say, as Winters makes clear. His writing in this period suggests that he did not understand his own experience, and to understand experience is the first duty of the literary arts, in the judgment of Yvor Winters. Nowadays, of course, uncertainty delights most critics and reviewers and writers. Open interpretation is a dogma of modern criticism. But Winters rejected this dogma and believed that alternatives come in the act of applying literary themes to life, not in endlessly ferreting out those themes from the artwork. In Winters's long, fascinating essay on Hawthorne, he theorizes on the causes of the final crumbling of Hawthorne's art and thought. The wonderful essay begins Winters's detailed account of the allegorizing tendencies of most of the major 19th-century American prose writers. It is a matter well worth studying in depth, for it seems that we Americans continue to understand the world through allegorization to this day.

6/2 - On Rural Subjects

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

Frost writes of rural subjects, and the American reader of our time has an affection for rural subjects which is partly the product of the Romantic sentimentalization of "nature", but which is partly also a nostalgic looking back to the rural life which predominated in this nation a generation or two ago; the rural life is somehow regarded as the truly American life. I have no objection to the poet's employing rural settings; but we should remember that it is the poet's business to evaluate human experience, and the rural setting is no more valuable for this purpose than any other or than no particular setting, and one could argue with some plausibility that an exclusive concentration on it may be limiting.

** COMMENT: This is a very telling passage. For if there is one thing that has made Frost one of the most popular poets of all time both among readers and critics, it is his rural settings and his countrified, aw-shucks tone of voice. This passage suggests that Winters did not wish that Frost had not employed the setting and the tone -- nor did he wish to discard everything Frost wrote in this style, which is a mountain of material. But ever cautioning us against the modern dogmas, he wanted us to recognize that it is not rural settings or the rural character of language that makes poems great or even good, but rather their qualities that enable us to understand human experiences and form the proper emotional responses to that understanding. Frost's nearly ubiquitous tone might endear him to readers, but that tone in itself does nothing to increase our understanding of his subjects. Of course, much more could be said about the chief causes of the love of rural settings and language. For example, Winters never considered that Frost's popularity might have arisen as a legacy of Jeffersonianism, which expressed our nation's understanding of itself as an idyllic agricultural nation, a cultural concept that has lasted in the 21st century.

6/3 - On Imagery

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

One can observe this [image of death approaching, in Stevens's "Sunday Morning": "as a calm darkens among water lights"], for example, on any of the Great Lakes on a quiet day in winter. A light wind whips the surface of the water and creates small ripples which glitter; in the distance, a calm settles in the midst of the wind, and the glitter disappears and we have instead something resembling shadow, and this calm may move swiftly or slowly in almost any direction. I mention this because so few people in our time have observed this kind of thing. I have met students who thought that Stevens was talking about artificial lights on water at night. The image is a marvelous perception, but the reader must share the perception, not invent another and inferior perception.

** COMMENT: Winters was a stickler when it came to metaphors and other forms of imagery. As we have seen from several other selections during this Year with Winters, he could gives what seems to be an inordinate amount of attention to a single image and its defects or virtues. Stevens's great poem is crammed with arresting images, and Winters was drawn to Steven's poetry, in part, for this reason, though he quickly lost patience with the endlessly clever and prodigal imagery found throughout Stevens's later poems. The particular metaphor discussed here is a exceptionally beautiful one that readers have often been unable to comprehend. Winters explains it clearly and beautifully himself. As a captain on the Great Lakes, I can testify that he is entirely accurate on the phenomenon, whether or not it is exactly what Stevens was describing. At the end of the note is Winters's moral: appreciate poems or parts of poems for their genuine virtues, not their imagined or invented ones. He rigorously abided by this principle throughout his criticism, though it is distinctly unpopular nowadays, when poetry has become, for far too many writers and readers, a cleverly entertaining interpretive game in which to indulge one's fancies.

6/4 - On Reason, Principle, and "Moby Dick" - KP

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

[Quoting from the chapter "The Lee Shore" in Melville's "Moby Dick":] "But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so, better it is to perish upon that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the less, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who could craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of the ocean-perishing -- straight up leaps thy apotheosis."

It should be observed that this passage is addressed to a helmsman, governed by the laws of his calling, and obeying the commands of a navigator, one who guides the ship with reference to the position of the land. Symbolically, the passage represents the process of living by judgment; that is not by perception of individual, shifting, and chaotic phenomena, but by perception trained in principle, in abstraction, to the point where it is able to find its way amid the chaos of the particular. Ahab is ultimately betrayed to his end by the white whale, who is the spirit of evil, in the farthest Pacific, after destroying his quadrant (the instrument which gives him his mathematical position upon the ocean), after having his compass needle reversed in a storm (a warning that he should turn about and retrace his way), after the snapping of the log-line (which enabled him to gauge his position roughly), and after the sinking of the life-buoy and the caulking of Queequeg's coffin to take its place.

** COMMENT: Reading this passage in the light of Winters's critical theories, one might be surprised to find that Herman Melville, writing about 100 years before Winters, was symbolically portraying Winters's theories in this, Melville's greatest work and one of the greatest works in prose in English. Was Winters right? Did Melville write these highly symbolic passages with some such ideas in mind about the rational faculty meeting the chaos of experience? I cannot say for sure after much study of the matter. Very few Melville critics seem to believe that Winters was right about his interpretation of the epic, and very few have ever had much to say about that interpretation, good or ill, or the essay that it is presented in. However, I consider the essay one of the greatest Winters wrote, a brilliant study not only of "Moby Dick" but all of Melville. Winters, I believe, derived much of his understanding of the question of principle and perception from reading Melville. Many of his poems from the 1930s were concerned with this troublesome, though abstruse problem. Winters saw Melville as a writer as much distressed over the problem of moral navigation as Winters himself was. Indeed, this one passage aids a great deal in interpreting many of Winters's own poems and critical theories, which very frequently deal symbolically with this issue. The "process of living by judgment; that is not by perception of individual, shifting, and chaotic phenomena, but by perception trained in principle, in abstraction, to the point where it is able to find its way amid the chaos of the particular" might be considered the central objective of all Winters's work, his essential literary philosophy. I must confess that as fine as I consider his poetry, however, this particular issue does not seem to have much meaning to my life or to my decisions on how to live. The temptation to the immersion in pure experience, in any one of its countless forms, has little troubled me, though it might be that I remain unconscious or ignorant or uncomprehending of the matter. This subject is an excellent one for a continuing study of Winters's poetry and the central issues of life that he struggled to understand and control through literature.

6/5 - On Advice to Writers

from two letters to SEYMOUR GRESSER (1951) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

Your poems strike me as worth very little. I am too busy & too tired to try to criticize them & I could not explain much to you by writing letters anyway. I assume, for example, that you have read my criticism, since you sent me these, yet these represent the kind of loose writing to which I have been objecting for years, & the fact has not, it would seem, occurred to you. About the best advice I can give you is to read as many poets as you can, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries & try to find out what poetry is....

[From a letter a month later:] My [previous] letter to you... was neither pompous nor rude. Yours to me is both. However, I am not shocked, for I have had so many letters like yours over the past 15 years that I am used to them, and merely find them an irritating bore. I have shown your letter to the secretary of my department, and she has promised to write me a form letter to deal with such situations in the future. Let me rehearse the situation briefly, however. You sent me some poems and asked my opinion of them and I gave it. If you had not been willing to accept an adverse opinion you should have had the ordinary wit not to send them.

