A YEAR with YVOR WINTERS

December

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

12/1 - On Moral Evaluation - KP

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:] "I should say the aesthetic attitude is definable with fair accuracy in the simple and almost sentimental terms: the love of nature."

This statement, if taken in the narrowest possible sense, would appear to limit poetry to the description of landscape; but we discover as we read farther in the three books, that this is intended as a formula for the treatment of almost any subject. But how applicable is it to the subject of "Macbeth" or of "Othello"? Were these plays written because of the love which Shakespeare felt, either for their actions as wholes or for any major part of their actions? Did Shakespeare love the spectacle of ambition culminating in murder, or of jealousy culminating in murder? Did he write of Iago because he loved him so sentimentally that he wished to render him in all his aspects? To ask the questions is to render the theory ridiculous.

Shakespeare wrote the plays in order to evaluate the actions truly; and our admiration is for the truth of the evaluations, not for the beauty of the original objects as we see them imitated. And how, one may wonder, can Shakespeare evaluate these action truly except from the position of a moralist? To evaluate a particular sin, one must understand the nature of sin; and to fix in language the feeling, detailed and total, appropriate to the action portrayed, one must have a profound understanding not only of language, for language cannot be understood without reference to that which it represents, not only of the characters depicted, but of one's own feelings as well; and such understanding will not be cultivated very far without a real grasp of theoretic morality.

** COMMENT: Definitely, there is something to Ransom's idea that art springs from love. That idea, of course, had its origins in Romanticism, but it carries a certain amount of weight in the mind, for there is something about the devotion and passion of art that is closely related to love. But the usual formulation of the idea, as Ransom summarizes it neatly here, is jejune and troublesome, as Winters makes painfully obvious in the searing comments that follow the quotation. This is one of Winters's harshest essays, in my opinion. Page after page, he quotes Ransom and then rips into his ideas like a ravenous wolf. It is a little unsettling, as judicious as most of his criticisms are. This passage illustrates some very basic concepts of the literary arts, which it would seem unnecessary to explicate in my comments. But modern literary culture has mostly lost sight of these fundamentals, and it will serve you well to study the passage closely and try to apply the concepts in your reading. Nonetheless, as we read we DO experience a feeling of love or delight -- even of Iago as he is portrayed, or Macbeth as he drowns himself in his own sin -- as deeply as we feel the need to understand and the sense of comprehension itself. Winters could have stepped back from the literal sense of Ransom's comment and studied it as a metaphor that expresses some truth about the value of literary artworks. What is IT that we love, for example, in the portrayal of Iago or Macbeth? I think this matter could use some further study.

12/2 - On the Summit of Literary Achievement in English

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

The language of metaphysics from Plato onward is a concentration of the theoretical understanding of human experience; and that language as it was refined by the great theologians is even more obviously so. The writings of Aquinas have latent in them the most profound and intense experiences of our race. It is the command of scholastic thought, the realization in terms of experience and feeling of the meaning of scholastic language, that gives Shakespeare his peculiar power among dramatists and Fulke Greville his peculiar power among the English masters of the short poem. I do not mean that other writers of the period were ignorant of these matters, for they were not, and so far as the short poem is concerned there were a good many great poets, four or five of whom wrote one or more poems apiece as great as any by Greville; but the command in these two men is not merely knowledge, it is command, and it gives to three or four tragedies by Shakespeare, and to fifteen or twenty poems by Greville, a concentration of meaning, a kind of somber power, which one will scarcely find matched elsewhere at such great length in the respective forms.

** COMMENT: Winters believed that modern literature, as the culmination of the Sentimental-Romantic decadence extending from the 18th century to the present, had abandoned, foolishly and groundlessly, a commitment to all we have learned through the work of thinkers from Plato to Darwin. We have discussed this matter in more than a dozen passages I have selected for this Year with Winters. Thomism seemed to hold, in Winters's view, nearly the sum total of all we have achieved as a general culture and a group of societies in the West. It was just like Winters to select one almost universally recognized genius and one pathetically obscure writer as his two examples of the finest expression of all we have learned through this language of metaphysics. Not many critics doubt the choice of Shakespeare (though I do believe there are a couple of critics who have downgraded his work considerably). But Fulke Greville? Who has even heard of him outside specialists in Renaissance poetry? Very few critics discuss Greville, and none besides Winters elevates him to this rank. So what are we to think of this choice? I think it is a justifiable choice. Regretfully, Greville has been often missed. He deserves to be studied more deeply than, say, Wordsworth or Frost now happen to be studied. We have missed a great deal by missing Greville. But I don't think he quite compares as a poet to Shakespeare as a dramatist. I would love to see some critic besides Winters try to make the case for Greville, however, for he is certainly in the top rank of writers who have ever lived.

12/3 - On Winters's Students

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

Some of my former students are derivative of me, although few of those whom I have mentioned here, and those very little; some are derivative occasionally of some one else. But most poets have their antecedents. These poets resemble all other poets in this: they should be judged on their best poems. These are all very intelligent people. It has been a common practice for years for casual critics to ridicule my students in a parenthesis; this has been an easy way to ridicule me. And the sneer is the easiest of all weapons to employ: it costs the user no labor, no understanding, and I should judge that it raises him in his own estimation. But I think that the time has come when my faithful reader may as well face certain facts, no matter how painful the experience: namely, that I know a great deal about the art of poetry, theoretically, historically, and practically; that a great many talented people have come to Stanford to work with me; that I have been an excellent teacher; that six or seven or my former students are among the best poets of this century....

** COMMENT: We have written of many of these students -- Bowers and Cunningham and Gullans and Momaday and others -- elsewhere in this Year with Winters. I will not discuss them in detail here. In this passage, Winters defends his students against the charge that has been leveled against them countless times while Winters was alive. They are guilty by association. Their work, as great as it is, and IT IS GREAT, has been foolishly condemned because of their association with Winters. In fact, Winters's own poetry has been foolishly shunted aside because of the reaction of most literary critics to his controversial critical theories and practices. Nonetheless, some of his students have achieved some level of success in our literary culture, though I think none of them has ever risen to the ranks of the great, as Winters rated their best work. I guess my hope is that you will simply lay aside any prejudice you might have against these writers and give them a try. I think and hope you will find that they are indeed as great as Winters once claimed. Finally, again, note the weariness and bravado in the tone of the passage, as Winters approached the end of his life and work. He had grown very weary of the repeated charges made against him and his supposed "disciples".

12/4 - On Epic Tragedy

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

Except in "Paradise Lost", that other great masterpiece of more or less Calvinistic literature -- the epic hero is normally a successful figure, and not a tragical one; Ahab, on the other hand, obeys the traditional law of tragedy, and destroys himself through allowing himself to be dominated by an heroic vice: he is another Coriolanus, but in dimensions epical, in the quality of his mind and of his sin metaphysical, and in his motivating ideas Calvinistical. One should note that Melville, in writing a tragic instead of a traditionally heroic epic, displayed a thorough understanding of his material: the Calvinistic view led to sin and catastrophe, not to triumph, although at times to sin and catastrophe on an inspired and heroic scale; Ahab is the magnificent fruition of Maule's Curse. Melville, on the other hand, escaped the curse by comprehending it.

** COMMENT: I do not have the space here to explicate Winters's theory of "Maule's Curse". Suffice it to say that only Melville of the eight writers considered in the book mostly saved himself from the curse by his intelligence. This is what makes the essay on Melville the key to the entire concept of the curse, and also the key to Winters's entire outlook on the struggles of American literature. In this passage, Winters discusses his understanding of "Moby Dick" as an epic tragedy, an important concept that can help you considerably while reading the book. Once again, Winters considered this "novel" as one of the very greatest artworks of literary prose ever written in any language.

