A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

August

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

8/1 - On Henry Adams's Nominalism

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

But [Henry Adams] was of the Ockhamist tradition; and as for the Mathers, so for him, the significance could not reside within the event but must reside back of it. He would scarcely have put it this way, and he might have denied the paternity of Ockham; but he belonged to a moral tradition which had taken its morality wholly on faith for so long that it had lost the particular kind of intelligence and perception necessary to read the universe for what it is; and had developed instead a passion to read the universe for what it means, as a system of divine shorthand or hieroglyphic, as a statement of ultimate intentions.

He had no faith, however, and hence he could not believe that there was anything back of the event: the event was merely isolated and impenetrable. Yet he possessed the kind of mind which drove him to read every event with a kind of allegorical precision; and since every event was isolated and impenetrable, he read in each new event the meaning that the universe was meaningless. Meaning had been a function of faith; and faith had been faith not only in God and his decalogue but in a compete cosmology and chronology, that is, in all of Revelation; and if any part of this system was injured, every part was destroyed. The discoveries of geologists and astronomers caused him indescribable suffering and made it utterly impossible that he should examine dispassionately the moral nature of man.

** COMMENT: Yvor Winters's erudite and lengthy dissection of the main philosophical ideas of Henry Adams has found few opponents and few admirers. Winters's writings have seldom stirred up much trouble, but there have been a few thinkers who challenged his explication of Adams's main theories. I can't claim to be an expert in Adams, but from what little I have studied the matter, I do find Winters's argument convincing, though I will not make a case for Winters's essay here. Adams certainly believed that the universe was meaningless, and this belief was a cause of great heartache and despair. The origins of these theories remain a mystery. Winters located them in the philosophical tradition of William of Ockham, often called nominalism, filtered through a ruined American Calvinism. Unless one is well versed in these various philosophical and theological movements, there is little reason to hope that one will be able to judge Winters's conclusions properly. Yet regardless of the sources of Adams's modernist despair, Adams certainly experienced it strongly. Winters's goal, I believe, was to locate those sources so that we, who might read Adams, can avoid the dangers that ruined his thought. To add to the difficulty of fathoming this fine essay, consider that Winters considered Adams's one great history, "The History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison", to be the greatest piece of prose ever written in American English (see selection for 8/5).

8/2 - On Complete Judgment

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

According to my own view, the poem is rational statement about a human experience, made in such a way that the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the experience is communicated simultaneously with the rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the experience, a judgment both rational and emotional. The poetic medium is simply a means to a finer and more comprehensive act of understanding than we can accomplish without it. The poem thus falls under the heading of prudence, to continue with the scholastic terms; it is a method for perfecting the understanding and moral discrimination; it is not an obscurely isolated end in itself. I believe that my own view of art is more Thomistic than the one which [critic John] Pick offers, that it is more in conformity with Thomistic philosophy as a whole; for it relates a major human activity to the whole of human life, to the economy of redemption, so to speak, and does not leave it dangling.

** COMMENT: Here is another of those almost credal statements of Winters's basic theory of the literary arts, which pepper his writings. In this particular version of the "Wintersian Creed", Winters emphasizes a particularly important point: that a literary work of art is way of understanding life more completely than, say, a work of philosophy or behavioral science, because literature incorporates, at its best, the emotion proper to the conceptual, rational understanding of human experience. Note also the very important point that the literary arts perfect our understanding by dealing with concept and emotion at the same time, by fusing them into each other, and that this is a matter of "moral" discrimination, a matter of "prudence". These are very difficult concepts to grasp from such a brief passage, I know from having tried to explain them to many people over the years. What Winters is saying, I believe, is that in the act of adjusting emotion to rational concept in writing, the artist is making a moral decision, step by step in his writing, and the reader is receiving the communication of this moral decision, step by step, in the reading of the work. The reader is thus evaluating the writer's evaluation. It is a brilliant, fruitful, and highly meaningful theory. To encourage you to study it further is the chief purpose of this Year with Winters.

8/3 - On Ben Jonson

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

Like most of the lyrics of the period, Jonson's are expository in structure; but, unlike many, they engage in very little figurative excursion (such as one gets in Donne) and very little illustrative repetition (such as one gets in Nashe's "In Time of Pestilence"). They are closely written arguments, or at least a good many of them are, and they have to be read very closely if one is not to lose the continuity of the arguments. He wrote a little devotional poetry of a high order, but his subject matter is chiefly ethical in the narrowest sense: that is, he deals with problems of conduct arising between one human being and another, or between one human being and the social group, or between one human being and other serious problems; indeed, his devotional poetry concerns itself explicitly with man's moral relationship with God. The language is accurate and concise with regard to both idea and feeling: there is an exact correlation between motive and feeling that may easily be mistaken for coldness and mechanical indifference by the reader accustomed to more florid enticements, but which impresses the present reader rather as integrity and nobility.

** COMMENT: The taste for Ben Jonson's poetry is mostly gone in our culture. I doubt there is an academic program in America that features his work, and there are certainly no Jonson readings or conferences occurring, nor are there any popular books of Jonson's poetry available (though he does remain in print). He is a pretty dry, dull read in comparison to what's being published and read nowadays. It will take a long time and a great deal of effort for anyone interested in Yvor Winters to make a just assessment of his praise for Jonson, for it is clear from this and other, stronger passages that Winters considered him one of the three or four greatest poets in English. A number of his poems made the final cut for the greatest poems of all time, the Winters Canon. And one poem, "To Heaven", was consistently noted in those repeated lists in Winters's essays as one of the few very greatest among the greats. But how about all the rest, the dozens upon dozens of sometimes lengthy poetic epistles that Jonson wrote? Just as Winters describes them, they are expository arguments, often in heroic couplets, a verse form that has gone almost completely out of favor. He does have a cold feel to his writing, a logical chilliness. He reads like a man who thought too much and too deeply about what was good and proper. Still, the poems Winters chooses as his best are, indeed, very great. "To Heaven" I will not hesitate to call one of the five best poems in the language. It has even been anthologized in some of the most popular textbooks, though it never received the attention or praise that Winters accorded it. Overall, I find Jonson to be fairly tiresome reading, even with Winters's recommendation behind him. The good and great poems are few. I suppose it's a matter of taste, and perhaps our taste for this sort of expository poetry can flourish again some day. I doubt it, though. I think Jonson will grow ever more obscure unless there are more people reading his only ardent defender, Yvor Winters. I suppose that one of my secondary goals for this Year with Winters is to keep such writers as Jonson from being lost in favor of the impressionistic ditties that pass for poetry in the modern age.

8/4 - On Moral Judgement Against Madness

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

After they set sail, the mates are introduced and described. They represent various levels of normal human attitudes toward physical and spiritual danger, the highest being that of Starbuck, the first mate, who represents the critical intelligence: "Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all morally practical occasions.... For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father's? Where in the bottom deeps could he find the torn limbs of his brother?" Starbuck's desperate effort to turn Ahab from his purpose, and, after his failure, his submission to Ahab, is a major crisis in the book; it represents the unsuccessful rebellion of sanity and morality against a dominant madness.

** COMMENT: "Moby Dick" is one of the greatest works of prose ever written, according to Winters, and he lavished a great deal of energy on his interpretation of the book -- and a brilliant and insightful interpretation it is. His discussion of the allegorical symbols of the epic, principally embodied in the characters of Ahab, Starbuck, and Ishmael, is almost a page-turner. This brief passage from the great essay presents Winters's understanding of Melville's comprehension of the character of Starbuck, who struggles against Ahab and then unwillingly succumbs to Ahab's vengeful designs. Starbuck stands almost as a symbol in Winters's own life and work, since it is our failure to use Reason to hold back our impulses and face the dangers of life, and the demons of human nature, that Winters most often wrote about in his poetry and devised his critical theories to combat. The few critics who wrote about Winters's interpretation of "Moby Dick" have claimed that Winters interpreted the book according to his own concepts and theories about the world and Reason and madness and danger, not Melville's. I will say that after much reading in Melville studies ("Moby Dick" remains my work of prose as well), I side with Winters. I guess it's up to each reader of both Melville and Winters to evaluate the matter for himself. Winters's overall interpretation clarifies the whole novel more expertly than any essay I have ever read; the essay, moreover, constitutes one of the great prose masterpieces of critical literature, in my opinion. In fact, I believe it to be one of the few contributions to literary criticism that can be read as a work of art. It is essential to understanding Melville and Winters.