** COMMENT: A harsh rebuke indeed, but one that I have selected not to take a swipe at Winters and show him in his worst light, but to draw attention to an interesting part of his life: his relations with the public and his few readers. Winters was always a loner and a misfit, an oft-condemned and ostracized heretic in the literary community. Some few thinkers and readers, mostly students, were drawn to him, perhaps perversely. He had a number of casual correspondents, and many of these, it seems, wrote to him seeking his analysis of their work and his advice. Mr. Gresser received a blunt and stern note back, and Gresser, later, seems to have written back to denounce the brusqueness of Winters's note. He was growing ever more weary during the latter years of his life (he was 51 when these letters were written). It is sad, though humorous as well, to see his decline into both physical weariness and emotional bitterness (probably brought on by the nearly universal hostility that greeted his work in the world of letters). But, most importantly, note the truly kind and wise advice of the final sentence of the first letter. This is what those coming to Winters must do to understand him and appreciate his unrecognized accomplishments: begin reading those poets he lauded and the styles of poetry he championed. His entire critical career was spent trying to get readers to do this, especially through the Winters Canon I have discussed repeatedly. If you wish to understand and profit from Winters, this you must also do.

6/6 - On Comparing Arts

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

The modern Catholic thinkers are the most stubbornly confused in this matter. [Jacques] Maritan is the worst sinner, but he has had many followers, and even [Etienne] Gilson has fallen into line in recent years. Some of them go so far as to say that such arts as poetry, painting, and the making of furniture are essentially similar. A moment's consideration of the idea of the FINAL CAUSE, the purpose for which an object is created, should be sufficient to disabuse them: a chair is created to provide repose for the human posterior, a poem to provide a certain kind of activity for the human mind; the two ends have nothing in common, in spite of the fact that we may employ both creations simultaneously. And what about the pleasing proportions of the chair? Pleasing to what? The aesthete will usually say to the eye, but there seems to be a problem here.

** COMMENT: Winters harped on this matter again and again in his essays. He argued time and again that there is little or no connection between the various kinds of art that human beings produce, between painting and poetry, or sculpture and music, and so on. The reason that there are no connections is one of the important foundation stones of his theories of literary art. For if we look to the final cause of the production of artistic objects, which Winters urges us to do many times in his writings, we must start our study of each art with the nature of its medium. This means that if we are to understand literature, we must start with the nature and purpose of language, which is the medium of the literary arts. One might ask whether Winters was right about this, whether he was correct in thinking that the nature and purpose of the art's medium defines the character and attributes of that art. There could be much said both for and against the idea, surely. But it has not been discussed widely enough to receive its due. I will say here that I agree with Winters, but, if his idea is to find widespread approval and application, his argument needs to be more fully fleshed out by some of the critics who are drawn to his theories.

6/7 - On Order

from the Winters poem "BEFORE DISASTER" - KP

** COMMENT: This the first of two stanzas from a deceptively simple poem about war. This stanza presents the metaphorical vehicle that informs the second stanza about nations plunging into armed conflict. It is a fascinating image that Winters gives us here, one of my personal favorites, for it so neatly and powerfully lays before us his understanding of the dangers of social change, development, or corrosion. On how fine an edge travels the civilization that we enjoy. How quickly it can all be lost or abandoned in the mistakes we make, as we might allow our cars to wander from their freeway lanes. The civilization we have created, founded upon the rational understanding of our environment, has been hard won by careful, thorough thinkers and artists and maintained with difficulty for 2000 years. In this stanza, I see Winters calling on us to heed its maintenance assiduously, as he did in much of his criticism as well. You might have guessed that the loss of our civilization is what Winters feared as a result of faulty philosophical conceptions of reality, such as, most prominently, Romanticism and all its assorted manifestations. If we indulge ourselves too long in such "errors", Winters repeatedly pointed out in his criticism, our civilization shall collapse. This is matter well deserving of deeper study, for we have followed Romanticism even further on the highway of civilization since Winters wrote more than 50 years ago, and yet our civilization doesn't seem on the verge of collapsing. So was Winters right? Is there much danger? Please see the selection for tomorrow, 6/8, to delve more deeply into this matter.

6/8 - On Emotional Possession - KP

from the essay "THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BRIDGE BY HART CRANE, OR WHAT ARE WE TO THINK OF PROFESSOR X" from "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

Poetry is a medium by means of which one mind may to a greater or less extent take possession of another, almost in the sense in which the term POSSESSION is used in demonology. It is a well-known fact, to medieval and modern psychologists alike, that our emotional prejudices may pervert our rational faculty. If we enter the mind of a Crane, a Whitman, or an Emerson, with our emotional faculties activated and our reason in abeyance, these writers may possess us as surely as demons were once supposed to possess the unwary, as surely as Whitman possessed Crane, as surely as Whitman and Emerson were possessed by their predecessors. If we come to these writers with all our faculties intact, however; if we insist on understanding not only what they are but what they are not; we can profit by what they may have to offer and at the same time escape being bemused by their limitations.

** COMMENT: We have seen Yvor Winters attack Romanticism and its attendant sentimentalism again and again during our Year with Winters, and this question might have occurred to you: Why did Winters think Romanticism was so dangerous? This important passage, among the very few that explicitly tackle the topic in his writings, answers the question clearly. The rational faculty that empowers the human being to control his life is always in danger of being subverted by emotional prejudices or bad ideas. This is what Winters's moral critical theories aim to prevent -- the loss of control -- the possession of human minds by unsound principles and irrational processes and concepts. Winters clearly not only believed in the great power of literature over the human mind, but also the great dangers in a writer's holding such power. Note, as well, that Winters believed that readers and thinkers could profit from the romantic poetry of Crane and Whitman -- and others -- but only when their poetry is fully understood and we cannot be "possessed" by their unsound ideas. These concepts form a fascinating part of his theory that deserves a great deal more attention from those who would build on Winters's theories. Is it true that this possession occurs? Is it dangerous? Is poetry this powerful? Is romantic poetry in specific this dangerous? How do we judge such matters? These are questions still open for discussion, and the advancement of Winters's ideas might proceed from opening such a discussion.

6/9 - On History and Fact

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

Let me return for a few moments to historiography and to prose fiction. As I have already said, one advantage enjoyed by the historiographer is this: that what he tells us has the force of accomplished fact, it has really happened. But this is also a disadvantage, for the historiographer depends upon this particular power more heavily than does any other writer, and the human mind, no matter how learned and talented, is fallible, and the modern reader is skeptical. We have learned to read history with caution and to examine the methods and credentials of historians. We ask: DID this really happen, or did it really happen in this way? The question if pursued very far can sometimes be damaging. We discover that [American historian Francis] Parkman, who wrote in so authoritative a manner about the Indian, knew far less about the Indian than he might have known even at that early date [the 1850s]; that he knew next to nothing about the religious mind and religious experience, in spite of the fact that such knowledge would have been relatively easy to acquire if he had had the intelligence to understand it; and we discover that in a variety of ways his mind was very limited.

** COMMENT: As we have seen, Winters favored treating history as a form of literature, and in two essays, this and the essay on Henry Adams in "In Defense of Reason", he explored the idea in some depth. Francis Parkman was listed among the greatest literary historians of all time in Winters's essay on Adams, but here he seems to qualify the earlier assessment. Winters recognized the issues that separated the historian from the fictionist, and here he points out some of the dangers of a literary artist using history as his medium. Of course, Winters also thought that history had unappreciated strengths that demonstrate that it is in some ways, in Winters's view, the greater of the two literary genres. He was willing to overlook some of the errors made by and the weaknesses of historians because the overall view of human experience and literary purposes of our finest historians is so much more comprehensive and serious than the fictionists. Winters's attitudes to history and fiction is an issue that well deserves much deeper evaluation by a literary critic who has studied deeply in history, for I believe that Winters was generally right that history is the greater prose genre for the rational and emotional evaluation of human experiences (though, certainly, fiction is never to be discarded or overlooked).

