A YEAR with YVOR
WINTERS
September
Selection and Comments by Ben Kilpela
A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS Introduction
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
9/1 - On
from the essay "POETIC CONVENTION" in
"PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF
REASON"
II. EXPERIMENTAL POETRY endeavors to widen
the radical experience, or to alter it, or to get away
from it, by establishing abnormal conventions. In one sense or another Spenser,
Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Laforgue, and Rimbaud are
experimental poets of a very marked kind. The most striking example in English
of a convention of heightened intensity (that is, of what the unsympathetic
might call poetic strain) is to be found in "Paradise Lost". When the
poem does not achieve grandeur, it is grandiloquent; yet the
quality of the grandiloquence could have been achieved only by a master of the
highest order, and without it the poem could hardly have been
accomplished. As an act of invention, of daring experiment, the creation of
Miltonic blank verse, both meter and rhetoric, is not equaled in English
poetry; in fact one is tempted to wonder if it is
equaled in any other. The perils amid which
** COMMENT: Did you get a little eager to
hear just who Winters thought was the wildest
experimenter in English poetry? And how much did it
surprise you to read that he named
9/2 - On Prose
from the essay "PROBLEMS FOR THE MODERN CRITIC OF
LITERATURE" (1956) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"
Verse is metric or measured language. The
measure controls the rhythm, and provides precision of rhythm. The resulting
rhythm is more expressive of emotion than is the relatively loose rhythm of
prose. That is, verse can express a stronger emotion than prose, and, within
the limits proper to it, can express emotion more precisely than prose, even if
the emotion is not strong. But it has a different
range of emotion than that of prose: the total range of verse is higher,
although the two ranges overlap perhaps half of the time. Thus
there are subjects which verse can treat with greater power than prose; there
are many subjects which verse can treat with greater precision than prose; but
there are many subjects which prose can treat with propriety and which verse
cannot treat without a somewhat embarrassing exaggeration. The
problem with any particular work in hand is to decide which of the two mediums
will be more effective the greater part of the time and in general: the
decision may be far from an easy one, but one should never forget that the
power of truly great prose is far from contemptible -- the fact is, that truly
great prose is great, although we have not seen much prose of this kind in the
past one hundred years.
** COMMENT: Winters never in his career went
on to create the Winters Canon of the great prose works that this passage
suggests he considered, at least, possible. We can derive his prose Canon,
tentatively, from comments sprinkled throughout his essays, but there can be no
firm confidence of his judgments in this matter. It is clear, notwithstanding,
that Winters granted prose literature a nearly equal
status to poetry among the literary genres, though he did consider poetry the
most effective way to present a rational understanding of the most important
human experiences and also conveys the proper emotions attendant on that
rational understanding. Also clearly, Winters had
little regard for much of the prose of fiction written in the last half of the
19th century and the first half of the 20th century, as he here says. Though he
praised Henry James highly at times, there was no one else he thought worthy of
mention for excellence (it is not easy to guess how well read Winters was in fiction from his essays and letters). I
believe that in the area of prose literature Wintersians
have an excellent opportunity to build on Winters's
theories where he left off, create a Winters Canon in fiction, and more fully
define excellence in prose in accord with Winters's theories.
9/3 - On Modern Famous Poets
from the essay "THE SENTIMENTAL-ROMANTIC DECADENCE OF
THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES" (1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"
Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Miss
Moore, Mina Loy, Williams, Hart Crane, Allen Tate were all dominated by the
doctrines [of association and Romanticism] which destroyed the poets whom I
have been discussing [Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc.]. And
in fact these doctrines destroyed or severely damaged the poets whom I have
just named: of this list, Stevens alone wrote a few great poems; for the rest,
these are the great eccentrics of our time, but eccentric for eccentric I would
rather read the Pound of the early "Cantos" than the Spenser of
"The Fairie Queene".
I have written at length about most of these poets and stated that their faults
are serious, and I am not now recanting; but these poets are all better than any of the "great" poets to whom I have objected in
this essay.
** COMMENT: It is little wonder that Winters's last book "Forms of Discovery" has been
rebuked for being much harsher than his heretical and unquestionably abrasive
earlier writings. In this passage, he reserves only for Stevens the judgment of
greatness -- even though Williams has a number of poems that made the Winters
Canon (a strange choice, I contend); though Tate was once regarded by Winters
as having written near-great poems; and though the now obscure Mina Loy has two
poems that made the Canon. But Winters is willing to grant them a touch of
faint praise by saying that he'd rather read Pound than Spenser, which, to my
eyes, is a very curious choice considering all the time he spent railing
against the destruction wrought by Pound's associationist
doctrines and methods on modern verse. There is a definite note of sadness in
this passage, for Winters believed that writers in the
modern period have failed to make of the most of their talents because the
dominant Romantic culture lacked the intellectual resources to let them take
good advantage of those talents. This judgment, my readers, is why Winters took criticism and intellectual debate so seriously.
He believed that intellectual errors and critical ignorance caused the waste of
far too much genius. He hoped, I believe, to keep it from happening in the
future. His hopes have so far been completely dashed.
9/4 - On Judgement
in Fiction
from the essay "MAULE'S WELL OR HENRY JAMES AND THE
RELATION OF MANNERS TO MORALS" in "MAULE'S CURSE (1938) "IN
DEFENSE OF REASON"
The result of this
uncertainty [that is brought about in reading James's novel "The Spoils of
Poynton"] is that we do not have a tragic moral
victory, in which the protagonist judges, makes a sacrifice, and saves her
soul; nor do we have a tragic defeat, in which she makes an unjustified choice
and is judged by the author -- that is, suffers the consequences. We have rather an intense situation, developed with
the utmost care, so far as the succeeding facts and states of mind are
concerned, but remaining at nearly all times and certainly at the end uncertain
as to significance. Fleda's attitude is never
resolved; nor is ours; but the experience has been intense, and as we have not
understood it, we cannot but feel it to be essentially neurotic and somewhat
beyond the margin of the intelligible.
** COMMENT: Winters here seems to be lending
his support to the ancient Aristotelian notion that the outcome of the plot is
the means by which the author makes his judgment on the action of the plot. He
is never perfectly clear in his writings that he approves of this theory, but
he does hint at his approval a number of times in his essays. It is a classical
attitude toward fiction and drama, one that has fallen far from favor in our
age, this old idea of poetic justice. Following James and
others, the fiction plots of our best writers are routinely left unresolved, as
James left his concerning Fleda Vetch.
Nowadays, of course, it is bad form and manners for an author to make a
judgment of his material by almost any means or to try to attach any clear
significance whatsoever on his story, a general position clearly antithetical
to Winters insistence on the moral judgment found in
the finest literary artworks. It is high time we followed Winters's
advice in this matter and started writing fiction that resolves the author's
attitude toward his action and his characters and gives his readers the means
to resolve their judgments toward the author's judgment, which is the first and
primary business of criticism.
