A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

July

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

7/1 - On Cooper's Prose in "The Water-Witch"

from the essay "FENIMORE COOPER or THE RUINS OF TIME" in "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

"Wing-and-Wing", though occasionally amusing or even beautiful, is less certain of its intention than the earlier novel of a somewhat similar kind, "The Water-Witch". The action of "The Water-Witch" is extremely unreal, and the unreality, not to say the impossibility of much if it, would be preposterous did Cooper not utilize this very quality. It has the plot, entrances, exits, abductions, and mysteries of a comic opera; and the style is adjusted to the plot in a manner at once brilliant and meticulous. Plot and character alike have the unreality, but the consistency within themselves, of the plot and character, let us say, of "Volpone"; and Cooper endeavors to achieve a style not dissimilar, so far as the limits of prose permit, to the style of Jonson's dramatic verse. This novel, though imperfect artistically, is imperfect in minor ways; questions of scope aside, it is probably Cooper's ablest piece of work, as it is certainly one of the most brilliant, if scarcely one of the most profound, masterpieces of American prose.

The numerous quotations from Shakespeare employed in this work give a clue to the Elizabethan models for the prose; and if they did not, there would be clues sufficiently obvious scattered throughout the prose itself. The following commentary, for example, is spoken by the incredible Thomas Tiller: "'Every craft has its allotted time, like a mortal,' continued the inexplicable mariner of the India-shawl. 'If she is to die a sudden death, there is your beam-end and stern-way, which takes her into the grave without funeral service or parish prayers; your dropsy is being water-logged; gout and rheumatism kill like a broken back and loose joints; indigestion is a shifting cargo, with guns adrift; the gallows is a bottomry-bond, with lawyers' fees; while fire, drowning, death by religious melancholy, and suicide, are a careless gunner, sunken rocks, false lights, and a lubberly captain.'"

** COMMENT: Modern critics of high literature very seldom even discuss Cooper any longer, let alone praise him as the author of masterpieces. It is one of the lasting surprises of Winters's work in this essay that he gave strong support for the virtues of Cooper's writing. This came some decades after Mark Twain had, seemingly, dismantled Cooper's reputation for good with his gleefully caustic and hilarious comments about the inanities of Cooper's prose and plots. Ever true to form, Winters was untroubled by Twain's assessment, however often repeated by critics ever since. The writing in "The Water-Witch" is, indeed, a Shakespeare-like blooming confusion of images and metaphors of all kinds. It is far too rich for the subject matter of the story, as Winters suggests in this discussion. But it has its virtues, and it should surely be another sign of the erudition and insight of Winters that he is the only critic to recognize these virtues and defend them clearly in the face of the scorn of Twain and those who have laughed at Cooper following Twain's lead.

7/2 - On Characters of High Estate

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

Is the character of high estate essential to the serious subject [of tragedy], however? I suspect that the chief virtue of this kind of character lies in his power to generalize the subject, to extend its significance beyond the limits of particular experience, and although it may well be that the greatest possible generalization is impossible without this kind of character, yet this kind of character is obviously not the only means to such generalization. "Macbeth" and "Phaedre" both employ such characters, and both fulfill the traditional requirements for tragedy; yet "Macbeth", as I have tried to show, is the more generalized of the two, and for a reason irrelevant to this one. There might well be tragic possibilities in the predicament of the German and other European professors who refused to betray the principles of scholarship at the insistence of the Nazi government; they were not of high estate in the technical sense, but they were at least in conflict with those who were, and -- what might prove to be more important -- they represented something greater than the State and were conscious of the fact. It is possible that the labor leaders of fifty or sixty years ago might have a measure of the same power. Frank Norris, in "The Octopus", had characters and a situation, which, though more restricted than those of "Macbeth", might yet have resulted in a greater novel than "The Age of Innocence" had he possessed the ability to understand them and sufficient education to write literate prose.

** COMMENT: Yvor Winters went entirely against the grain of modern fiction theory and practice with his belief that characters of "high estate" were necessary write to the greatest works of drama and fiction. The convention is ancient; it goes back at least as far as Aristotle and was a important linchpin of the dramatic arts for centuries. The novel never reckoned much on the convention or the concepts that supported it. But Winters was always interested in seeing literature became more general. His overall theory held that the greatest works were those with the broadest and most serious subjects -- the fate of man, the condition of humanity, and other such BIG issues. He argued that only by portraying characters of "high estate", under his careful definition of the term, was it possible for writers to make generalized comments about the human condition and the meaning of life. The point is certainly arguable, but it is important to note that the concept goes against the strong river of critical thought and practice of the last 100 years, in which novels and plays have focused ever more often on those of low or of the lowest estates. To state my personal opinion, I believe that Winters was clearly wrong about these ideas. It would require a full essay to discuss my views, but I opine that characters of low estate have a great deal to show about the human condition to those of us who inhabit the lower estates, such as I, a person born into the American middle class in the 1950s. Still, just for the record, it is in the generalizing power of stories about characters of "low estate" that greatness is found. This is why the mundane, turgid, monotonous fiction of, say, Joyce's "Ulysses" will pass away soon enough, for, in my judgement, Joyce's stories of characters of low estate do not have the generalizing power necessary for the greatest literature -- despite the wrong-headed judgements of panels of critics that that novel is the greatest of the 20th century.

7/3 - On Friends and Poets

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

Howard Baker appeared at Stanford in 1927 as a first-year graduate student; this was my first year there as a graduate student; we met quite by accident. He remained at Stanford for a year, then went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he took his doctorate. He then taught for three years at Harvard, and then abandoned teaching in favor of raising oranges and olives in the southern San Jauquin Valley. In recent years, he has done a little teaching at the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis. He has written very few poems, none for some years; his best poems are very early: "Dr. Johnson" and "Pont Neuf" in particular. In general, Baker's style is very unsteady and his ear is bad, and he indulges in irresponsible associational procedures ("Ode to the Sea" is one of the worst examples: the sea is life, and anything on its shores gets into the poem).

** COMMENT: Yvor Winters has been accused far too often for unreasonably favoring the work of his friends and students as the finest poetry written in this century. I quote this passage about long-time friend and correspondent Howard Baker to refute that tired notion, with which opponents have bashed Winters over and again. Winters could be hard on anyone whom he considered to have written poorly. This late assessment of Baker reminds me of an letter Winters wrote to one of his students, Thom Gunn, who has become an accomplished poet and critic. After praising his skill and intelligence very highly when he was a student, and even after choosing one of his poems as among the greatest ever written in English, Winters turned on Gunn's work some years later and advised Gunn to go back to journalism (a searing condemnation in Winters's mind, which Gunn would have recognized). It is simply not true that Winters favored the work of his friends and students inordinately or unjustly. The poetry that he lauded among their works is very fine and deserves our full attention, even though it is unfortunately obscure. Those poets have been too often dismissed because of their association with Winters. It is readers who have suffered the most because of this bias, for these great poets have written some of the greatest poetry in the history of our language.

7/4 - On People in History

from the essay "HENRY ADAMS or THE CREATION OF CONFUSION" in "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

All [of Adams's] generalizations [in "The History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison"] are made from the objective data actually presented, and the generalizations give the effect, at least, of caution and precision. We have human action of the most serious kind, the action of mature men affecting and governing the lives of nations. We have become so conditioned -- I think that is the word -- to the reading of novels, that we are likely to have the feeling that human nature cannot be depicted with depth or subtlety except as it appears in which we should call the personal adventures of the relatively young, in the private relationships arising in what is relatively the leisure time of the characters. To appreciate fully what Adams has done with his people one must have, I suppose, a sufficient interest in history as bare fact not to be troubled by it; but the interest at least is adult and I can see no great harm in anyone's having it.

** COMMENT: Long before critical attention came back to Henry Adams's great history of two presidential administrations in the early years of the American republic, Yvor Winters was touting it as one of the greatest historical works of all time in the English language, another daring assessment among so many such audacious assessments during his controversial career. It was Adams's depictions of various historical figures that drew Winters's greatest praise. In this passage, he speaks very highly of generalizing power of the finest expository prose. This judgement, it may not need stating, goes entirely against the current of American critical thought on prose. The concrete and the particular are praised, and our historians have been urged to write like novelists and become more interested in the minute particulars of setting than in the general exposition and evaluation of human action and character. Clearly, from this passage, one can see that Winters had little regard for the focus of the modern novel on the quotidian and decried its effects on the writing of history.