6/10 - On the Standard Canon

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

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) is by his own account, obviously in fact, a disciple of Ben Jonson, but essentially of Jonson's lesser poems. Herrick learned the art of writing from Jonson but he lacked Jonson's intelligence. Here and there in Herrick one finds lines which indicate moral insight, for example these lines from the "Litany to the Holy Spirit":

Most of Herrick's best poems are available in the standard anthologies; the elegies on the flowers, the "Night-Piece to Julia", and some of the little epitaphs in the tradition of Jonson. Some of his more ambitious poems on the mortality of man and the immortality of art are impressive: the best are "Now is the time for mirth" and "Only a little more". They are in the classical tradition which has continued almost to our own time....

** COMMENT: I selected this passage to illustrate that Winters was not solely a prejudiced and stubborn heretic in his judgments of literary art and in the creation of his alternative Winters Canon. Robert Herrick has long been part of what I have been calling the Standard Canon of English literature. His work appears in all the anthologies, and the poems that appear are commonly those which Winters chose for his own Canon. This case, and a few others, shows, I think, that Winters was not prejudiced in any way against the poets or poems that the Standard Canon has long elevated. He was open to all literature and read everything he could get his hands on. He evaluated individual poems solely on their merits, never on their reputation, whether good or bad. I believe this to be an very important point to make for anyone trying to fathom Winters's strange career as a critic. He has been accused so often of being a narrow-minded and partisan crank, as well as an doctrinaire heretic against the Standard canon, that I felt it was important to address this issue openly at some point during this Year with Winters.

6/11 - On Reason and Image

from the essay "TESTAMENT OF A STONE: BEING NOTES ON THE MECHANICS OF THE POETIC IMAGE" (1924) from "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

Many poets have entirely omitted any intellectual sequence from one image to the next, depending upon an emotional unity, and there is nothing to be said against this. Other poets have attempted to carry the method even further, omitting all intellectual (syntactical) sequence within the image, or trying to, attempting to create aesthetic relationships from broken words and phrases. This is interesting, and may someday succeed. The difficulty with most of these experimenters up to date, however, is that, having cast out all other thought from their minds, they cannot cast out the cliches, the very old sentimentalities, which seem to be so deeply rooted as to be almost mental reflexes. Their poems become, then, desperate efforts to conceal these cliches under a broken exterior, which is evading the question.

** COMMENT: This is our first encounter with this early and highly important essay, which in his later years Winters completely repudiated as "worthless". Winters was only 24 when he wrote this long analytic essay classifying poetic images, and he was still at least three years from the beginning of his change from free verse imagism to formalism. But his interest in reason was clearly evident very early in his career, as is shown here. Winters would, to wildly understate the matter, eventually find much to be said against the lack of intellectual sequence from image to image in the literary arts. He even hints that there are certain problems with the procedure of most experimental poets of this kind, that they are forced to write in cliches because there is nothing left to write with if reason is squeezed out of literature. As we have seen from other selections, Winters would in time conclude that not only did these experiments not succeed, but that they are not particularly uninteresting and dangerous to civilization. As most of my readers know, the experiments Winters discusses here have continued to grow ever wilder since this was written more than 70 years ago. It is not hard to guess how the mature Winters would have judged nearly all of them.

6/12 - On "Sunday Morning"

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

Whatever the defects of the hedonistic theme, and with the possible but by no means certain exception of a few short poems by Stevens and of two or three poems by E.A. Robinson, "Sunday Morning" is probably the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and is certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English: in a blank verse which differs, in its firmness of structure and incalculable sensitivity of detail, from all other blank verse of our time save that of a few poems by Hart Crane which were in some measure modeled upon it, it renders the acute uncertainty of what we are inclined to consider the modern mind, but it does so with no uncertainty of method or of statement; it renders an acute consciousness of the imminence of death, of the sensory and emotional richness of life on this bewildering planet, and of the heroic magnificence of the religious myths which are lost to the poet and to many of the rest of us, except as memories of things long past.

** COMMENT: How could the heretical Yvor Winters choose this poem for his Winters Canon, since it has almost been universally praised and admired among critics and readers alike who have or would have stridently opposed him? He clearly, however, saw something different in the poem from those thousands who have lauded it, for they have lauded at the same time hundreds of other poems to which Winters will give no sanction whatsoever. The poem is fully as great as Winters appraises it here; it made many of his short lists of the five or ten finest poems ever written, and he mentioned it a couple times as the greatest poem written in the modern period. He believed that the poem exhibited the stylistic method that Winters named Post-Symbolism, which refers to poems employing "concrete" imagery and description or narration to convey rational and even abstract ideas in such a way that the thought cannot be separated from the image and is fully understood and responded to emotionally ONLY through the image. Stevens wrote in this way unconsciously, Winters believed, for his conscious theory of life and poetry eventually ruined his work and nearly all of the poems that he wrote after his early period -- poems which, by the way, have been much praised by the critics Winters agrees with about the excellence of "Sunday Morning". The poem is one of the great achievements of our literary arts; it is a haunting and powerful meditation on some of the most profound themes that humankind has pondered, hope, death, religion, passion, stoicism. It is well worth knowing very well, even memorizing. It is also, to turn back to Winters's opinions of it, a pertinent case study on how Winters has differed so deeply from his critical opponents, for he praises the poem for entirely different reasons that they have praised it, even though they have comprehended the same themes Winters did. Finally, the selection of this poem for the Winters Canon also illustrates what I discussed in my comments for 6/10. Winters was not prejudiced in any way, it seems, against the writers of the Standard Canon, which his opponents claimed endlessly. One cannot justly say, as has been said often, that he was just a narrow crank. He rejected almost all of, say, Yeats, who has been as strong a member of the Standard Canon as Stevens, because he believed Yeats to be seriously flawed, not because he was a prejudiced, rancorous heretic against all things modern. This is a very important point that I will come back to again during this Year with Winters. My hope is that you can overcome this common misconception of Winters's work and give his theories and practices a fair hearing on their merits.

6/13 - On the Influence of Pound

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

[Those of us looking for a stronger relationship between literary art and criticism] found our enlightenment in Ezra Pound. Pound had enough scholarship to impress the young, but it was largely linguistic. He was incapable of thought, and his theories of poetry were merely restatements of principles which had been flourishing for over two centuries: the corrosive principles of eighteenth-century sentimental-romanticism and associationism. But we were ignorant, and his principles, as he stated them, seemed new. Furthermore, he had two closely related gifts which [critic Irving] Babbitt lacked: he could write poetry, which, however it might be damaged by his theories, showed a real genius for language; and he could show us poems and passages which were genuinely fine. He showed us fine poems which we had overlooked, whereas Babbitt all to often misunderstood fine poems with which we were familiar. For about fifteen years Pound was the most influential critic in American letters, as far as practical results were concerned; and when he was replaced it was by his disciple Eliot, who did little save restate his ideas in a more genteel style.