8/5 - On Elaborate Prose Styles

from a letter to MALCOLM COWLEY (1958) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

So far as prose is concerned, I think that you and I could be classified as members of two schools which among the sixteenth century poets were known as the courtly and the plain. You belong to the courtly, I to the plain. The plain style poets -- Wyatt and Jonson, for examples -- believed that poetry should say something efficiently, and they believed that such saying was an art, and in their hands it was a very great art. Sidney and Spenser, however, were less interested in saying something than merely in saying with grace and ornament, and their poetry was inferior. Don't get the idea from the above that my verse is in the sixteenth century plain style, because it isn't; it isn't in the courtly, either. When you say that I don't recognize prose as an art, you are dreaming. Adams's history ["The History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison"] is great art. So is Johnson's introduction to his dictionary. What bothers me about your prose -- not merely this one essay, but nearly everything I have read -- is the elaboration of elegance, out of all proportion to what you are saying. I get bored very early, and stop. The same kind of poetry bores me equally.

** COMMENT: In today's terms, one could hardly call Malcolm Cowley's prose courtly. I suppose it would take some work, but a case could be made that Cowley wrote an elegant and cool brand of modern prose. But common to most prose in the literary culture of today, he had a bent for the occasional flourish, the penetrating image or metaphor that could make his description or his point "vivid". Winters's prose, on the contrary, is indeed plainer than Cowley's, but not so plain as one might imagine from this passage. It was actually a nineteenth-century style, similar in many ways to the restrained essayists of Melville's era, who could also offer a few flourishes. It is a highly polished, clear, exact style. It is probably true that most of the prose stylists in the popular literary magazines of today write with the idea of writing gracefully and with vivid ornament. But Winters did not, and perhaps could not, understand the purpose for this style. The purpose of all writing is to illuminate, to bring into bright light the ideas or story or exposition or narrative the author wishes to reveal. It comes down to the matter of imagery. Does it contribute to the exact perception of the particular of a concept, a rational judgement of a human experience? Or are the images there for the sake of the images themselves, like frosting on a cake. In Winters's view, the finest prose is that which offers images that precisely and fully illuminate the conceptual content of the matter under consideration. Cowley's work -- as much as that of his contemporaries -- exhibits much ornamentation, much of it very effective and lovely in itself, but little of it in the finest tradition of prose that Winters is referring to here. It would be most appropriate if you were to get Adams's "History" from the library to get a taste of the highly refined and splendid prose of that great work. It is so well controlled that when Adams wishes to speak in highly emotional terms, the prose is ready to bear all the weight of significance with which he wishes to burden it. Still, Cowley's style has its virtues. It needs adjustment, however, in Winters's view, to the conceptual purposes of all works of literary art. It is too much mere ornament. Winters's point was: Hold your ornament in reserve, or you waste it by over-doing it.

8/6 - On Sidney's Sonnets

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

I will consider the second and more famous [sonnet of Sidney's]:

This is a rejection of the love which reaches but to dust in favor of divine love. The first stanza is composed mainly of the cliches of devotional literature -- "reachest but to dust", "aspire to higher things", the entire third line and the fourth -- but they are not obtrusive and are handled gracefully. "Draw in they beams": the reference here seems to be to the beams of light which are shot from the lady's eyes, or from Cupid's, in so many sonnets, and which are often compared to Cupid's arrows. Here the contrast is between the beams -- the light of earthy love -- and the light of heavenly love mentioned in line three of the second quatrain. It is a routine contrast, and gets whatever effectiveness it has from the technical grace of the quatrain.... The remainder of the poem is stereotyped, but the rhythm of the third line of the third quatrain is fine: the anapest in the third position, a very light one, followed by the very slightly accented syllable of the subsequent iamb, makes the sliding perceptible, however subtly. The couplet is commonplace but honest. The subject is serious; the language is the small-change of Christian moralizing, but it is sincerely felt and gracefully arranged; the rhythm is beautiful. The poem is moving but essentially second rate.

** COMMENT: Winters was accused from time to time of being much too dismissive of too many poems on too little evidence. On the contrary, I think it is clear on the evidence of his extremely close analysis of dozens upon dozens of specific poems throughout his writings, as is illustrated here in this passage on a sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney's, that Winters studied each poem he read, even those of his students, with an intensity and care that is unmatched in the literary criticism of any era. This point is also clearly demonstrated in the testimonies about his teaching we have from many of those students. He gave every poem he came across the same kind of rapt attention that he paid here to a poem he considered second rate. And I have even cut out at least half of this particular passage. So, you might disagree with Winters's judgments, but to accuse him of being perfunctory or slapdash or hasty is simply an error. Sidney is another of those interesting cases in Winters's writings. He had much good to say about Sidney's style in his essays, but he never gave him credit for composing one of the better poems of the language. It was a bit of a surprise for me that one Sidney poem made the final cut of the 185 greatest poems as published in "Quest for Reality", for most of the time Winters considered his work second rate for just the reasons enumerated concerning this one sonnet, which Winters considered to be among his finest work. Winters simply couldn't stand cliches or mannerisms of thought, which display lazy writing or thinking. And though this is clearly a very fine poem, one can see after working through it with Winters that it has serious flaws that keep it from being a truly great poem, however fine Sidney's writing from line to line, and however well the rational content is properly adjusted to emotion.

8/7 - On Being Moved

from the Winters poem "TO A YOUNG WRITER"

** COMMENT: This short stanza from one of Winters's "Collected Poems" concisely presents two themes of his criticism. Winters wrote a good deal of occasional poetry, and much of it has this taut, sharp feel to it. His advice to the young writer was much like his manner of conducting his own life and career. He wrote relatively little, and this has left those of us who believe in his greatness a little frustrated. But he believed firmly that there was only little that one man or woman COULD write that would ever be judged great. The prolific writer is never guaranteed greatness, and, in Winters's view, his profuseness often keeps him from achieving anything great. Secondly, note the emphasis, once again, on knowledge and emotion. Just as he tried to give himself to pure sensation early in his career, seeking it so much that he almost desired to be merged with nature and cease to be a person, so he cautions this young writer to use Reason as the foundation of all emotion. Of course, this advice goes against the mighty tides of American literary practice and theory. Our common writers have commonly advised us all to give in entirely to our emotions and to claim that poetry and knowledge have little or nothing to do with each other.

8/8 - On Relativism - KP

from the essay "FOREWORD" in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON" (1947)

The absolutist believes in the existence of absolute truths and values. Unless he is very foolish, he does not believe that he personally has free access to these absolutes and that his own judgments are final; but he does believe that such absolutes exist and that it is the duty of every man and every society to endeavor as far as may be to approximate them. The relativist, on the other hand, believes that there are no absolute truths, that the judgment of every man is right for himself. I am aware that many persons believe that they have arrived at some kind of compromise between these two positions, but actually no compromise is possible. Any such attempt at compromise, if closely examined, will exhibit an ultimate allegiance to one position of the other or else will exhibit simple confusion. It is popular at present to profess relativism and yet in important matters to act as if we were absolutists. Our ideas of justice, which we endeavor to define by law and for which wars are often fought, can be defended only by invoking moral absolutism. Our universities, in which relativistic doctrines are widely taught, can justify their existence only in terms of a doctrine of absolute truth. The professor of English Literature, who believes that taste is relative, yet who endeavors to convince his students that "Hamlet" is more worthy of their attention than some currently popular novel, is in a serious predicament, a predicament which is moral, intellectual, and in the narrowest sense professional, though he commonly has not the wit to realize the fact.