7/5 - On Students and Winters's Reputation

from a letter to LINCOLN KIRSTEIN (1933) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

It is probably a sign of advancing neuralgia and increasing weight that I am becoming both vain and irritable about my students. Baker, Ramsey, Miss Lockett, [J.V.] Cunningham, [Donald] Stanford, [Albert] Geurard, and Holt make a rather impressive list for four years. I picked them all up before they had done anything decent, showed each one of them what he could do, and made him do it. I steered them all out of the morass of modern nonsense. I have four or five others almost as good as some of the above, and still developing.... I picked [William] Stafford up when he was trying to imitate "Prufrock". And the damned faculty here is not only blind to the fact, but regards me as an incomprehensible and probably dangerous influence on budding talent. When I have finished my degrees, I shall probably be out on the world as a high school teacher. Geurard got a D on the best prose he has written in an advanced comp course.... It gets on my nerves, especially as Geurard is easily discouraged and as I have a very ticklish job in getting him clear of his papa's very muddy ideas without reflecting on his papa, whom I admire as a human being and for whom the kid has a little boy's devotion.

** COMMENT: As we have had occasion to mention several times already, Yvor Winters was frequently accused throughout his career of inappropriately and unjustly favoring the work of his students at Stanford University. Several of these students he considered to be among the greatest poets ever to have written in English, and some of their poems were judged by Winters to be among the finest ever written, and some few of those poems as among the top ten or twenty ever penned. As this passage from a letter early in his academic career shows, it was an accusation that came at him early. If I may venture into the muddy waters of personal analysis, these accusations might have played a large role in his hardening attitude toward colleagues and other critics and professors down the decades of his professional life, a hardening which finally made him seem harsh, judgmental, unkind, angry, arrogant. I suppose it comes down to what a person's opinion of Winters is: If one believes that he is a great poet and critic who trained a number of young poets, then one will conclude that Winters was unjustly treated throughout his career, even back to his earliest days at Stanford. (You might easily guess that this is my position, though I sympathize with those Stanford faculty who were so puzzled by him that they thought him dangerous.) If, on the other hand, you consider him a strange, reactionary conservative and a bizarre, heretical crank, then you will probably think, as his colleagues did, that he needed to be controlled or dismissed. It is amazing that in the midst of all the controversy he aroused and all the vitriolic condemnation he received, Winters kept his job at Stanford his entire career. Several department chairman supported him, even though he was an isolated member of the faculty. In this letter, he betrays his fear that at some time he will be let go because of his outlandish views.

7/6 - On Weak Imagery

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

As an example of another problem, let us consider the opening lines of "The Lamp":

The third line is strange: it gives one the impression that Vaughan had seen a time-exposure photograph of the stars, in which the stars appear as threads instead of as points; but of course he had not, and the stars as one regards them at any moment with the eyes appear as points. However, the French expression for "shooting star" is "e'toile filante", or thread-spinning star. The verb is "filer", which means primarily to spin thread, or to flow (as of a liquid) without division into drops. I know nothing of Vaughan's French, but he may have acquired at least a little and have encountered this expression, or he may been struck independently by the resemblance which inspired the French expression. But if we accept this interpretation, we are in the same difficulty in which we have found ourselves with "some stones", for Vaughan writes: "stars nod and sleep... AND spin," as if all stars were shooting stars, and there is the additional difficulty that what they do is slow and sleepy, and the trail is compared to the slow and relatively permanent trail left by a glow-worm. If he had meant to describe shooting stars, he should have written "or" in place of "and", but, as I have said, his grammar is unreliable. The trail of the glow-worm appears to be there partly for its own sake and partly because it belongs to the night, but it serves only to confuse the image of the star. In brief, we are involved in a heavily sensuous description of details for their own sake, with little reference to their relationships to each other and (as we shall presently see) with little concern for their effect in the total poem. This is a minor example of the breakdown of the great Renaissance style, but it is a real example.

** COMMENT: Is it any wonder that Yvor Winters was so far out of step with modern literary theory and practice? Here we have an intense and almost overwrought look at a single line of a poem that he considered to be one of the greatest in the English language. He points out a flaw in that line that is truly one of the commonest features of modern literature, the offering of interesting, delightful, or witty images for their own sake. I don't believe I need to rehearse the number of novelists and poets who play with images ceaselessly throughout their work. It clearly saddened and at times disgusted Winters, for it meant that works that had potential for true excellence would be ruined by irrelevant imagery. Almost nothing could be worse for a poem or any work of literary art in his view than something irrelevant to the end purpose, the goal of great writing: to achieve conceptual and emotional understanding of an important human experience. The passage is also a trenchant example of how Winters could concentrate so closely and finely on images and words and study them with great exactitude. There was so much to be learned from him, I am sure, as a teacher, because the reports are clear that he spent a great deal of time delving into images in just this way in class, and passages like this are found throughout his writings. By the way, I am not sure that the singular concentration on appropriateness and relevance in every aspect of writing should be a major criterion of excellence in the literary arts. I see that images are wonderful in their own right, as in, say, the embellishments offered us by a contemporary writer like John Updike, in whose writing I take a great deal of pleasure. Obviously, this is a matter for much discussion, for the finest images will surely be those that are fully relevant to the rational subject matter of the artwork and appropriate both to our rational understanding and to our emotional response to that understanding. Lastly, note that though Winters considered the line a flaw, and a serious one, he still considered the poem in which it appears great and chose it for inclusion in his compilation of the greatest poems of all time. This is an important corrective to the common notion (as common as anything gets concerning his obscure work) that Winters wanted to throw out any work that had the least flaw in it.

7/7 - On Post-Symbolism

from the poem "SIR GAWAINE AND THE GREEN KNIGHT"

** COMMENT: This passage is from one of Yvor Winters's best known poems and one that has received perhaps more praise in literary culture than any other. It has found a place in a few anthologies down the years. It was one of his most concise attempts at the style he called Post-Symbolism, which we have had many occasions to discuss during this Year with Winters. In this brief opening section of the poem, we see the stilted line, tightly controlled, that Winters employed in many works. This style does not appeal to everyone. I find many of his poems in this ultra-regular versification a trifle dull, especially with the full stops at the end of each line. It sounds blocky as one reads it aloud. None of the rest of the poem offers more than the thinnest hints about what is being symbolized, and I would think that almost no one who came to this poem without a prior and somewhat deep understanding of Winters's thought would have any idea what it is about. I think, for this reason, that the poem is weak. It is, simply, too murky, and it was obscurity that Winters's critical theories teach us to abhor. This would be a matter for endless debate, for the poem has been recognized as great by a number of critics, mostly enthusiasists of Winters of one ilk or another. Ken Fields chose it as one of Winters's 12 finest poems and included it in "Quest for Reality".

7/8 - On the Conceptual Content of Words - KP

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

My theory [of the morality of poetry] rests on the observation that language, if one disregard for the present its phonetic values, is dual in nature; that each word is both conceptual and evocative, denotative and connotative, and that the feeling, evocation, or connotation is directly the result of the concept and dependent upon the concept for its existence. The word "tree" is conceptual: it refers to a class of objects. The word, or rather the concept, suggests a loose body of perception and feeling, the result of out experience with large numbers of individual trees. What the genetic relationship may be between percept and concept, I am not sufficiently philosophical to say, but when we come to use the language, it is the concept which evokes the feeling. Deprive the sound of its conceptual content, and the sound will evoke nothing in particular. In words which represent qualities, ideas, or states of mind, such as "justice" or "malice", the content of sensory perception is for most persons negligible; but these words are at least vaguely evocative of emotion, and can be made precisely evocative if properly employed.

** COMMENT: These are central ideas in Yvor Winters's literary criticism. He restated his theoretical creed at least a dozen times in his essays, mostly because his theory was so unusual and little known that he had to begin almost every extended argument with a restatement of his basic ideas. As we have seen from many passages, and as we shall see from many more in the weeks to come in this Year with Winters, the distinction between connotation and denotation was fundamental to almost every idea on the morality of poetry that Winters ever entertained. This distinction was the reason Winters focussed so intently on directing literature away from the romantic influences that have been driving it, for a long time now, away from a focus on denotation -- from concepts to evocations of emotion. This passage on basics of the theory continues on for several paragraphs, both in his own terms, and then as a response to Ransom's objections to the theory. These paragraphs as a whole contain the most complete description of the foundation stones of Winters's theory of criticism and literary practice in his entire oeuvre.

7/9 - On Sixteenth Century Poetic Styles

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

But [C.S.] Lewis sees the sixteenth century in terms of two schools: the Drab and the Golden. He says that these two terms have no evaluative connotations; but of course they have such connotations, as everyone who has read the book has remarked. He would have done better to employ the terms of the age, to refer to the plain style and to the sugared or eloquent style: he would thus have come closer to seeing things as they were seen at the time and perhaps as they really were. He sees the "Drab" poets in terms of their dead mechanical jingling, and his "Golden" poets in terms of their sugared silliness. He dislikes the first and likes the second. He blames modern scholars for approaching the period with Romantic prejudices, but he sees the entire poetry of the period in terms of a Romantic prejudice: he likes the pretty so profoundly that he overlooks the serious. And he misses most of the best poems in both schools. The best poems in both schools have more in common with each other and less in common with their respective schools than have the typical poems; and this is the difficulty.