9/5 - On the Single Electric Shock
from a letter to ALLEN TATE (1927) in "SELECTED
LETTERS"
My belief is that it is possible to touch
certain obvious physical facts of existence in such a way as to invoke -- or
evoke -- or expose -- as by one single electric shock an entire existence or
phase of existence. Emily Dickinson does this for me in such a poem as
"The last night that she lived," or Hardy in "The Darkling
Thrush", Williams in the first poem in "Spring and All", or, in
[the book] "Sour Grapes" [the poem] "To Waken an Old Lady".
This is what I am endeavoring to do. It is more exciting to me than whole
libraries of Pounds, Eliots, or even Rimbauds. Perhaps I am all wrong. If there is any
perfection in [my] poems it is, I fear, the product of labor rather than
dexterity. It is only recently -- in the stuff I sent [Paul] Rosenfeld ["American
Caravan"] -- that I have felt myself to move neatly and freely. Th rest is an infinitely slow and painful accretion -- I
cannot begin to tell you how painful -- sheer agony.
** COMMENT: This letter was
written during the life-changing transition in Yvor
Winters's career, when he was discarding imagist techniques and adopting
traditional literary concepts and techniques. At the time, he was still writing
imagist poems in free verse, and these poems have almost exactly the quality
that he speaks of: the invoking of existence. Only "The Darkling
Thrush" among those poems mentioned sank very far in Winters's
estimation during his mature career, and that one poem he considered, though
not great, very fine. To the end of his days, Winters,
in a different way, esteemed and lauded poetry that fanned this shock of
insight into flame. Though we have seen that he later defended Reason and
traditional structures in literature, he never wandered far from his belief
that the finest writing exposes existence as Williams's
poems do. It is also most important to note that this exposing was a matter of
slow and difficult work, which was how Winters
approached all writing, traditional or otherwise. He did not produce much
poetry, or criticism, and he was suspicious of those who wrote a lot.
9/6 - On Emily Dickinson and Post-Symbolism
from the essay "THE POST-SYMBOLIST METHODS"
(1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"
The point which I wish to
make is this: in the best lines [of Emily Dickinson's poetry]
sense-perception and concept are simultaneous; there is neither ornament nor
explanation, and neither is needed. This is the new kind of imagery
which I am trying to demonstrate in this chapter. In the progress from
stanza to stanza there is no trace of associationism,
controlled or other, and this is true of most of [Dickinson's] poems. We
usually have... a straight narrative order or a simple expository order. The
poem ["Twas warm at first"] is crude, but
at its best moments very great; in comparison, the poems which I treated in my
third chapter are trivial (poems by Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc.], even the
best of them. Miss Dickinson often writes badly, but she sometimes writes
perfectly.... Most of the poets whom I treated in my third chapter never
suspected the nature of good writing.
** COMMENT: Emily Dickinson is a curious case
in the career of Yvor Winters, as I have already had
occasion to discuss. Winters believed that she, almost miraculously,
independent of any influences, developed a "post-symbolist" style in
her poetry, this Wintersian uniting of sense and
thought, as here mentioned. To restate the matter
briefly, Post-Symbolism is the describing of scenes or actions in such a way
that a rational argument is being made simultaneously; it is a method similar
to allegory or parable in many ways (use ctrl-f to search on the key word
"post-symbolism" to find more about the style in this Year with
Winters). It is curious that Dickinson has remained popular and even adored
throughout the modern period, for her methods, as Winters makes abundantly
clear in his writings on her work, are not in any way associated with modern
poetic experiments and movements -- nor does anyone write or even try to write
like her any longer.
9/7 - On Passion
the complete Winters poem "QUOD TEGIT OMNIA"
Earth darkens and is beaded
with a sweat of
bushes and
the bear comes
forth;
the mind, stored
with
magnificence, proceeds
into
the mysterv of time, now
certain of its
choice of
passion, but
uncertain of the
passion's end.
When
Plato temporizes on the nature
of the plumage of the Soul, the
wind hums in the
feathers as
across a cord
impeccable in
tautness but of no
mind:
Time,
the sine-pondere, most
imperturbable of elements,
assumes its own
proportions
silently, of its own
properties --
an excellence at which one
sighs.
Adventurer in
living fact, the
poet
mounts into the
spring,
upon his tongue
the taste of
air becoming
body: is
embedded in this
crystalline
precipitate of time.
** COMMENT: This is a transitional poem in Winters's career. It was written at the time Winters was beginning to cross over from free-verse
experimental techniques and imagism to traditional structures and rational
literary procedures. I will not offer an interpretation of the work, which
co-editor Ken Fields chose for inclusion in the special Winters Canon collected
at the end of Winters's life in "Quest for
Reality". It has never moved me deeply, and I do not consider it great,
though perhaps I lack the skill and knowledge to understand it sufficiently.
You can see the character of Winters's late free-verse
technique in this poem. It is a dense, charged, abstract medium that is intended to bear massive amounts of rational meaning on
highly serious subjects: time, passion, experience, emotion. These are subjects
that do not particularly interest me, at least in the highly abstract and
general sense they are studied in this piece. I remain
mostly unmoved by this poem, which has been anthologized
on occasion.
9/8 - On the Fragmentariness of Modern
Fiction
from the essay "JOHN CROWE RANSOM OR THUNDER WITHOUT
GOD" in "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943) republished in "IN
DEFENSE OF REASON"
[Quoting John Crowe
Ransom:] "Long ago Mr.
Richards laid down a canon of relevance: Anything is relevant to the total
meaning which belongs to the psychological situation. The canon might as well read: Anything is relevant.... Yet Joyce's book
["Finnegan's Wake"] is on the side of the angels, and I do not like
to abuse it. For the poets it is sure to become an inexhaustible source of
courage. It shows at most places how to escape from conceptual prose, and into
the contingent world; a difficulty that most poets seem unable to
surmount."
Ransom apparently has faint doubts about the
propriety of the method which he is describing; but
they are faint indeed; he would prefer the risk of having no conceptual content
to the risk of having too much: and quite rightly from his own point of view. If the method here described, however, represents the infinity
toward which true poetry should draw as near as possible without ever quite
reaching it, and if his concept of poetry rests, as Ransom frequently assures
us, upon a study of traditional English poetry and a deep sympathy for it, one
cannot but feel that something has gone wrong in the study.... And one is inclined to wonder at this point what has become
of the unique object. The only object left to us now is the
universe, and the universe is so chaotic that it can scarcely be called unique
with any real sense of security; and the work of art, which in spite of
Ransom's having expressed dislike for the theory, is a perfect illustration of
the doctrine of expressive form, is merely a shapeless conglomeration of
supposedly unique fragments. This, however, is what one would expect of
a work of art of which the essential characteristic is
described as a tissue of irrelevancies, and of which the function is
pure imitation in a nominalistic universe.