12/5 - On Reason

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

[Austin] Warren's essay on Ransom you have accepted and announced, so that my objections to it are not to be taken as a vote against its appearance. It seems to me, however, a very weak effort. The word "reason" is abused throughout: he employs it to mean imperfect reason, or half-educated reasoning, as when we speak of the Age of Reason (an age, really, of naïve and unsophisticated reasoners, inadequately educated in the history of reason and the meaning of the experience that history formulated). This abuse of a good word is a sentimentalism that plays into the hands of the enemy (Satan, I mean, and [Eugene] Jolas, and Joyce and Dr. Williams). I believe his theory of a clean cut between the present and the past in all their aspects is a myth as naïve as the myths of science: it really is a myth of a golden age, which justifies sentimental nostalgia for the unattainable and the resultant facile irony. Ransom's irony is exactly of the same kind as Laforgue's, Pound's, or Eliot's. So far as the detail of the writing is concerned, it encourages looseness; in the realm of morality it offers a politely weary excuse for the slackening of effort at a line chosen by the actor. To say that a secure and sane moral attitude is impossible because the agrarian south is destroyed is silly: We have Bridges, Moore, Tate (kicking but a convincing example), Baker, and others to prove the contrary.

** COMMENT: I have taken no more than a glance through the old essay by Austin Warren that Winters is discussing in this letter. I cannot judge the question of whether it abuses the word "reason", but it is important to see that Winters believed, in general, that the concept of reason had markedly deteriorated in the West in the past 300 years or so. I believe Winters was right about this, and we have had a number of selections concerning the matter throughout this Year with Winters. Once again, you see Joyce being taken to task for his abuses of reason, but look at William Carlos Williams, who Winters believed was a great poet, also taking his lumps from Winters in 1933. Also, notice that Tate was still considered at this time to be among the greats, though no poem of his made the Winters Canon in the end. "Baker" was Winters's student and friend Howard Baker. Winters just despised looseness, which explains a lot of his criticisms of various modern poets, who wrote loosely intentionally. Even the "new formalism" movement that has sprung up from the admirers of Robert Frost in the past 40 years or so is marked by remarkably loose writing.

12/6 - On Robinson's Historical Position

from the chapter "CONCLUSION" in "EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON" (1946)

I have called attention to [Robinson's] having certain more or less Jamesian vices as a narrator, but I am thinking now of his virtues: of the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness, and the stubborn persistence. In respect to one or another of these qualities, one may find him related to such a mind as that of Henry James, but perhaps more obviously to Edith Wharton and Motley and Francis Parkman, and perhaps even at times to Henry Adams. He is, it seems to me, the last great American writer of their tradition and not the first of a later one; and the fact that he writes verse is incidental. There was little verse of major importance produced in this country in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth; there was a good deal of major prose; and Robinson is more closely comparable to the great masters of prose than to the minor poets.

** COMMENT: Robinson has certainly been out of fashion for some time, even though the critics of Winters's day paid him a good deal of attention. Winters's insistence that Robinson was part of an era coming to an end, not of a new beginning, is insightful and powerfully explanatory. I would have to possess deeper knowledge of the issues to be able to assess Winters's claim that Robinson stands in the tradition of Henry James, Henry Adams, and John Lothrop Motley. The series of descriptive phrases to summarize Robinson's finest qualities are too general to make plausible any definite connection between the various writers mentioned. There is no question, though, that the writers he compares Robinson to are complementary. Each of these writers for various reasons were considered among the finest prose artists Winters ever studied. Does Robinson belong with them? I would say that in his finest poems, which only Winters has been able to find consistently, Robinson does stand with these greats and is deserving of much more careful than he has been accorded in the 20th century.

12/7 - On Stoicism

from the poem "AT THE SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT, TO MY DAUGHTER"

** COMMENT: These are the final two stanzas of one of Winters's last poems and one of his greatest. Winters has been considered by many to be a stoic. He emphasized the value and virtues of patience and indifference and cool, calm steadiness in the face of the ultimate difficulties of life, as principally shown in his confrontation with the fact and meaning of death. It seems a bit strange that this man who fought so hard for the future of literature espoused a doctrine of life that seems almost resignedly fatalistic. But as you study deeper in Winters, you will see the connection between the two aspects of his thought and might even recognize anew the value and importance of his kind of stoicism. The concision and power and breathtaking beauty of the images of this selection are almost beyond any description. Winters is telling his child about what it means to live as she goes off on her own quest for reality. The stoic ideas are penetratingly clear and convincing. The emotion is stoic as well, with the carefully and fully controlled bitterness and wisdom of one who has seen (in that hard light) what all these quests end in.

12/8 - On Ideas of Consciousness Influencing Modern Literature

from the section "PSEUDO-REFERENCE" of the essay "THE EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOL OF AMERICAN POETRY" from PRIMITIVISM AND DECADENCE" (1937), republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

I have illustrated one extreme type of pseudo-reference with a passage from Ben Jonson. I might have ulitized also the "mad songs" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as were written by Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Herrick. Samuel Johnson wrote thus in his "Life of Dryden": "Dryden delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness mingle.... This inclination sometimes produced nonsense, which he knew; and sometimes it issued in absurdity, of which perhaps he was not conscious." The method appears, then, to have been for a long time one of the recognized potentialities of poetic writing, but to have been more or less checked by the widespread command of rational subject matter.

[The literary method of pseudo-reference] should naturally have been released, as it appears to have been, by a period of amateur mysticism, of inspiration for its own sake, by a tendency such as that which we have for some years past observed, to an increasingly great preoccupation with the fringe of consciousness, to an increasing emphasis on the concept of continuous experience, a tendency to identify, under the influence, perhaps, of scientific or romantic monism, subconscious stimuli and reactions with occult inspiration, to confuse the divine and the visceral, and to employ in writing from such attitudes as this confusion might provide, a language previously reserved to the religious mystics. Such a charge would involve along its way such indefinable philosophies as Bergsonism and Transcendentalism, such as half-metaphorical sciences as psychoanalysis, and especially the popular myths and superstitions which they and the more reputable sciences have engendered. In such an intellectual milieu, semi-automatic writing begins to appear a legitimate and even a superior method.

** COMMENT: You will have to read this entire essay to gather in all of Winters's insights into the various methods of literary composition and into this particularly important one, "pseudo-reference". This passage only suggests some of the conclusions that Winters reached as a result of his study of this literary method, which he effectively argued is the main method of modern literature in both poetry and prose. To put the concept in layman's terms, the method employs "rational" sounding language without any Reason behind the ideas expressed. Thus, the method employs references to a non-existent or rejected system of ideas and values, the concept of Reason in the West. Pseudo-reference has resulted in many of the worst features of literature that are produced in our day: excessive emotionalism, obsession with physical details and descriptions, etc. Winters points out here that the method, which has its antecedents far back in Western literature, has often led writers to indulge in the exploration of madness through the tools of Reason, a perilous quest at best. This, in turn, has led to the interest in madness as an end in itself, which is what Winters means by the comment about "semi-automatic" writing.

12/9 - On Frost's Best Poem

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

In the seventh volume [of Frost's poetry], "A Witness Tree", there is an even more impressive piece entitled "The Most of It". This poem represents a momentary insight into the vast and brute indifference of nature, the nature toward which Frost had cherished so sentimental a feeling through so many poems. For a moment the poet appears to be appalled. The poem deals with a protagonist who seems to have cultivated solitude, like Frost, and who heard only the echoes of his own voice in the wilderness but who longed for a personal reply from nature. The reply, when it came, was not the one he had wanted. One morning he saw a splash on the far side of the lake, and something swimming toward him, and then:

Frost's buck has much the same kind of symbolic grandeur as the apocryphal beast in "The Second Coming", by Yeats, and he has the advantage of greater reality; the style combines a descriptive precision with great concentration of meaning and at the same time is wholly free from decoration, ineptitude, and other irrelevancy. The poem gives one some idea of how great a poet Frost might conceivably have been, had he been willing to use his mind instead of letting it wither. In this poem especially, and to some extent in "Acquainted with the Night", the poet confronts his condition fairly and sees it for what it is, but the insight in momentary: he neither proceeds from this point to further understanding nor even manages top retain the realization that he has achieved. Much else in "A Witness tree" is similar to the earlier work, and the next two books, "A Masque of Reason" (which I have described in some detail) and "Steeple Bush" are his feeblest and the least serious efforts.