** COMMENT: Yvor Winters's review of Lewis's book was scathing. Though he praised Lewis for his learning, for his wide reading, and for some of his judgements, it was clear that Winters believed that Lewis had made several major errors, the most prominent of which was that he had failed to find what Winters considers the "best" poems. A brief list of the best poems can be found in Winters's review and a more complete listing in his own late collection of the greatest poems ever written in English, "Quest for Reality". As we have discussed elsewhere during this Year with Winters, one of the great achievements of Winters's career was his revision of our conception of 16th-century English verse, an achievement for which he has not been adequately recognized, nor for which has he been earned greater trust in other areas of literary study, especially modern poetry. I believe that what Winters achieved for us in the study of 16th-century literature should make us open to what he can do for our understanding of all the literary arts. His achievement does not give him cart blanche, nor should it ever do so, but I hope that by drawing attention to all he achieved with his scholarship and criticism in this one area, he can at least earn a respectful hearing in the other areas of study that he focused on.

7/10 - On The Nero Plays of Robert Bridges - KP

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

Two plays entitled "The First Part of the History of Nero" and "Nero Part II", if read as a single work, form one of the most remarkable narrative works that I know. They are not independent works; they are not dramatic in from, they could not be staged. They are a single long narrative in verse, employing the dramatic conventions of acts, scenes, stage-settings, and speakers named in the margin. These conventions make for concentration. The style becomes unfortunately excited on a few occasions, but only on a few. For the most it is compact and effective speech, modulated and clarified by the subtleties of blank verse which is the work of a master and is not in any way Elizabethan or Victorian. Nero and Seneca, of course, are the chief characters: Nero is the embodiment of Roman decadence, a decadence scarcely distinguishable in theory and in effect from the decadence of modern Romanticism; Seneca, who pretends to control Nero by reason, becomes his apologist and is corrupted utterly; and we have, through numerous minor characters, a portrait of the corruption of state. The work was published late in the nineteenth century, but it seems to have been written with the twentieth century in mind. As far as I am able to judge, it is sound historically. It is far from being a short poem, and so, like "The Testament of Beauty", is improperly included in this essay; but it is a great work that almost no one has read and so should be mentioned.

** COMMENT: Winters could drop in such flatly stunning discussions throughout his essays. It happens time and again. Suddenly, without the slightest preparation, he announces that some entirely unknown work is great. It can feel slightly offensive, for we might think: How could EVERYONE ELSE miss such-and-such if it is so GREAT? How?!!! Here is another of those passages, one that comes very late in Winters's career, almost at the very end. Many times in his career, Winters had defended the work of Robert Bridges against modern critics who dismissed him as a cliché-riddled traditionalist. And then along comes these comments on Bridges's Nero plays. Naturally, being a devoted disciple of Winters as a college senior (in 1978), I had to find and read these plays. I didn't comprehend Winters's evaluation for some time, though I right away recognized that Bridges had done something very fine. It was difficult even to find the plays. They were not available in the small state college library I went to. They are discussed in no book of literary criticism that I know of, though they are mentioned and receive some discussion in books on Bridges himself. They are as far as I can determine far more than obscure -- they are wholly lost to our culture. I have read them several times over the past 20 years, and Winters's judgment of them increases my trust in him, for I now judge that these plays are, indeed, as great as he claims. I still cannot understand how all the literary critics of the past century could have missed them. That Winters found them and, however briefly, championed them is a deed of literary heroism, the kind of deed for which he has been vilified again and again. I urge my readers to find these plays, somehow, and open yourselves to two of the greatest dramatic works in English -- and to the thought and ideas of Yvor Winters, who has done so much to recover what we have misunderstood, misjudged, lost, or simply missed. Robert Bridges's Nero plays, I believe, will interest you in all of Bridges's poetry and further strengthen your growing trust in the critical theory and practice of Yvor Winters.

7/11 - On Modes of Poetic Construction

from the review "HOLIDAY AND DAY OF WRATH" (1925) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

I have elsewhere given in considerable detail an analysis of the known modes of poetic construction, a brief summary of the principal elements of which may possibly clarify Miss [Marianne] Moore's intentions for the hesitant reader. In general plan the lyric may be of any one of five classes: It may progress from image to image or from idea to idea LOGICALLY (a common method of Donne, Crashaw, and others of similar tendencies). Or the images may have a SCATTERED relationship to one another, such as one finds in Nashe's "Adieu, farewell earth's bliss" -- that is, each illuminates a given central idea of emotion, but there is no logical progress from image to image. Or the connections of either of these two types may be reduced to or below the threshold of consciousness, so that we get what has already been termed a PSYCHOLOGICAL progression, such as one gets from event to event or from place to place in a dream -- Rimbaud's "Larme" is an exceptionally good example of this type. A purely narrative order of parts may be considered, for convenience's sake, to fall under the heading of logical connections. We may also have a single method employed in combination with a rapidly alternating mood, as we find in the work of LaForgue, Gautier, and Mr. Eliot; and we may find a single mood progressing through a double method -- this we find an alternation of the logical and the psychological in Mallarme's "L'Apres midi d'un Faune" and in Mr. Eliot's "Gerontion".

The emotional unit of the poem may be divided into two general types, the "image", in which all sound and meaning elements fuse into a single physical whole; and the "anti-image", in which the relationship of at least one element to the rest is non-physical, which precludes the possibility of the sound-element containing onomatopoeic value for its entire meaning content, as onomatopoeia is obviously a purely physical affair. Symbolic, or connotative value, can, of course, exist simultaneously with imagic value, both in sound and in meaning-content; and that symbol is most intense which, provided it be fresh, sets into harmonious action and reaction the widest possible range of life-connotations in the smallest possible space -- it is purely a matter of specific density.

** COMMENT: From very early in his career (Winters was just 25 years old when this review of a book of poems by Marianne Moore was published), we have here two paragraphs packed with interesting ideas. There are too many points to cover in this brief comment, so I will stick to the highlights. First, this review was written just two years before Winters began to change the entire focus of his poetic and critical practice. He was still an imagist, free-verse poet at this time. Despite this, the passage come fairly close to Winters's later and more mature ideas about the classification of poetic structures. In fact, Winters's brilliant, extended discussion of classification in "Primitivism and Decadence", published 12 years later, does not stray far from this scheme, nor does any of Winters's work on this issue in all the rest of his career. Therefore, I encourage you to study the ideas contained here as though they were definitive statements, rather than of merely historic or biographical interest. Second, take note of the final clause on the widest range of connotation in the smallest space: Winters would remain committed to these ideas about "specific density" throughout his career, though he never used the phrase again. He believed that it was in its high concentration of content and feeling that the power and excellence of poetry and all literature were found. Third, note the emphasis on how a poem proceeds, the means by which it moves from word to word. Winters would continue to the end of his days to judge poetry and all literature according to very similar schemes that apply to most works of literary art. Of course, this was one scheme among many proposed in the first half of the 20th century by literary critics, especially the New Critics, who were imitating each other in devising such classificatory systems. Finally, note the division of art into content and feeling, denotation and connotation, which, we have already seen, is a foundation stone of Winters's mature critical theory. There could be so much more said about this passage. The references to individual writers are fascinating in the light of Winters's later writings on the same people. At just 25 years of age, before he had made his decision to return to traditional poetic forms and to theorize on the morality of poetry, Winters had already taken major steps toward the construction of the greatest theory of literature ever devised.

7/12 - On Winters's Theism

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

Finally, I am aware that my absolutism implies a theistic position, unfortunate as this admission may be. If experience appears to indicate that absolute truths exist, that we are able to work toward an approximate apprehension of them, but that they are antecedent to our apprehension, and that our apprehension is seldom and perhaps never perfect, then there is only one place in which these truths may be located, and I see no way to escape this conclusion. I merely wish to point out that my critical and moral notions are derived from the observation of literature and of life, and that my theism is derived from my critical and moral notions. I did not proceed from the opposite direction.

** COMMENT: That Yvor Winters believed in God once troubled a few critics. At times, Winters seemed to be answering some unknown critics or a general rumor that his whole critical theory is called into question because he is in some sense "religious". This brief discussion at the very end of the single most important philosophical essay of Winters's career seems to have been composed to answer this rumor or attitude toward his work. I must admit, for illustration, that I was first drawn to Winters because I sensed he was a Christian of the sort that an intelligent Evangelical could love. But as time went on, though I found his moralism congenial to my former religion's truth-system (I have since rejected Christianity), I also saw that Winters was no Christian in any sanctioned orthodox sense and that his professed theism was nothing like the personal, trinitarian divinity that Christianity professes. Winters's "religious" views can be gleaned from various essays and from his poetry; he postulated a Spirit of "pure" mind, a concept I cannot fully comprehend after years of study. Nonetheless, it is a subject well worth studying, for he proposes a divine being quite different from the run-of-the-mill, anthropomorphic, personal gods of the major religions. It is most important to note that these theistic concepts played a key role in his critical theory and practice, as you might be able to see by now in this Year with Winters. Literature works toward the apprehension of truths that are absolute. It is therefore a very serious business, as imperfect as the apprehensions are. These ideas account for the sober solemnity of Winters's criticism. He mentioned comedy, but it seemed utterly foreign to his understanding of the literary arts. This lack of theory on comedy might be a severe weakness in his work, since our critical theories, it seems to me, must account both for tragedy and comedy -- for both, to take one quick example, Ahab cursing the gods and for Ishmael humorously sleeping with Queequeg.

7/13 - On Generalization and Uncertainty

from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS" in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM" (1957)

This poem ["Low Barometer" by Robert Bridges], like Donne's [Holy Sonnet "Thou hast made me"], deals with a common predicament; unlike Donne's, the poem does not profess to deal with a personal experience. Both poems deal with the experience in the most general of terms: Donne's despair, death, and sin could hardly be more general, but they are definite, for they have a body of theology behind them, and we know what they include and why Donne feels as he does; Bridges, without such a theological system for direct reference, must limit his statement further:

These lines are the culmination of his account of sin as the subhuman, the archaic, and the chaotic; he is forced to greater particularity here than Donne, and he achieves greater power, but the statement is nevertheless general and very inclusive. What I wish to call to the attention at present is this: that though both poems are generalized, they are precise; that there is a great difference between generalization and uncertainty.

** COMMENT: Uncertainty is a great sin for the literary artist. Its cultivation is a product of Romantic doctrines that have come to us and overtaken our cultural world, polluting every form of literature. It has become a high religion for many critics and readers. They revel in seven types of ambiguity, in dream-states, in the sub-conscious, in the unconscious, in hypnosis and mysticism and private revelries of all sorts, in endlessly fanciful interpretations, in wholly private meanings to language and the artworks of language. We have seen the world of literature become a seething pool of these theories, each one as foolish as the next. Winters fought against their kind his whole life, and he would not be surprised where literary theory has gone in the decades since his death. There are a number of minor points that could be made about this passage. First, the Donne poem gradually sank in Winters's estimation and did not make his final cut of the best when he offered the greatest poems in English in his anthology "Quest for Reality". On the other hand, the poem of Bridges's remained one his greatest among the greats to the end of his days, though he discussed it less and less. It repeatedly made his short lists of the top five or ten poems written in English. It is very great. It has been missed by everyone else and is not often anthologized. I believe, also, by the way, that Winters was wrong in part about Bridges's theological beliefs. He was a very learned man in philosophy and theology and a committed Christian, one who entrusted his salvation to the atoning work of Jesus the Christ. He wrote many explicitly Christian poems, and discussed Christian issues in his writings, though he does seem to have drifted away from pure orthodox doctrine late in life. I am making no charge against Winters here, just pointing out that he could at times overstate his case, as I believe he does here. He does not overstate at all when he says elsewhere that this is one of the greatest poem's ever written. The generalized statement the poem makes on sin is slightly offensive to modern ears, I am sure. If you decide to read this poem and know it well, it will take time after all your reading in poets like Stevens or Rich or Lowell or Ginsburg or Snyder or any of these tortured adherents of Romanticism.

7/14 - On Yeats's "The Second Coming" - KP

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

The difficulties are similar in "The Second Coming". In line six, the expression "the ceremony of innocence" is misleading and awkward. By reading "A Prayer for My Daughter", which follows, one discovers that the phrase means the ceremonious life in which innocence flourishes; but as one comes to it in the poem, it would seem to indicate some kind of ceremony, perhaps baptismal, perhaps sacrificial, perhaps some other. Otherwise the first eight lines are very impressive if one takes them phrase by phrase: the adjective "mere" in the fourth line, for example, is a stroke of genius. But what do the lines mean? One who lived through the last thirty years or more in adulthood and who has not observed the date of the poem (the volume was published in 1921) may feel that Yeats was writing about the growth of fascism or communism:

But the first two are impossible and the third is unlikely. "The best" are the Irish aristocrats; "the worst" are the Irish engaged in politics, who were trying to establish a constitutional democracy and who eventually succeeded. The poem is an attack on civilized government made by a man who felt an intense dislike for democracy and the political activity without which democracy cannot survive -- a dislike which was due in part to his native temperament, but largely, I fear, to the fact that Maude Gonne was more interested in politics than in Yeats; by a man who, during much of his later life, was often tempted in the direction of fascism. The first four and a half lines of the second section are an example of Yeats's rhetorical skill, but for their effect they depend upon our belief in his notion of the Spiritus Mundi. From there on we have his description of the beast, which is a fine description. But the account of the beast is not pure description. If we are to take it as seriously as Yeats's language indicates that we should, we must accept his theory of the gyres as in some way valid. And if we do this, we must face the fact that Yeats's attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying -- he is Yeats's judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality. When we consider all of these complications, it becomes very difficult to arrive at an acceptance of the poem, an acceptance both rational and emotional. And what would we mean if we said, in the face of these difficulties, that we accepted the poem emotionally and in no other way? The question seems to mean nothing.

** COMMENT: Here we have a passage from Winters's final book about one of the poems generally regarded as one of the greatest in English by most standard critics. It is a very instructive passage, for Winters is fully aware of the excellence and power of the writing in the poem, as he was in most of Yeats. His objection to Yeats was not so much to bad writing, except for Yeats's obscurity, but to shoddy, often ridiculous, ideas. These he explicates as very few critics have ever had the courage to do. Winters holds Yeats to the ideas he sought to express and spread in our culture. It is amazing how this poem has shaken loose from almost any connection to the ideas Yeats was trying to convey through it. Winters did not address this issue, for it surely would have seemed to him irrelevant and impertinent to say that any literary artwork could take on a meaning much different than the one its author intended. But this seems to have happened with "The Second Coming". It is, however, a poem full of oddities and twisted imperceptions when we try to interpret it according to our own systems of thought and behavior rather than Yeats's. Nonetheless, much of modern critical commentary on the poem has centered not on Yeats's ideas, but on each critic's ideas about second comings and allegorical beasts being born and the world going to hell in a hand-basket. Winters has nothing to say about these wider, extra-poetical implications of this famous poem.

7/15 - On Winters's Reputation

from a letter to ALLEN TATE (1961) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I have a sabbatical leave next year and a Guggenheim grant, and I hope to write my last book of criticism if I can pull myself together. I have made a start and hope to move faster now that I have done a lot of sleeping. I am somewhat depressed by my sudden accession to fame now that the fame will do me little good. I feel as if I were surveying the first stage of my posthumous reputation. My reputation will doubtless go down before it goes up again, but it will last. The worst thing about it is that my son Dan will have to live his life out in my shadow. Dan is very civilized and has a fine critical intelligence. He might have been a fine poet and critic if I had not been in the way. But I doubt that he will try. He will be a very good teacher of Romance Languages, probably in state college or junior college, and will hunt continually for obscurity.

** COMMENT: This letter was written just a handful of years before Yvor Winters's death from cancer. He had spoken of how tired he was many times, and he had expressed his irritation with the literary establishment of his day in many letters before this one. Winters had received some awards and honors in recognition of his work at about the time this letter was written, but the muted accolades don't seem to have softened him a great deal. He would die just weeks after the last book of criticism he mentions was finished, "Forms of Discovery", published in late 1967. It is hard to judge how much Winters believed his own bravado, but it is clear from several others passages I have quoted and various other writings that he believed that his literary ideas would one day prevail, that the poems and theories of literature that he championed would finally be acknowledged and accepted. This belief can be called no more than a delusion of grandeur, for the decades succeeding his life have only witnessed his increasing obscurity. It is true, if you don't already realize this, that there are some few critics and scholars who continue to discuss him, but they are exceedingly few in number. Most of them were connected, in some way, to Winters when he was alive or his wife Janet Lewis Winters, and one has to wonder what will happen to his reputation in the years after the deaths of Winters's last supporters. Winters's reputation has actually sunk beneath "low", for he no longer possesses any reputation at all in the main literary circles of our day. This Year with Winters is a desperate attempt to right that wrong, but I fear the worst.