** COMMENT: For anyone who knows how much of Ezra Pound's work Winters considered to be weak or botched, this passage can be striking for its praise of Pound. Winters himself became one of the scholar-artists that his generation was hoping for and that they first discerned in Pound. Winters clearly learned a lot from Pound, and one of the essays that surely seems to have influenced him was "The ABC's of Reading", the little book that almost reads like an essay by Winters himself except that the content is so different. As we have seen in several other selections, Winters judged Pound's poetry to be seriously and deeply flawed, even though he admired its virtues quite highly. Winters considered Pound a very fine writer, all in all. Though he discussed Pound's critical work very seldom in his essays, it is clear from this passage that he considered it valuable as well. It is most interesting to note that what he praises Pound for in his criticism was the very goal of Winters's own criticism: to find the very finest poems that have been overlooked because of faulty theories. This was how Winters's generation, as he understood matters, came to trust Pound and to follow his work. It is my opinion that in the same way Winters can make himself trustworthy to a generation of the lovers of literary art that, for now, scorns him or has forgotten all about him.

6/14 - On the General Evaluation of T. Sturge Moore

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

In theory, [T. Sturge] Moore was a counter-romantic, but he was not naively so. He was opposed to the pseudo-scientific historical scholarship which was influential during much of his life; he was aware of the unclassifiable act of judgment, but in the composition of the work of art and in the evaluation of the work of art; he was aware of the dangers inherent in the failure to relate this act of judgment to a controlling reason; but he could not write with sufficient precision to clarify the problems which he perceived -- his thought too often evaporates into talk about beauty or about circumambient perfumes. Yet he was aware of these problems, far more aware of them than were any of his contemporaries. He was aware also of the necessity of enlightenment from scholarship, but he was aware at the same time that professional scholars were imperceptive blunderers when they attempted critical judgment. It seems to have occurred to him that the poet and critic might be at the same time a professional scholar, and, by combining all of his activities, improve all of them. In his arguments with Yeats, in their correspondence, he is almost invariably the winner on points, for Yeats was simply foolish and Moore was not foolish; but Moore remains an amateur theorist.

** COMMENT: As we have already discussed, Winters was bashed again and again for his judgment that T. Sturge Moore was a great poet, while Moore's friend, the much more famous William Butler Yeats, was, though stylistically talented, badly flawed. Winters never backed down from his evaluations of the two poets, and this passage appears late in his final book, published just before his death in 1968. So what can we conclude from these comments about Moore? It all depends on how one assesses Moore. If one is a standard critic, one will judge these comments as bizarre, almost crazy. If one reads Moore and finds in his oeuvre great poems, as well as many good ones, one will marvel that Yvor Winters, almost alone in the academic world, and certainly alone of all major critics, was able to discern the greatness of Moore. I hope you will read some of T. Sturge Moore, who is going to be hard to find in print, though most major university libraries carry his collected works. Let me state, just for the purpose of throwing some weight behind Winters, for whatever it might be worth, that Winters was right about Moore: he was a great poet for many reasons. And let me say as well that the case of Moore is ample reason to start trusting Winters in other areas. Finally, note the comment about the "unclassifiable act of judgment", a kind of phrase Winters tossed out from time to time in his essays. What he is referring to is the moral act of evaluating human experiences, the true business of the literary arts. But what did Winters mean by calling it "unclassifiable"? This is an important question. It means, as I understand it, that this moral act of judgment is something that is beyond full and final explication in critical discourse. Only works of art themselves form the whole of the moral act inherent in the finest works of literature. The critical interpretation only approximates the richness and breadth of what a great poem accomplishes and speaks to the human mind and soul. This matter, never fully addressed in Winters's writings, is deserving of more thorough study, elucidation, and application. It was part of Winters's belief that poetry is at the summit of human achievement because only poetry can embody all aspects of human experience and human thought, both the rational and the emotional. Poetry is more, and much more, than philosophy, much more than politics or psychology or sociology or realist fiction or history. When all the aspects of poetry are nearly perfectly arrayed in a great poem, every aspect of human life is engaged. This, also, is a matter for much deeper study.

6/15 - On Writing Criticism

from a letter to HOWARD BAKER (1931) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I don't know what to do with my long story ["Brink of Darkness"]. It is too unwieldy as it stands. I could try to build a novel under it, a precarious proposition. Or I could break it down into several shorter things, told in the first person. There is too much good prose in it to waste, but the prose is not functioning in the proper way, I still have an idea I could write prose if I could recover my sense of leisure. At present I am obsessed with the necessity of reestablishing my reputation at Stanford with a good dissertation. It is hell to write criticism. Literally, I mean: it makes one feel as if one had the mange.

** COMMENT: The story Winters refers to here was eventually published in a much shortened version. It is an interesting story, famous among those who study Winters, but certainly it has many weaknesses, in my opinion. Winters never wrote fiction again. His mind and art were apparently ill-suited to the prolixity of fiction. The dissertation he was working on he later revised into the book "Primitivism and Decadence", which steadied his reputation at Stanford (because it was congenial to the classical professors who were running the Department of English) but began the process of isolating him in American literary culture. The only prose Winters would write the rest of his career was criticism, and it is strange to read of his feelings for it here. Frankly, his critical prose is so well thought out and written that the comment astonished me when I first came across it. But his first love was always poetry, even though he would write few poems after about 1940.

6/16 - On the Tragic Task of Life

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

This requisite seems to be ignored in a large measure by a good many contemporary poets of more or less mystical tendencies, who avoid the difficult task of mastering the more complex forms of experience by setting up a theoretic escape from them and by then accepting that escape with a good deal of lyrical enthusiasm.... In the religious poets of the past, one encounters this vice very seldom; the older religions are fully aware that the heart, to borrow the terms of a poem by Janet Lewis, is untranslatable, whatever may be true of the soul, and that one can escape from the claims of the world only by understanding those claims and by thus accustoming oneself to the thought of eventually putting them by.... The attitude is humane, and does not belittle nor evade the magnitude of the task; it is essentially a tragic attitude.

For this reason, the religious fervor of Gerard Hopkins, of John Donne, or of George Herbert should weaken but little the force of most of their poems for the non-believer, just as the deterministic doctrines, whatever their nature and extent, to be found in Hardy, should not weaken for us those poems which do not deal too pugnaciously with the doctrines, and for the same reason. Though a belief in any form of determinism should, if the belief is pushed to its logical ends, eliminate the belief in, and consequently the functioning of, whatever it is that we call the will, yet there is no trace of any kind of disintegration in Hardy's poetic style, in his sense of form, which we have seen to be, so far as writing is concerned, identical with the will or the ability to control and shape one's experience. The tragic necessity of putting by the claims of the world without the abandonment of self-control, without loss of the ability to go on living, for the present, intelligently and well, is just as definitely the subject of Hardy's poetry as of Herbert's.

** COMMENT: Winters has frequently been derided for being a didactic writer (on the misguided assumption, by the way, that didacticism is inherently dreadful in art) -- that is, for supposedly having a philosophy that he wished to grind into the readers of his own poetry, to laud in the poetry of others, and to pound into readers through his critical theories. But it is clear from this passage, and from many others, that a specific set of doctrines or specific creed or philosophical system interested Winters little. He read the best literature for its understanding of the tragic task of laying aside the "claims of the world", of gaining self-control in the face of the challenges of life through Reason in art. He was not put off by the Christianity of many poets in English, despite his not being a Christian himself (though he was a theist of an odd sort). He was not put off, it seems, by any creed, even the Romanticism he despised because of how it had destroyed the literary artworks of many, many writers. Rather, he looked to Reason in literature to judge every creed, and looked to those creeds that empowered, as we say today, people to shape their experience, to gain control of their lives. It is a powerful message of hope and purpose for the literary arts. It always surprises me that it has not found many more supporters than it has down the years since Winters wrote. For it gives to literature a high place in the activities of life, perhaps a higher place than all the talk of making a religion of art from the original romantics and their countless descendants. For more on the question of religious poetry, see tomorrow's selection, 6/17.