** COMMENT: It's a nice poem. Is it Frost's best, as Winters opined? In this essay, he set aside as second rate or worse just about everything more famous from Frost. I don't know for sure. Many of Frost's lyrics sound about the same. I don't see this one as achieving a higher level of rational control, adequate diction, and proper emotion. There are times in studying Winters that one reaches a point of ambivalence. I trust Winters so deeply that I feel nearly compelled to trust him on this judgment, too, but after some years of study on the matter, I still cannot fully assent to his evaluation that this is Frost's best poem, as fine as it is. Notice that the poem Winters chooses as the best is one that has little sentimentality, country bumpkin nostalgia, or overly conversational, folksy diction. And, too, its theme strongly attracted Winters: the indifference of the natural world, of the whole universe that we inhabit, to the feelings and desires of humankind. All in all, if you are drawn to study Winters, a look into this poem and its rank within the oeuvre of Frost would be an excellent way to dig deeper into his theory and practice.

12/10 - On Milton's "Lycidas"

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

Milton continues the ornate style, but in Milton the rational structure is decaying toward association. At the time when Milton was writing "Lycidas", the doctrines of English associationism were not yet current, but he had his models in another decadent tradition: that of Vergil and his Sicilian and Alexandrian predecessors. "Lycidas" is a poem of which the scheme is held together by a loose pun: that on the word "pastor". King was a divinity student and this would have been a pastor in the ecclesiastical sense; but he was also a poet, and in pastoral poems shepherds were addicted to poetry. In Milton's opinion, of course, a poet had a moral responsibility, and there was a general relationship between the two kinds of shepherd. But Milton does not even indicate this relationship in the poem. Ben Jonson or Fulke Greville would have defined it. The poem falls apart here, or at best depends upon loose association; and much of the rest of the poem is a matter of loose association; -- partly in the progression of the poem, partly in the pseudo-descriptive details, the numerous flowers, fauns, satyrs, and so on which are named but not seen or understood, and are named purely for the connotations of the names. Milton did this kind of thing with more skill than anyone else who has ever attempted it in English -- with more skill even than Ezra Pound -- but the poetry is of a decadent kind and is not great. "Lycidas" gets what unity is has from Milton's magnificent gift for sound and for rhetorical tone.

** COMMENT: I notice the "Lycidas" has risen quite high in the Standard Canon during the past 50 years or so. It is now taught regularly in universities and discussed frequently in journals. Though almost no critic besides Winters consciously goes in for rankings, it seems to have reached an apotheosis over the last century and is now considered one of the greatest English poems, though I do not deny that it has always been part of the canon. The poem is certainly rather weak, and Winters is being generous to say that many of the images are handled with skill. The cliches are rife and the stereotypes are painfully sweet. It is a tiresome poem, and it mystifies me why it is so beloved. It is sentimental cliché-mongering almost at its worst. The poem is almost not worthy of being judged with greeting card doggerel. I see little skill in the poem other than a deft hand with keeping the meter and rhyme scheme going. Winters objects to its lack of unity, mostly, but I find much more to flog this poem for, and elsewhere Winters does give it a harder time. One has to wonder why he let it pass at this late stage in his career.

12/11 - On Emotion

from the essay "NOTES ON CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM" (1929) from "UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS"

The basis of Evil is in emotion; Good rests in the power of rational selection in action, as a preliminary to which the emotion in any situation must be as far as possible eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood. I say "as far as possible" advisedly, for such an elimination can never be complete; and the irreducible emotion, if properly evaluated, may even function on the side of Good. If the subsisting emotion in any situation is genuinely irreducible, there is at least the possibility of a sound moral evaluation of its character on the part of the person experiencing it; and if such an evaluation is made, right action becomes highly probable even though the emotion be definitely aligned with the forces of Evil. This personal decision, dangerous though it may be, is nevertheless not eliminated by religion. No dogma can be so complete as to fit exactly every situation.

** COMMENT: Here are very strong statements on emotion from early in Winters's career, when, clearly, his exasperation with the theory of Romanticism and its stress on the importance and usefulness of emotion had reached the point of obsession. I think the young Winters overstates the matter in this dogmatic, fist-thumping essay, which section by section tries to demolish much of the foundation of modern literary thought and practice. Shortly after this essay, which was written right during the time of Winters's transition to traditional and rational poetic practices, Winters would cool down and begin to more fully appreciate emotion. Later, far from thinking it evil in and of itself, he developed his theory of the rational control of emotion in literature, a doctrine which is his hallmark and one of the most significant products of his unrecognized genius. This passage, though, shows how seriously Winters took the matter of romantic excess. Overall, however, Winters was a very emotional writer who looked to irreducible emotions as the means of final judgment in the literary arts, though, as we have seen repeatedly, this emotion was to be controlled by rational understanding, not freed into unbridled expression.

12/12 - On Romanticism, Irrational and Dangerous - KP

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

The Romantics, however, although they offer a relatively realistic view of the power of literature, offer a fallacious and dangerous view of the nature both of literature and of man. The Romantic theory assumes that literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience, that man is naturally good, that man's impulses are trustworthy, that the rational faculty is unreliable to the point of being dangerous or possibly evil. The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve also a kind of mystical union with the Divinity; this, for example, is the doctrine of Emerson. Literature thus becomes a form of what is known popularly as self-expression. It is not the business of man to understand and improve himself, for such an effort is superfluous: he is good as he is, if he will only let himself alone, or, as we might say, let himself go. The poem is valuable because it enables us to share the experience of a man who has let himself go, who has expressed his feelings, without hindrance, as he has found them at a given moment. The ultimate ideal at which such a theory aims is automatism. There is nothing in the theory to provide a check on such automatism; if the individual man is restrained by some streak of personal but unformulated common sense, by some framework of habit derived from a contrary doctrine, such as Christian doctrine, or by something in his biological inheritance, that is merely his good fortune -- the Romantic doctrine itself will not restrain him. The Romantic doctrine itself will urge him toward automatism. And the study of history seems to show that if any doctrine is widely accepted for a long period of time, it tends more and more strongly to exact conformity from human nature, to alter human nature. The Romantic theory of literature and of human nature has been the dominant theory in western civilization for about two and a half centuries. Its influence is obviously disastrous in literature and is already dangerous in other departments of human life.

** COMMENT: This passage, from a crucial and incisive essay, makes a nice companion to yesterday's early discussion of the "Evil" of emotion. This is Winters's view of Romanticism after some decades of reflection on the matter of emotion and the true dangers of the sentimental-romantic doctrines that have dominated literature in English since about 1700. The matter of improvement, which Winters believed that the adherents of Romanticism dismiss, was essential to Winters, for he believed that such Romantic ideas simply led to degradation and chaos in both life and literature. Winters had no interest in watching anyone let himself go, though this seems to be one of the chief aesthetic pleasures of most people in the modern age. Winters also strongly believed, and argues well here, that the only thing holding our society and its members back from this chaos are the habits of the rational mind developed before the modern Romantic decadence set in. This passage can change the entire way you look at and understand the modern world, in philosophy, literature, and society. The ideas are closely related to Irving Babbitt's, as he developed them in the very useful and readable book "Rousseau and Romanticism". Winters's discussion is much more concise, much clearer, though no more caustic toward the whole theory.

12/13 - On Self-Expression

from the essay "THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLY HOPKINS" (1949) from "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

Physically, there is no such thing as the perfect man: there may well be the perfect boxer, the perfect wrestler, the perfect jockey, or the perfect hurdler, but they will be of different types, and many of their physical characteristics will be irrelevant to their functions. If we assume that Joe Louis represents the type of the perfect boxer, nevertheless the color of his skin has no bearing on his perfection: it happens to be brown; it might as well be white, green, or yellow. When we proceed from this type of material form through the lower animals, the plants, and the minerals, the area of irrelevance increases, the curiosities of accidental forms and relationships become more numerous, and the type of person who is fascinated by natural curiosities may find here a legitimate and harmless pasturage provided he knows what he is doing and does not confuse his activities with activities of a different kind.

If, however, we have a poet who is concerned with the expression of his own inscape (self-expression) and with the inscapes of natural objects and with little else, we may expect him to produce poems which are badly organized, and loosely emotional, and which endeavor to express emotions obscure in their origins and to express these emotions in terms of natural details of landscape to which the emotions are irrelevant. And poems of this kind are what Hopkins most often wrote.

** COMMENT: This loose comparison of perfection in poetry to perfection in boxing might raise more questions than it answers. It is almost as if the two paragraphs make for very neat arguments on their own, but have no firm connection that can be made out, as least as Winters might have intended a connection. In general, what Winters was chiding Hopkins for was his emphasis on self-expression, which, Winters held, would inevitably lead to the very imperfections that we find in his art. The second paragraph is a succinct and enlightening summary of most of the popular poetry written in the last 50 years or so. The discussion of "irrelevance" is probably related to the critical ideas of John Crowe Ransom, with whom Winters had been waging critical battle in the same years as his study of Hopkins. Ransom held that literary artworks make statements that are surrounded by a "tissue of irrelevancies": images, rhetorical devices, etc. Naturally, Winters hotly opposed any such idea, since he believed that the greater the "relevance" of every element in a literary artwork to every other draws it closer and closer to full unity and perfection. "Concrete" details have become the modern literary artists stubborn goal. Winters endeavored with all his energy to pull us back from writing exclusively according to this unnecessary doctrine.

12/14 - On Naming Individually the Greatest Poems of the Winters Canon - KP

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

I shall attempt in this study to define certain major talents who have been in varying degrees neglected, along with certain minor talents equally neglected; to re-evaluate certain established reputations; to offer a new historical outline and a new set of critical emphases; and to base my conclusions on poems individually named**.

**FOOTNOTE: In a review of my own poems published in 1953, Professor Austin Warren expresses resentment at my naming poems in this fashion. He seems to find it insulting. It is not intended to be so. I do this regularly in the interests of clarity. It is pointless to praise or blame a poet without offering evidence. Furthermore, many intelligent people, especially young people, have not read all of these poems, and a few may be grateful for the lists. And I do not believe that Professor Warren has read the poems often enough.

** COMMENT: Winters waited until the end of his career to offer these brief words in defense of his lifelong practice of naming and discussing specific poems in order to define his judgments of individual writers, to explicate his theory of literature, and to lay out his special Winters Canon. There has probably been no more fierce criticism of Winters than this aspect of his work. Somehow, the modern critic and reader does not like the naming of specific works, the singling out with specificity what are the very finest works or near perfect of our literary artists. I have never understood this difficulty. I believe that behind the constant objection is the underlying misjudgment that Winters wanted to discard or consign to oblivion every work that didn't make his Canon. NOTHING could be further from the truth, as Winters stated time and again. Winters demanded that we find the specific greatest poems to inform our theories and our practices. Readers should use the Canon as a model for writing and as a way of assessing any work of literature, whether specifically of the Canon or not. Thus, to take the first example that comes to mind, consider Frost. Winters believed Frost was worth reading in great detail, even though he did not judge a single poem by Frost great. Nor did he consider more than four or five to be fully successful. Nonetheless, we appraise and appreciate Frost through the models provided in the Winters Canon, which help us to see clearly Frost's virtues and defects. Winters singled out almost nothing from Frost for discarding. The attitude expressed by Warren is a calumny that simply will not go away, yet it must if we are to understand Winters at all. I agree with the theory and the practice of naming individual works for the highest praise and for blame. Winters's work in this area can help more in understanding and evaluating literature than any other theoretical concept I have ever encountered.

12/15 - On Winters and Williams

from a letter to ALLEN TATE (1926) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

I think you are wrong about Williams, purely and simply. I am not moved by any youthful admiration for technical gymnastics and what not in my liking for him -- he moves me more profoundly than any other living poet save Hardy, and as so only a handful of poets dead: Hopkins, Arnold, Emily Dickinson, Browning, [Tristan] Corbiere, and sometimes Baudelaire and Rimbaud. These are men who presented a blank wall to their contemporaries -- even their contemporaries of genius (Rimbaud and Corbiere never heard of each other though their only books were published in the same year, a thing which is indubitably fortunate, however) -- largely because their contemporaries (like themselves) considered themselves sufficiently intelligent to recognize genius without labor. When absolutely new perceptions appeared, absolutely bare of recognizable literary connections, they were not perceptible to the genius who refused to work for them -- very frequently, at least. Browning, of course, was and is popular, but for his bad poems and qualities, which are abundant. As to my admiring Williams, I do not lay it to superior intelligence but to my having spent five years in a definite effort to undermine him theoretically and to my having demonstrated to my own satisfaction at least that it can't be done. It was for that purpose mainly that I worked out my mechanics of poetry.

** COMMENT: The case of the poetry of William Carlos Williams, as I have said elsewhere, is probably the most difficult one in the work of Yvor Winters. More than a half dozen of his free-verse poems were selected for the Winters Canon, and they are the only large body of such modernist poems to make his Canon. Winters knew Williams's work from very early in his career, well before he changed from modernist techniques to traditional, rational poetic structures and theories. Yet though most of the modern experimenters were considerably downgraded after the change (which was just beginning to happen in Winters's life when this letter was written), Williams stayed in the Canon to the end of Winters's career. It seems that Winters tried many times to lower his appraisal of Williams, mostly because his romantic theories had led to his writing the imagist poetry he practiced to perfection, but kept coming back to him as one of the greats. As I have also said elsewhere, I don't see it. Williams's work is not especially better than the run-of-the-mill free-verse imagists whom Winters condemned. I cannot imagine why Winters was so moved by the poetry of Williams, since he seems to do nothing like what the other great poets of the Winters Canon do. I have tried to see it, but as I understand it, if you let Williams into the Canon, many other lesser poets are also dragged in on principle. Of the poets he mentions here, only Hardy would receive unqualified designation as great late in Winters's life. Browning was eventually dismissed in total, and Arnold sank step by step to a very low level. The others Winters considered worth reading but seriously flawed in one way or another. Dickinson he considered great, but also the writer of hundreds of bad or weak poems.

12/16 - On the History of Ideas

from the "FOREWORD" to "MAULE'S CURSE" (1938) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

The present volume is an attempt to trace some of the earlier aspects of this state of mind [obscurantism] in America, to suggest at least a part of the outline of a history of this state of mind. In so far as this history is merely a history of the international romantic movement, it is probably fairly well understood, at least in general terms; in so far as it is merely a history of American religious and other ideas and attitudes, it has been well treated by other writers, to whom I shall refer in the essays to follow. The relationship of the history of ideas to the history of literary forms, however, or conversely, the intellectual and moral significance of literary forms, has not been adequately studied; yet this subject is the very core of literary criticism and of the understanding of the history of literature.

** COMMENT: A singular achievement of Yvor Winters was precisely in this area of inquiry: the study of the relationship between the history of ideas and the history of literary forms. Winters was not a moral critic in the usual sense, as we have had occasion to point out. He had no ethical or political or religious system for which he was a partisan defender and advocate, like any didactic, propagandistic critic or author. In fact, generally, he steered away from direct discussion of moral and social doctrines -- of how one should live -- in his essays. This might seem strange to someone who has heard or has inferred that Winters was a moralist literary critic. His moral attitude concerned the way writers write: properly adjusting emotion to rational understanding so that moral understanding and proper evaluation of experience results. Winters expresses in this passage, one from rather early in his career, his commitment to this outlook for the book to follow, but these comments accurately summarize his approach to literature throughout the final two-thirds of his career. It is time that this misinterpretation of Winters were finally laid to rest. He might be worth ignoring for many reasons, but that he was a moral critic espousing didactically a certain ethical course in art and life is NOT one of them.

12/17 - On the Implicit Critical Judgment - KP

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

The "scientific" scholar who studies literature objectively as a record of the past is deluded. He is not studying all of the literature of the past, not even of a single period. He devotes much more time, for example, to Milton than to Sir Richard Blackmore, and quite likely he has never read Blackmore. This fact indicates that a critical judgment has been made, either by the scholar or by his predecessors. In this case it may have been easy to make, and may have required no great talent; but every writer that the scholar studies comes to him as the result of a critical judgment, simple or multiple, and many of the problems may be more difficult, and in fact they are, and in fact many of the judgments have been wrong. Furthermore, it is hard to see how our scholar will be able to write the history of poetry, let us say, when he does not know what a poem is or how it functions: for this scholar the history of poetry will be a disjointed description of discrete phenomena, all of them seen through the haze of various misapprehensions.