7/16 - On Emerson'S Morality

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

In Emerson the exercise of the will is as active as ever, and his moral judgments are frequently made with force and with accuracy; but his central doctrine is that of submission to emotion, which for the pantheist is a kind of divine instigation: an inadmissible doctrine, for it eliminates at a stroke both choice and the values that serve as a basis for choice, it substitutes for a doctrine of values a doctrine of equivalence, thus rendering man an automaton and paralyzing all genuine action, so that Emerson's acceptable acts of expression are accidental poems or epigrams drawing their only nutriment from the fringe or from beyond the fringe of his doctrine. To understand the difference between Very and Emerson at this point, we are forced to engage at least tentatively in that most precarious of pastimes, psychological analysis. Very believed that he had surrendered himself to God, but it was to the God of Christianity, who disapproved of surrender to emotion and whose moral standards had been revealed; so that Very, if we assume for the moment that there was an element of self-delusion in his mysticism, must have engaged in a good deal of rapid, efficient, and scarcely conscious criticism and selection of his own impulses, and on that basis of traditional Christian morality.... Emerson, on the other hand, believed that flesh and spirit were one, that the universe was divine, and that all impulses were of divine origin. Emerson's personal acts, like those of Very, were qualified by tradition, for he was the descendent of a line of clergymen, and his character had been formed by the society which they and their kind had formed, so that his impulses were no doubt virtuous; but his doctrine abandoned the last connection with Christianity and the last support for his personal dignity, and the difference, though it does not appear in his life as a man, is already apparent in the whimsical facility of feeling to be discerned equally in his prose and in his verse, a feeling very different from the austere purity of Very. Emerson could write such a poem as "Mithridates", for example, with enough rhetorical vigor to make it an important part of our literary heritage, but with no realization of its implications; it required Rimbaud, who probably never heard of the poem, or Hart Crane, who probably derived the Emersonian influence indirectly, and in some part through Emerson's chief disciple Whitman, to realize the implications of such an attitude in life and in art.

** COMMENT: As we have already seen from a few passages, Yvor Winters believed Emerson sat astride the cultural world like a colossus. Emerson has become a minor figure in cultural and literary studies in recent decades, so it is difficult to believe that Winters could have opined that Emerson was the font of all the Romantic ills of American literature and thought. These are matters for scholarly debate, and the debate would probably end much more skeptically than Winters was willing to be about the influence of Emerson. But on the main doctrines of Emerson, Winters was unquestionably correct. Reading Ralph Waldo through Winters's eyes (and he had read him through the eyes of other scholars, particularly the once well-known and respected historian Henry Bamford Parkes and the cultural critic Irving Babbitt) makes Emerson come clear. Most everything Winters charges Emerson with believing, it is clear to me, Emerson believed, and it is also clear that his thinking is as philosophically and morally dangerous as it is intellectually foolish. Nonetheless, Winters's understanding of Emerson would have shocked Emerson himself and shocks most his supporters. For Emerson believed in the freedom of the individual, the human spirit overcoming all obstacles to foster the spirit of divinity within. Nothing could be further from Emerson's intention than to make man an automaton. These are matters for intense study, but after much reading in this area I have become convinced that Winters was right about Emerson's ideas, and this conviction helps clear the way for me to place even greater trust in the critical and philosophical judgments of Winters, despite the low regard his opinions on Emerson's doctrines have been accorded. But whether Emerson was a cause or an effect, the disease itself or merely a symptom, remains a matter for much discussion -- though the discussion might yield nothing fruitful for life or art.

7/17 - On Comedy and Ben Jonson

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

But Volpone is trivial in spite of his intensity. He represents a limited and contemptible passion. Hence, in the opening speech and in others, Jonson is bringing his brilliant poetic talent to bear upon a subject of minimal importance. Jonson, of course, know this: this is a comedy, and comedy is a minor form; furthermore, not only did Jonson know this, but his whole intention in the play is to demonstrate this, to convince us of this for our own improvement. But the fact remains that in spite of brilliant writing we have an extended elaboration of trivial material, and eventually it becomes tedious. Jonson, like Shakespeare, is handicapped by the mimetic principle: Dryden was able to depict Shadwell in Dryden's language and to relate him directly to Dryden's principles; Jonson was forced to depict Volpone in Volpone's language and with relation to Volpone's principles. Jonson did a remarkably brilliant piece of work, if one considers the limitations of his medium, but Dryden did a better -- it would not be hard to devise a very good argument to the effect that Dryden's Shadwell, as we get him in "MacFlecknoe" and in the portrait of Og in the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel", is the greatest comic figure in our literature. Yet Jonson was a far greater poet than Dryden....

** COMMENT: As we have had occasion to discuss during this Year with Winters, Winters never held comedy in high regard or spent time theorizing about it. In this long, involved essay that evaluates literary forms rather than individual works (a radical essay that has failed to spark any revolution whatsoever, nor even a follow-up from any other critic) Winters took a brief look at comedy. Jonson's "Volpone" has worn thin and now gets little interest. The play is a bit tedious, for some reason. The writing in it seems odd, though at times it is nearly the equal of Jonson's best short poems. Are the weaknesses of "Volpone" the fault of the medium itself, dramatic comedy, and not simply of chance? Winters thought them the fault of comedy, and the matter is worth greater study, I believe. Dryden's "MacFlecknoe" is a dry, dull affair, in my view, though the language is certainly wonderful at times. Surprisingly, it is the only comic piece to make the Winters Canon, the best poems written in English, and it can hardly be called comic (satire, someone has said, is a piece intending to be comic but isn't). I remain doubtful that Winters refined his brilliant theories enough, for "serious" comedy has been left out, and serious comedy needs to be brought in. It is a task for another critic to so refine Winters's conception of the literary arts that comedy can take a firmer place in that theory than as the very minor form Winters considered it.

7/18 - On the Humanity of Humankind

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

The house [in the poem "Low Barometer] is the mind of man; the "tenants unknown" are the forces of what the Christian would call his lower nature, of what the psychologist would call his unconscious mind, of what the anthropologist would call his pre-human memory. It is the last description that Bridges emphasizes, for the tenants have "an earlier title than his own." Bridges sees the humanity of man as something recently acquired and precariously kept. "Air" is figurative, just as the house is figurative: if Bridges were a Christian, one might call it Divine Grace. The non-Christian theist might have a similar concept; Socrates has his daimons; it may be the habit of civilized man, habit which was created by the will in accord with Reason and which often acts as a saving power when Reason is overcome for the time being. In any of these terms the situation is comprehensible.... This poem is an exposition of a predicament common to all men; it does not appear to be a narrative of a particular experience.

** COMMENT: For the sake of comparison, I come back quickly to Robert Bridges's great poem "Low Barometer", which was the subject of discussion on 7/13. Here, in a later essay, Winters returns to this poem that he considered one of five or ten greatest ever written in English and discusses its understanding of the nature of man. It is most important to note that Winters understood the poem to be speaking to some of the most important and deeply felt moral issues of his own life and facing humankind. Whatever we call this force or power to evil within the human soul, Winters saw it is as the power that could destroy lives and saw the writing and reading of literature (and particularly the short poem) as one of the central human intellectual activities that could save us from the hegemony and destructive results of that power. We spoke yesterday of Winters's lack of regard for comedy, and perhaps we see here the reason he held it in such low regard. The stakes are so high; the power of evil in the human mind is so very durable. There is little to joke about in such matters, to Winters's mind. Perhaps the most enlightening phrase in this passage is that Bridges and Winters agreed that our humanity is "precariously kept". Is this so? Are things so bad? Not always, certainly, and not even often, in my view. Life seems fairly good, on the average, in the big picture, from the view here in educated, middle-class America. But this happy condition was only very recently won, at least as compared to the time encompassed by human civilization, and perhaps I have grown myopic and soft to the dangers that lie so close to the surface of civilized life. Winters believed those dangers were real and extremely near. Bridges's poem is a great one -- and a frightening one. The emotions in it are very strong, yet precisely appropriate to his rational understanding of the theme. It is indeed one of the near perfect embodiments of Winters's theories, and it should be honored as one of our great literary achievements.

7/19 - On Louise Bogan

from the poem "HENCEFORTH, FROM THE MIND" by Louise Bogan

** COMMENT: The work of Louise Bogan was an interesting case in Yvor Winters's criticism. She was distinguished and well-respected formalist poet who found publication in many of the top journals and magazines of her day. But though Winters championed her work, as did others, his regard for her poetry did not earn the same kind of hearing for other modern poets he championed, many of them his friends and students. Though she was respected, however, not many modern critics considered her an important figure in modern poetry, like Pound or Eliot or the second tier below them. For she was a throwback, as our selected poem makes clear. She used traditional forms and highly regular metrical verse. She has the feel of the Renaissance about her poetry, and the feeling is even stronger in other poems. Frankly, to me, it is puzzling that she "made it" in the modern literary world. She should have been as quickly dismissed as Winters and the Wintersians were. What happened in her case? I can't say. This poem was regarded as one of the greats in the English language by Winters and included in "Quest for Reality". It is a lovely piece that has so little modern feel to it. It is a small affair, in my opinion, but so expert that, perhaps, it is deserving of the praise that Winters lavished upon it.

7/20 - On Henry James's Well-Heeled Characters

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

The moral issue is also freed from economic necessity. Money is never an impelling motive in a Jamesian novel: that is, no one is forced to choose, as Moll Flanders was forced to choose, between crime and starvation. On the other hand, a lack of sufficient funds to live in luxury is a frequent motive to baseness among the corrupt characters; Lambert Strether, in "The Amabassadors", surmounts temptation among others; but it is never sufficiently great to be compelling. Isabel Archer is benevolently provided with funds after her story opens, with the express purpose that her action shall thereafter be unhampered.

This necessity, in the Jamesian art, of seeing to it that the leading characters shall be well-heeled, leads to some curious paradoxes. Christopher Newman, of "The American", for example, is a perfect embodiment of the Jamesian conscience, yet he is man of fabulous wealth, which he has acquired himself and in a very few years, immediately following the Civil War, and very largely in western railroads, and he is, in addition, a citizen of San Francisco -- he is, in brief, a colleague of Leland Stanford and of Collis P. Huntington. James conceives nearly all of his American financiers in the same terms, until he comes to write "The Ivory Tower", a book in which an intense suspicion, never supported by exact knowledge, of the evil of American financial life, of its actually corrupting effect on the characters of the participants, is the explicit theme.

* COMMENT: Winters's brilliant survey of moral ideas in the fiction of Henry James focused tightly on issues of moral freedom and responsibility. As Winters saw the matter, James's novels mistakenly isolated the moral decisions of human beings from the true and powerful influences of human experiences and social and private circumstances. Hence, Winters zeroes in as few critics have done on James's methods of isolating his characters and their moral situations and dilemmas. As we have seen from other passages, Winters wavered on James during much of his career. In his final judgment, which we can glean from a cross-examination of all his writings on James, he appears to have come to the opinion that James was one of the great forerunners of modern fiction, one who thereby displays some of its major flaws in excessive particularity and quotidian detail, but who also created unforgettable characters who portray a limited though valuable understanding of the moral difficulties of human experience and society.

7/21 - On Poetic Borrowings

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

The aspect of [Charles Gullans's] work which most bothers me is the habit of borrowing phrases, entire passages, and subjects from the work of other people. This sort of thing has been done before: it was common among the classical poets; a good deal of it went on in the Renaissance all over Europe; Ben Jonson recommended it; "Lycidas" is virtually a mosaic of borrowed passages, and there are many borrowed passages in "Paradise Lost." In our time Pound seems to have borrowed every passage that he could remember; he seems unable to distinguish between what has happened to him and what has happened in historical and legendary times and what he has read in his favorite poets and politicians. Eliot borrows quite as heavily, but with a little more deliberate intention. But Gullans borrows more heavily than is customary and frequently because this seems to be his only source of inspiration.... I think that Gullans often becomes a parasite upon original men and fails to make the same effort that they have made in writing their own poems. Yet he himself has written fine poems in which the borrowings or accidental echoes are no more serious than in the work of other men.

* COMMENT: Borrowing has been a popular poetic practice at times, and it became almost a theme of modernism when Pound and Eliot began employing the technique throughout their major work. The practice always seems to have irritated Winters, mostly, it seems, because he felt it to be parasitic on the work of accomplished artists. Gullans was a student of Winters's at Stanford, and one of his poems made the final cut of Winters's list of the greatest poems written in English. His poetry is certainly very fine overall. But the affectation of erudition, perhaps best illustrated by the habit of borrowing, detracts from any general evaluation of Gullans's work. It is a minor point that seems to have drawn more attention from Winters than it deserves. Though Winters is a great thinker because he offered reasons for his strong opinions, in this case he seems to offer little to back up his "feeling" that Gullans is making an error by borrowing.

7/22 - On Emphasis

from the essay "THE INFLUENCE OF METER ON POETIC CONVENTION" in "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

The extremely abnormal convention is seldom necessary, I believe, to the expression of powerful feeling. Shakespeare can be just as mad in a sonnet as can Hopkins, and he can be at the same time a great many other things which Hopkins cannot be. He has a more limber medium and is able to deal with more complex feelings. I mean by this, that if no one quality receives extreme emphasis, many diverse qualities may be controlled simultaneously, but that if one single quality (the ecstasy of the thirteenth century lyric, "Alisoun", for example) does receive extreme emphasis, it crowds other qualities out of the poem. The meter, the entire tone, of "Alisoun", render impossible the overtone of grief which would have been present had Hardy dealt with the same material, and which would have given the poem greater scope, greater universality. One may state it as a general law, moral as well as metrical, that an increase in complexity commonly results in a decrease of emphasis: extreme emphasis, with the resultant limitation of scope, is a form of unbalance. Sexual experience is over-emphasized in the works of D.H. Lawrence, because Lawrence understood sexual experience so ill.

* COMMENT: This is a revealing passage from Winters. Why did he so strongly support the careful control of emotion and denotation in poetry? On the surface, the reason seems to be that he simply favored the cool, calm, stoic, controlled "sound" of the plain style, as exhibited in, say, Ben Jonson, a style that many consider too dry and lifeless to be considered poetry at all nowadays. But it turns out that Winters, from very, very early in his career, supported tightly controlled lyrical methods because he wanted to take advantage of all the emotional techniques language has to offer. He didn't want our poetic styles to cheapen the emotions we seek to convey. Thus, in this passage he shows, quite incisively in my opinion, that if one is always emotional, then each individual statement of emotion becomes less effective. More is required to do a good deal less. Rather, Winters believed, let us do less so that all we do does so much more. If poets are controlled and cool, then when they get emotional, readers feel their emotions much more deeply and strongly, and the judgement of experience is brought out much more powerfully and clearly. Thus, Hopkins's violent emotiveness and wild metrical experiments, in poem after poem and passage after passage, begins to sound all the same; it actually begins to sound unemotional, dull, lifeless, just because the emotion is too uniformly violent. Finally, note the insightful comment on D.H. Lawrence. Seldom do critics cut to the heart of matters as quickly as Winters. Lawrence was off the mark on his understanding and presentation of sexual experience, and it seems clear that it was because he could not balance his obsession with sex with the myriad other aspects of human life.

7/23 - On Meaning in Poetry

from a letter to ALLEN TATE (1961) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I have a sabbatical leave next year and a Guggenheim grant, and hope to write my last book of criticism if I can pull myself together. I have made a start and hope to move faster now that I have done a lot of sleeping. I am somewhat depressed by my sudden accession to fame now that the fame will do me little good. I feel as if I were surveying the first stage of my posthumous reputation. My reputation will doubtless go down before it goes up again, but it will last. The worst thing about it is that my son Dan will have to live his life out in my shadow. Dan is very civilized and has a fine critical intelligence. He might have been a fine poet and critic, if I had not been in the way. But I doubt that he will try. He will be a very good teacher of Romance Languages, probably in a state college or junior college, and will hunt continually for obscurity.

* COMMENT: Winters did have a taste of what for him must have seemed fame, but it was a paltry morsel to chew indeed. I suppose it all depends on how you define fame, how many people have to know who you are what you do. In the late 50s early 60s, Winters did receive a few awards and prizes, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry that seemed to him to constitute fame. But he was even at this time unknown outside American and, to a degree, British academia. He had almost no people who knew him or his work well that I have found other than a few dozen professors and poets. His critical theories did not receive much attention, in general, though there were a few essays written about him at this time, a couple by "major" critics. None of the general literary culture paid him any attention. His poems received even less attention than his criticism. The poets he supported made no progress toward being accepted into the canon, though one or two have enjoyed some notice (J.V. Cunningham and N. Scott Momaday probably the most). He believed that his reputation would last, but it has not. A smattering of professors and poets in the U.S. and here and there around the world continue to teach his theories, but none has carried on his critical work, though some few have kept at writing poetry in his vein. Among the general literary intelligensia, he is wholly obscure, unimportant to any current debate. He has no reputation at all that I can, and it does not seem he has any prospects for one. This Year with Winters is my hope to change that, albeit slowly. I don't think his son Dan ever had to live in his shadow, which he meant was the shadow of a crank, for Winters dropped into obscurity not long after his death. I fear that someday he will simply be another obscure intellectual whom a few oddballs continue to study at desks among dusty library stacks. What a terrible loss for our culture.

7/24 - On Emersonianism

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

Professor X will defend democracy in Emersonian terms, never stopping to consider that a defense of democracy which derives ultimately from the doctrine of natural goodness, of the wisdom of the untrained and mediocre mind, and of the sanctity of impulse is the worst kind of betrayal. He tells us that Emerson was an "idealist", but he does not tell us what kind. He tells us that Emerson taught self-reliance, but not that Emerson meant reliance of irresponsible impulse. He will cite us a dozen fragments of what might be mistaken for wisdom, and cite Emerson as the source; but he will neither admit what these fragments mean in the Emersonian system nor go to the trouble of setting them in a new system which would give them an acceptable meaning -- and which would no longer be Emersonianism. If one insists on driving him back to the naked generative formulae, the only terms which give any of his ideas any precision, he is inclined to find one naive, bigoted, or ludicrous, but he will not say precisely why.

* COMMENT: Yvor Winters held firmly to the end of his days to the dangers of the Romantic ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, as we have noted in a number of passage from various essays. It is true that his emphasis on Emerson waned in his later writings; he mentioned him far less often than he did in essays from the '30s and '40s, but it is clear that he still held his ideas to be extremely dangerous. It is a little hard to get as worked up any longer about this, because Emerson is virtually meaningless to contemporary cultural debate, whether or not we accept Winters's views that he was a primary fount of the debilitating Romanticism of American cultural, moral, and literary life. He clearly states here the reasons why he finds Emerson so objectionable, but it is hard to take his as seriously as he took them 60 years later. Emerson's ideas have become submerged in the American philosophical mist. A few cherished American ideals that Emerson expressed early, such as the divinity of the world and the call to self-reliance, seem rather innocuous to us nowadays, if they did not seem so in Winters's own day. I find Emerson symbolic of the power of Romanticism in our American culture, rather than a true leader of or heavy influence on our culture. He is worth studying and reading, but Romantic ideas have progressed so far beyond his work and in so many ways that there are many other important thinkers to discuss and to wage battle against. Emerson simply isn't important any longer. Still, the similarity of his ideas to much cultural thought in this country remains strong.

7/25 - On Allegorical Symbols

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

I will illustrate the problem with a very brief example, an example which, though minor in itself, is characteristic of the method. Near the beginning of Canto I of "The Inferno", Dante encounters three beats, a panther, a lion, and a wolf, and we are informed in a footnote in Tozer's translation that these represent the vices of lust, pride, and avarice. In Tozer's translation, the panther, lust, appears as follows:

The panther as such is charming, and he is naturally more charming in the Italian than in the prose translation. But he is a very mild embodiment of lust; in fact there is nothing in the description of the panther which relates him to lust. I am aware of the somewhat vague mythological association, but that is not sufficient: the subject here is the sin of lust, and nothing has been said about it. There is no philosophical understanding, no psychological insight. The panther could just as easily represent procrastination or absent-mindedness. The fault is the fault of the method -- when Dante is not hampered by the method, as in some of his more direct accounts of human character, he often displays the virtues which he lacks here -- but the method accounts for the total structure and for the greater part of the detail.

** COMMENT: One of Yvor Winters's most important and useful critical ideas is that literary images should have as meaningful a connection as possible to the theme and purpose of the artwork. He discussed this matter again and again in his writings, and this passage presents a particularly fruitful example of how he thought writers and poets could go wrong, could produce mere ornament, rather than imagery vibrant with meaning. Dante's allegorical symbols, often, simply do not add anything to the meaning of his work, nor to its emotional power. They are too often simply arbitrary, and their lack of connection is a serious flaw in even so great a work as the "Divine Comedy". Winters argued that every word and image and phrase of a poem or novel should, in the finest works of literary art, endeavor to advance the conceptual theme of the work. Loose ornament is a flaw, in other words, as charming as it might be as ornament (and Winters praised many passages of poetry that he considered mere ornament). Of course, much of modern poetry and prose is, in our general literary culture, praised for its ornaments (see the selection for 8/5 on modern prose ornament). Most reviewers and critics seem to revel in bright and vivid images, and such images seem to be one of the main delights of reading for most literate readers. In contrast, see the poem at 7/19, Louise Bogan's "Henceforth from the mind," to see how vivid imagery can be put into the service of conceptual content and lead to great writing. In this particular essay, as you can see, Winters laid the blame for Dante's errors at the feet of the conventions of the allegorical epic, which forced Dante to place these ornamental symbols throughout his poem. I must admit that I have been taken in and thrilled by plenty of "ornamental" writing in my day, and I believe, as I opine that Winters believed, it is not wrong to enjoy such writings as long as one recognizes that they are seriously flawed and much less excellent than they could be.

7/26 - On Coleridge

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

S. T. Coleridge is famous primarily for "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), and any real reputation that he may in the long run retain will have to derive from this poem. "Christabel (1797-1800) and "Kubla Khan" (1797) are well known and have their admirers. There is no point, I think, in trying to find any intellectual profundity in the "Mariner" nor in trying to import such profundity from outside of the text; the poem is quite as simple as it seems. It is a story for children with a Sunday-School moral attached. Coleridge is quite as naïve intellectually as any other poet discussed in this chapter; unlike most of these poets, he has a charming command of style, but only, I think, in this poem. He is at his best when he intends to be, in his realistic description of preternatural or miraculous details:

These lines and a few others (the account of the ghost-ship, for example) exhibit a precision which we seldom find in the decadence. But it is a precision of description only, and the tone of excitement is unconvincing and does not move the adult. Or not this adult. It is the tone of refined elocution in the nursery. The style nowhere collapses; the tone which the poet sought he achieved and maintained; the poem is a relief after Wordsworth.

* COMMENT: It is a bit surprising, in my opinion, that Winters favored the "Ancient Mariner" over Coleridge's other poetry (not that I thought ANY of it would be acceptable to Winters). The poem has inspired countless admirers and has in recent years, I've noticed, become much more than the mere high school requisite it once was. Some prominent, popular intellectuals have written lately about its greatness and its power. I find the poem a pretty childish affair, almost a children's book in a way, and what "command of style" Coleridge has I can hardly say. Winters's comments here actually sent me back to the poem a couple times, but I must admit that I cannot fathom what he is driving at in praising the jingling cliches of the "Mariner". It is almost insufferable for this adult. The passages Winters quotes are puzzlingly flat. I cannot explain why he considered these two brief sections to be worthy, over many another in the poem, of his attention. I do not find them particularly striking or insightful. Perhaps I have more to learn, or perhaps Winters was simply being generous. He has been so excellent in teaching me about literary theory and practice, however, that I am willing to keep trying to understand what he sees in these passages from Coleridge that makes them exceptional. It is, finally, interesting to note that Winters completely dismisses Coleridge's other poems, which, as most of my readers probably know, have risen high in critical estimation during the past century or so. It is not the least surprising that Winters finds them weak, for they are pure Romanticism. Rational conceptuality has been banned from them.

7/27 - On Teaching and Poetry

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

Mr. [Hayden] Carruth says that as a teacher the poet will dissipate his poetry by talking about poetry to his classes. This is something that neither he nor any psychologist can prove. So far as my person history is concerned, it was the necessities of teaching which forced me to clarify my ideas about literature, and it was this clarification of ideas which enabled me to write the only poems I am interested in preserving. Had it not been for my academic career, it is quite possible that I should still be a minor disciple of William Carlos Williams, doing little impressionistic notes on landscapes. It is true that I have written less and less poetry as I have grown older, but I believe that there is in the main a perceptible improvement in the quality of the poetry. As to the reasons for the decrease in quantity, they are perhaps several: in a period of critical muddleheadedness such as our own, I have had to divert a good deal of my energy into prose, if only to keep my own ideas in order; as I have risen in the Stanford English department, and as the university has grown, my duties have increased;... as I have grown older, my energy has diminished -- I mean my nervous and physical capacity for working instead of sleeping; as I have grown older, I have become more critical of my own work and am less easily satisfied with simple or casual themes than I once was; and beyond all this I do not like to repeat myself. I can see no reason to leave 1,500 pages of mediocre verse behind one, with a few good poems lost in it all. I would rather let the few good poems stand alone; they will have a better chance of surviving if I do my own editing, if I do not leave the editing to editors.

* COMMENT: In this essay, Yvor Winters wrote an "apologia pro vita sua", the justification for the way he had lived his life and conducted his career. A few things are worth noting. First, Winters held throughout his life to the idea that a poet should publish little, because the chances of success were so slim. This idea affected his criticism as well, and his reception by the academic community, for few people have been able to understand his insistence on singling out poems from some poet as great and not even mentioning other good poems. Whether this practice is sound or not is for each to judge for himself; I mention the idea because it is so important to Winters's work. Second, Winters, as we have seen in other selections, appears to have not enjoyed writing prose or criticism, even though he was a prose stylist. Personally, I favor his prose over his poetry, and that is saying a lot, for I judge that he wrote several of the greatest poems of all time. But his prose, at least in the field of literary criticism, is, almost, incomparable in depth, style, perception, and power. Third, Winters's commitment to conceptual thought in the creation of literary art and in the study of those arts is very refreshing. It is at the center of his critical thought, as we have seen throughout our Year with Winters. That he puts down Williams's work is interesting, since he chose a half dozen of Williams's poems as among the greatest ever written in English. (They are slight affairs indeed. I consider them the strangest picks Winters ever made for inclusion in the Winters Canon; I'm still trying to figure out after 25 years of study how they made it. Williams seems no better than a good 15 or 20 dozen poets who have written the same sort of impressionistic notes -- charitably called poems -- written before and since Williams's day.)

7/28 - On Coherence of Feeling

from the essay "THE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL IN AMERICAN POETRY, AN ANALYTICAL SURVEY OF ITS STRUCTURAL METHODS, EXCLUSIVE OF METER" from "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

[The method of "qualitative progression"] makes no attempt whatever at a rational progression. Mr. Pound's "Cantos" are the perfect example of the form; they make no unfulfilled claims to matter not in the poetry, or at any rate relatively few and slight claims. Mr. Pound proceeds from image to image wholly through the coherence of feeling: his sole principle of unity is mood, carefully established and varied. That is, each statement he makes is reasonable in itself, but the progression from statement to statement is not reasonable: it is the progression either of random conversation or of revery. This kind of progression might be based upon an implicit rationality; in such a case the rationality of the progression becomes clearly evident before the poem has gone very far and is never thereafter lost sight of; in a poem of any length such implicit rationality would have to be supported by explicit exposition. But in Mr. Pound's poem I can find few implicit themes of any great clarity, and fewer still that are explicit.

* COMMENT: We have become so accustomed to Pound's method, since it has spread like a plague over literature, that most readers are hardly able to recognize the existence or nature of qualitative procedures, which is why Yvor Winters's discussion of this structural principle is so important to the future of the literary arts. I would venture to opine that Winters's comments here about Pound could easily be made into a fairly accurate description of almost all modern poetry. If you decide to study Winters deeply, it will pay great dividends to know the poetry of Ezra Pound well, especially the "Cantos", since Winters refers to them again and again as a foil to his own theories and practices. Qualitative progression has become an extremely damaging convention that has controlled literature for the past 75 to 100 years. The unity of mood is all that is left in most poetry -- and even in fictional prose today. I believe that the conventional procedure of qualitative progression is the reason poetry and fiction are so unimportant in cultural, social, and political affairs nowadays, why poetry and fiction are considered "wastes of time". It has been a sad turn of events to witness as poetry has declined further and further and become ever more lost in revery and random associations. Let's be frank: poetry will not matter again until poets are willing to give up qualitative progression.

7/29 - On Frost's Intellectual Vagueness

from the essay "ROBERT FROST OR THE POET AS SPIRITUAL DRIFTER" in "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM" (1957)

From [the] subject [of the first section], however, the poem ["The Lesson for Today"] wanders into a brief discussion of mortality in general and the poet's concern with subject; and after that topic the poem closes on the poet's epitaph for himself:

These two transitions are casual rather than structural, and the poem falls apart badly. The last lines, moreover, are extremely bad. There is a weak sentimentality about which one perceives easily, but the reason for which deserves mention. These are good reasons for quarreling with the world, or at least large segments of it; much of the world is evil, and the evil had better be recognized and taken seriously. If the quarrel can be reduced to a lover's quarrel, it is not serious. It is as one said to a murderer: "After all, you are human, and you have a perfect right to your own opinions, attitudes, and behavior: we are all human and should respect and admire each other." The principle back of the final line is vicious and corrupts the line. And the intellectual vagueness which is responsible for this weak ending is responsible likewise for the fragmentary structure of the poem and for the weakness of the other poems which I have been considering.

* COMMENT: I have thought a great deal about this one seemingly minor passage in the writings of Yvor Winters because it brings up a major problem with his criticism. Frost has been admired, I believe, not because, as Winters stated in this essay, he was a "classical" poet, but because of his casual, folksy diction employed within traditional popular verse forms. The line to which Winters objects so strenuously seems a fitting one for Frost and one very congenial many people who love Frost: he didn't get all worked up about things. Our response to evil can be compared to a lover's quarrel in a way. We have this love affair with a corrupted world, but we don't want to get too worked up about it, take ourselves or the problem too seriously. Winters couldn't seem to see any value in such an attitude, that casual, lighthearted flippancy that is so common in Western culture right now -- that sarcastic, glib cynicism that seems to be on everyone's lips. This concept, this way of handling experience and the evils of the world, was uttering foreign and repugnant to Winters. It can make him difficult to read at times, because he just takes everything in life so seriously. One wishes that he'd lighten up. But his critical theories and literary practices are intensely and uniformly serious. Everything seems to be riding on every word. But for a casual thinker and affectedly casual writer like Frost (and he has legions of imitators and followers), there is no point in getting too serious about all the difficulties of life, even evil. Winters's attitude toward the line seems, to me, much more vicious than the line itself. In fact, after much reflection, actually years of reflection on the matter, I don't see the line as vicious at all. The casual, curt, playful, and impertinent line speaks to me; it increases my understanding and gives me an emotion I believe appropriate to that understanding (though I won't offer my opinion here of the poem as a whole). I love the world, but I have quarrels with it, too. Obviously, there is much to debate here, and much room to extend Winters's theories in areas that he would not have approved of. It goes back to his distaste for comedy, which we have discussed in a number of selections.

7/30 - On The Talent of Wallace Stevens

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

Steven's doctrine of the Imagination, like the doctrines of the Imagination that preceded it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a psychological doctrine purely and simply; it does not deal with language or the proper use of language, and it offers no guidance to the writer in his writing. In Stevens, as in his predecessors, it generated a bad style. Yet Stevens is different from his predecessors in an important respect: he was born with a talent for great writing; the talent appears in the poem from I have just quoted ["The Course of a Particular"] and in a few others. Stevens, in his best poems and passages, is a master of the resources of meter and syntax; and he is a master of diction. The facts are well known, and I shall waste no time on them; but I would like to add that in my opinion he is, in these respects, fully the equal of Ben Jonson and the superior of Donne, Sidney, or the Shakespeare of the Sonnets.

* COMMENT: Wallace Stevens is a curious case in the career of Yvor Winters. Here, late in his career, long after he had become a harsh, sour, cantankerous grouch in the eyes of most, he was still praising a poet whom other critics also consider one of our greatest, though certainly not above Shakespeare. What's going on here? It is difficult to describe why Winters's views and those of his opponents mesh at this poet. But it is not difficult to point that there were distinct differences. Most of the poems the literary community praised are poems Winters rejected, except for one or two ("Sunday Morning" and "Le Mononcle de Mon Oncle" being the two most prominent examples). Though Winters proclaimed that the facts are well known, there was on the contrary considerable disagreement about just what they facts were. Most of the literary community lavishly praised all of Stevens's forays into his theory of the imagination, which had informed "Sunday Morning" and a few other poems Winters judged great (such as, I believe, "The Course of a Particular"). Winters belittled Stevens's theories, which he delighted in endlessly and playfully exploring through his poetry. Yet our standard literary culture has studied those theories endlessly, as though they matter deeply, and has stood in awe of Stevens's foolish ideas. I don't have any good answer as to how Winters and his opponents came to agree, at least to a small degree, on Stevens, but it is clear that the study of Stevens is an illuminating test case to better understand Winters's thought. Such a study will shine a bright light on his differences from the Romantic literary theories that hold sway in our culture.

7/31 - On the Abandonment of Reason - KP

from a footnote in the essay "THE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL IN AMERICAN POETRY, AN ANALYTICAL SURVEY OF ITS STRUCTURAL METHODS, EXCLUSIVE OF METER" from "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

Mr. Pound, writing in the New English Weekly... on remarks similar to the above... [see selection for 7/28] states: "The nadir of solemn and elaborate imbecility is reached by Mr. Winters in an American publication where he deplores my 'abandonment of logic in the Cantos,' presumably because he has never read my prose criticism and has never heard of the ideographic method, and thinks logic is limited to a few 'forms of logic' which better minds were already finding inadequate to the mental needs of the XIIIth century."

As to the particular defects of scholarship which Mr. Pound attributes to me, he is, alas, mistaken. For the rest, one may only say that civilization rests on the recognition that language possesses both connotative and denotative powers; that the abandonment of one in a poem impoverishes the poem to that extent; and that the abandonment of the denotative, or rational, in particular, and in a pure state, results in one's losing the only means available for checking up on the qualitative or "ideographic" sequences to see if they really are coherent in more than vague feeling. Mr. Pound, in other words, has no way of knowing whether he can think or not.

* COMMENT: This minor dispute is very instructive. Winters's footnote on the matter gives only a brief overview of what was at stake. Pound, it seems clear, thought he was following some new ways of reasoning with his ideographic method and which he discussed many times in his letters and essays. Winters rejected Pound's notion that this method was a kind of reasoning. I agree with Winters on the point, but I know there are thousands of critics out there who do not. It has become a hallmark of modern poetry that it is an attempt to explore other means of knowing and experiencing and feeling. Winters understood this well; he simply rejected that these alternate ways of knowing had anything to do with Reason, with the rational legacy of Western civilization. It is a complex topic and well deserving of further study. I myself have long been a student of William James, and James was one who believed that we must always open ourselves up to other ways of thinking and knowing, other kinds of Reason, if we are to be able to meet the problems and issues that confront us. This pluralistic, pragmatist approach to the matter has seemed to me quite plausible. On the other hand, I see nothing rational deriving from the forms of "logic" Pound supposedly employed in his poetry. This is a matter for careful debate, I believe, since such ideas have at least the potential to provide us with important tools for living and thinking. Winters, as we have seen from other selections, believed such ideas about rationality were exceedingly dangerous, just because our only moral hope is to maintain our commitment to Reason. This idea is expressed in various ways throughout his essays, and we have already seen some of them and we shall see yet more ahead, especially concerning Hart Crane. I haven't decided the case yet for myself, but I am a Wintersian and plan to stick to Winters's theories, obviously, for a good long time.