** COMMENT: The idea embodied in that final sentence is one of the cornerstones of the Yvor Winters's thought. We have already learned from many selections that evaluation is the foundation of any system of literary criticism, in Winters's view. Here, in this important and stirring passage, the concept is bound to philosophical absolutism and the rejection of ALL kinds of relativism. Winters was perfectly certain, it seems, that he was correct in these matters, for he even dismisses those unnamed philosophers who have tried to find some middle ground between absolutism and relativism. I am strongly drawn to these ideas and strongly tempted to agree with Winters in whole. But I also remain doubtful that NO middle ground can possibly exist. Of course, it is an extremely important philosophical and moral issue, as Winters shows, but I remain unconvinced that Winters is right about justice or the existence of universities being founded on the concept of absolute truth and values. I am more sure that we must treat our truths and values AS THOUGH they are absolutes, with an wise eye always on the improvement and refinement of our concepts and systems of truth and morality. I am also more sure that some form of weak absolutism -- if such a phrase makes any sense -- is wholly appropriate in the study of literature, for it is undoubtedly true that we are always defining our canons without adequate justification. Obviously, these are very important matters for any student of Winters to study and ponder deeply.

8/9 - On Modern Critics

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

Like [R.S.] Crane, [Cleanthe] Brooks seems to see poetry purely as structure -- in Brooks it is a kind of balance between thematic opposites -- and not as a definable method of understanding human experience and judging it. He is inferior to Crane for the reason that Crane points out: he is aware of only one principle of structure and that one inadequate. He is superior to Crane in this: that he made a serious attempt to explore the possibilities of his principle in the analyses of a good many poems. Neither man seems to be aware that the primary function of criticism is evaluation, and that unless criticism succeeds in providing a usable system of evaluation it is worth very little.

[R.P.] Blackmur appears to be unwilling to commit himself to any principles, but feels that all principles should be used as methods of exploration. One never feels sure why they should be used, since we do not know in reading Blackmur what we are looking for, and we suspect that he is looking only for what he may happen to turn up. He appears to be a relativist, and a relativist in criticism is of little help to anyone save himself, and one would like to reserve the right to be skeptical about even that.

** COMMENT: Yvor Winters took part in a number of the more well-known critical debates of his day, though it is fair to say that he didn't throw himself into every broad river of literary debate (the Marxist debates, for example, swept right past him) and that he was never a major player in any of those debates he chose to take part in. Brooks's ideas, which Winters refers to in this passage, are exhibited most fully in "The Well-Wrought Urn", one of most famous books of literary criticism ever written, I believe. I see it everywhere, and it was once a staple of introductory classes on literature at universities, though it has declined in popularity over the past decade. It is an odd book, as well done as it is (and Winters praised Brooks, at least, for proceeding with his ideas by studying poems one by one). Brooks honed in on one central idea or thematic principle, paradox, which he then claimed was the center of the poetic art to the near exclusion of all else. It is an interesting idea, no doubt, and Winters is certainly right that Brooks played out this concept to the very end, but it is a strange chapter in the New Criticism. I cannot say why this one book became so widely used and read. Perhaps it simply gave professors a set of specific interpretations to work from in their classes, and, as I say, for that Winters praised it. Once again, in judging Brooks's work, Winters comes back to evaluation, as he always did -- to that defining and making of what I call the Winters Canon. Blackmur seems a typical critic of our times. He noses around among books looking to talk about whatever interests him. Winters thinks him a relativist, but he is only one of a very common sort. He simply gives no reasons for his implicit canon -- that is, those books Blackmur considers worthy of discussing -- and since Winters founded his whole critical thought on the giving of reasons for a canon, Blackmur does not fare well in this assessment of his work.

8/10 - On an Obscure Lyric

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

I discovered the poem in the "Oxford Book of English Verse" many years ago. But where and how did Quiller-Couch discover it? Quiller-Couch was a man of very small talent; his anthology is a poor one, and it is especially poor in the Renaissance. But we are greatly in his debt for this poem [Mark Alexander Boyd's "Fra bank to bank"]. I placed the poem on my reading list for my course in the English lyric perhaps thirty years ago, and I always called it to the attention of my students. In recent years it has found its way into two or three anthologies, which, I fear, will not long survive. I have never mentioned it before in print, and it is not in Professor Williams's anthology. It would be interesting to know if Boyd did anything else of value; perhaps the gentleman of the Scottish Text Society or of the University of Edinburgh could help us. It would be interesting to know how many readers have admired the poem in the "Oxford Book of English verse". I suspect that the number is small. The anthology might easily disappear from print, for it is now obsolete, and the poem with it. Yet the poem should be preserved as long as our language is read.

** COMMENT: Winters could latch on certain single poems with a stunning and sometimes puzzling intensity. The poem he discusses in this selection is a nice one, but it is a simple affair all in all. It made the Winters Canon as found in "Quest for Reality", but it seems almost wholly unknown and unappreciated in literary criticism today. I quote the poem in full, by Mark Alexander Boyd (1563-1601):

There are many other examples, as we have seen, of this sort of discovery in Winters. It angered and puzzled many critics. Could this slight poem be the equal or the better of 146 of Shakespeare's much praised and beloved Sonnets? Moreover, it is another of Winters's failures, for the poem has received no attention as a result of his work and seems destined to continue in the obscurity from which Winters tried to rescue it. It would take a long essay to explain why, but I consider the poem not nearly as great as Winters judged it to be. He made slight mistakes like this on occasion, but his successes were so spectacular that I have decided to trust him almost wholly. Still, the poem is a nice one, and it is worth reading and remembering. You can see why Winters's students wrote and thought so differently. They were regularly treated to such unusual and obscure poems and told that they were great and why, with an authority that seems to have quelled the stoutest rebel. That must have been a profoundly moving experience for the young men and women who studied under him.

8/11 - On Philosophical Study and Literature

from the review "THE POETRY OF LOUISE BOGAN" (1929) from "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The poet of the present age, in order to free himself from the handicap of the philosophical misconceptions of the age, has, I believe, to turn metaphysician in a profound and serious way if he is not to be victimized by false emotions, as most of our contemporaries in at least a measure are; or if he is not to be, as Miss Bogan in some degree is, limited rather more than some of his more fortunate forefathers. Very few contemporary poets seem aware of the difficulty or seem willing to make the effort. I am thoroughly convinced that the effort need not be, as Mr. Allen Tate seems certain that it is, fruitless. The least -- and the most -- that one can demand of it is that it clear the air once and for all of a great deal of nonsensical doctrine and belief, along with the attendant feelings, and that it justify, and make it possible to assume with a measure of ease, a normal and more or less classical dignity or attitude toward human destiny and human experience, an attitude that at least SEEMS natural to Hardy but that is achieved by only a few contemporaries (Miss Bogan among them) and by most of them (Miss Bogan included) only with a good deal of effort, suspicion, and trembling. The means to this end may strike the innocent bystander as unjustifiably complicated, but it is still the only means that will accomplish the end in a thoroughly satisfactory fashion. The short cuts invariably end in bogs, and the avoidance of the labor ends either in bogs or in insecurity.

** COMMENT: This paragraph was written rather early in Winters's career, long before he became well-known as the cantankerous, heretical canon-maker of the New Criticism. His emphasis on the importance of reason and philosophy to poetry and all the literary arts is, however, distinct at this early stage. Winters believed that the practice of modern poetry resulted from faulty and often dangerous theories of human nature and reality. It is true that very few poets were aware of the difficulties that Winters perceived in modern thought, for they did not consider them difficulties -- and still don't (it might not need to be added). But for Winters the Romantic theory, which has reached its full fruition in modern literature, leads to false emotions -- emotions, as we have come to understand from other selections, that have no mooring in conceptual thought and are, therefore, out of balance with Reason and unjustified. Louise Bogan, as we have seen, was a poet whom Winters believed to have accidentally become a great poet. She was not given to deep metaphysical studies and her poetry only incidentally expresses any philosophical convictions, but she had the talent, in Winters's opinion, that led her to write great poems of classical dignity. It seems that she was rather more highly learned than Winters was willing to give her credit for, but that is a matter for further study in another venue. She is certainly well worth reading across her career, for Winters passed over many of her better poems in favor of a few he judged as great (though this was his practice with almost every poet he studied and criticized).