** COMMENT: In many essays, Winters defended this idea in one way or another. Every critic makes some decision about what to study and what is important in literature, and these decisions imply that evaluations have been made or adopted. Winters simply laid out his evaluations for all to see rather than hiding them behind implications and hints and innuendoes. Of course, as have seen, evaluation was the foundation of the Winters critical system, since he believed that knowing what was best and which poems achieved greatness (and both processes occur simultaneously in the act of critical judgment -- the theory informing the judgment and the judgment modifying and strengthening the theory) was crucial to creating fine artworks, thinking well, and living well and soundly. Making our evaluations and justifying them also aids the understanding, as Winters argues effectively here, for the critic who does not understand why he is choosing to study or appreciate one artwork over another cannot fully understand the artwork he chooses blindly to study nor that artwork's relationship to the history of literary culture or philosophical thought. For these same reasons, I agree with Winters's approach to ranking works of literary art and creating a special Winters Canon of the greatest poems, both concepts which have received steady and commonly harsh criticism from the few who have paid attention at all to Winters during the past 50 years and more.

12/18 - On Imagination

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

In the Graeco-Medieval psychology, fancy (or imagination) was the faculty which linked the sensible soul to the rational soul. The sensible soul alone provides the materials upon which the rational soul may work; the fancy is a combination of memory and the power to recombine the elements of memory; the fancy thus frees the rational soul from bondage to that which is immediately before it. But the fancy (or imagination) so conceived is not the poetical faculty. That is, if I wish to write a poem about a murder, I may obtain my materials by committing a murder or by imagining a murder. But when I have done either, I do not have a poem; I have the materials for a poem. The poetic faculty must then be brought to bear upon these materials. The poetic faculty is a particular activity of the mind which takes place in language, an activity which I have described in the "Introduction" to this volume and elsewhere, In the course of the eighteenth century, however, imagination and the poetic faculty gradually came to be identified, in ways which remain obscure, and imagination and revery became indistinguishable. The nature of function of language disappeared from critical theory, and the quality of the language employed in poetry deteriorated.

** COMMENT: Few concepts have received more adulation in modern literary criticism than imagination, as diverse as opinions and theories about the concept have been. In many of his essays, Winters challenged the prevailing exaltation of imagination in various ways, but in this passage he takes the concept on directly and beautifully explains why it cannot be considered the foundation stone of the literary arts, as has been theorized by many critics and writers over the past 300 years. For Winters, the imagination is simply another source of material for the study of human experience, much as private perceptions and sensations are for the individual writer. Moreover, not only has imagination been raised to far too high a level of importance in modern criticism, it has also been misused, as is suggested in Winters's final comments in this passage. Winters spoke frequently in his later essays about the widespread modern literary habit of poetic revery, the almost formless contemplation of some bit of human experience without understanding or judgment. He clearly thought that the theory of imagination, fueled by other Romantic theories, had helped produce this unremitting habit. Once again, it is another manifestation of the modern mistake of exalting the materials of art, the paint, over what one does with those materials, the painting. The analogy to murder that Winters uses to make his point, by the way, in my judgment, is superb, an excellent example of his skill as a polemical writer. His brilliant style, I hope, has come through in these selections. It is one of the important reasons he should be read more.

12/19 - On the Single Greatest Poem Ever Written

from the poem "EBAUCHE D'UN SERPENT" ("Silhouette of a Serpent") by Paul Valery

** COMMENT: Maddening to the end, Winters offered in the lead essay of "The Function of Criticism" his verdict on the single greatest poem ever written. I suppose he felt it was necessary, for a critic who founded his system on evaluation and his practice on finding the best poems, to offer his single choice of the greatest. He chose Paul Valery's "Silhouette of a Serpent", a very long poem for a thinker who devoted his career to finding the best SHORT poems to choose (even Winters draws attention to this variance in the essay). The poem has 31 ten-line stanzas, of which I have selected stanzas 4 through 6. It is an unexpected choice, to be sure. Most of the other poems that made those short lists in Winters's essays of the greatest among the greats were less than 30 lines long and offered very tight, concise arguments with minimal description or narrative drive. But this poem -- seldom mentioned in Winters's writings before this moment -- this is a different sort of poem altogether from Herbert's "Church Monuments" or Jonson's "To Heaven" (which are two great, great poems). Perhaps only Stevens's "Sunday Morning" of Winters's short-list poems comes close to this one in general style. "Silhouette" has not been considered Valery's best or drawn much critical attention from either general critics or Valery specialists, but it is highly deserving as being rated as one of the greatest poems ever written. Once again, Winters is the critic who found it and championed it, and that fact alone should instill some of your trust in this great thinker. But even if you reject Winters, do not reject this poem. It is deserving of all the attention such weak famous poems as "The Waste Land" has received and a great deal more. The "Great Sun" is God, being addressed by Satan, who will, in the poem, invade the Garden of Eden. Valery employs the Christian myth to plumb the depths of the meaning of existence.

12/20 - On Expression and Obscurity

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

The next step in the development of romantic practice, though it was suggested by Coleridge in the doctrine of organic form, was first indicated more or less fully by Poe, and in the matter of actual poetic practice was perhaps first taken by Poe, though very haltingly. One sees its nature precisely in the great French Symbolists. If it is the business of the poem to "express" emotion, then the form itself of expression should be expressive and if we are rigorously reasonable, as a few of the romantics are, in the pursuit of their unreasonable ends, we shall see that language can best be purely expressive of emotion if it is so used that all except emotional content is as nearly as possible eliminated. Mallarme was quite clear as to the necessity of eliminating rational content from language and was more brilliant and more elaborate than any other poet has ever been, in his technique of elimination. The later poems especially display extremely obscure symbolism and reference, stated in a syntax so perverse as to be barely and very uncertainly explicable, at the same time that the individual phrases communicate feelings and perceptions more sharp and interesting, when viewed in isolation, than they frequently have a right to communicate when viewed as a part of any deducible whole. The suggestiveness of the details is forced into startling isolation by the difficulty of comprehending the poems as wholes; and the effect appears, at least, to be deliberately sought.

** COMMENT: Has this been the goal of most literary artists of our time, to reduce rational content as nearly as possible to zero and express emotion as purely as possible? I think Winters somewhat overstates his case and his assessment of modern poetry in many of the passages devoted to this subject. It is true that the emotional, connotative side of language has been elevated far out of proportion to its importance to the literary arts and life, but it also remains true that, however loosely suggestive their thought is, most literary artists seek to convey ideas or to tell at least a reasonable story. Few artists have sought the daunting path of Mallarme, as fascinating as his experiments are. He seems, actually, to have caused a reaction against such excesses by the very obscurity of expression that he so assiduously and arduously cultivated and achieved. Moreover, to be rational, the excesses of Mallarme do not of themselves damn the entire doctrine and results of Romanticism, as Winters suggests here and elsewhere. I am opposed to Romanticism on the grounds Winters laid down, but I don't want the case to be overdone, for Romanticism has virtues, and these virtues have done a lot of good in the advancement of our literary arts. But note also the emphasis on the role of Edgar Allen Poe in these developments. Was Winters right about his influence? It would seem so in French letters, though Poe also seems to be a symptom as much as a cause. So many critics have missed or downplayed Poe's role in this movement that one has to look to Winters to get the story straight.

12/21 - On Stevens's Doctrine of Imagination

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

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is central to my discussion of post-Symbolist method, but by now it should be possible for me to indicate his contribution briefly. I have discussed him at greater length elsewhere. "Sunday Morning" is one of the earliest of his poems, and states his central theme: that there is no life after death, that man is isolated in time and space but in a universe of magnificent beauty, that man should cultivate his senses and his emotions to the utmost for only this can he fulfill the destiny allotted him. Stevens is a hedonistic nominalist. The hedonism, as I have pointed out in my early essay, led to boredom, romantic ennui; and to alleviate the boredom the poet was moved to greater and greater indulgence in stylistic excesses. The nominalism was the source of another difficulty: Stevens desired order in his universe, but his philosophy could not provide it, He sought this order in a concept of the Imagination, borrowed from Coleridge, but modified. For Coleridge, the Imagination was a link to transcendent reality; for Stevens there was no transcendent reality, but only the reality of the nominalist, a universe of discrete particulars. By means of the Imagination, however, and the Imagination not responsible to any transcendent truth, the poet could create Order. The trouble with this order was that it was imaginary, not real; reality remained what it had always been. The clearest statement of the doctrine, or defense of it, can be found in "The Idea of Order at Key West"; "She", the singer, is the Imagination; the sea is reality. The doctrine could not of its very nature be satisfactory to him....

** COMMENT: We come back to the concept of imagination, which was the subject of the selection for 12/18. Here, Winters is discussing how Wallace Stevens took up and altered these common and prevailing theories to find a satisfactory way to answer the BIG questions of life as Stevens understood them. Clearly, judging from the amount of critical attention Stevens draws among critics, his ideas on imagination, so elegantly and playfully expressed in dozens of his most prominent poems, have had a profound and enduring effect on serious readers for some time. I cannot judge how deep their influence on the average reader of poetry and literature might be or how far they have spread in the common literate culture of America or the West. His ideas would seem far too esoteric to inspire many devotees, though his solemn mature poetry does seem to provide some consolation for the materialist universe that modernity is always touting as "all there is". Winters, it might be easily guessed, had no regard for such nominalist ideas, since using the imagination to create order seemed to Winters to be tantamount to giving up control of one's life and discarding any pursuit of absolute, unconditional truths or the Truth. Literature, as we have seen, has much higher responsibilities than this, in the judgment of Yvor Winters. Still, Stevens's way of thinking is quite common nowadays in many fields of human endeavor, and it is most important to study Winters's discussion of that work to counter the ideas that Stevens probably only picked up on from the general climate of cultural attitudes and beliefs.

12/22 - On Literature and Human Action - KP

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

Nothing thus far has been said about human action, yet morality is supposed to guide human action. And if art is moral, there should be a relationship between art and human action.

The moral judgment, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is commonly the prelude and instigation to action. Hastily or carefully, intelligently or otherwise, one arrives at some kind of general idea of a situation calling for action, and one's idea motivates one's feeling" the act results. The part played by will, or lack of it, between judgment and act, the possibility that action may be frustrated by some constitutional or habitual weakness or tendency, such as cowardice or a tendency to anger, in a person of a fine speculative or poetic judgment, are subjects for a treatise on ethics or psychology; a treatise on poetry stops with the consideration of the speculative judgment, which reaches its best form and expression in poetry. In the situations of daily life, one does not, as a rule, write a poem before acting: one makes a more rapid and simple judgment. But if the poem does not individually lead to a particular act, it does not prevent action. It gives us a better way of judging representative acts than we should otherwise have. It is thus a civilizing influence: it trains our power of judgment, and should, I imagine, affect the quality of daily judgments and actions.

** COMMENT: Though I have cautioned against thinking that Winters was didactic and though he denied that his critical theory was didactic in any way, this passage from one of his most important theoretical essays implies that, at the end of the whole process of writing and reading literary artworks, there should be a moral result. Literary artworks can change the way we behave, by training our power of judgment and making it more powerful in meeting the challenges of the simple and rapid judgments of our mostly mundane lives. This does not come close to implying that Winters has some ethical system that he wishes to persuade us to adopt, and nowhere in his writings does Winters even hint that he has some moral philosophy waiting in the wings to trot out when the time is right (he was a political liberal and devoted to constitutional democracy, as we learn from his letters). But these comments do imply that Winters believed that there was some absolute standard of quality in daily ethical judgments and actions. His final position can only be guessed at. It was probably related to Aristotle and Aquinas in some way, but one cannot be sure of much. I think it is a strength that Winters resisted the temptation to speak as forthrightly on the evaluation of ethical principles and practices as he did on evaluation in literature. It might seem strange that he even wanted to resist, so strong was his commitment to philosophical absolutism. But I believe Winters recognized the intellectual tangle that he would get trapped in if he let himself go. And more than this, I also believe that he considered ethical excellence to follow from a proper attitude of critical judgment, not from following any critical system. If you can think well, good actions will follow, so there was an infinitely greater need to help people think well than to lay out a moral system: any predefined set of do's and don't's.

12/23 - On Modern Fiction

from a letter to HOWARD BAKER (1930) in "SELECTED LETTERS"

The best modern fictionists have done one of two things: they have written autobiographically (Proust and Joyce) of they have frankly taken the reader into their confidence, discussed the character's problems and their own machinery in the text itself, and have done it at length (James, Hardy, etc.). The modern ideal of objectivity is lost either way, but something much more complex and much more valuable arises in its place. The more complex situation is harder for the artist to dominate, but, once dominated, it is greater art. In short fiction it is easier for the artist to inject himself into his material without frankly announcing himself ("Dubliners", Callaghan's "Girl with Ambition" and "A Cocky Young Man:, [Janet Lewis's] "Proserpina".

Now then, the art of really vigorous prose, prose that is capable of plunging into a nest of such difficulties, mastering them, and dragging them on in its wake, is rather rare today.

Read Fielding, Melville, or "The Golden Bowl", and then try some of our cleanest modern objective stuff that tries to conceal the fact that it is art, a form of major poetry. The comparison is pathetic. In the opening chapters of "Joseph Andrews" the "machinery" is as obvious as it is in a power house, and it is just about as magnificent. The attempt to conceal your machinery by letting weeds grow up between the wheels is, I think, fatal. The important thing is to make it work. There is no need for art to be ashamed of itself in any form -- and most of the art that can be disentangled in modern fiction IS ashamed of itself. The impulse is confused and the result is weakness. Unless something is going on in the prose as prose, as well as in the narrative as narrative, you have very incomplete and an ultimately unsatisfactory form of art.

** COMMENT: As I have discussed many times during this Year with Winters, Winters spent too little time discussing the other genres of the literary arts besides poetry in his essays. It is the area into which his critical theories and practices need, most clearly, to be expanded if his thought is to be revived and built on. This early letter, written well before Winters embarked on his publishing career as a major critic (as he was once regarded), reflects some of his early thinking about modern fiction and what's good and bad in it. Clearly, modern fiction, that of the now-illustrious experimentalists, deeply disappointed Winters. As he mentioned in his essays, he looked back to prose written before 1900 for most of the great writing in fiction and history. His comments on the weaknesses of the modern approach provide a clear place to begin applying his theories across the board in 20th-century literature. We await the Wintersian to tackle the job, perhaps even to define a Winters Canon of prose.

12/24 - On Dickinson and Eccentricity

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

The difficulty is this: that even in her most perfect poems, even in those poems in which the defects do not intrude momentarily in a crudely obvious form, one is likely to feel a fine trace of her countrified eccentricity; there is nearly always a margin of ambiguity in our final estimate of even her most extraordinary work, and though the margin may appear to diminish or disappear in a given reading of a favorite poem, one feels no certainty that it will not reappear more obviously with the next reading. Her best poems, quite unlike the best poems of Ben Jonson, or George Herbert, or of Thomas Hardy, can never be isolated certainly and defensibly from her defects; yet she is a poetic genius of the highest order, and this ambiguity is one's feeling about her is profoundly disturbing. The following poem is a fairly obvious illustration; we shall later see less obvious:

** COMMENT: Winters receives little comment in modern criticism nowadays (not that he ever drew wide attention), but this passage was recently used to bash Winters's whole critical enterprise in a book by an ethical critic of some prominence, Wayne Booth. In "The Company We Keep", Booth objected to Winters's listing good and bad poems and of praising and blaming at the same time. What a sorry misrepresentation of this essay and even of these words. Emily Dickinson's work is exactly as Winters portrays it in this short summary at the beginning of the essay. The point is so accurate that one wonders about the ability of Booth, not the skills of Winters. Why is it that Winters sees so often through the cant of the critics and the follies of modern literary doctrine lays out exactly what we need to hear, such as that Miss Emily wrote many fine poems but also wrote many hundreds of badly damaged poems, most of which can still be read for their virtues. Nonetheless, the example he offers to demonstrate his theory about her body of work does not show me anything with ready clarity. The poem has a number of cutesy phrases, but they don't seem all that distracting to me. The poem does not achieve greatness, but has its virtues and is worth knowing. Winters has lots more to say about this poem and its deficiencies, as well as how the poem illustrates and exemplifies her general weaknesses, and I encourage you to read the essay in particular, since Dickinson has become such an exalted member of the Standard Canon in our time.

12/25 - On Parlor Verse

from the chapter "CONCLUSION" in "EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON" (1946)

The vatic pomposity of Wordsworth is ruinous to most of his work and can be detected in his best; the grammatical machinery of Milton's sonnets is almost always a little too great for the occasion and sometimes endeavors to enforce unity upon unrelated matter; and there is the excessive ingenuity of the Metaphysical School. It is unfortunate that Robinson published so voluminously, for one becomes irritated in reading him through, just as one becomes irritated with Wordsworth or Tennyson, and one becomes nervously aware of his faults and is inclined to see them even where they do not appear. No poet can publish in this manner with impunity, and as time goes by the risk will become progressively greater; even a genius as great as Wordsworth, a hundred or two hundred years hence, might succeed in burying his worth under the mountains of his mediocrity.

These defects are the initial defects of a manner and temperament, defects which Robinson held under reasonable control in a great many poems, and eliminated, or all but eliminated, from seven or eight. In the diminution of these faults and in the more or less comparable process of universalizing his New England mind, he became on certain occasions one of the most remarkable poets in our language. His style at its best is free from the provincialism of time and of place as the best writing of Jonson and Herbert.

** COMMENT: This is Winters's summary judgment on the poetry of Robinson, and high praise it is, indeed. Very few critics have ever rated Robinson so highly, and among the major general theorists, none has given him the stature that Winters has. But note that Winters also believed that Robinson wrote dozens if not hundreds of weak and even bad poems. This apparently offends many literary readers, since they draw attention to such sweeping judgments again and again to condemn Winters. I consider this a great mistake on their part. Always, Winters was simply endeavoring to uncover the very best, and in his view Robinson wrote not only very fine poetry, but a number of great poems and a couple of the greatest poems ever written. His lesser poems, and many of them are far, far beneath the quality of his best, are not to be dismissed or discarded. Rather, they are judged according to the explicit standards of Winters's literary theory and the more important standard set by all the greatest poems of the Winters Canon. It is time that this criticism of Winters's theory and practice were laid to rest for good. Finally, it seems that Winters will probably be wrong about Wordsworth and Tennyson. He is right that they are weak poets, but he is wrong that will come to be so regarded centuries hence. Robinson continues to sink while Wordsworth rises. Tennyson has had his ups and downs, but unless Winters's theories become the hallmark of Western literature, which is well deserved but highly unlikely, Tennyson will never cease to be rated as one of our greatest poets.

12/26 - On the Faults of Donne

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

Before proceeding further, I will give a grief list of Donne's more obvious faults, some of which I have already indicated; after that I can proceed to his virtues. Donne is a man of harsh and often of imperceptive temperament. He is given to over-dramatizing himself, even to the point of dismal melodrama. He is over-sexed, neurotically so; and he never copes with the problem of sexual relations in a mature fashion, as Jonson does, for example, or Greville. And as Ben Jonson remarked, he should have been hanged for his misplacing of accents. As to his frequent misuse of metaphor and simile, the causes are in part the weaknesses which I have mentioned and in part the bad side of the tradition which formed him: if one will consider the Petrarchan fascination with ingenious figures, the Gascoignian passion for harsh realism, and the complications of Donne's own character, one will not find it hard to understand why Donne came to commit the sins to which Samuel Johnson objected. There were European influences as well, but they were scarcely necessary. Understanding, however, should not involve forgiveness. The sins were real, and they vitiate most of Donne's poetry.

** COMMENT: Comments like these almost always infuriate critics and readers alike. But I have no idea why, after years of reading the many repeated censures of Winters. It is high time that it be faced: John Donne wrote a lot of crap in addition to a number of good poems, a few great ones, and many fine passages in the weak ones. Winters is accurate to the point of painfulness in his discussion of the weaknesses of Donne and their causes. You can learn a great deal by finally understanding what went wrong with so fine a poet as Donne, rather than by papering over his obvious weaknesses in a spirit of hagiography. We have fallen under spells. We are quick to condemn other poets who write like Donne only because they aren't Donne and have not been declared sanctified. I appreciate Winters's approach rather than disparage it. No poem and no poet is off limits from criticism and evaluation. In fact, in order to deeply understand Donne, we must be able to evaluate him. This is the central dogma of Winters's critical creed, in both theory and practice: find the best poems and have clear and full reasons for calling them the best.

12/27 - On the Modern Lyric

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

I have endeavored [in this essay] to define and evaluate the possible modes of literary expression, with especial reference to those that have appeared or been revived during the past seventy-five or eighty years. My conclusions, in brief, are that the song or "scattered" lyric may function now quite as effectively as at any time in the past; and for the evidence one need look no farther than Hardy or Corbiere; that the poem of the specific experience is the modern equivalent of the logical structure of the metaphysical school, being essentially the same thing and possessing potentially all the same virtues -- it simply works out from instead of working in toward the center, the experience; that the modern attempt to revive the Metaphysical School is almost purely syntactical, and is necessarily syntactical, as no adequate metaphysic exists unless one is able conscientiously and individually to find his way back to Rome; that the psychological or dream method is definitely subversive unless modified by a strong intellectual substructure as well as a rigid technique; that the alternation of method provides a variant, subtle and perhaps of great value, upon the poem of the specific experience; and that the alternation of mood as a consistent system is a trifle childish.

** COMMENT: This essay was the central effort of Winters's early career. It was expanded and substantially revised some years later into his dissertation and then his first book, "Primitivism and Decadence". The original essay was written during his transition from free-verse imagism to traditional poetic structures. His opinion of the modern methods under discussion in this passage changed considerably in just three or four years, as we have seen. He seemed to bounce back and forth between his two systems, looking for some kind of compromise theory. But in the end, his defense of rational content and control in the literary arts won out and destroyed the other position for him. The passage, nonetheless, shows some of Winters's early thinking on the matter of modern poetry, and it is fascinating to see how he was endeavoring to solve the same problem in modern literary practices that he would be endeavoring to solve 40 years later. In particular, his emphasis on unity, so muted here, yet still distinct, became a clarion call in the mature work. Also, rather than thinking that any substructure could rescue the dream method, he condemned such methods wholesale in the mature essays. Finally, the search for a solution to the rational techniques of classical poetry and the modern experiments was his abiding concern throughout his career.

12/28 - On Ockhamist Nominalism

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

Once a more or less Ockhamist position is taken, there are various ways by which faith may be lost, as one can discover examining the history of European thought from the time of Ockham to the present. Moreover, Ockham was by no means the inventor of the general religious position which he took; he was merely the last of its great defenders, and as a logician the greatest of them. The type of Christianity to place faith, which results from an act of the will made possible by Divine Grace, above understanding, has its first great exponent in Augustine, but is older than Augustine. This type of Christianity, the fideistic, or voluntaristic, derives all knowledge from faith and Revelation, and refuses to take the natural reason seriously; and although some voluntarists are willing to argue rationally from Revelation, their theology leads commonly and rapidly to a daily dependence upon Grace and distrust of reason -- that is, to extreme mysticism. Aquinas was a sane enough man to wish to make the most of all his faculties, and a good enough Christian to believe that God had given him his faculties for use.

The voluntaristic tradition seems to have grown upon Christianity of all kinds since the fifteenth century, but especially upon the western churches severed from Rome. Voluntarism is an easy form of Christianity for those who are not vigorous intellectually but who are slow to give up old habits, and it may for this reason have gained upon the Church of England and upon the Episcopal Church in the United States, churches in which faith seems to have died so slowly and gently that its demise is only half suspected today. It was in Calvinism, however, that voluntarism received its logical expression, and it was in New England that Calvinism was able to work out its own natural development with less interference or outside influence than was possible anywhere in Europe.

** COMMENT: Here is certainly a deep, cold plunge into some of the most important philosophic concepts of Western culture. This essay is one of Winters's most intellectually rigorous examinations of the ideas, concepts, and values that he sought to defend through his critical theories and practices. It is one of my favorite essays, just because it helps so much to illuminate the philosophical issues Winters believed had led to the primitivism and decadence of modern literature. In Winters's judgment, Adams had somewhat unwittingly wandered into some of the most egregious and dangerous philosophical ideas of modern times and any time. The passage I have selected is much too dense to discuss in detail. It is probably safe to say that Winters considered the influence of William of Ockham -- whom many readers don't even know of, let alone know well -- to be the most perilous philosophical force in the history of the West. Gradually, this doctrine, called nominalism -- which holds, in sum, that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names -- led to Romanticism in literature and other weakening philosophical influences in the literary arts. Winters's is a complex argument that is difficult for me to assess. He derived it from several prominent scholars whom he studied at this time in his career. I trust his judgment on the general scheme, and in concert with my own studies in philosophy and history, but do not feel adequate to the task of judging each particular in his discussion. What nominalism led to, by denying the reality of abstract thought and general categories, in Winters's opinion, is the slow degradation and destruction of Reason in the intellectual culture of the West.

12/29 - On Moral Judgment in Non-Poetic Literature

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

In "Macbeth", we have not merely the imitation of an action, but we have a moral judgment of the action. The judgment occurs in several ways. It occurs explicitly in the form of the action: that is, Macbeth is destroyed as a result of his sins. It occurs explicitly in the comments of other characters upon Macbeth. It occurs explicitly, and more importantly, as I have said earlier, in Macbeth's comments upon himself. The kinds of judgment thus far indicated, however, are explicit, or denotative, judgments. We could have all of these and still have no more than a good prose synopsis of the play. That which makes it a living simulacrum and a living judgment is the emotion resulting from this rational grasp of the theme. Ideally this emotion should be appropriate to the action at any given stage, and the final emotion should be appropriate to our realization of the significance of the whole. And of course we do not have a simple relation, at any point, of rational understanding to emotion, but once the process begins we have a complex interplay of the two, each enriching the other, the two becoming inseparable in fact, even though we may separate them by analysis for theoretic discussion.

** COMMENT: This is one of the most important passages in all of Winters that could be used to expand his views on the literary arts from poetry to drama and fiction. As I have said a few times during this Year with Winters, Winters neglected fiction and drama so that he could concentrate on his first love, the writing, reading, and study of poetry. He said several times in his essays that his critical theories and practices cover the other forms of the literary arts, but he spent precious little time discussing exactly how. We can guess with reasonable accuracy, of course, but it is important when the ideas are this important that we have the words of the founder himself on the matter. In discussing "Macbeth", Winters sketches in how moral judgment occurs through a literary genre other than poetry. The ideas expressed here are much more easily transferable to fiction than his discussions of moral judgment in poetry. The Wintersian theorist who wishes to expand on Winters's theories could easily take up this task, building on this sketch of moral judgment in drama and fiction, and thereby improving Winters's critical theory and our ability to understand and evaluate more of the literature of the past and present. Historiography, as well, as I have mentioned this Year, is another field of theoretic inquiry that awaits the next critic who can build on Winters sketch of the art of history in the essay on Henry Adams from "In Defense of Reason".

12/30 - On Universals and Particulars

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

The breeders who devised the standard [of perfection for airedales] and created the breed, however, started with neither a perfect standard nor perfect specimens; they started with a general idea of which they wanted and with a multiplicity of variously crude specimens with which to begin their breeding. One improves one's understanding of the general by examining the particular; one improves the particular by referring it to the general. Precisely where or how this process began not even the most learned among us can say. This example will serve as a parable of our experience. The romantic lover of nature dislikes universals and can neither see not describe nature; like Wordsworth, he sees nature in terms of cliches, which are the universals of the uneducated amateur; nature is a blur -- he prefers to accept it with enthusiasm and "en masse". To write about human experience with distinction, one must know the relevant universals; to manage poetic form with distinction or to perceive it clearly when managed by others, one must know the relevant universals.

** COMMENT: One of the beloved pastimes of Yvor Winters was the breeding and showing or airedales, which we have had occasion to mention during this Year with Winters. He mentioned the matter a few times in his essays, and on occasion used analogies to the breeding and training of airedales. This selection is one of the best such analogies. It is another piece of Winters's foundational argument that there are literary standards, absolute and universal, which we try to approximate as well as we are able and then apply as well as we are able to the study of individual literary artworks and artists. Winters endeavored, as no other critic ever has before him, to make those standards, founded on reason and philosophical realism, as explicit as possible. Just as the dog-world has very carefully defined and narrow standards for showing airedales, so the literary critic and artist must accurately define their standards, both to ensure and inspire excellence in the literary arts and to properly judge artworks. That these matters have not been acknowledged, in Winters's opinion, has led to the untold wastage of great literary talent, such as with Ezra Pound and Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and so many, many others. The modern critic implies, strongly, that he has standards, just by the fact that he makes strong and definite choices about what is worth studying, but he fails to take the more important step of defining those standards and applying them consistently to ensure that they are well-founded and properly useful. These are the purposes of those two end-products of Winters's thought that I have playfully, yet highly appreciatively, called the Winters Creed and the Winters Canon.

12/31 - On "The Waste Land"

from the essay "T.S. ELIOT OR THE ILLUSION OF REACTION" from "THE ANATOMY OF NONSENSE"(1943) republished in "IN DEFENSE OF REASON"

The matter of "the Waste Land" is Baudelairian. It is no accident that the last line of the introductory poem of "The Waste Land" is also the last line of the preface of "Les Fleurs du Mal". That preface details the sins of the modern world as they appeared to Baudelaire, and it names as the most horrible of them all the sin of Ennui. Now Ennui, as it appears in much romantic literature is very much the same sin as the Christian sin of acedia, or spiritual torpor, and it might well be regarded as the most deadly of sins because it leads to all the others and interferes with one's struggling against them: it would be above all other sins the one most likely to appear, if we accept Christian postulates, in a man or society deprived of grace.

Both poets deal with such a society, and both endeavor to judge it from a more or less Christian position. But there is this difference between them, if no other: that Eliot surrenders his form to his subject, whereas Baudelaire does not do so. Henry Adams, whose influence on Eliot's entire poetic theory is probably greater than has been guessed, worked out in his "Education", in "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres", and in certain minor essays the entire theory of modern society and its relationship to the society of the Middle Ages, upon which Eliot's critical theory rests; and near the end of "Mont Saint Michel and Chartres" he offered the now commonplace theory that modern art must be chaotic in order to express chaos ["Art had to be confused in order to express confusion; but perhaps it was truest so."] -- a variant, I suppose, of the earlier romantic doctrine of organic form sponsored by Coleridge....

** COMMENT: We come to Winters's discussion of a poem that has apparently reached some kind of apotheosis in literary culture in our time, perhaps because it just passed its 75th anniversary since publication and because of the turn to a new millennium. As you might guess by now, the sprawling mass of Eliot's poem does not much impress Winters. Rather, it reflects the serious defects in his thought, especially when compared to so fine a masterpiece as Baudelaire's. Still, for most common critics, both Eliot's poem and Baudelaire's collection stand at the summit of poetic achievement in modern times. How do they miss the weakness in Eliot and yet find the virtues of Baudelaire? These are important questions concerning whom to trust. I side with Winters. Eliot's poem commits the fallacy of expressive form with impunity, and it is seriously degraded as a result. One can easily understand why Winters took the theme in the two works so seriously: acedia led to the great sins of modern literary development, the giving in to mere expressiveness and emotionality. And so we end our Year with Winters on one of his most useful concepts, which seems to find application wherever one turns in modern literature, this fallacy of expressive or imitative form. It would do you well if you understand nothing else in Winters to understand this concept.