6/17 - On Devotional Poetry

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

It is a curious poem [Hopkins's "The Starlight Night"]. The description is sometimes extremely brilliant and is interesting everywhere save in the sestet. Yet the theme is to be found in the first line of the sestet, and nothing is done with it. A devotional poet of the Renaissance, dealing with "prayer, patience, alms, vows," would have had a good deal to say of each and of what each meant in terms of daily life and toward salvation. The reader who wishes to orient himself, might begin by rereading Ben Jonson's "To Heaven", John Donne's "Thou hast made me", Greville's "Down in the depth of mine iniquity", and Herbert's "Church Monuments". In no other literary period, I think, save our own, would a poet who was both a priest and a genuinely devout man have thought that he had dealt seriously with his love for Christ and his duty toward him by writing an excited description of a landscape: this kind of thing belongs to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the period of self-expression and the abnegation of reason. The impressiveness of the landscape described in this poem provides a more nearly adequate motivation for the feeling asserted than one can find in many other poems similarly constructed: Hopkins' method in general is to employ the landscape as the immediate motive for a feeling which is too great for it, and then to append the perfunctory moral as a kind of theoretic justification.

** COMMENT: This is a particularly damning assessment of one poem, though the evaluation discussed here might be generally applied to much of Hopkins's poetry -- and indeed to far too much of the poetry composed in the last 100 years. For Hopkins was simply following the course mapped by Wordsworth and his many successors (Whitman being the principal American Romantic), who seemed to think that describing a landscape is enough to make good and profound poetry. This habit -- or, at best, a weak and mindless convention -- has become a pitiful and unrecognized cliché, except in Winters's criticism. Thus we have yet another reason to trust Winters on other matters, since once he makes one aware of the habit, it reveals itself nearly everywhere, for this habit manifests itself nearly everywhere in modern poetry. Also, we find in that poetry the excesses of passionately expressed emotions, though sadly little of the conceptual context that makes rational sense of such strong emotions. And this is frequently done in deliberate obscurity. It is, indeed, thought that obscurity is artistic, even at times the summit of artistic achievement, for it gives endless room for private and fanciful interpretations. It probably does not bear repeating that Winters regarded such notions as utterly foolish and sometimes morally and culturally dangerous. We also have in this brief passage one of Winters's short lists of the greatest poems of the Winters Canon, in this case four devotional poems of the English Renaissance. Three of these four made many of Winters's repeated listings of the greatest among the great. Only the Donne sonnet mentioned here neither makes the other top lists nor the Winters Canon. Late in his life, Winters seemed to have changed his mind about this poem for some reason I have been unable to discover. I believe it is a worthy part of the Winters Canon and should be reinstated. Moreover, in general, I believe that the work of expanding the Winters Canon must continue in our day, especially since new poets have come along and old poems have been rediscovered. It is time for the followers of Winters and those who appreciate his criticism to forge ahead with his work, to lay before us all the best poems -- the act which was at the heart of his theoretical labors. I hope this web site will contribute to the task.

6/18 - On Greville's Love Poetry

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

It is curious that this poem [Fulke Greville's "All my senses, like Beacons flame"] has never been picked up by the admirers of Donne's poems of disillusionment with love, for few -- probably none -- of Donne's love poems equal it in power, and none are more disillusioned. The explanation probably lies in the fact that Donne's poems are more dramatic, as the current jargon goes: the disillusionment seems more an outburst of momentary feeling, sometimes even for the sake of the rhetorical effect. There is no such impression in this piece: though the imagery is elaborate and even violent, the feeling is cold, convinced, and even brutal; this is a poem in praise of the soulless body, and it means what it says. Once Greville had made the Calvinistic separation of the soul and the body, it is not remarkable that he should have revolted against his allegiance to the body and announced his allegiance to the soul.

** COMMENT: The idea pervasive in the mid-20th century (and lingering still) that a poem should be dramatic perturbed Winters a good deal throughout his career. The doctrine remains a commonplace in our time and a favorite of the literary textbooks, but my sense is that it has receded a bit in criticism. Donne has been a favorite of the modern "dramatic" critics for a long time, because his poetry tells stories. Winters wasn't against telling stories in poetry, but only against telling stories with no rational, evaluative intent. For it is the moral evaluation of human experience that makes poetry good or great, not the telling of a story, which seems to be the central purpose of poetry in much of the critical discussion of the last 75 years. One might say that the qualities Winters looked for in poetry were its coldness, conviction, and brutality. Greville, as I have mentioned before, was one of the great poets in Winters's judgment, and one of his poems makes many of Winters's short lists of the greatest of all time, "Down in the depths of mine iniquity". The poem he is discussing here is a difficult one, but well worth reading and studying. It made the Winters Canon.

6/19 - On Shakespeare

Sonnet LXXVII, by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1620)

** COMMENT: Here is one of four sonnets of Shakespeare that Winters chose for the Winters Canon. Do you agree that it more nearly meets the concepts of his critical theory than many another in the sequence? It is an interesting matter to study, since Shakespeare's Sonnets have generally been acclaimed as the greatest poetry in the English language, a status that has reached an apotheosis in our day. Winters never rated the Sonnets quite so highly, and he believed many of them, if not the majority, had various distinct weaknesses, principally related to ambiguity and obscurity of thought, though as a whole they are, in Winters's judgment, one of our great poetic achievements. Still, no single sonnet is found on one of those short lists of his greatest among the greats. Winters would have none of our current sacrosanct convention that Shakespeare is our greatest lyric poet. As for this poem, it is certainly profound and moving and is certainly one of Shakespeare's finest. The rational foundation of the poem is very strong, but in no way inhibits the emotional power and control of the writing. It is a captivating illustration of Winters's theories, though probably not the best.

6/20 - On Morality and Meter - KP

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

It is for this reason I have spoken of meter as having a moral significance. Meter has certain phonetic values of its own, and it clarifies, identifies, and even modifies the phonetic values of unmetered language. And the total phonetic value of metrical language has the power to qualify the expression of feeling through language. Since the expression of feeling is a part of the moral judgment [in the literary arts] as I have defined it, the meter has moral significance, for it renders possible a refinement in the adjustment of feeling to motive which would not otherwise be possible. This being true, the poet is not likely to find it embarrassingly easy to write in the "smooth" meters of Shakespeare and Jonson; those meters are difficult in proportion to their smoothness, for they achieve a maximum of effect with a minimum of variation. Every movement in such a meter is perceptible, and, in the hands of the good poet, makes its contribution to the total poem. In the lurching meter employed for the most part by Tate, Ransom, and their group, the effectiveness of meter is at a minimum; the meter staggers for the sake of staggering. It is quite as difficult to be Shakespeare today as it was in the year 1600.

** COMMENT: This is one of the most important and unusual concepts in Winters's critical theories and a very difficult one to understand. He returned to it in his essays many times to explicate and defend it. At first glance, no doubt, it strikes you as absurd, that meter plays any part in moral understanding. But within the context of Winters's total view of the literary art, it might begin to make sense, if you give it a chance. I won't offer a summary here, but let me make a few comments that, I hope, can help. Winters was trying to say that the way the poet uses style and image and meters in a poem more fully and accurately portrays the emotions that should be aroused as we contemplate the rational statement on a human experience found in a poem. If such an artistic act has value, it has moral value, since in a great poem meter and other rhetorical devices more perfectly adjust those emotions to reason, to our total comprehension of the theme of the poem. Now, this idea is so unusual as to be weird, and it will take some time for anyone reading Winters the first time to get accustomed to it, though it deserves careful study. I think it is a powerful concept that has not yet received its due -- and perhaps never will. Nonetheless, for those who have eyes to see, let them see that meter has this profoundly expressive function. Finally, note that the reason Winters often sided against wild metrical experiments, as has been the "cause de rigueur" in modern poetry, is that he believed that emotion is tuned to the variations within a certain metrical structure. Hence, if there is no structure, as in most free verse, the meter can add nothing to the emotional depth or control of the poet, since she cannot vary from a convention or a set structure to express well-adjusted emotions. This is why Winters believed the smooth meters of the Renaissance English poets to be so powerful. Small variations from a strong base structure yield great emotions, and the possibilities for poetic expression of emotion (always tied to rational content) are increased immeasurably. This is another matter for careful study, and we await the critic who can carry on the work of Winters in assessing this concept and applying it more widely.

6/21 - On Experience

from the essay "THE PLAIN STYLE REBORN" (1967) from "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

I will quote Cunningham's poem "To the Reader", which is one of his finest:

Cunningham is a textual scholar by profession, and at the level of the vehicle this is an ironic comment on textual scholarship. At the level of the tenor, however, it describes Cunningham's usual way of writing poetry; that is, he draws abstractions from the experience and discards the experience itself. The "text" is the experience; the "gloss" is the poem. If the poem is ironic at the level of the vehicle, it is deeply bitter at the level of the tenor, for the loss is real, and the word "loss" refers not merely to the discarded material but to the personal suffering involved, just as the word "gloss" refers to the wisdom gained from the suffering. The double meanings of these words are not a whimsical imposition of my own; they are clearly evident in the poem, and they are largely responsible for the extraordinary concentration and force of the poem.

** COMMENT: Winters considered his friend and student J.V. Cunningham the greatest poet of the 20th century. The poem discussed here is one of his finest, though deceptively simple. Winters's discussion of the poem is brilliant and incisive, a good example of what you will find in Winters's practical criticism. The poem concerns a common theme in Winters's own life, one that I must admit has not much troubled me: the problem of pure experience, of immersing oneself in the world of sensation to the point of losing one's Reason and one's self. This desire for immersion is an act of love and profound passion, a thirst that can leave one deeply embittered about the loss of the purity of experience and even the whole of one's individual experiences. Perhaps I am just not "deep" enough, as the cliché goes, even to entertain, let alone understand, such profound experiences and longings. Still, the poem means a great deal to me for several private reasons, and I clearly see its greatness. I will forebear to offer my own reflections on the poem and leave it to my readers to explore and meditate upon.

6/22 - On "The Ambassadors"

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"

If we proceed from these latter works to the latest, and consider the book for which James was his most satisfactory, "The Ambassadors", we have at least three sources of difficulty, of possible dissatisfaction. In the first place, it is only by stretching a point that we can bring ourselves to consider Chad Newsome at best a bone worth quite so much contention, worth the expenditure of quite so much moral heroism as Strether expends upon him. We can understand Chad's hesitation to return to the American business life of his period, but his alternative -- that of a young man about Paris, however cultivated, -- is scarcely the alternative of a Henry Adams. The central issue does not quite support the dramatics, as does, on the other hand, the central issue of each of the other late masterpieces, "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove". Furthermore, our final attitude toward Chad is unresolved, and thus resembles our final attitude toward Owen Gereth in "The Spoils of Poynton"; this may not be untrue to life, but it is untrue to art, for a work of art is an evaluation, a judgment, of an experience, and only in so far as it is that is it anything; and James in this one respect does not even judge the state of uncertainty, as in "The Spoils of Poynton", he merely leaves us uncertain. Shakespeare left us in no uncertainty about Coriolanus; Melville in none about Ahab or Benito Cereno; nor did either author lack subtlety. And finally, Strether's ultimate scruple -- to give up Maria Gostrey, so that he may not seem in Woollett to have got anything for himself from a situation in which he will seem to his fiends in Woollett to have betrayed his trust, and in spite of the fact that Maria Gostrey could scarcely have been regarded as in any sense a bribe -- this scruple, I say, impresses me very strongly as a sacrifice of morality to appearances; there might, conceivably, have been more Christian humility in considering the feelings of Maria Gostrey and in letting his reputation in Woollett go by the board.

** COMMENT: It was only in this book, "Maule's Curse", that Winters offered any extended analysis of prose literature in his essays. For this reason, the book remains one of my favorites, for I believe Winters's critical theories have application far beyond poetry, the genre he concentrated on during most in his career. It is true that Winters considered fiction to be a lesser genre of the literary arts, simply because it had too many foundational weaknesses, as he explained in a later essay "Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature". This is a matter for further study, as is the matter of evaluating more works of prose fiction through the critical concepts the Winters laid out. In this passage, Winters admirably evaluates one of the supreme novels of American literature, a novel which Winters believed to be among the greatest. But as he explains clearly here, the novel has many weaknesses, and some of them quite serious. His discussion fits neatly into his extended analysis of the entire James oeuvre. At this point, I believe it is important to say that Winters believed that the fictionist must always labor to make clear what the final attitude of his readers to his characters and his action should be. This is an act of evaluation and judgment, a clear, rational statement about human experience that is properly informed with the emotions aroused by that understanding. This he sees as lacking in "The Ambassadors", and this makes it, in the end, a failure in spite of its great virtues. Note how closely Winters read these works, delving deeply into character motive and plot structure. We need a critic to follow on this work and extend it much more widely in fiction than Winters was interested in doing or able to do.

6/23 - On Friends and Colleagues

from a letter to FELICIA GEFFEN (1952) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I simply don't have any personal friends among the literary people in N.Y. The few acquaintances I have back there, except for reservations which will follow hereinafter, are people whom I would just as soon duck.

As to the oldest generation of American poets, the only one who moves me very profoundly is Wallace Stevens, but he is more than 20 years my senior and is not even mildly interested in me, and I would feel it presumptuous to send him an invitation [to the New York ceremony inducting Winters into the American Academy of Arts and Letters]. I have a limited admiration for W.C. Williams, but again see no reason why he should be interested in me. I would like you to send an invitation on my behalf to Miss Marianne Moore, provided she will not be there anyway. Many years ago, when I was stuck in the coal camps of New Mexico, Miss Moore used to write me letters and send me books from the N.Y. Public Library. I have never met her face to face, but I have always been grateful for her patience and kindness, and I think she would understand my reason for sending her an invitation.

As to the people of my own generation, I would enjoy seeing Louise Bogan, whose poetry I admire very deeply, and whom I knew slightly more than 25 years ago, Stanley Kunitz (if you know where to find him), Allen and Caroline Tate (except that they will be embedded in the deep southern spring in Minneapolis), and K.A. Porter if she is not lost in South Africa or her dreams. I would enjoy seeing Robert Fitzgerald once more; he was my guest in California a good many years back, and I met him again at Tate's apartment when I was last in N.Y. And please send an invitation to J.V. Cunningham, Dept. of English, U. of Chicago. He will not be able to come, but he is the greatest poet now writing in English and one of my few close friends. I have some acquaintance with all of the above save Kunitz. I admire his poetry a great deal, and would enjoy meeting him.

** COMMENT: Winters gradually became more and more isolated as his career progressed and he was branded more frequently as an unrepentant heretic to the Standard Canon. At the time this letter was written, he had published most of his controversial essays and had been embroiled in countless debates that he had lost through being virtually ostracized, if respectfully so, by American academia and literary society -- and even many of his own Stanford colleagues. He was by this time thought to be an insufferable crank for his critical system and practice and the Canon that resulted -- as deeply as he was respected for his learning and for the depth of his study. Thus, he received an invitation to join the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was brought to New York for a ceremony inducting him into the Academy. The letters shows Winters to have been a loner even in the literary world and reveals no desire to see any of the major literary figures of his time. As we have seen and discussed, Winters had become fairly bitter by this time, beset as he was all around by opponents and nay-sayers, who thought he a fool, a wacko, or a Nazi. But it seems equally clear that Winters had little desire to try to mend any fences or get chummy with other critics and authors to repair some of the tattered rags of his reputation. I could regale my readers with comments about each of the writers mentioned in this letter and there are many interesting points to be made for Winters aficionados, but I shall forebear.

6/24 - On Progress and Civilization

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

In fact the mere figures relating to the increase of population during the past century and a half are proof in themselves that the basic hardships of life have decreased beyond our imagining. I do not wish to give the impression that I believe our civilization is perfect. We do not enjoy a high degree of civilization, and I believe that probably we never shall; the race is not capable of it.

** COMMENT: Winters was unquestionably a pessimist and an elitist, if I can use the latter term without its negative connotations. Literature was for the few civilized souls of any society or culture, and the rabble will seldom if ever aspire or achieve any degree of true civilization. One wonders, naturally, what Winters might have thought of the literary artists and thinkers who did not agree with him. Were they part of the rabble, that part of the race that makes it ineligible for a "high degree" of civilization? Such comments and many others like them irritated many of Winters's fellow critics, since they seemed to say that anyone who disagreed with him was to be classed as a plebeian or worse. Note that Winters drew attention a number of times to the advances in well-being made in the past two centuries in the Western world. He seemed to be very aware of this and considered it very important. But he was pessimistic that it would mean anything in the end for the advancement of our culture. Certainly, we have had many thinkers in modern times who have agreed with Winters to one degree or another, though undoubtedly for widely differing reasons.

6/25 - On "Chanting" Poems

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

A formal reading which avoids dramatic declamation will necessarily take one something of the nature of a chant. This kind of reading itself has dangers, however, for the reader may carry the procedure so far as to appear precious, and worse, he may deform syllables in the interests of what he considers musical intonation, much as a musical composer will draw syllables out or hurry over them in setting a poem to music. I never heard the late W.B. Yeats read aloud, but I have been told that he was guilty of both of these vices: if it is true that he was guilty of them, one has some reason to suspect that he never properly heard his own poems, a fact which may have been responsible for a number of curious rhythmical mishaps which are scattered through his works. A poem should, on the contrary, be conceived as having a movement of its own, an autonomous movement, which should be rendered as purely and as impersonally as possible. The reader has no more right to revise the rhythms in the interest of what he considers an effective presentation than he has the right to revise any other aspect of the language. The poem, once set in motion, should appear to move of its own momentum.

** COMMENT: Simply put, nothing, in Winters's view, should get in the way of the purity of the poetic medium: language. Dramatic declamation is simply a fluffy, meaningless add-on that overrides or occludes the pure expression of emotion that comes through words and rhythm and style and meter. Winters recorded a reading his poems in the early '60s, and he read them in a chant-like intonation that sounds to the unfamiliar ear dull and lifeless, too impersonal for those of raised on television and film actors. A number of his students have written about the rapt readings he gave in class, almost as though he were going into a trance as he chanted the poems he loved. I would think the whole question of how to read a poem aloud is highly debatable. I believe it could be argued that the declamatory style further increases the range of emotional expression in poetry, just as metrical versification does, though it must be surely and securely tied to rational content. Clearly, though, whatever position one might take on this matter, this passage shows that Winters took poetry more seriously than I would guess any reader of this Year with Winters and perhaps any writer or critic who lived in his time.

6/26 - On Beauty

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

I am not speaking of art for art's sake. My subject is the art of writing, or rather or a particular kind of writing, the art of saying something about something in verse. The term "art", as I use it, signifies "method". We speak of the "fine arts" and usually mean literature, painting, sculpture, and music, and sometimes architecture, and there are philosophers who believe that a comprehensive "aesthetic" philosophy can be discovered which will account for all of these in a single definition: the word to be defined is "Beauty". These philosophers are deluded: the matter and the method of each of the arts are peculiar to that art itself. "Beauty" is merely a term denoting exceptional excellence of one kind or another, and it usually involves the idea of pleasing proportions. The proportions of a poem, like the proportions of a musical composition, are rhythmical, for both compositions exist in time. I will let the musicologists speak for music; but if the proportions of a poem are "pleasing", they are pleasing because they further the intention of the poem: they contribute to the definition of the emotion to be conveyed, and this, in turn, is related to the matter with which the poem began.

** COMMENT: Winters did not consider the wrangling over "beauty" to be of particular value in criticism. From this passage, we can see that he considered the whole issue a simple matter quickly disposed of. He held that there was little from the general field of Aesthetics that could apply to or be of use in understanding or writing poetry, or for that matter to any of the other fine arts, since the idea of beauty in art shifts with the medium employed. Typically, he dismisses the efforts of these theorists with a harsh word or two. There might be more to said for aesthetics, I would like to think, than this. Other thinkers might pursue such lines of thought, trying to understand beauty as it applies to Winters's rational-moral conception of literary art. But note most importantly that, as stated in the final sentence, criticism must come back to the central purpose of literature, the rational statement a literary work is trying to make about a human experience. If any part of the work does not contribute to this statement and the emotions consonant with that statement, then, for Winters, it is not beautiful. With such ideas, one can see easily how Winters could dismiss so much of romantic and modern poetry.

6/27 - On the Canon - KP

from the review "A DISCOVERY" (1950) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The past twenty years of editing and criticism have made one thing (at any rate) clear to myself, in spite of the normal confusion of the period. The history of American literature, especially with reference to the nineteenth century, will have to be drastically revised. The discovery of Edward Taylor, of the colonial period; the gradual emergence of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville (neither of them well understood even yet by most of their admirers); Witter Bynner's recovery of F.G. Tuckman from obscurity (a recovery as yet but scantly appreciated); my own recovery of Jones Very; and such major figures as J.L. Motley, as the Henry Adams of the "History", as the Bryant of "Thanatopsis", who are even yet awaiting some approximation of just evaluation -- these writers, and the facts which I have indicated, cast a somewhat different light upon our literary history than that which we saw or thought we saw a generation ago. Longfellow, Lowell, and most of Holmes, to say nothing of others comparable, are now regarded as negligible, or so I suppose. Whitman and Poe will shortly disappear into the twilight of queer historical phenomena and bad influences; and Emerson will disappear into it to emerge only fragmentarily, or perhaps as the most shining example of a hopeless cause. What is emerging now is a group of writers who were obscured in their day (and in most of ours) because of a provincial audience, but who themselves were not provincial, or, if provincial, only superficially so, writers all of whom were profound and most of whom were (at least part of the time) finished masters of the respective arts.