8/12 - On Cooper's Genius

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

Furthermore, the dichotomy of Good and Evil in Hawthorne is essentially so serious that the extreme concentration upon it which is implicit in allegorical simplification seems justified. The corresponding concepts in the field of manners, however -- the Genteel and the Vulgar -- appear at a considerable remove from the spiritual seriousness of the Good and the Evil; we can demonstrate certain imperfect relationships between the two pairs of concepts easily enough in a rational fashion, but the second pair is derivative and therefore inferior, and it is bound to be felt as inferior when perceived in action; so that a concentration by Cooper upon the second pair of abstractions comparable, though far less intense, to the concentration upon the first pair by Hawthorne, is certain in itself to create in some degree an atmosphere of priggishness. The vigor with which Cooper realizes at least a few characters and patterns of action, and the sense with which he leaves us when the books have long been read and laid away, of a rich and varied way of life, are sufficient evidence of the reality of his genius, for these ends are achieved in the face of obstacles.

** COMMENT: The distinction between morals and manners is a crucial concept in "Maule's Curse", Winters's study of the finest literature of 19th-century America. The lesser literature of the period concentrated upon Manners, the social mores that organize and control society and its members. The greater literature, such as Hawthorne's and Melville's, on the contrary, concentrates, in Winters's view, on Morals, the conflict between good and evil in the human condition. I must admit that despite this high praise from Winters on Cooper's novels of Manners, I have read very little in them. Cooper has sunk quite deep into obscurity in the past 100 years. Modernity has never had much regard for him, especially after Mark Twain, as I have mentioned before, famously and devastatingly ridiculed him in his famous essay on his style. The so-called Littepage novels, which Winters is discussing in this passage, have failed to draw me in. But it was highly unusual among critics even in the '30s to say any longer that Cooper had genius. Perhaps it is time to revive our interest in his work. Winters clearly held it in much higher regard than almost any other critic I have ever encountered, except, of course, Cooper specialists.

8/13 - On Metrical Basics

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

Now rhythm is in a measure expressive of emotion. If the poet, then, is endeavoring to make a statement in which rational understanding and emotion are properly related to each other, metrical language will be of the greatest advantage to him, for it will provide him with a means of qualifying his emotion more precisely than he could other wise do, of adjusting it more finely to the rational understanding which gives rise to it. The rational and emotional contents of the poem thus exist simultaneously, from moment to moment, in the poem; they are not distinct, but are separable only by analysis; the poet is not writing in language which was first conceptual and then emotionalized, nor in prose which has been metered; he is writing in poetical language. And the rhythm of the poem permeates the entire poem as pervasively as blood permeates the human body: remove it and you have a corpse. It is for this reason that the audible reading of poetry is quite as important as the philosophical understanding of poetry; without audible reading, and adequate audible reading, you simply do not have poetry.

** COMMENT: This essay is one of Winters's most important statements on the importance of meter to literature. Metrical language was, for Winters, a way of precisely refining one's thought and emotion and a way for readers to understand experience and to feel more accurately and deeply. But meter isn't something tacked on to conceptual thought, as though one could take a piece of Aquinas and versify it and have any hope of writing great poetry. No, using the techniques of verse, the poet writes with thought and emotion striding hand in hand as the poet explores his experiences. This is why so much of Winters's writings focus on metrics and the principles of diction and imagery: he considered them essential to the literary arts (I believe many of his metrical principles are transferable to prose, though much work still needs to be done in this vein). You will learn so much about writing poetry and prose by studying Winters's writings on metrics, if you give them some time. He was a master of this subject. His students, whatever their overall assessment of his critical theories, almost universally praised his ability to teach meter and poetic style. There has probably never been a greater critic of metrical language and the principles of verse. That has been admitted even by some of Winters's staunchest and most intractable opponents.

8/14 - On Precise Thought

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

The philosopher or the scientist endeavors as far as may be to employ only the denotative aspect of language; the poet employs the total content. But language as a tool of denotation has had a history in the occident which has not, so far as I can discover, had a parallel elsewhere in the world. Plato and Aristotle undertook the exploration of language as a medium of precise thought; they had their Greek predecessors -- Socrates and others earlier -- but these two men appear to have given western civilization its definitive character. Their work was continued with diminishing vigor in Athens until the closing of the philosophical schools in 529, and in Alexandria and elsewhere. But Rome had conquered the known world and Latin was becoming the universal language of the educated, and in fact had been the universal language in western Europe long before the closing of the schools.

** COMMENT: This is a key clarification of one of the main tenets of Winters's critical theory, what I have lightheartedly called "The Winters Creed". The literary arts endeavor to employ the "total" content of language, and this is what makes them so important and why they are taken so seriously by artists and readers alike (see yesterday's selection and comment). Why else, in Winters's view, would we read, say, Milton unless he was trying to significantly increase our understanding of human life? This seems unassailable, at least in my eyes, but most modern literature has thrown out the idea entirely, as Winters pointed out again and again. Language became a medium of precise thought in the West, and the poet, to be true to his medium and to build on a foundation of learning that goes back thousands of years, must use the conceptual features of the languages of Western civilization to their greatest effect to achieve greatness or even adequacy in his art. This, as you surely see by now, leads directly to the emphasis on intelligence and rational thought in the Winters Creed. To be great, any poem must endeavor to use language as a tool for understanding life and the world we inhabit, since it is a primary characteristic of the medium that the literary artist employs.

8/15 - On Thought in Modern Poetry

from a letter to PEARL ANDELSON SHERRY (1929) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

Your Letter to [Winters's wife] Janet is charming but nonsensical. We deny in the manifesto [to the "Gyroscope"] nothing that we practice and very little that you practice. You seem to be some sort of mysticised -- or mystified -- pantheist, and that I mildly deplore. Otherwise we agree in the main with your actual practices. You suffer, in general, from the blight that has enervated practically all of American letters this side of Robinson: sheer ignorance of everything even approaching the nature of abstract thought and a rather placid and complacent attitude toward your own ignorance. That manifesto is a summary of the commonplaces of the modern humanistic movement, which is merely a revival of the humanism of the past. Modern humanism holds the critical and philosophical field in an absolutely impregnable fashion. You had better get acquainted with it. I suggest Irving Babbitt's "Rousseau and Romanticism", Rene Lalou's "Defense de l'homme", Ramon Fernandez' "Messages" (in English), the works of Albert Thibaudet on Mallarme and Valery, Whitehead's "Science and the Modern World", and the essays of Allen Tate, in back numbers of the "Bookman", the "Nation", and the "New Republic".

** COMMENT: The "Gyroscope" was a small literary journal that Winters and others edited and published for just a year or two back at the beginning of the Depression. It was one of just a few editing jobs that Winters took during his career, even though, in my view, he probably should have spent a good deal more time at such jobs if he had wished to get the poets he was championing before the reading public. He might have done his theories and practices a lot of good in this way. Sherry was a minor poet whom both Winters and his wife Janet Lewis knew from their early days of marriage (Winters was 29 at the time this letter was written). Once again, notice that at this time, shortly after his "conversion" to traditional poetic forms and rational procedures, he was emphasizing the lack of thought and learning in poetry. This state of affairs has continued to the present day, of course, when all a poet need do is take in some strange experience and then write about it as though it were a dream. The "manifesto" Winters speaks of is an important short essay on the principles behind the "Gyroscope" that was published in the first issue. We have already had a selection or two from that essay. Finally, the list of books to read is an unusual one if you know Winters's formal essays well, for little that is mentioned here was mentioned in the essays. Babbitt was very important to Winters's understanding of and contempt for Romanticism, and he remains well worth reading to this day. Lalou and Fernandez I had never heard of until I read this letter. Whitehead seldom received any notice in Winters's published works, and Mallarme he considered a proto-modernist who, however brilliant his writing line to line, contributed to the breakdown of literature in the 20th century. Tate was still a regular correspondent at this time, and Winters had a high view of both his poetry and his critical prose. Winters even called Tate's work great on occasion. But he would change his judgment of Tate in the decades to come, and in the end he makes little mention of Tate in his most important writings. Tate's poetry and essays are not mentioned at all in his final book, "Forms of Discovery", which is the summation of his critical career and his final judgment on the literary matters he considered most important.