** COMMENT: If you are going to stick with
and profit from the study of the ideas of Yvor
Winters, you are going to have to accept this basic judgment that the fad of
dream-like experimental writing in modern literature is mostly a pernicious
mistake. Though Ransom himself did not study such experimental writings or lend
much approval to them in his criticism, he could not bring himself to reject
them as poorly written or morally worthless. Winters had no such qualms, and he
attacks Ransom's weak, half-hearted defense of the late Joyce and the influence
his work had on the direction literature has taken. Nonetheless,
most fiction has continued to be written during the last 100 years much as it
was at the end of the golden past that Winters approved of: with a strong
emphasis on chronological narrative, though nowadays, under the influence of
Joyce and others, writers refuse to offer a final authorial judgment of their
stories and provide a deeply interior outlook on their characters. What
I am saying is that Joyce was not alone in inaugurating a wide revolution with
his experiments and neither have those who have defended the artistic value of
his work. Modern fiction does not seem, to me, to be written
in meaningless fragments. More often, what is weak about modern fiction is that
it is written without the intent to judge rationally
the stories and characters that it puts before us (see 9/4 for further insight
into this matter).
9/9 - On Incidentals
from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLY
HOPKINS" (1948) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"
"Duns Scotus's
Yet
ah! This
air I gather and I release
He lived on;
these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who
of all men most sways my spirit to peace;
Of reality the
rarest veined unraveler; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival
Who fired
This is the climax and the point of the poem,
yet it is obviously very weak. We are told that Scotus
is the one "who of all men most sways my spirit to peace"; yet we are
not told how he does it nor why. We are told that he is "of reality the
rarest veined unravaler; a not/ Rivalled
insight", yet these are empty epithets, and the subject of the poem,
properly speaking, is merely mentioned sentimentally and is not defined or
developed. It is as if one should say: "This is a
magnificent landscape," or "this is a great man," or "this
is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen." What we have is stereotyped
assertion, which we are supposed to take seriously, but which we cannot take seriously
for lack of definition and perceptual evidence....
** COMMENT: This particular poem is a popular
one among our leading critics. It is anthologized
often and has drawn a good deal of comment from those drawn to
9/10 - On Two Great Literary Periods
from the essay "CONCLUSIONS" (1967) in
"FORMS OF DISCOVERY"
Before my retirement
I taught both periods [Renaissance and modern poetry] for many years, and, as a
result of almost endless reconsideration of the materials in both periods, I
have come to the conclusion that the second is certainly the greater. The
subjects of the Renaissance are in the main sound and important, but they are
few and formulary; the methods employed are sound but simple and formulary; in
spite of one's admiration for the best work, one comes to feel a deadly
monotony in the period. The moderns to whom I have referred in this volume as
eccentrics have their own monotony; each of these concentrates on a personal
mannerism, on what the modern politician would call a particular public image;
their ideas are few, unoriginal, and unsound; but they are experimenting with
their styles and in different directions and they have their interesting
moments. And of course a few of them escaped from
their mannerisms on a few occasions into fine achievements.
** COMMENT: That Winters considered modern
poetry greater than Renaissance poetry comes as a surprise to those few who
even know of his views. He has been accused numerous
times of wishing that modernity would simply wither to dust and we could all
get back to writing Shakespearean sonnets. But as his
career progressed, it seems that he became more and more sure that the modern
period produced the greater poetry, even though it also produced a mountain of
junk. Of course, we must not lose sight of what poetry Winters
considered great in modernity. Most of it, as we have seen from many other
passages, was little known and undervalued by almost all
prominent critics. Lastly, note that in regard to
the major modern poets, whom Winters condemned repeatedly in his essays, he is
willing to grant that they have "interesting moments". That does not
constitute an endorsement of such "eccentrics" as Eliot, Pound, and
Frost, but he did believe that they could "write", as he put it
himself, meaning, I surmise, that they had facility with words and images.
9/11 - On Imagic
Values in Poetry
from the review "
If we confine ourselves to those poets who
are masters of the minutiae of style, rhythm, and outline, that poem will be
most intense which most fully exhausts the possibilities of the medium -- that
is, which contains the greatest possible imagic and
symbolic intensity. It is possible, of course, that a
poem of very great symbolic intensity may outweigh a poem of slighter symbolic
intensity and slight imagic intensity, but it is
certain that the first poem would be greater with imagic
values. It is worth observing in this connection that the metaphysical can
attain imagic existence and hence the greatest
possible intensity only when expressed in terms of the physical,
and this transference of the metaphysical into physical terms is one of Miss
Moore's most noteworthy achievements.
** COMMENT: This passage comes from an
article that appeared some years before Yvor Winters
began using traditional poetic forms and structures and while he was still
committed to free-verse imagism. Winters never left some of the central
concepts of imagism entirely behind and remained committed throughout his
career to the imagic and symbolic intensity of
poetry. Some time after this was written, he came to
believe that the greatest literature presents rational content in concentrated
form and offers the use of the devices of rhetoric and language to convey the
emotion proper to a rational comprehension of a human experience. Even later in
his career, he began to systematize his early ideas about post-symbolist
poetry, which is a style that uses natural description and images to express
rational thought, an idea which is expressed in early form in those last
comments on Marianne Moore's poetry. In general, though it might seem so on the
surface, there was not as great a disconnection between Winters's
two phases of literary development as has been supposed. Note also how Winters is thinking about ways to evaluate
intensity, critical tools that he employs throughout his career, as we have
seen clearly during this Year with Winters. Nonetheless, Winters
entirely rejected the ideas expressed in that final sentence and came to
expound his belief that abstract language is as artistic as concrete language.
9/12 - On Melville's Portrait of Evil
from the essay "HERMAN MELVILLE OR THE PROBLEMS OF
MORAL NAVIGATION" in "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in
"IN DEFENSE OF REASON"
The subject matter of the first two of the
later masterpieces may be briefly defined: In "Benito Cereno",
the Spanish sea-captain of that name takes
insufficient precautions in the transporting of a ship-load of negro slaves
belonging to a friend; the slaves mutiny, kill most of the crew, and enslave
the remainder, including the captain. When Cereno is finally rescued by
Captain Delano, he is broken in spirit, and says that he can return home
but to die. When Captain Delano inquires what has cast such a shadow upon him,
he answers, "The negro." His reply in Spanish would have signified
not only the negro, or the black man, but by
metaphorical extension the basic evil in human nature. The morality of slavery
is not an issue in this story; the issue is this, that through a series of acts
of performance and of negligence, the fundamental evil of a group of men, evil which normally should have been kept in abeyance, was
freed to act. The story is a portrait of evil in action, as shown in the negroes, and of the effect of the action, as shown in Cereno. It is appalling in its completeness, in its subtle
horror, and in its silky quiet.