** COMMENT: This is the opening of Winters's essay on the rediscovery of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, the great 19th-century poet who had been almost entirely lost to obscurity in the 20th century and who remains almost completely obscure even today. If you wish to appreciate the true achievement of Winters, you must be willing to read through some or most of Tuckerman, for he is a poet who was lost to our culture and remains almost wholly lost in our time because Winters's critical theories have simply never found favor or a wide audience. Yet Winters is right, Tuckerman is one of the greats, and his masterpiece, the long poem "The Cricket", is one of the greatest poems of our language. It is true that literary history was rewritten in the years that Winters wrote in. Dickinson and Melville did change our understanding of the past. But Whitman and Poe gained in importance and standing in Winters time and they have risen further since. Contrary to Winters's expectation, neither will soon disappear, if ever. Emerson remains one of our greats, in the common judgment, though he is no longer widely read, it seems. Jones Very has made little headway, though he is very good, and very few readers of critics ever read or mention him. Bryant is a touch better known, though even this once famous poet has become almost lost. Motley's work has gone the way of most heroic history: into obscurity. It will be long before it is better known. Adams has been a popular writer of the Standard Canon throughout the 20th century, and his "History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison", which was once lost in the murk, has justly made a small comeback because of the new "Library of America" edition. Though it remains seldom mentioned or discussed or read, it is at least back in print. Winters was mostly wrong in these predictions, as he was dead wrong about the future of his theories and the future of the kind of poetry he loved and considered so valuable. Was he a fool? Perhaps "fool" is too strong a word. Was he deluded? These are hard questions in the light of the evidence we have in this passage and others we have seen. Winters seems to have suffered some sort of delusion of grandeur, a flattering dream of eventual vindication after he had been long in the grave. That day is not coming soon, and I doubt that it will ever come. But it is my hope to give it the small chance it has through this Year with Winters. Winters's work itself now suffers the same obscurity -- or worse - from which he was trying to rescue so many poets and writers.

6/28 - On Evaluating Dickinson

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

Emily Dickinson was a product of the New England tradition of moral Calvinism; her dissatisfaction with her tradition led to her questioning most of its theology and discarding much of it; and it led to her reinterpreting some of it, one would gather, in the direction of a more nearly Catholic Christianity. Her acceptance of Christian moral concepts was unimpaired, and the moral tone of her character remained immitigably Calvinistic in its hard and direct simplicity. As a result of this Calvinistic temper, she lacked the lightness and grace which might have enabled her to master minor themes; she sometimes stepped without hesitation into obscurantism, both verbal and metaphysical. But also as a result of it, her best poetry represents a moral adjustment to certain major problems which are carefully defined; it is curious in the light of this fact, and in the light of the discussion which they have received, that her love poems never equal her highest achievement -- her best work is on themes more generalized and inclusive.

** COMMENT: This passage is from the final paragraphs of Winters's essay on Dickinson, in which he summarizes his evaluation of her puzzling career. This erudite summary of her literary oeuvre shows Winters in the best light possible, I believe, for his judgments here are probably nearly unquestionable. But Dickinson's poetry is an interesting subject in the study of Winters. For she was one poet who had so many stylistic and thematic oddities that one would think that Winters would have not had the patience to dig through all the slag to get to the gold. Yet he did, and he judged her a great poet, unusually concurring with many of the standard critics of the 20th century, as well as with the most regular readers of poetry. Once again, we see that Winters was not stubbornly committed to being a heretic at all costs, but was willing to evaluate every idea and work of art individually and on its own merits. His whole essay on Miss Emily is incisive and eye-opening. It is high time that essay received its due.

6/29 - On the Burden of the Poet

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

"The Road Not Taken", for example, is the poem of a man whom one might fairly call a spiritual drifter: and a spiritual drifter is unlikely to have either the intelligence of the energy to become a major poet. Yet the poem has definite virtues, and these should not be overlooked. In the first place, spiritual drifters exist, they are real; and although their decisions may not be comprehensible, their predicament is comprehensible. The poem renders the experience of such a person, and renders the uncertain melancholy of his plight. Had Frost been a more intelligent man, he might have seen that the plight of the spiritual drifter was not inevitable, he might have judged it in the light of a more comprehensive wisdom. But his poem, is good as far as it goes; the trouble is that it does not go far enough, it is incomplete, and it puts on the reader a burden of critical intelligence which ought to be borne by the poet.

** COMMENT: In this passage, Winters tackles one of the most highly regarded and popular poems in the history of modern American literature, Frost's "The Road Not Taken", a favorite of critics and readers of poetry alike, a poem almost universally admired and beloved as one of the greatest poems ever written. It has inspired countless youths to choose a new path, to decry and reject convention, to battle against the establishment, to march to that different drummer, as Thoreau urged. As you might guess, Winters takes it down for the count. The poem, in Winters's judgment, is just not well thought out, as admirable as Frost's writing is in most of the lines. In the end, the poem just doesn't have anything to say, and what it is trying to say is obscure. The language might be well turned, and I believe, like Winters, that it is, but it doesn't add up to great poetry, not even close, for, in Winters's system, great poetry makes clear, rational statements that evoke the emotions proper to the rational understanding of a human experience presented in the artwork. This particular Frost poem is an excellent case study of Winters's theories, if you wish to take him up on the matter. It could change your whole reading life to work to understand and appreciate Winters on this one poem, since the poem has been so highly regarded in the Standard Canon for so very long. It is, at bottom, an empty poem, and to understand how and why it is can make for you a whole new approach to the literary arts. By the way, just to be clear: despite Winters's praise for this poem's virtues, I think it a rather trite, bland, undistinguished affair. It expresses, in my view, what amounts to a common American countrified cliché. Understood as such, it's popularity is not surprising.

6/30 - On Wordsworth

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

Most of the poems to which I shall refer can be found in the "Oxford Book of English Verse" or in other standard anthologies. Let us consider "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". The opening line is an example of one of the worst formulae of amateur writing:

Earth has not anything to show more fair.

The line says nothing about the scene. "She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen." "What a glorious day!" This is the ultimate in stylistic indolence. The next three and two-thirds lines proceed in much the same way. Then to the end of the octet we have simple but excellent description. The next three lines revert to the formula of the opening, and the twelfth line states a ridiculous falsehood in the interests of romantic pomposity: the river does not glide at its own sweet will, and this is very fortunate for London; the river glides according to the law of gravitation, and a much better line could have been made of this fact. Of the last two lines, the houses are good, the two exclamations are mere noise.

** COMMENT: I quote the full poem discussed here so that you have it in hand as Winters proceeds through it:

Do you agree with Winters assessment of each of the sections of the poem? I do. It was a revelation for me to read it stated boldly and openly, to see a critic say what I believe needed to be said. Winters's assessment of the poem's very small virtues are also very important to study closely. Look at the lines he praises. They are simple, yet well wrought. But note too how Winters can take an image apart so quickly and expertly. The 12th line is simple nonsense, and it took Winters to point it out its inadequacies. Once you fathom the reasons for which Winters downgraded this poem, you might begin to trust him deeply. Nonetheless, it seems it was a sad chore for Winters to have to state the obvious. Yet, for all the poem's weaknesses, for all its similarities to so much of empty, formulaic romantic poetry, and even heavily formulaic modern poetry, I must admit that there is SOMETHING, some small thing, that is captivating in those trite lines that Winters justly condemns. What is it? Even the 11th line, which is indeed mere noise, draws us in by some means. This is a matter worth studying. It's not great poetry, not even good poetry, in those terribly weak lines, but it is poetry worth reading, somehow. At bottom, I believe Winters wanted us, finally, to recognize all the weaknesses of so universally acclaimed a poet as Wordsworth and then to appreciate his work for the very minor achievements it offers.