8/16 - On Wisdom and Knowledge - KP

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

We have seen the manner in which Adams demonstrated twentieth century multiplicity; and as I have already said, it seems to me pointless to invent difficulties in a universe in which irreduceable difficulties flourish. The philosophical problem, as I see it, is to define the various possible mysteries, and where choice is possible, to choose those which eliminate the greatest possible number of the remainder; and to keep as scientific, as Aristotelian, an eye as possible upon the conditions of our life as we actually find ourselves forced to live it, so that we may not make the mistake of choosing a mystery which shall, in proportion as it influences our actions, violate those conditions and lead to disaster. For example, a strictly deterministic philosophy, whether materialistic or pantheistic, and no matter how enticing the cosmology or theology from which it may derive, can lead only toward automatism in action, and automatism is madness. And similarly, a strictly nominalistic view of the universe can lead only to the confusion and paralysis reached by Adams; whereas a certain amount of understanding, small no doubt in the eye of God and of the philosopher, but very useful in itself, is actually possible. If we find that a theory violates our nature, we have then learned something about our nature; and we have learned that there is something wrong with the theory. When Dr. Johnson demonstrated the real existence of the wall by kicking it, he employed a philosophical argument far from subtle but absolutely unanswerable. The philosopher who needs further convincing may try driving his car against the wall, and at as high rate of speed as he may feel the ingenuity of his philosophy to require: he may, in this manner, learn something of the nature of absolute truth. Adams quotes Poincare as saying that it is meaningless to ask whether Euclidean geometry is true, but that it will remain more convenient than its rivals. I am no mathematician and can only guess what this means; but I surmise that it means that a bridge built by Euclidean geometry may conceivably stand, whereas one built by a rival system will certainly fall. If this is true, I should be willing to accept the fact as perhaps a Divine Revelation regarding the nature of the physical universe and as a strong recommendation for the study of Euclidean geometry.

** COMMENT: For Winters, life was full of difficulties, full to the brim, giving us all we could possibly handle, and just barely. This is why he feared "making mistakes" so much, and why he feared any theory of literature or any literary practice -- or philosophy or any field or system of ideas -- that contributes to our tendencies to make mistakes in understanding and solving our problems. He believed that various theories of literature actually violate the nature of the world and are, therefore, dangerous to our ability to handle the difficulties we face as a species. Philosophically, Henry Adams, in Winters's view of the matter, made a number of these violations, and his violations are rather similar to the literary theories that have greatly weakened modern poetry and fiction and drama. This passage contains a basic statement of Winters's pragmatic absolutism, a phrase that would perhaps have astounded and offended him. Winters's view of the truth and its foundation is, here, shown to be at bottom pragmatic: we adopt various theories because they are shown to work in the world we perceive. Though these pragmatic conclusions are not certain and must be regarded as approximations of the absolute truth, for Winters that truth must exist, according to all human experience and rational thought -- and all the teaching of the great philosophers of Western culture. There are many points, of course, that we could debate and controvert within this passage. That is for another venue. But it is an excellent passage in which to see clearly Winters's understanding of the importance and meaning of philosophy in life. Take it from me, for this passage does not reveal it, that this applies quite clearly to his literary theories and the seriousness with which he takes writing and reading. Our very lives depend on sound thinking in literature and philosophy. The poet must have a sound, rational understanding of these issues if he is to be a sound poet. Just for the record and to show that SOMEONE backs Winters and other "absolutists" on such ideas, I declare my full agreement with Winters on these ideas.

8/17 - On the Prose of "Moby Dick"

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

Since Milton there have been only two attempts at anything bearing any resemblance to epic by writers of real ability: "Moby Dick", and the "Cantos" of Ezra Pound. Melville used materials, characters, and states of mind more diverse than one can find in any of these works [the "classic" epics under discussion], and although I have not devised any accurate and rapid method of measurement, I suspect that the bulk of his work exceeds the bulk of any of them, save possibly that of "The Fairy Queen". He substituted prose for verse, and hence freed himself from the tyrannic overemphasis of materials proper only to prose. But after he had freed himself from the tyranny he often submitted to it: much of the writing is inflated even in the absence of any need for inflation. The prose often recalls, though most of the time it surpasses, the prose of the nineteenth-century translations of epic poetry; it sometimes recalls the prose of Shakespeare or even his verse; it sometimes recalls the prose of Dickens in his more ambitious passages. It is a curious medium, but it should have been flexible enough for most of the material had it been written with greater care. Though about a fourth of the book is very badly written, this proportion is not high if we compare it scrupulously with the other works which I have been discussing. The bad writing seems to be due less to the method which Melville selected than to his occasional attempts to emulate the defective aspects of the methods which he had rejected, and perhaps to mere carelessness and haste.

** COMMENT: Winters had highly praised Melville's novel many times in his earlier writings as perhaps the finest work in prose in world literature. Here, he seems to back away from his earlier judgment, at least a step or two. "Moby Dick" still stands high, no doubt -- certainly among the top five or ten greatest works of prose literature -- but Winters concedes what seems obvious: it has distinctive flaws. The immediate context of this discussion is the epic and why it has passed from use by literary artists, but since Melville's novel has the "feel" of an epic, as Winters argued elsewhere, he considers it when he takes up the subject of epic in this seminal essay. Winters seems by this time in his career to have judged that much of "Moby Dick" was written in unjustifiably "inflated" prose. The matching of style to subject matter was a key part of Winters's moral theory of literature and poetry, as we have seen in a number of selections. As always, Winters makes several highly insightful comments on Melville and his great prose. I consider the prose of "Moby Dick" to be some of the greatest writing in English (as did Winters), and I would be hard pressed to find those sections Winters considered "very bad". It is truly the equal of Shakespeare in all the key passages. Also, note the reference to Dickens. Winters mentioned him very seldom in his essays and conducted no study of his work, but here, as almost nowhere else in his writings, Winters implies that Dickens's prose is of the highest quality.

8/18 - On Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXVII

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

But something very strange occurs along the way. The imperceptible coming of wrinkles displays the physical invasion of the enemy, just as the imperceptible movement of the dial's shadow displays the constant movement of the enemy. In the ninth line, however, the enemy invades the mind, the center of being; it was the figure of the book which enabled the poet to extend the poem to this brilliant and terrifying suggestion, yet so far as the development of the theme is concerned, the extension occurs almost by the way, as if it were a casual and merely incidental feeling.

This command, in isolation, is merely a command to make good use of the book, and the remainder of the passage deals wholly with the advantage of doing so; yet the command follows the lines in which we have observed the destruction of the physical being by time, and in this position it suggests the destruction of the mind itself. This terrifying subject, the loss of identity before the uncontrollable invasion of the impersonal, is no sooner suggested than it is dropped.

COMMENT: It is a casual poem, Sonnet LXXVII, almost blithe or insouciant -- sad, too, but not despairing. In Winters's hands, however, the poem takes on almost unimaginable power. It would be a good exercise to look up this sonnet and give it a couple of reads. Let's do it:

The poem seen through Winters's eyes suddenly glows with danger and fear. Winters was a brilliant writer on such matters, and his sharp wit and precise style superbly illuminate dozens upon dozens of poems on all sorts of subjects throughout his writings, obscure works as well as famous. But this was a favorite topic for Winters, as it is for most poets -- death and the effects of the understanding of death on human experience. Winters seemed to have suffered a terrible fear of death. His emotions apparently ran extremely high when he considered his own demise. His poetry is focused on the matter as intensely as any written in the last 100 years. We all share his feelings to some degree, but Winters seemed to have experienced an existential dread at a depth I cannot reach. Perhaps I have become so secular and materialistic as to have finally left behind most of the fear of death. Though the sonnet contains the concept discussed here, Winters crystallizes Shakespeare's thought in such a way that this becomes one of the most memorable poems Winters ever scrutinized.