** COMMENT: Winters considered Melville's novella
one of the finest works of prose literature of all time. His interpretation of
the work is incisive and compelling, and this passage is typical of his
approach to analyzing specific works of both poetry and prose throughout his
essays. Only for the very finest or highly illustrative works does he take the
time to do more than this -- a quick overview of his interpretation followed by
a summary evaluation. My view is that the novella is probably a touch
over-rated. There are much better works, even though it is unquestionably a
fine and profound literary artwork. Whether it is one of our greatest prose
works remains an open question in my mind for a variety of reasons.
9/13 - On Robinson's Intellect
from the chapter "THE NEW ENGLAND BACKGROUND"
from "EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON" (1946)
Emerson gave to American romanticism, in
spite of its irresponsible doctrine, a religious tone which
it has not yet lost and which has often proved disastrous. He gave, also, a
kind of moral and religious sanction to mere eccentricity, to self-satisfaction
and to critical laziness. The type of mind which follows its first guesses in
matters of opinion and perception, with irritated contempt for opposing
arguments, and which finds any kind of careful thinking beneath the dignity of
a gentleman, is his legitimate heir and can find explicit justification in his
writings. This kind of mind is common in modern New England
(and no doubt elsewhere); and commingled with the New England moral sense and
moral curiosity, there is a good deal of this intellectual laziness in
Robinson; and as a result of this laziness, there is a certain admixture of Emersonian doctrine, which runs counter to the principles
governing most of his work and the best of it. This tendency does not
result in stylistic eccentricity in Robinson, as it does, for example, in much
of Emerson and Frost; but it results in loose thinking and in a good many
failures of structure. It is the moralistic tradition which
predominates in Robinson, however; in the choice of matter, this shows itself
in the moral curiosity with regard to the particular case; in the realm of
style, in honesty of statement and clarity of form; in the conduct of life, in
immutable adherence to a purpose.
** COMMENT: This is our first selection from Winters's only book-length study of a single poet. I do not
believe that we should draw any conclusion about Winters's
view of Robinson from his decision to pay Robinson the honor of being the
subject of such a book, for I believe Winters wrote the book simply at the
request of an editor for money. He did believe that Robinson was a great poet
and had written a number of great poems (several of which made the Winters
Canon), but he certainly did not consider Robinson the only poet worthy of a
book. I personally consider it a great loss that Winters
did not write more such books, but, alas, he considered himself a poet and
teacher first, and turned to criticism only to secure his academic post and to
help rescue literature from modernist Romanticism. One would hardly know the
high regard Winters had for Robinson from this
passage, or from most of the book for that matter. Once again, Winters lays Robinson's weaknesses mostly at the feet of
Emerson, his continual whipping boy for the damage Romanticism has done, in
Winters's opinion, to modern literature. Note how Winters ties life and
literature together in his final description of the work of Robinson. That bond
is central to his critical theory and practice.
9/14 - On Donne's Struggles
from the "INTRODUCTION" (1967) to "FORMS OF
DISCOVERY"
The previous stanzas [of John Donne's poem
"A Valediction of My Name, in the Window"], in the course of the
poet's intense efforts to hold the lady in his warnings, have identified the
poet with his name, the identification culminating in images drawn from the
doctrine of the resurrection of the body and from astrology. We are thus
prepared to watch the suffering of the "trembling name"; this stanza
is the climax of the poem. In the three final stanzas the poem is brought to a
quiet but embittered close.
This poem exhibits more fully than any other
Donne's desire for a stable love, his fear of betrayal, and a kind of
sublimation of his excessive sexuality. He gives us the feeling that he is
endeavoring to master his problem through an enormous act of the will operating
through an equally enormous act of the intellect. The engraved name, the
possession of the lady in his absence, become real, in
part, because of the effort made before our eyes to make them real, though we,
like the poet, are aware that the effort is toward something transcending human
power and cannot wholly succeed. The immensity of the effort, the illusion that
it can exert real power, the awareness that it cannot exert enough power or
cannot exert power which is quite real, these in
combination result in moving poetry.
** COMMENT: What has commonly come to be
called "metaphysical" poetry Winters
considered, mostly, a manifestation of decay in the literature of the English
Renaissance. This brand of poetry, of course, usually forms the core of
teaching on this period, and it seems clear that most critics and professors
consider it to be the finest poetry written in the
period. Winters rejected that implicit judgment (contrary to most critics, he
made his judgments concerning the Canon explicit and, most importantly,
endeavored to defend them with sound reasoning). But
one metaphysical poem did manage to make the special Winters Canon of the
greatest poems ever written, and this is the poem under discussion here. It is
a difficult poem, and in many ways it is out of step
with most of the work Winters chose to include in his Canon. It seems that in
this one poem Donne's technique of using extravagant metaphors and images and
rhetorical devices fit the theme so well that Winters
granted that he had achieved greatness. The important thing to note is how, I
believe, Winters's discussion of the poem makes one
thirst to read it and know it well. This is one of the great pleasures of
reading Winters's criticism. Moreover, Winters believed that all of life was an immense struggle of
will and intellect to gain control in one's life, fashion one's moral
decisions, and shape one's actions. This is why he pays such close attention to
the poem, for it embodies Donne's understanding of a key concept of morality.
9/15 - On the Art of Show Dogs
from a letter to HARRY DUNCAN (1950) in "SELECTED
LETTERS"
You seem to resent my Airedales especially.
Why, in God's name, should you resent my enjoying the company of five of God's
most charming little creatures? Breeding and showing Airedales is a minor art; quite as much so as making fine furniture or making fine
books. You may not realize this, but that is doubtless because of your
ignorance of animals. I have two dogs on the place who
are beautiful to watch in every movement and position and I have two others who
are almost as fascinating; and the fifth is not bad. I would rather have these
dogs than, say, masterpieces of furniture or silver -- as works of art they are
quite as admirable and quite as serious and much more to my taste.
** COMMENT: This letter was occasioned by Winters's mild dispute with a book-maker, and this piece is
one of several exchanged with
9/16 - On the Dangers of Our Philosophies
from the essay "WALLACE STEVENS OR THE HEDONIST'S
PROGRESS" from "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943) republished in
"IN DEFENSE OF REASON"
There appears to be in the best of [Wallace Stevens's] early poems, as I have said, a traditional
seriousness of attitude and a traditional rhetoric cognate with that attitude
and precisely expressive of it. This traditional element in the early work
enables Stevens' talent to function at its highest power; but it is not only
unjustified and unsupported by Stevens' explicit philosophy, it is at odds with
that philosophy. And the conflict between the
traditional element and the element encouraged by the philosophy results little
by little in the destruction of the traditional element and the degradation of
the poet's style. It is extremely important that we understand Stevens for more
reasons than one; he has written great poems, and we should know them and know
why they are great; and we should know what is bad, and why it is bad, so that
we may separate the bad from the good and the more surely preserve the good. But beyond this, he gives us, I believe, the most perfect
laboratory of hedonism to be found in literature. He is not like those
occasional poets of the Renaissance who appear in some measure to be influenced
by a pagan philosophy, but who in reality take it up as a literary diversion at
the same time that they are beneath the surface immovably Christian. Stevens is released from all the restraints of Christianity, and is
encouraged by the modern orthodoxy of Romanticism: his hedonism is so fused
with Romanticism as to be merely an elegant variation on that somewhat
inelegant System of Thoughtlessness.