8/19 - On Forgiveness

The complete poem "THY BROTHER'S BLOOD", by Jones Very

** COMMENT: I consider this one of the greatest poems ever written in English. Who found it, and discerned its greatness? None but Yvor Winters. Making such discoveries is one of the great pleasures of reading him and one of the chief reasons to trust his judgment and study his theories carefully. Very was a buddy of R.W. Emerson back in 19th-century Boston. He was a Calvinist mystic, of sorts, but he had semi-heretical views on most theological matters. He wrote a truckload of poetry during his life, and little of it received public acclaim then or now. He wrote many sonnets. Many of them are as fine as this one. This one was one of the four poems of Very's that Winters hose for his Canon of the greatest poems. Why this one is so much greater than any of the dozens of others that seem just about as good -- well, I can't say I know or agree. The subject is profound and important, surely; the writing is controlled and impeccable, without question; the emotions are true and powerful. Perhaps Winters favored it because its theme is more easily understood in non-Christian terms. Of course, if you are not a Christian or drawn to Christian concepts, you must allegorize the thematic concepts of the total poem, but it delves with great understanding into a momentous human experience.

8/20 - On a New Generation of Poets

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

There is always the danger that such a list [of good poems] as I have made may seem nervous and niggling, but if it has called attention to a few poems that otherwise might be overlooked, it is justified; and even if it contains a good many errors of judgment, it nevertheless indicates fairly enough certain general tendencies which I wish to be indicated. If these writers are compared to the outstanding talents of the preceding generation, that is, of the generation immediately subsequent to that of Frost and Robinson, their common characteristics begin to appear. The leading experimentalists were Wallace Stevens, Adelaide Crapsey, W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and H.D. If one looks for less talents in this tradition, one will have difficulty finding them, for small talents had difficulty surviving in modes so formless; and if one looks to the traditional poets in this generation, such as the Benets, Elinor Wylie, and Miss Millay, one will find them a very unsatisfactory lot of easy rimers. Stevens alone of his generation did great work in the traditional forms, but he did it early, and became more and more an experimenter. The poets whom I have listed, however, are all moving toward traditional practices and not away from them. Most of them display a certain intellectualism in their way of dealing with their subjects, even when the subjects are essentially anti-intellectualistic.... There is a great deal of confusion of intention in these poets, both individually and collectively, but in general they are trying to recover what the preceding generation had lost; and in some of them, mainly the younger ones, there is a good deal of maturity, not only of style but of mind.

** COMMENT: Briefly considered in the list preceding these comments were some of Winters's students, some of the obscure poets that drew his attention (most of whom still remain obscure), and a few better-known poets like Tate and Ransom. As can be rather irritating to those who have no reason to agree with him, Winters's flip dismissals of such poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay can seem mean-spirited. She received no extended discussion in Winters's writings and was mentioned very seldom. Yet she is called an "easy rimer" without explanation or defense. It's interesting to note that Millay's reputation has risen quite high in the past few years. Winters was, as we know, striving for greater intellectualism in poetry, but almost no one on this list, not even Tate (whom he once appeared to judge great), finally produced a poem that Winters added to the Winters Canon. I think that at this time, in '43, Winters truly believed that his ideas were going to have some impact on the future of the literary arts and that the influence of Pound and Eliot would begin to diminish as Ransom and others of his ilk gained ascendancy in literary culture. None of this ever happened. We have a few isolated poets of intellect, but the emphasis on revery and the free rein of the emotions and story-telling in poetry and confessional solipsism has continued unabated since Winters wrote. Traditional practices have almost died away, except for a small tradition that seems to be descended from admirers of Robert Frost and, of course, the small group of professors and poets whom I call Wintersians.

8/21 - On the Miltonic Breakdown

from a footnote to the essay "ASPECTS OF THE SHORT POEM IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE" (1936, 1956, 1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"

The greatest defect of Renaissance poetry as a body is the narrow limitation of subjects and methods. In the later sonnets, Milton extended the subject matter into the realm of public (united with personal) morality, and the public aspect of this morality may have been responsible for the oratorical style, or, on the other hand, the oratorical style may have made the union possible. But the style, even of these sonnets, is symptomatic of Milton's great weakness. The weakness was continued and extended in the two centuries following, centuries in which new subjects as well as new methods were explored, but most often with disastrous results. The ultimate results of such exploration has been an enrichment of poetry as regards both subject and method; but this enrichment comes late and appears for the most part in American poetry. The enrichment is not Miltonic in aim or in quality; it results, rather, from a breakdown in traditional procedure which Milton inaugurated and which proceeded rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from the recovery from this breakdown.

** COMMENT: This brief passage from the conclusion of this essay presents an encapsulated description of Winters's theory of the development of the short poem in English. The culture enjoyed a period of great poetry in the Renaissance, which broke down around the time of Milton and in large part because of Milton; this was followed by a long period of waste and confusion; then literature ends in a second flowering of great poetry in America in the 20th century. Now, you surely must find this quite strange. It doesn't fit any well-known critical system or history of English Literature. No prominent critic comes even close to comprehending our literary history in this fashion. Well, you'll just have to study the matter if you wish to assess it fully, and perhaps you will come to accept it, as I do, after pondering it for many years. It is so radically different from everything an American liberal arts student is usually taught that it might feel dizzying. Strange to say, Winters was not frequently challenged on this historical theory, perhaps more because he was summarily dismissed and not bothered with than that there was no opposition. Also, the original essay on which this chapter was based has a small but high reputation among some critics, though it still receives very little attention or discussion.

8/22 - On Conclusions About Henry James

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

It is James himself, as I have abundantly indicated, who holds our attention so constantly on his defects of conception. As I have shown, he was so obsessed with the problem of moral judgment in its relation to character, that he not only constructed his plots so that they turned almost wholly on problems of ethical choice, but he sought to isolate the ethical problem as far as possible from all determining or qualifying elements, an effort which in any period would have led to difficulty, and which in his period would have been sufficient to dissolve in complete obscurity any talent save one of the greatest. As a result of this effort at isolation, he accomplished two secondary ends which have no bearing upon the value of his art as such: he focussed attention forever upon the problems of serious plotting, and in this respect he probably brought about the greatest single change in the practice of the novel ever effected by one man; and in addition he fixed imperishably the finest quality of American life of his period.

** COMMENT: These comments are from the final paragraph of Winters's intricate essay on Henry James. You see here that Winters's objections to James's art focus on the moral issues surrounding his themes. It is a complicated case that Winters makes in this essay, and it takes a deep knowledge of James's entire oeuvre to be able to evaluate it properly. I reach a slightly different and perhaps somewhat more favorable conclusion about James than Winters does, but there is no question that Winters considered James a brilliant novelist in many ways, perhaps ways too secondary, in his judgment, to allow him to classify James as one of our very greatest fictionists. Nonetheless, there is little question that Winters regarded the novels of Henry James as works of art that are extremely valuable to read and know well.

8/23 - On Doggerel, Conventions, Cliches

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

I venture to suspect that you have never gone through the 16th century song books, poem by poem, marking the good songs, the songs that show a fine variation of feeling worth saving, for future reference; that you have never gone over the volumes of early Tudor doggerel. It is by so doing that one learns something about poetry; you are doing it unwillingly now for your own age, and are surprised that you like so little. Most modern poetry (like most other poetry) is not conventional but cliché. Unless you have studied conventions -- and there are many conventions -- you will confuse the conventional with the cliché very often, and you will mistake the attempt to establish a new sort of convention for intrinsic superiority, for a new revelation. It is new revelations that you seem to be looking for. A poem like Tate's "Shadow and Shade" (in spite of the two outrageous revisions in the printed version) or like the sonnet on "Silence" which I quoted from [T. Sturge] Moore will stand beside the best work of any period. So will Frost's "Acquainted with the Night", or, within narrower scope, his "Spring Woods".

** COMMENT: Here is the Winters critical method clearly summarized, in this letter to the editor in chief of the "Hound & Horn", for which Winters was western editor for a couple years in the '30s. The method involves reading everything and marking the best poems and then winnowing them down to the very best and finally culling out the greatest. Winters was irritating to many of his readers because he is so severe and rigorous in his judgments. Why so few poems that can be called great? This method of winnowing literature down to the few greatest works seems antithetical to the modern spirit of criticism, which, as George Steiner once wrote, is to open up our vistas, to give us more and more to read that is beneficial or suggestive. Winters, on the other hand, considered almost all the poetry in every period to be at best third-rate. He was always looking for those very few "touchstones" that can inform our judgments of all literature, those very, very few almost perfect works of art that stand as standards of judgment over all the third- and fourth-rate junk that finds its way into the common anthologies. He thought modern poetry was filled with cliché, even though so few see it clearly. Finally, only one of the four poems mentioned here eventually made Winters's final cut for the Winters Canon. Tate's poem was seldom mentioned in his criticism again, and not one of Tate's poems made the Canon despite Winters's early insistence on their greatness and Tate's promise. Frost sank quite far in Winters's estimation over the next 15 years, until his essay on Frost condemned most of his work (though he praised it as the product of talent wasted). None of Frost's poems made the Canon. The incisive sonnet of Moore's did make the Canon and received critical attention from Winters throughout his career. It is a brilliant piece. The comparison of these four poems can instruct one quite deeply in Winters's critical theory and practice.

8/24 - On Originality

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

[Quoting Poe:] "The most exquisite pleasures grow dull in repetition. A strain of music enchants. Heard a second time, it pleases. Heard a tenth, it does not displease. We hear it a twentieth, and ask ourselves why we admired it. At the fiftieth it produces ennui, at the hundredth disgust."

Now I do not know what music most delighted Poe, unless perchance it may have been the melodies of Thomas Moore, but if I may be permitted to use exact numbers in the same figurative sense in which I conceive that Poe here used them, I am bound to say that my own experience with music differs profoundly. The trouble again is traceable to Poe's failure to understand the moral basis of art, to his view of art as a kind of stimulant, ingeniously concocted, which, if one is lucky, raise one to a moment of divine delusion. A Bach fugue or a Byrd mass moves us not primarily because of any originality it may display, but because of its sublimity as I have already defined the term. Rehearing can do no more than give us a fuller and more secure awareness of this quality. The same is true of "Paradise Lost". Poe fails to see that the originality of a poem lies not in the newness of the general theme -- for if it did, the possibilities of poetry would have been exhausted long before the time of Poe -- but in the quality of the personal intelligence, as that intelligence appears in the minutiae of style, in the defining limits of thought and of feeling, brought to the subject by the poet who writes of it. The originality, from Poe's point of view, of the subjects of such poems as "The Raven", "The Sleeper", and "Ulalume" would reside in the fantastic dramatic and scenic effects by means of which the subject of simple regret is concealed, diffused, and rendered ludicrous. From the same point of view, "Rose Aylmer" would necessarily be lacking in originality.

** COMMENT: In this seminal essay, Winters takes apart and throws away nearly every major critical principle Edgar Allen Poe defended passionately in his essays and followed assiduously in his jejune poetry. He is the one author in all of Winters's criticism who seems NOT worth reading after Winters has done with torn him, though Walt Whitman comes close. The specific idea that Winters attacks in this passage is a common one from Poe, and one that inspired a great deal of his childish doggerel (despite the obvious fact that Poe has continued to be read by educated men and women for more than 150 years and has been very highly regarded by many popular and professional critics ever since he wrote). Poe simply couldn't think straight, for whatever reason, though his prose demonstrates at times that he had some capacity for intelligence. As Winters makes clear, it is not in originality -- one of the thickest, toughest, and most tiresome clichés of criticism in our day -- that poetic or literary excellence is to be found. It is in understanding and intelligence. If you have long admired Poe, Winters's essay on him might be the place to begin with the study of the Winters critical theory. The essay in itself is a work of art.

8/25 - On Textbooks

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

... [C.S. Lewis's "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century"] is the work of a man who has read most (perhaps all) of the literature in the field, but who is competent to discuss only a small part of it professionally. One cannot understand and evaluate the book unless one has read most of the material discussed, and as far as reference is concerned, there are many books and articles of more limited scope which are far more helpful in connection with the matters which they treat. The book is, as I have said, misleading, and so is every other book of the kind which I have ever read. And within twenty years it will doubtless be superseded by another book on the same subject, which will be better in some ways and worse in others. The first-rate monograph, or the first-rate critical essay, is never superseded; it becomes a part of literature; but the text-book is a hugger-mugger affair, no matter who writes it. Lewis undertook a thankless task, and a hopeless one.

** COMMENT: As I have already mentioned a few times, one of the greatest achievements of Yvor Winters's career, one that has actually changed a few of the more prominent minds in modern literary studies, is his theory of the development of English Renaissance poetry. This achievement begins with the publication of his essay on the matter in "Poetry" in 1939. But not everyone had read or accepted Winters's theory, and C.S. Lewis would seem to have been one of these. In his textbook under review here, Lewis kept to the more common line. But Winters dismissed his work almost entirely, even though Lewis was extremely well read in the field. In Winters's mind, Lewis missed or entirely misunderstood the main themes and styles of the period, as mostly illustrated in his rejection of the Plain Style, which we have already had a number of quotes on during this Year with Winters. Once again, Winters seems to stand alone, as he thought at the time of this writing. But it is true that many of those who oppose him on just about everything he wrote have conceded that he has changed the course of the study of Renaissance poetry with his historical theories.

8/26 - On Sense Perceptions and Poetry

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

The associationist doctrines taught that all ideas arise from sensory perceptions, and gradually it came to be thought that all ideas could be expressed in terms of sensory perceptions, but this effort, as in Pound's "Cantos" or in much of Williams ("no ideas but in things"), was doomed to failure. The result is very often a situation in which the poet offers us, or seems to offer us, sense-perceptions for their own sake, and for the sake of whatever vague feelings they may evoke. This dissociation of the sense-perception and feeling on the one hand from conceptual understanding on the other finds it chief theorist in Mallarme, although Rimbaud and Verlaine are also such theorists. These three men are the most distinguished apologists form and practitioners of, deliberate obscurity. The reader may examine Rimbaud's "Larme" as a remarkably brilliant example of the practice.

** COMMENT: Most of the readers of this Year with Winters have become so accustomed to the sense-impression method of poetry that it has almost become the ONLY way to write poetry any longer. I've read many books on how to write poetry, and this doctrine as Winters describes it is taught in nearly all of them, and is invariably taught in the most popular and most widely used. Williams's Romantic ideas about "no ideas but in things" has become Gospel. Of course, as we have seen, Winters's whole career was the attempt to reconnect conceptual understanding and feeling in a rational and morally proper relationship.

8/27 - On the Experiments of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein

from the essay "THE EXTENSION AND REGENERATION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT" (1929) in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The psychological procedure [of modern novels] has gone further still. In the work of Miss Gertrude Stein the logical (syntactic) connections within the sentence have broken down; and in the latest work by Mr. Joyce, this disintegration has continued even into the word....

The actual phenomena under discussion as nearly as I can make out are these: The surrealists and others, including Miss Stein, proceeded with one aspect of the experiments of Mallarme, but substituted a very lax prose rhythm for the tense poetic rhythm and difficult rhymes of Mallarme, a substitution which involved another -- that of a purely passive state of mind for the taut and nervous intellectuality of the great Symbolist. The technical instrument, being therefore practically nil, and the mind entirely receptive, whatever comes into the head is set on paper and, because of the oath of the brotherhood or whatever it was, stands uncorrected. The actual poetic result so far as my own perceptions have been able to penetrate, is as shapeless as water spilt on the floor, and of about the same spiritual value. There is neither the genuine psychopathic hallucination of Rimbaud, or the dynamic control of Mallarme -- they have simply unbuttoned their spiritual vests and stretched out for a nap and called it mysticism.

** COMMENT: This selection makes a nice companion to yesterday's. The experiments of Mallarme and Rimbaud in French poetry, in Winters's view of the matter, inspired the prose experiments of Stein and Joyce. Winters judged that most of the experimental work of these fictionists was a further step in the disintegration of prose literature and modern thought, for all logic and reason had been washed away as they and others experimented with Mallarme's methods of pure sensation. As you probably realize, this method, under the enchantment of Joyce and Stein, has swept the world, and much literary, high-brow fiction is written now using similar non-rational methods and styles. Winters believed, as we see in his wonderful put-down of the results of the experimentation, that the work of Joyce and Stein in this vein was a waste of time and energy. Nevertheless, Joyce and Stein and their methods have continued to inspire and move readers for decades. The lack of control that Winters perceived, rightly, has been judged as artistic and profound by almost all readers and critics. To side with Winters on this point, you will have to swim against a powerful and still rising tide of opinion and taste.