** COMMENT: The passage reveals two central
propositions of Yvor Winters's critical system. First, he reiterates that the purpose of setting canons is to be
able to decipher good works from weak and bad one (I believe, as some have not
realized, that Winters knew there was a large gray area in between these two
extremes, between the excellent and the worthless) and to preserve the good
ones and use them as our models. As we have seen, Winters's
entire critical career was dedicated first to this great task of uncovering and
preserving the very finest of our heritage. It is a gross misconception of his
theory that no poem that failed to make his Winters Canon was worthless. That
special Canon and his critical writings are intended
to show what is near perfect, more or less, to explain why it is near perfect,
to offer those artworks as models, and to encourage readers to pay more
attention to the most nearly perfect poems written in English than any other
literary artworks. Second, the passage speaks about why Winters
took this endeavor so seriously: because the stakes in life are very high. Stevens
work (and, in Winters's judgment, perhaps his life)
was ruined by the Romantic "System of Thoughtlessness" he adopted --
perhaps naively, perhaps ignorantly, perhaps willfully -- as his understanding
of life and art. As a consequence, his considerable
talent was, in Winters's view, wasted on almost all his later and very weak
poetry. Stevens is a cautionary tale, and Winters had
a number of such exempla that he turned to more than once. Hart Crane's career,
for example, was another cautionary tale, as we have had numerous occasions to
discuss. The choosing of a bad philosophical system, is, therefore, highly
dangerous to one's art and life. I agree with Winters
for the most part on this matter as it applies to Stevens, though I do have
reservations about how badly his philosophy damaged his later work.
9/17 - On Imperfect Understanding
from the essay "PROBLEMS FOR THE MODERN CRITIC OF
LITERATURE" (1956) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"
A novelist would be able to write about
Macbeth and his state of mind [in the famous dagger scene, Act II Scene I], and
would thus have an advantage over the dramatist, who must exhibit Macbeth's
state of mind in words in some sense appropriate to Macbeth in that state of
mind. The novelist could employ the best prose of which he might be capable;
the poet cannot employ the best poetry of which he is capable, for such poetry
would be out of character -- such poetry has to wait until later, when Macbeth
has been educated up to the point at which he can speak it plausibly. Yet this
is not a minor and quiet situation [the scene with the dagger], such as a
novelist, or perhaps Chaucer, might exhibit in a quiet and unobtrusive style as
a necessary step toward reaching more important matters. It is a major crisis
in the life of Macbeth, and his feelings and terribly aroused, in spite of the
fact that his understanding is imperfect. The situation calls for powerful
statement; but the statement must be made by an imperfect
intelligence.
** COMMENT: Though Winters's ideas about
discerning the best genre of literature, which are laid out
in this long essay, have found very few convinced adherents, there is
something, to my mind, amazingly insightful about this analysis of one famous
speech of one great play. The author of the play had to write at lower than the
finest level out of necessity, constrained by the form of the dramatic genre
itself. I find this insightful and compelling. After many
years of thought on the matter, I am not sure what the next step should be in
the development of drama, but I believe someone along the line is going to take
that next step, because Winters has revealed -- and he is the only critic ever
to do -- a wide gap in our understanding of one of the most fundamental issues
of literary art. Note that Winters's point is
that the dramatic form FORCES a writer to write without all the resources of
his intelligence and knowledge and moral wisdom. Clearly, this is a flaw Winters discovered that must, and perhaps can, be addressed.
It is time critics went back to this essay to deal with the problems Winters uncovered.
9/18 - On Modern Poetry and Sensory Detail
from the essay "THE TURN OF THE CENTURY" (1961,
1967) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY"
Yeats's poem ["
** COMMENT: The comments Winters
makes here speak to all modern poetry as much as to the specific poem of Yeats's under discussion. The reliance on sensory detail
has become an overmastering convention, as strong as any that have controlled
literature in past ages. Consider the once inviolable convention that the
action of a dramatic tragedy shall take place in one day. Talking in terms of
sensory detail has become a convention just as strong as this once was. In Winters's opinion, however, Yeats's
sensory details embody very little rational understanding beyond their literal
meanings. The poem he is discussing here is a very famous and highly praised
artwork of the modern age. It is generally considered one of
the finest poems by our finest modern English poet. Winters
is right that it is almost pure ornament, but it seems that most critics
praise it all the more for exactly this reason. The language is, indeed,
violent, by which Winters means wholly out of
proportion to the rational ideas being conveyed in the total poem. It is a strong condemnation that the poem is one of easy emotions,
for it is clear that "
9/19 - On Cleverness
from a letter to DONALD DAVIE (1958) in "SELECTED
LETTERS"
Maybe [Philip Larkin in his poem "The
Less Deceived"] is ignorant. Maybe he is just trying to be ugly, But he ended up ugly. And the poem
should have been beautiful. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph
Album" is the next best [poem]. It reminds me of some of Ransom. You have
some of the same faults, and these faults seem common in your generation of
Englishmen. "The Wind at Penistone", for
example, is deliberately diffused in much the same
way. The subject is more interesting, but you were playing with the subject.
Reread Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'". More is there
in 12 short lines. All of you people strike me as afraid not to be clever. It
is easy to be clever. I was clever as hell when I was about 25, but I gave it
up.
** COMMENT: Of course, to be clever and to
find cleverness, clearly, is one of the reasons people write and read. It is
not so easy to be clever ENOUGH, as Winters seems to
think. We all delight in the beauties of phrasing and rhetoric, and Winters did, too. But he was always
focused on the unity of each work of literary art. Sparkling and arresting
images, creative metaphors, elegant turns of phrase, these all must serve a
rational understanding of human experience and an exact evocation of the
emotion that OUGHT to be evoked by that rational
understanding. This kind of literature demands much greater effort and care,
much higher goals than the mere cleverness that can be found in almost every
poem of Larkin and
Thomas Hardy's "IN TIME OF 'THE BREAKING
OF NATIONS'" (not quoted in the letter):
Only a man
harrowing clods
In a slow silent
walk
With an old
horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as
they stalk.
Only thin smoke
without flame
From these heaps
of couch grass
Yet these will
onward the same
Though dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid
and her wight
Come whispering
by
Wars annals will
cloud into night
Ere
their story die.
9/20 - On Diffuse Poetry
from the section "THE HEROIC COUPLET AND ITS RECENT
RIVALS" from the essay "POETIC CONVENTION" from
"PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF
REASON"
Unlike the Webtserians
(such as T.S. Eliot), Mr. [Ezra] Pound in his best "Cantos" does not
muddy his verse with secondary and uncontrolled didacticism: he is usually
dialectic, if at all, by implication only, but implication is inadequate, in
the long run, as a didactic instrument. In the best "Cantos", at
least, Mr. Pound is successful, whether in fragments or on the whole, but he
presents merely a psychological progression or flux, the convention being
sometimes that of wandering revery, sometimes that of
wandering conversation. The range of such a convention is narrowly limited, not
only as regards formulable content, but as regards
feeling. The feelings attendant upon revery
and amiable conversation tend to great similarity notwithstanding the
subject matter, and they simply are not the most vigorous or important feelings
of which the human being is capable. The method, when employed in satirical
portraiture, lacks the incisiveness of the eighteenth century masters:
So we left him
at last in Chiasso
Along with the
old woman from
Solid Kansas,
her daughter had married that Swiss
Who kept the
buffet in Chiasso.
Did it shake
her? It did not shake her.
She sat there in
the waiting room, solid
Stiff as a cigar
store Indian from the Bowery
Such as one saw
in the nineties,
First sod of
bleeding Kansas
That had
produced the ligneous solidness
If thou wilt go to Chiasso wilt find that
indestructible female
As if waiting
for the train to
The passage is amusing in a way, but is soft
and diffuse. Even "The Rosciad" offers more successful portraits.
** COMMENT: You might say that most of modern
poetry is as diffuse and soft as this passage from one of Pound's
"Cantos". Winters opined that the convention of revery
and free-verse imagism were, despite contrary claims
from its myriad adherents, a severely limiting convention. This seems painfully
obvious to those of us who have awakened from our modern thrall and come to
understand modern poetry in terms of Winters's
critical theory. Much of the poetry of our age has a tedious sameness, as
though the poets were determined to be merely as clever as possible as they
work over the same thin and private ideas and the same vague emotions. Our
"major" poets have described the chaotic flux of life very well, but
they have done little to help us understand or experience life more deeply.
9/21 - On the Poets and Professors
from the "INTRODUCTION" (1967) to "FORMS OF
DISCOVERY"
The only important difference between a
chimpanzee and a professor of English is that the professor has a greater
command of language. The professor may think himself
more handsome, but the chimp thinks otherwise, and the chimp is beyond argument
the better athlete. The chimp, of course, would not admit the one kind of superiority which belongs to the professor, because he does
not know what it is. The only important difference between the professor and a
distinguished poet is that the poet has a greater command of language; but few
professors will admit this difference, because almost none understand the
nature of the difference -- it is for this reason that nearly all are so feeble
when they come to the defense of their profession. The scientist knows what he
is doing; the professor of literature does not.
** COMMENT: Here is another of Winters's gibes at professors of English, whom he attacked
right up to the end of his career. This passage comes from one of his last
writings, and still we find Winters irritated that professors cannot see an
important point that he had been expounding his entire career: that it is only
poet-critics who know enough about the true meaning of literature to decide
what is good and great literary art. Winters believed that, like chimps who do not and cannot know of their lack of intelligence
compared to human beings, professors are unqualified to pass judgment on the
Winters Canon or on the critical theories that led to it. The put-down is a
harsh one, and it was never forgiven and will not be
easily forgotten. This last book has been often dismissed as Winters
at his belligerent worst, and perhaps it is. But the
point is well taken, in my view. Nonetheless, poet-critics have dismissed Winters's theory and practice right along with the
professors for decades right up to the present. Winters's rejection is almost
complete, and he has now settled into an obscurity from which few writers have
ever arisen. Though, perhaps, as Melville did, Winters
is yet destined to make a recovery. That is my hope and the purpose of this
compendium.
9/22 - On Spiritual Control in Poem and Poet
from the essay "THE MORALITY OF POETRY" from
"PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF
REASON"
The spiritual control in a poem, then, is
simply a manifestation of the spiritual control within the poet, and, as I have
already indicated, it may have been an important means by which the poet
arrived at a realization of spiritual control. This conception must not be confused with the conception of the poem as a
safety valve, by which feeling is diverted from action, by which the writer escapes
from an attitude by pouring it into his work and leaving it behind him. The conception which I am trying to define is a conception of
poetry as a technique of contemplation, of comprehension, a technique which
does not eliminate the need of philosophy or of religion, but which, rather,
completes and enriches them.
One feels, whether rightly or wrongly, a
correlation between the control evinced within a poem and the control within
the poet behind it. The laxity of the one ordinarily appears to involve laxity
in the other. The rather limp versification of Mr. Eliot and of Mr. MacLeish is
inseparable from the spiritual limpness that one feels behind the poems, as the
fragmentary, ejaculatory, and overexcited quality of a great many of the poems
of Hart Crane is inseparable from the intellectual confusion upon which these
particular poems seem to rest.
** COMMENT: A definite connection exists
between literature and life: nothing could be further from theories of
art-for-art's-sake than these words from early in Winters's
career. Writing reflects one's life and soul, as reading influences the life
and soul of readers. These are the reasons that Winters
takes the study of literature so seriously and why he considers the setting of
a Canon so important: if we read the bad, it can influence us in such a way
that we can lose control of our spirit, just as the poet has lost control of
his spirit in writing badly. It is a demanding theory that exalts the literary
arts, and Winters never backed away from its demands throughout
his career, neither in his criticism nor in his poetry. Note also Winters's surmise that literature "completes" the
work of philosophy and religion (another idea that he defended throughout his
career). For literature seeks to convey the emotions that ought to be aroused
or, in Winters's terminology, "motivated" by the writer's rational
understanding of her subject, which was not the goal of philosophy. I tend to
think that this is slightly off the mark. The concentration of poetry is
greater than expository writing, true; but there are many writers of philosophy
who convey a great deal of emotion through their prose, and their work might
convey a much richer understanding of a particular subject than the short poem
-- the greatest genre of literature in Winters's view -- can bear. As an
example, I think of the writings of William James. Much of his general essays
on philosophical subjects are emotion laden, and they seek to be emotional in
the sense that they urge his readers to come to an intellectual and emotional
understanding of the subjects under discussion. This is another area that Winters's critical theory must be expanded to take in those
writers of expository prose who have achieved literary greatness.
9/23 - On Defects in Style
from a letter to T.C. WILSON (1933) in "SELECTED
LETTERS"
When you speak of stylistic advances, you
perhaps inadvertently indulge in nonsense. There is no such thing as progress
in literature after a certain degree of civilization has been
reached. Williams is as fine a poet as you will find in English in a few
poems and within a certain range; he has worked out a new technique and
mastered it; but he is bound to certain limitations of subject matter by that
very technique. Pound is a remarkable poet, but not much better than Swinburne,
I suspect, and of much the same type. Stevens is occasionally as fine as Williams and covers more ground. Neither one appears to me
as great as [T. Sturge]
** COMMENT: The essential work of literary
development was done long ago, in Yvor
Winters's opinion. Writers can continue to work out the implications of the
rational and moral approach to literature and apply it to ever more subjects,
perhaps subjects never before considered, but if they wish to write well they
must approach their subjects as Winters theorized to
achieve excellence and perhaps greatness. This astonishing and seemingly
arrogant view, expressed rather early in his career before any of his major
writings had been published, runs counter to the
wildly experimental bent of the modern era. The common view has been that there
are yet countless discoveries to be made in
literature, and the way to make them is to keep on experimenting. But Winters viewed most experiments (as he probably would
today's continuing experiments) as nothing more than further extensions of the
sentimental-Romantic decadence that began to ruin literature with the rise of
Romanticism and associationism in the eighteenth
century. The defects Romanticism has caused are a serious matter, for the
reasons given in the yesterday's selection, 9/22. His summary of the work of
W.C. Williams in this passage is expert. But Williams
has continued to inspire many thousands more writers and poets than Bridges or
Moore or Hardy (who traded places near the top of Winters's pantheon of the
greats several times during his career). Once again, we see him struggling to justly assess Pound. He considers Pound a good poet in
some ways, though a full comprehension of his work shows how seriously flawed
it is. For Winters, our recognition and understanding
of the flaws in Pound (or any poet), however serious, enables us to properly
enjoy and profit from the considerable merits of Pound's work. These ideas
counter the common accusation against Winters that he
wished to banish every poem that did not make his special Winters Canon of the
greatest poems in English. Nothing, I believe, could be further from the truth,
though this censure has been leveled at Winters again
and again.
9/24 - On the Logic of Narration
from the section "NARRATIVE" in the essay
"THE MORALITY OF POETRY" from "PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE"
(1937) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"
Narrative achieves coherence largely through
a feeling that the events of a sequence are necessary parts of a causative
chain, or plausible inferences with a natural causative chain. In this it is similar to logic. The hero, being what he is and
in a given situation, seems to act naturally or unnaturally; if his action
seems natural, and is in addition reasonably interesting and, from an ethical
point of view, important, the narrative is in the main successful. To this extent, Mr. Kenneth Burke is wrong, I believe, in censuring
nineteenth century fiction for its concern with what he calls the psychology of
the hero as opposed to the concern with the psychology of the audience: by the
former, he means the plausibility of the portrait; by the latter the concern
with those rhetorical devices which please and surprise the reader, devices,
for example, of the type of which Fielding was a consummate master. Mr.
Burke overlooks the facts that rhetoric cannot exist without a subject matter,
and that the subject matter of fiction is narration, that, in short, the
author's most important instrument for controlling the attitude of the audience
is precisely the psychology of the hero.
** COMMENT: Winters refused to give his
approval of the great experiments in fiction that came about in the first half
of the twentieth century. It is a suggestive idea that he offers here, that
narrative is a form of logical structure, which, as we have seen, qualifies
narrative as an acceptable literary structure to bear the weight of both
rational content and the evocation of proper emotions. Winters never had much
to say about later experiments with narrative poetry, some of which were written by students of his former students. He had a
good deal to say about novels and narration in his much later essay on the
evaluation of genres, "Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature",
which appeared in "The Function of Criticism" and from which we have
seen many selections. It is probably safe to guess that most of the experiments
of our day would not have impressed Winters very
deeply, for he was not much interested in clever writing. Still,
despite all the experimenting among the high-cult novelists nowadays, a
logical, causative chain of events and the psychology of a hero should remain
the focus of most popular mid-cult novels. The top writers, those who aspire to
write literature, seem uninterested in writing fiction in this manner any
longer and find themselves endlessly and almost pointlessly experimenting.
Unlike Winters, though, I find some of the experiments
in narrative to be meaningful. They point, I believe, to a better future for
the novel, when the time comes 'round that these techniques are employed to
gain rational understanding and evoke appropriate emotions as in Winters's critical theory.
9/25 - On Emerson's Influence on Frost
from the essay "ROBERT FROST, OR THE POET AS
SPIRITUAL DRIFTER" (1956) republished in "THE FUNCTION OF
CRITICISM"
Frost has said that Emerson is his favorite
American poet, and he himself appears to be something of an Emersonian.
Emerson was a Romantic pantheist: he identified God with the universe; he
taught that impulse comes directly from God and should be obeyed, that through
surrender to impulse we become one with God; he taught that reason is man-made and bungling and should be suppressed. In moral and
aesthetic doctrine, Emerson was a relativist; his most thoroughgoing disciples
in American literature were Walt Whitman and Hart Crane. In
Frost, on the other hand, we find a disciple with Emerson's religious
conviction: Frost believes in the rightness of impulse, but does not discuss
the pantheistic doctrine which would give authority to impulse; as a result of
his belief in impulse, he is of necessity a relativist, but his relativism,
apparently since it derives from no intense religious conviction, has resulted
mainly in ill-natured eccentricity and in increasing melancholy.
** COMMENT: That Emerson's romantic theorizing
heavily influenced the world-view of Robert Frost is a matter that could arouse
a great deal of scholarly debate, if any one paid attention to Winters at all any longer. There is little question, I
believe, that Frost is a Romantic, though many of his readers and admirers
continue to befuddle us all by pigeonholing him as a classicist. Described as
he is here in Winters's fine essay on Frost, he seems
hardly worth reading at all if such are Frost's views of human nature and life.
There might be, and I believe there is, more to Frost than this summary
implies, though I agree that he is not the great poet his purported to be.
Because many influences push Frost to and fro in his
work, the best Winters can say about him is that he was a spiritual drifter.
Finally, anything that smacked of reliance on impulse, for Winters,
as a proponent of reason in all serious matters of life, was abominably
foolish.
9/26 - On Obscurity in Modern Poetry
from the chapter "THE SHORTER POEMS" from
"EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON" (1946)
There has been a great deal of obscurity in
modern verse, and where it has not been due merely to incompetent writing, it
has been mainly of two kinds. Sometimes the poet endeavors to be perfectly
lucid, but he thinks so badly that he makes statements which are without his
realizing it incomprehensible. Such statements in modern American verse belong
most frequently to the tradition of Emerson and Whitman, and there are a few
mild examples to which I shall eventually refer. When Emerson, in "The Problem",
tells us that the artist produces art unconsciously, functioning as a divinely
controlled automaton, we cannot understand him, because we can imagine an
automaton only as a madman. When Hart Crane, in
"The Dance", describes under veils of metaphor the apotheosis of Maquokeeta as union with the American soil, we are
similarly baffled, for a man cannot be imagined as
both keeping and losing his personal identity. Sometimes,
however, the poet may be fully conscious that he is obscure; he may follow the example
of the later Mallarme and suppress the rational element in his poems in the
mistaken idea that he is thus strengthening the emotional; or he may write as
it would seem that Rimbaud frequently wrote, more or less automatically, in a
state more or less approximating hallucination, with the mistaken idea (one
which Emerson shared without putting it into practice) that the automatic is of
necessity divinely inspired, thus achieving fantastic symbols with the empty
semblance only of significance, symbols arranged in a meaningless sequence.
Reference to strange bits of erudition, such as we get in Pound, may cause
temporary obscurity, but only till an appropriate doctoral dissertation may be
written; and this is true likewise of reference to a private set of symbols,
such as we get in Blake. The method of progression by revery,
or random association, which we get in Pound's "Cantos", may seem to
result in obscurity, but only if one fails to recognize the method and is
expecting to disentangle something which was never
there.
* COMMENT: This passage offers a tidy summary
of the way poetry is still being written in the modern age, though Winters does not discuss the one other major structural
focus of the modern period: sensory impression, which he writes of elsewhere at
length and which we have discussed in regard to many of our selections. It is
surely no longer necessary to point out that Winters
disapproves of all methods that breed such obscurity. Intellectual depth and
clarity are the chief virtues of all literature, as Winters
argues throughout his essays. In this chapter, Winters
later specifically contrasts Robinson and his clear and rational poetic
structures to the obscurity of the major moderns. It would surely be
instructive to find a copy of the Hart Crane poem mentioned here, for this much praised poem has elicited countless interpretations
from English professors for more than half a century. Modern poetry, as most of
you know, is written just to elicit multiple, if not
infinite, interpretations. It would also seem clear, at least to me, that this
has been one of the great joys of reading poetry for most lovers of the modern
literature: the open and endless possibilities for interpretation. The openness
suggests depth and power. To the contrary, Winters
believed it merely reveals thoughtlessness and willful obscurity, and such
poetry lacks both depth and power for these very reasons.
9/27 - On the Experiments of James Joyce and
Gertrude Stein
from the review "THE INDIAN IN ENGLISH" (1926)
in "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"
In a primitive, non-specialized society,
every mind gravitates toward the religious center, by which the race is preserved. All art, therefore, will have a definitely
ritualistic nature or will be strongly colored by ritual, and will so be in a
greater or less degree comprehensible, or at any rate
useful, to all the community. Likewise, as all the community has a practical
use for art, and as the individual members of the community are not, as in a
modern city, forced to divert all of their energies into narrowly specialized
channels, the average taste in artistic matters will be rather high.... My own
slight experience substantiates this: I have found the taste of several quite
commonplace Indians to be all but infallible in such fields as, say, medieval
German art.
** COMMENT: This review was published just a
year before Winters began to change his mind about how
to write and about what is good in literature. First, note that he toys here
with the idea that art is the new religion, a common idea at the time, common
for a couple centuries in fact, and one which still has life in our own era as
well (though much of its original strength is now dissipated). Winters would
retreat from such ideas shortly, though there is no question that to his dying
day he held that the writing and studying of great poetry, as a form of
contemplation, to be among the highest intellectual and spiritual activities of
humankind. Second, Winters believed that the Indian
communities he knew in
9/28 - On Moral Judgment in Literature - KP
from the essay "PRELIMINARY PROBLEMS in "THE
ANATOMY OF NONSENSE" (1943), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF
REASON" (1947)
The relationship in the poem of rational
meaning to feeling we have seen to be that of motive to emotion; and we have
seen that this must be a satisfactory relationship. How do we determine whether
such a relationship is satisfactory? We determine it by an act of moral
judgment. The question then arises whether moral judgments can
be made, whether the concept of morality is or is not an illusion.
If morality can be considered real, if a
theory of morality can be said to derive from reality, it is because it guides
us toward the greatest happiness which the accidents
of life permit: that is, toward the fullest realization of our nature, in the
Aristotelian or Thomistic sense. But
is there such a thing, abstractly considered, as full realization of our nature?
To avoid discussion of too great length, let
us consider the opposite question: is there such a thing as obviously
unfulfilled human nature? Obviously there is. We need only turn to the
feeble-minded, who cannot think and so cannot perceive or feel with any
clarity; or to the insane, who sometimes perceive and feel with great
intensity, but whose feelings and perceptions are so improperly motivated that
they are classed as illusions. At slightly higher
levels, the criminal, the dissolute, the unscrupulously selfish, and various
types of neurotics are likely to arouse but little disagreement as examples.
** COMMENT: This passage comes from one of
the foundational essays in Winters's career, an essay
that concisely laid out and argued cogently for the basic principles of his
critical theory. We see here that Winters justified
his moral theory of literature on Thomistic and
rationalist grounds. Literature, Winters is suggesting
(and he states this clearly and openly in many other writings), is an important
part of the development of the human being toward the full realization of his
nature. This is why he took the study of literature and poetry so seriously,
and why he considered various weak forms of or procedures in the literary arts
to be so dangerous: they warp us away from full sanity, full knowledge, full
virtue, full and proper emotion.
9/29 - On Moral Literature
from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLY
HOPKINS" (1948) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"
One observes here [in a critical passage from
** COMMENT: This selection makes a very
interesting companion to yesterday's, 9/28. Winters's conception of morality is
quite different from the common definition of the term. Literature is not moral
only by virtue of the ethicality of the subject matter -- that is, the
statements it makes or the content it offers; it is moral in the way a literary
artwork judges a human experience through rational understanding and properly
motivated emotion. Thus, surprisingly, Winters seems
to be stating that Hopkins, a priest and a conscientious writer, was
"immoral" because he incompletely and improperly understood his art
and wrote weak and bad poems that reflect his deficient understanding. Winters
believed that there was no sole aesthetic value for literature, simply because
literary artworks employ language, and the highest and fullest realization of
the nature of language is in rational understanding (again see the selection for
yesterday). Art for art's sake is not only immoral, in Winters's
sense of the term, but properly impossible, since it is a denial of the primary
function of language in rational communication. For the
artists to use language as both a rational and emotional instrument is its most
glorious, vital, and fullest use.
9/30 - On the Mock-Heroic
from the essay "THE POETRY OF CHARLES CHURCHILL"
(1961) in "FORMS OF DISCOVERY" (1967)
The best single poem by Dryden is certainly
"MacFlecknoe", and the best by Pope
"The Rape of the Lock". Yet these are mock-heroic poems; their
principal virtues arise from the fact that they exploit the ridiculous aspects
of the style that both poets held in the highest esteem. This is a sad
commentary on the main preoccupations of the period; and parody is a dangerous
style, because it depends upon cliches for its
effectiveness, and cliches are still cliches even when used in the interest of wit. Even poems
as remarkable as these are essentially a kind of light verse.
** COMMENT: "MacFlecknoe"
made Winters's special Winters Canon of the greatest
poems in English, published in "Quest for Reality". However, Winters seldom referred to the poem in his essays, and it
came as a surprise that he judged it so highly when I first read "Quest".
Winters was generally wary of the comic, ironic, and the mocking, however
gentle it might be. He might have seen a significance
to such uses of language, but he could not consider such techniques among the
very finest uses of language because of the problem discussed in this passage
from an important late essay. The comic, I believe, has not been fully
investigated through the principles of Winters's
critical theory; I am hoping that some able critic will take up the work of
extending Winters's theory to account for the comic in the years to come.