8/28 - On Cooper's Ideals

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

If we except "The Watch-Witch", a minor but original masterpiece, not flawless, perhaps, but still a unit, we find Cooper to be essentially a man of fragments,; it is likely that the best part of him is in the fragments, moreover, and not in "The Water-Witch". He embodies a social ideal that in his own lifetime was so far gone in decay that his defense of it cost him his reputation, and that it may scarcely be said to have survived him to the extent of two decades. He displays at his best a rhetorical grandeur of a king cognate with his social ideals, but habitual rather than understood, and commonly collapsing for lack of support from his action; that is, he displays a great traditional moral sense corroded by the formulary romantic sentiment of his own period, and apparently with no realization that the two are incompatible.

** COMMENT: This is a small part of Winters's conclusion on the work of Fenimore Cooper. It sounds strange in our ears, so far has Cooper fallen in modern criticism. Nowadays, he seems little more than a bombast and a fool. But Winters found great insight in his delineation of the aristocratic ideals that he espoused but were already in decay in his lifetime. It might be time, at last, for us to return to Cooper and give his work another serious look. Perhaps we have come far enough from Twain's famous jocular condemnations to start reading him again with profit. Winters certainly thought we had much to learn from Cooper. "The Water-Witch", by the way, was Winters's choice as the best novel in Cooper. It remains a difficult and tortuous read. The language is splendid at times, but the turgid whole of it doesn't seem to hang together well enough to inspire deep reading. Perhaps we have simply come too far in our commitment to modern ideals of literary art to go back yet to this novel or Cooper's social novels. Similar fates have pulled other once monumental works of literature, such as the Italian epic of the Renaissance "Orlando Furioso", into inescapable obscurity. Perhaps this too shall be the eternal fate of Cooper's work.

8/29 - On Abstractions in Literature

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

For the past two hundred and fifty years it has been common to assume that abstract language is dead language, that poetry must depict particular actions, or if it be "lyric" that it must be revery over remembered sensory impressions, according to the formula of the associationists. But these assumptions are false. They are our heritage of confusion from Hobbes and Locke, by way of Addison, Hartley, and Alison -- and more recently by way of Ezra Pound. A race that has lost the capacity to handle abstractions with discretion and dignity may do well to confine itself to sensory impression, but our ancestors were more fortunate, and we ought to labor to regain what we have lost.

** COMMENT: This is third selection in the past few days on the general theme of employing sensory impressions as a foundation in the literary arts (see 8/26 and 8/27). Winters never flagged in his belief that abstract language is literary, or as we might say "aesthetically beautiful", to offer a phrase that he would not wholly have approved of. He never flagged in demanding that the finest poetry employ abstract, conceptual language to convey rational understandings of human experiences. Here and there in his essays, he opined that sermons and philosophical or hortatory essays can be considered art as much as any poem can, more, in fact, when compared to the mindless reveries of Pound, whose style and methods have spread like a pestilence through all the land. The ideas Winters is arguing against in this passage have actually become inviolable doctrines in modern literary practice and theory. It is high time they died out, and this Year with Winters is part of the effort to put them to rest.

8/30 - On Hatred of Scholars

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

A first-rate poet differs from his contemporaries (and I include those who think of themselves as literary contemporaries) not in being eccentric or less human, but in being more central, more human, more intelligent. But the difference in this respect between, let us say, a great poet and most distinguished scholars is very great, and few scholars are distinguished; and the scholar cannot recognize the difference and is scarcely prepared to admit the possibility of the difference, for he regards himself as a professional man of letters. To the scholar in question, the poet is wrong-headed and eccentric; and the scholar will usually tell him so. This is bad manners on the part of the scholar, but the scholar considers it good manners. If the poet, after some years of such experiences, loses his temper occasionally, he is immediately convicted of bad manners. The scholar often hates him (I am not exaggerating), or comes close to hating him; but if the poet returns hatred with hatred (and surely this is understandable), he is labeled as a vicious character, for, after all, he is a member of a very small minority group. The poet may become neurotic under such pressure; there is no comparable pressure on the scholar, and he usually remains normal.

** COMMENT: Though this discussion concerns several themes in the poetry of J.V. Cunningham, it is almost impossible not to read these words in light of Winters's own life and career as both poet and critic. One has to wonder about the origins of Winters's many condemnations of scholars during his career. I generally enjoy such speculation, though Winters abhorred it, so I will offer my opinion that it appears rather obvious that Winters's professional difficulties at Stanford University, where he spent his entire career after receiving his doctorate there, contributed to this gradual hardening against "scholars". What does he mean by this term? After much study of the matter, I conclude that he means professors of English or Literature or Liberal Arts or the Humanities, etc. Winters held them in greater and greater contempt during his career, and the reason seems clear that his contempt sprang from the way that professors and critics had misread and misunderstood him -- and, at times, hated him and his work. It is true that critics and professors and even other poets often accused Winters of all sorts of bad manners and crimes against his profession -- and sheer imbecility, to boot -- and not only for his critical views, but for his poetry. But Winters felt strongly that he had learning and skill far above the professors to judge poetry, mostly because he was a practicing poet and a great one. So Winters succumbed to a kind of neurosis, it seems, in the last 20 years of his life or so, as he himself hints in this passage. He was consumed with bitterness against his critical foes, who continued to assail him in print. (Still, it is important to note, Winters never received wide attention. He was never close to famous, even during his life, and was never showered with honors or essays or books of essays about his work. In fact, very little criticism of his work has been published since his death.) Winters simply couldn't find a way to convince the professors who reviled his work that they were not intelligent enough to understand or judge him and his critical theories and practices. I have to admit that I believe Winters is right, as might come as no surprise to those reading this Year with Winters. But the fact remains that his work continues to suffer in obscurity because of his "neuroses" and probably will never arise from that obscurity, despite Winters's own strange confidence that it would.

8/31 - On Didactic Poetry

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

Now if Poe had merely intended to exclude some of the unsatisfactory didactic poetry, let us say, of Longfellow or of Lowell, we should have very little complaint to make; however, these poets are bad not because they are didactic, but because they write badly, and because their didacticism is frequently unsound in conception, and because the lesson which they endeavor to teach is frequently connected only arbitrarily with their subjects. The didactic close of Bryant's great lyric, "To a Waterfowl", on the other hand, is merely explicit statement, and a fine statement, of the idea governing the poem, an idea inherent, but insufficiently obvious, in what has gone before, and it is foolish to object to it; and in the poetry of Samuel Johnson, of Dryden, and of Pope, as in Milton's sonnets, we have yet another form of didacticism, the loss of which would leave us vastly impoverished*. (*Winters Footnote: It is instructive to compare "To a Waterfowl" with "The Chambered Nautilus". Both follow the same rhetorical formula, but in Bryant's poem the "moral" is implicit throughout; in the poem by Holmes, it is a rhetorical imposition. The poem by Holmes is impressively written, notwithstanding; but it illustrates the more vulgar procedure.)

** COMMENT: This short passage and footnote are full of interesting and important insights into literature and Winters's thought. First, though many accused him of such (and though many continue to think of him as such), Winters did not believe, nor do I, that he was a didactic critic or poet. His explanations of his position throughout "In Defense of Reason" cover the matter admirably. Second, Bryant drew some interest from Winters early in his career, but gradually he had less and less to say about Bryant's work. In the end, none of Bryant's poems made the Winters Canon. Third, Johnson and Pope both sank in his estimation during his career, though a couple of pieces from Dryden made the Canon, which has always surprised me, for Winters had little to say about Dryden anywhere in his writings. Finally, finding the two poems of Bryant and Holmes will not be easy, but the comparison should be highly instructive for those wishing to pursue this matter more deeply. Oh, what the heck, I've looked them up for you and print them here. I could find a good deal to say both about the poems themselves and their relation to Winters's criticism, but I will forebear in the interests of time and space -- and let my readers make some discoveries on their own. These poems, though not at the summit of excellence, should be better known.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT'S "TO A WATERFOWL"

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES'S "THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS"