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The Absolutist The poetry and criticism of Yvor Winters In Defense of Reason by Yvor
Winters. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947. Reprinted with an introduction by Kenneth Fields, Ohio University Press / Swallow Press, 1987.
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Yvor Winters, who lived from 1900 to 1968, was
one of the most influential critics of poetry of his time. He played a
large role in shifting the aesthetics of the literary establishment from
its focus on the Romantics to a focus on the notable moderns, from a
nineteenth and twentieth century canon weighted toward English writers to
one weighted toward Americans, and from an emphasis on emotion and mystery
in the evaluation of poetry toward emphasis on rational coherence. A
professor of English at Stanford University for more than thirty years,
and a poet in his own right, he taught, influenced, and helped launch the
careers of a sizeable number of distinguished poets, including Thom Gunn,
Philip Levine, J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, N. Scott Momaday, and Robert
Pinsky. For these reasons, any attempt to understand how the canon of twentieth century poetry was formed must include scrutiny of the role Winters played and the ideas that motivated him. Those ideas are set forth principally in three volumes: In Defense of Reason, The Function of Criticism, and Forms of Discovery. Winters also wrote three monographs—on W.B. Yeats, E.A. Robinson, and J.V. Cunningham. Only the first title mentioned is currently in print. It would be possible to trace the development of Winters’ thought over his career with the aid of these texts, but that is not my purpose. While some development can indeed be discerned, there was a remarkable consistency to Winters’ ideas over a long span of years, and, more important, his influence on his peers resulted not from any evolution of his ideas but from his insistent stating and restating of them in essay after essay.
An Arsenal of Ideas
A succinct expression of Winters’ theory of poetry can be found in The
Function of Criticism, in his essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins: …[T]he
poem is a rational statement about a human experience, made in such a way
that the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational
understanding of the experience is communicated simultaneously with the
rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the
experience, a judgment both rational and emotional…. The poem … is a
method for perfecting the understanding and moral discrimination; it is
not an obscurely isolated end in itself. [FC 139]
Parsing this formula may require some effort. We must accept, first, that
a poem is about human experience, and second, that it is or ought to be a
rational statement about such experience. We also must accept that it
communicates emotions associated with the experience, and that the
emotions conveyed are in some way calibrated to the nature of the
experience. Winters calls this calibration a judgment and believes that
this judgment (of the experience by the poet) is the essential element in
the creative process by which the poem comes into being. It is a judgment
because there is in Winters’ mind an implicit standard whereby
appropriate emotion can be assessed, and that standard is part of an
overarching moral code. In The
Anatomy of Nonsense (collected in In
Defense of Reason), he asks rhetorically, “How do we determine
whether such a relationship [between motive and emotion] is
satisfactory?” And he answers, “We determine it by an act of moral
judgment.” (DR 370) For Winters, moral judgment implies an absolute
standard. Taken literally, this means that all persons of high moral
character will feel the same way about a given matter, provided they
understand it thoroughly.
While he largely avoids intense theological speculation (wisely, it would
appear, given his occasional forays into that territory), he admits to
holding “a theistic position” (DR 14) and, though professing not to be
a Christian, writes frequently and sympathetically of the moral philosophy
of Thomas Aquinas. We can fairly characterize Winters, therefore, as a
moral absolutist whose ideas on divinely inspired morality are by and
large Thomistic.
Winters sprinkled his critical writing with discussions of American
intellectual history—in particular the development of religion and religious thought and
its influence on literary practice. His most extended treatment of the
subject occurs in his essay on Henry Adams in In
Defense of Reason. He admired the moral stance of Luther and Calvin,
though he saw the contradiction inherent in a philosophy that elevates
faith to such a point that good works are essentially irrelevant to
salvation. He recognized that, if taken literally, the doctrine of
predestination, a cornerstone of New England Calvinism, offered no
incentive for moral behavior, since one might quite arbitrarily be damned
if one did and damned if one didn’t. But he also recognized the various
intellectual dodges by which the clerics of early New England circumvented
their own theology, discerned “signs of election” (or otherwise) in
their congregants, and thus managed to encourage and enforce a rather
stringent morality that they could not have justified by rigorous
argument.
Winters believed that the New England mystical disposition, which
flourished with the revival of Calvinism in the eighteenth century,
provided fertile ground for the importation of Romantic ideas later in the
century. These ideas held, as Winters put it, that God and his creation
are one, that man as part of that creation is inherently good, and that
man must trust his impulses and distrust his intellect. The chief American
exponent of these ideas in the nineteenth century, in his view, was
Emerson, and the chief literary practitioner was Whitman. To these two
figures Winters attributed much of the decadence he perceived in the
poetry preceding the modernist revolution.
It is apparent that Winters’ formulary description of poems and the
process of reading them omits many qualities that others have considered
central. Wit, figurative or ingenious language, irony, and the whole gamut
of rhetorical devices are treated only in passing. It is not that Winters
did not consider these elements possible tools of the poet, but he did not
view them as essential, and in fact his pronounced preference for the
Renaissance “plain style” of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson over the
ornate styles of Sir Philip
Sidney and Edmund
Spencer made it clear to his disciples that rhetoric ranked low in his
hierarchy of values. Unjustified decoration, in his characterization, was
“aimless debauchery.” (DR 540)
By tying morality to the judgment of poems, Winters solved a problem
familiar to priests and professors of literature: how to give primacy to
their own judgments as against those of their acolytes. The man who is
convinced that he can recognize a good poem better than can his students
or other members of the English faculty grows impatient at having to
explain himself or put up with what he sees as gross errors of taste.
Though he may modestly admit to imperfect understanding, he nonetheless
states or implies that he is in a far better position than most to apply
correct moral reasoning to the issue at hand. The Absolute may be
unknowable, but certain seekers in this view approach a level of
understanding not shared by most of their fellows.
Winters put the matter baldly in a poem entitled “On Teaching the
Young”: The young are quick of speech.
In common with the southern Agrarians, with whom he often fought, Winters
embraced a religious view of life and art even while such a view was
finding ever fewer adherents among the educated elite. He could not
conceive a morality that did not have a theological basis, and whenever he
encountered a writer such as Emerson who rejected traditional absolutism
without becoming personally dissolute, he concluded that it was only the
force of habit that held the man in place. If his own times rejected such
theologies, Winters rejected the times. He clung to a theistic position
because that was his nature and because it gave him the solid foundation
he needed for this approach to literature. From the perspective of our pervasive social ethos that looks askance at claims of absolutism in either art or behavior, a divinely backed morality seems a curious basis for solid literary judgment. “Truth” might have been an alternative criterion, and one not requiring recourse to a deity; but while it is possible to define certain literary situations in which truth criteria are relevant, even in fictional constructs such as stories and poems, there are many others that pose a serious challenge. Winters mentions truth occasionally. For him, however, truth seems a subset of a more comprehensive set of moral judgments that the poet makes of experience, and that the critic, in turn, makes of the poem.
The Doctrine Applied
Oddly enough, the characterization of a poem as a species of moral
judgment, though asserted relentlessly in Winters’ essays, finds few
demonstrations in the treatment of specific poems. In a poem like
Gascoigne’s “Woodsmanship” Winters recognizes that the poet is
commenting ironically on his own lack of skill in shooting a deer, and by
extension on his failures in various worldly pursuits. He understands that
in so doing Gascoigne is calling the value of those pursuits into
question, and that this questioning constitutes or at any rate implies a
moral judgment. With such a clear-cut example from the tradition of moral
verse in the plain style, Winters’ formula and critical approach seem
appropriate. But in treating Emily Dickinson’s “Farther in summer than
the birds” he offers a more complex analysis: “The intense nostalgia
of the poem is the nostalgia of man for the mode of being which he
perceives imperfectly and in which he cannot share.” (DR 292) Nor does
he isolate an explicit moral judgment in W.C. Williams’s “By the road
to the contagious hospital,” a poem he praises. Indeed, the moral
judgment he discerns in most poems appears to have less to do with
personal relationships or ethical issues than with the appropriateness of
the emotions evoked to the matter the poem is dealing with.
Appropriateness of emotion may seem a rather narrow basis for evaluating a
poem, and it may seem a perversion of terminology, at the least, to say
that in evoking an “appropriate” feeling as he depicts a situation, a
poet is rendering a moral judgment on that situation, but it is worth
remembering that much of Winters’ criticism was written when the
critical values of the Romantics were still ascendant. Editors of the
major anthologies gave pride of place to poems in which the language might
well be clichéd and derivative, but which featured emotional crescendos
not clearly tied to the matter at hand. Edgar Allen Poe among the
“traditional” poets, and Hart Crane, among the contemporaries, showed
this emotional disparity, though Winters credited Crane with far more
poetic talent than Poe. To achieve a sensible balance of emotion to
material, to write without evocative clichés, cleanly and honestly, is a
rare and noteworthy feat. Such writing attracted Winters’ attention
throughout his career.
If a dogmatic absolutism and a fixation on morality as a touchstone in the
evaluation of poems did not always persuade Winters’ readers and
students, his perceptive responsiveness to poetry carried more weight. And
his dogged indifference to received opinion allowed him to effect a
substantial re-evaluation of the poetic canon he had encountered at the
start of his career. Not that he succeeded (as he would have liked) in
deposing Wordsworth and Whitman (among others) or anointing T. Sturge
Moore and Jones Very—but he did nevertheless call attention to writers
and poems that were being ignored, and he helped give legitimacy to a less
mannered, more intellectual style that emphasized rational coherence over
decorative effect.
One of his most significant contributions was a reassessment of
Elizabethan poetry, undertaken in two essays: “The 16th
Century Lyric in England” (published in Poetry
in 1939, revised and reprinted in Forms
of Discovery), and “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,”
published in the Hudson Review and reprinted in The
Function of Criticism). In these essays he pays particular attention
to the native plain style, which he contrasts with the ornate
“Petrarchan” style of Sidney and Spenser. Practitioners of the plain
style included Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Fulke Greville, Walter
Raleigh, John Donne (in his late years), George Herbert, Ben Jonson, and
various lesser poets. The fundamental distinction was that the Petrarchans
wrote in a highly figured, trope-laden language with a minimum of rational
argument, whereas the practitioners of the plain style dealt with serious
issues of life and death, in a logical framework, usually with a minimum
of ornament. Clearly there were shadings and variations in all writers of
the time, and some, like Donne and Shakespeare, straddled both styles. But
Winters’ essays were a corrective to the views of such English critics
as Arthur Quiller-Couch and C.S. Lewis, and they helped revive the
reputations of writers like Greville and Jonson, whose short poems had
been largely neglected during the nineteenth century.
A digression is perhaps appropriate here. Winters praised the “rational
structure” of his favorite poems, and deplored the “associational”
structure of poems whose underlying logic appeared thin or non-existent.
But it is worth noting that rational structure is often illusory.
Winters’ one-time protégé J.V. Cunningham noted in print the
“syllogistic” argument of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” only
to be rebutted by a distaff response from Barbara Herrnstein Smith,
pointing out that the syllogism was false, since “if there were time
enough, you could delay” does not in strict logic imply that “since
there is not, you must not.” And Paul Valéry, a “rational” poet
esteemed by Winters above all others, likened prose to walking and poetry
to dancing. It is clear that readers in some times and places will
tolerate looser organization and more obscurity in poems than will others
elsewhere. But that is a relativistic observation, and Winters was not a
relativist. For him, rational structure implied a moral seriousness of
purpose and a genuine contribution to civilized discourse. The undeniable
delights associated with certain admittedly non-rational poems did not
constitute a counter-argument for this critic, who viewed delight with
scant charity among the array of poetic values.
To return to the business of criticism: death, as is often observed,
confers a nice equality. It is not so difficult for a critic with a keen
eye and ear to discriminate among poets and poems four hundred years
removed, though he must be able, as Winters put it, to “find the
poems”—something Winters was convinced he could do and believed that
C.S. Lewis could not. (FC 197) But it is another matter to forage among
the work of one’s contemporaries. For one thing, there is much more
underbrush: large numbers of poems in all sorts of periodicals, most
destined for history’s rubbish heap, but some— and not always in
prominent journals—that may be the next generation’s cultural icons.
For another thing, the complete work of one’s contemporaries has not yet
been written, so it is difficult, even if one could read everything, to
say whether a given poem is a flash in the pan or the sure promise of
genius to come. For a third, the critic has a stake in the contest. He is
often (as Winters was) a poet himself. He cannot help comparing his own
work, and his own reputation, with those of his peers. He has been
befriended by some of them and slighted by others, and he has slighted and
befriended in his turn. Preserving an Olympian detachment under such
circumstances is all but impossible. Winters’ solution appears to have
been to treat virtually all his contemporaries without charity. He was the
judge at the bar, St. Peter at the gate, and he was not lenient. Only, as
it developed, with his own students did he show preference sometimes
beyond merit. Of the major American contemporaries, Crane, Eliot, Stevens,
and Frost did not get off lightly, as we shall see.
Winters knew Hart Crane personally, spent some time in extended
conversations with him, and carried on a correspondence with him for
several years. The frequency with which Crane is mentioned in In
Defense of Reason is a measure of Winters’ interest in him and his
work; it is evident that Winters recognized Crane’s talent and was
disposed to view his work favorably, but also that he ultimately found
more fault than virtue in most of Crane’s achievement. Some of the
problems stemmed from Winters’ own literal-mindedness, but others must
be laid at Crane’s doorstep. Crane took a rather tangential approach to
the selection of images and to sentence construction. Commenting in an
early essay on this passage from “The Marriage of Faustus and Helen”— The mind is brushed by sparrow wings; —Winters rebuked Crane for writing deliberate nonsense. Only later, on
learning that “numbers” referred to the sparrows, did he credit the
poem with some meaning and the writer with a serious intention. As for
other poems, Winters recognized the magnificence of “Voyages II,”
despite (or because of) its full-throated Romantic rhetoric, but he
concluded that Crane’s attempt at a verse epic of America in The
Bridge was ultimately a failure. In keeping with an approach he would
use throughout his life, he criticized Crane’s work in relation to
actual or speculative knowledge of the man’s personal characteristics. He
was unfortunate in having a somewhat violent emotional constitution; his
behavior on the whole would seem to indicate a more or less
manic-depressive make-up, although this diagnosis is the post-mortem guess
of an amateur, and is based on evidence which is largely hearsay. He was
certainly homosexual, however, and he became a chronic and extreme
alcoholic. I should judge that he cultivated these weaknesses on
principle; in any event, it is well known that he cultivated them
assiduously, and as an avowed Whitmanian, he would have been justified by
his principles in cultivating all of his impulses. I saw Crane during the
Christmas week of 1927, when he was approximately 29 years old; his hair
was graying, his skin had the dull red color with reticulated grayish
traceries which so often goes with advanced alcoholism, and his ears and
knuckles were beginning to look a little like those of a pugilist. About a
year later he was deported from France as a result of his starting an
exceptionally violent commotion in a bar-room and perhaps as a result of
other activities.. In 1932 he committed suicide…. [DR 589-590] Despite
his moral disapproval, Winters’ considered assessment of Crane’s
legacy is fairly generous: The
style is at worst careless and pretentious, at second-best skillfully
obscure; and in these respects it is religiously of its school; and
although it is both sound and powerful at its best, it is seldom at its
best. Yet the last fifty-five lines of
The River, and numerous short passages in The
Dance and in Atlantis and a
few short passages elsewhere, take rank, I am certain, among the most
magnificent passages of Romantic poetry in our language; and at least two
earlier poems, Repose of Rivers
and the second of the Voyages,
are quite as fine. [DR 598] Characteristically,
he sees Crane’s limitations as stemming from the dubious moral influence
of his Romantic forebears, Emerson and Whitman: “We have, it would seem,
a poet of great genius, who ruined his life and his talent by living and
writing as the two greatest religious teachers [sic]
of our nation recommended.” (DR 598)
Winters subtitled his essay on Eliot “The Illusion of Reaction,” and
he meant it disparagingly: he insisted that Eliot was no true reactionary,
as he himself was. Readers who might have thought Eliot’s interweaving
of his Christian belief with his criticism and his poetry would strike a
sympathetic chord in Winters were quickly disabused. Winters objected to
Eliot’s criticism, in part because Eliot ascribed less overt judgment to
poets, instead basing his assessment of their work on the language of
their poems and the “sensibility” they evinced. To Winters this was
far too passive a role, suggesting that the poet was merely a medium for
some unconscious or semiconscious process. At least for the purposes of
this essay Winters refused to entertain the possibility that poetic
composition might indeed involve processes only partly under the poet’s
control. Such a theory of art was not acceptable to his sense of the moral
responsibility and active agency involved in composition.
Winters spent far more words on Eliot’s critical writing than on his
poems. He was not an admirer of much of Eliot’s verse, yet he chose to
challenge Eliot on the critic’s own turf—the battlefield of ideas.
In that venue, however, Eliot proved to be a slippery character, for his
statements, while appearing to come from a comprehensive and synthesizing
intelligence, were consistent neither with each other nor with his own
practice. At bottom the argument was over the nature of the process of
poetic composition. Eliot believed that the poet, while he should be
imbued with a deeply understood tradition and an active emotional
intelligence (he was less emphatic about straightforward intellectual
prowess), should write from his own profoundest feelings and without the
explicit aim of creating an argument or a judgment. Winters, of course,
believed judgment was everything and gave very little latitude, in theory
or (at least in his later years) in practice, to inspiration.
He therefore objected also to Eliot’s statements seeming to support
writers who worked with their native personalities rather than attempting
to achieve an artificial or constructed “character” in their work.
This debate seems quaint, involving as it does two men who had both quite
consciously created their characters. In this case Winters at least
retained the virtue of self-consistency.
At the heart of the one-sided critical argument (Eliot did not respond to
Winters’ gambits) are differing views—and perhaps different
definitions—of thought and emotion in poetry. For Eliot, thought
apparently was something done only by philosophers on the order of
Aquinas. Shakespeare and Dante did no actual thinking at all, he
maintained. Instead, they dealt with emotion, though that was achievement
enough: “In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion.
To express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to
express precise thought.” (“Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,”
quoted by Winters in DR, 470.) It seems evident that Eliot was describing
composition in which intellect and emotion were fused and in which there
was a consequent intellectual basis for the emotional effect of the
writing. This state of affairs closely approximates Winters’ idea that a
poet “judges” his material by associating an appropriate emotion with
the matter at hand. Yet Winters raises myriad objections to the passage
and appears to dismiss it.
Turning finally to Eliot’s poems, he praises only “Gerontian,”
though he objects to the use of portentous but unexplained characters (Fräulein
von Kulp, Hakagawa, et al.) whose function in the poem is unclear. He
objects that the subject of “The Waste Land” was handled better by
Baudelaire. He believes Pound had a better ear. He does not treat “Prufrock,”
“The Four Quartets,” “The Hollow Men,” or any of the other works
on which Eliot’s reputation hangs, but in Forms of Discovery he comments on the general method: “The method
is that of Dyer or Collins in the eighteenth century: a typical item is
mentioned—a gothic pile in Collins, a pile of rubbish in Eliot—and
we are supposed to have the typical, that is the “correct,” reaction
or association, and to have it automatically and with great force. And
many of us do, and will be angered by these remarks, but this kind of
writing has no life of its own and ultimately becomes very tiresome.”
(FD 322) While admitting the justice of what Winters says here, I regret
that he did not deal more directly with the poems, or parts of poems, that
have struck or moved several generations of readers. You do not have to be
a champion of Eliot to wish for a more thorough and balanced treatment of
his work. This technique of harshly judging a small sample of a writer’s
output and dismissing him, on that basis, from the company of “great”
poets is used by Winters with distressing regularity.
The charge Winters leveled against Wallace Stevens was that he was a
hedonist. Winters made the charge against the man as poet and not,
presumably, against Stevens personally, though we cannot be sure, since
Winters was rarely careful with such distinctions. Winters’ frequent
ventures into philosophy have a quality more of polemics than of rigorous
thought, so it is not entirely clear what he understood by the term
“hedonist,” though it was clearly a negative assessment. Hedonism can
mean a pursuit of one’s own pleasure above all else or a philosophy
basing ethics on pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. The
former reading does not fit Stevens personally and would be very hard to
derive from his poems, however richly decorative their surface. The latter
might be considered the dominant secular ideal of our time.
Much of Winters’ essay on Stevens in In
Defense of Reason scolds the poet for wasting his talent in pursuit of
“emotional stimulation” and “intense feeling.” Winters apparently
believed that Stevens, lacking a God-inspired sense of duty, entertained
himself by stylistic excesses but became bored by the process and wrote
much trivia, among which his undeniably great poems stand out as
anomalies. He speaks of Stevens’ ennui, which he finds depicted in
“The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” In that poem he finds in such lines
as “Out of such mildew plucking neater mould, / And spouting new
orations of the cold” a search for “some impossible emotional
finality.” The implication seems to be that the talented but bored and
aimless hedonist may commit some atrocity to entertain himself because he
lacks a stern morality and resulting sense of inner discipline.
Winters’ beliefs and pre-formed attitudes toward Stevens distort his
understanding of poems such as “The Comedian as the Letter C,” which
Winters says deals with “a poet who begins with romantic views of the
function of his art and who, in reforming them, comes to abandon his art
as superfluous.” (DR 439-440) He states that Crispin, the poem’s
central character, in leaving the exotic world of Yucatan, hopes now to
achieve “the beatific pleasure reserved for the successful hedonist.”
(DR 442) Perhaps the basis for this inference is Stevens’ lines: … blissful liaison But
Stevens himself evaluates this as “illusive, faint, … perverse, /
Wrong …” and concludes, “Moonlight was an evasion.” The poem does
not say that Crispin abandons his art—and if we (reasonably, in this
case) equate the poet and his protagonist, then the poem’s very
existence and its virtuoso style stand as irrefutable evidence that he did
not.
The pervasive finger-wagging tone makes Winters’ writing on Stevens
difficult to read, but in spite of his condescension toward a man a
generation older than himself who was surely one of the twentieth
century’s greatest poets, Winters appreciated many of Stevens’ virtues
and identified a good number of the most distinguished poems not long
after they appeared in print. He spent many pages discussing “Sunday
Morning,” and despite reservations about some lines and stanzas clearly
considered it a work of genius. And having used most of his essay to tell
readers that Stevens was neglecting his gifts and was sinking into
decadence and triviality, he appended to that essay, four years after
Stevens’ death, a postscript sincerely praising Stevens’ late poem
“The Course of a Particular,” thereby admitting implicitly that his
previous report of the death of Stevens’ art had been greatly
exaggerated.
Winters struggled mightily with the shades of writers who did not accept
his own philosophy. He was hard put to explain how, benighted as they
were, they managed to create what he was forced to recognize as excellent
poems. Characteristically, he fell back on Aquinas: a demon is good
insofar as he is realized, but evil insofar as he is incomplete. The
writers of perverse genius were great to the extent that they could
understand some things very well, and defective where their understanding
failed. That, of course, might be said of anyone, whether poet or critic.
We shall later explore how far Winters’ understanding got him as a poet.
For now, the last word on Stevens (which says a great deal about Winters)
comes from Winters’ summing up in Forms
of Discovery: “Stevens was a man who understood very little, but
that little is of great importance, and his understanding, his language,
is one of the marvels of our literature.” (FD 277-278)
Robert Frost confronted Winters with an awkward problem. Winters’ theory
of poetry almost required that a good poet be neither popular nor well
understood. Poetry was for him the most intellectual of the arts, and the
notion of a distinguished poet whose work was accessible and enjoyed by
ordinary readers seemed not just implausible but self-contradictory.
(Shakespeare posed a similar problem, but Shakespeare wrote dramas—crowd-pleasers that happened to contain patches of great poetry—and
flawed sonnets that were valued by ordinary people who had been told they
were treasures.) Moreover, Frost in most of his work adopted a persona
that underplayed the role of the poet as priest and judge. He wrote in the
voice of a plain-spoken countryman, colloquial and slightly cranky, a
little like one’s grandfather. Perhaps most annoying, he wrote
uncommonly well. But while Frost dealt with moral and ethical issues in
many poems, he clearly lacked Winters’ sense of moral mission, and he
was far more aware and tolerant of moral ambiguity. Winters saw this
attitude as a serious weakness and labeled Frost a “spiritual
drifter.” Armed with that appellation, he proceeded to dismember some of
Frost’s less notable poems.
In the course of a thirty-page essay mentioning about two dozen poems,
Winters treats only four or five that would be considered now among
Frost’s best. He ignores the anthology favorites like “After
Apple-Picking,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending
Wall,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay”; he says nothing about
“Directive,” “Range Finding,” “Out, Out— ,” “The Oven
Bird,” and many other larger and smaller triumphs. Winters rightly
points out that Frost’s didactic poems are not his best, but he goes out
of his way to choose didactic poems for discussion, apparently in the
belief that they best illustrate Frost’s ideas. He calls Frost’s
handling of blank verse “inept” and says his blank verse rhythms are
“undistinguished and … repetitious to the point of deadly monotony”
(an overly harsh judgment, in my view), without noting that Frost thought
in lines that, if not end-stopped, had at least a perceptible syntactic
pause after each. This slight pause, so helpful in the propulsion of rimed
verse, breaks up the flow of blank verse, making a reader inadvertently
look after every ten syllables for a rime that isn’t there.
Winters attacked Frost for the ideas he discerned in the poems, but it
becomes evident that his equally deep objection was to Frost’s diction.
He observes, “Frost early began his endeavor to make his style
approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation, and this
endeavor has added to his reputation. It has helped to make him seem
‘natural.’ But poetry is not conversation, and I see no reason why
poetry should be called upon to imitate conversation.” (FC 160) This is
a rather remarkable statement from a poet and scholar who would have had
to be familiar with recurrent historical attempts to reinvigorate poetry
with the vocabulary and diction of natural speech, who championed the
Elizabethan plain style against the ornate, and who might be supposed to
understand the emotional immediacy of an idiom that comes naturally to the
tongue. We might at least have expected admiration for a craftsman able to
write in strict rime and meter without resorting to the inversions,
unusual contractions, and archaisms that were the stock in trade of lesser
poets who had to wrestle their sentences into form. But Winters’ own
sense of the poet partook more of the vatic bard who declaimed in the
Russian manner: a deep-pitched chant with almost no concession to the rise
and fall of natural speech. Archaisms of style and vocabulary were
tolerated and even valued if they were seen as contributing to an elevated
tone. That such easy enhancements might constitute a spurious
“spiking” of the poem’s emotional aura (so essential to the
“judgment” in which its moral character inhered) seems not to have
troubled Winters.
A sense of Winters’ approach to Frost can be gained from his discussion
of “The Road Not Taken,” a poem too well known to require quotation.
It is this poem in particular that prompts Winters to call Frost a
“spiritual drifter.” He comments, [A]
spiritual drifter is unlikely to have either the intelligence or the
energy to become a major poet. Yet the poem has definite virtues, and
these should not be overlooked. In the first place, spiritual drifters
exist, they are real; and
although their decisions may not be comprehensible, their predicament is
comprehensible. The poem renders the experience of such a person, and
renders the uncertain melancholy of his plight. Had Frost been a more
intelligent man, he might have seen that the plight of the spiritual
drifter was not inevitable, he might have judged it in the light of a more
comprehensive wisdom. Had he done this, he might have written a greater
poem. But his poem is good as far as it goes; the trouble is that it does
not go far enough, it is incomplete, and it puts on the reader a burden of
critical intelligence which ought to be borne by the poet. [FC 163] What
the earnest reader takes from this is Winters’ conviction that there are
no choices over a lifetime whose relative merits cannot be clearly
evaluated with the information at hand, that anyone who believes a given
option is indeterminate is spiritually lazy, and that anyone who depicts
such a moment of decision and reflects on its implications is a person of
inferior intelligence. It is hard to credit such astonishingly simplistic
notions to a man capable, on other evidence, of considerable perspicacity.
It makes more sense to conclude that Winters’ competitive hostility
toward Frost, his resentment of the great reputation which so overshadowed
his own, clouded both his mind and his critical ethic.
In considering isolated passages in some poems, Winters finds real virtues
and responds with the excitement of genuine discovery. He quotes from
Frost’s poem “The Most of It” the passage in which a buck swims
toward a solitary observer— Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, Winters
observes that “the style combines descriptive precision with great
concentration of meaning and at the same time is wholly free from
decoration, ineptitude, and other irrelevancy.”
But almost every compliment contains a barb. Discussing a long poem called
“The Vindictives,” in which Frost depicts the Spanish conquest and
destruction of the Inca civilization, Winters notes that the motivation is
“a simple and honest hatred of brutality and injustice so obvious that
they cannot be overlooked.” He goes on to state that such an attitude
can be justified only by “the ideas of Christian and Classical
philosophy, which …[Frost] has during all of his career neglected or
explicitly maligned.” (FC 184) It should be unnecessary to point out
that one does not have to espouse either Christian or classical philosophy
to hate brutality and injustice. The parochialism of such a statement
uttered by a professor of liberal arts at a great university is
remarkable. It is especially perplexing to reflect that the statement
comes from a man who in the same essay accused Frost of “willful
ignorance” and “smug stupidity.” (FC 176)
In his memoir The Bread of Time,
Philip Levine tells of a visit Frost paid to Stanford while Winters was
teaching there. Informed that Frost was making his way through the quad
toward the vicinity of Winters’ office, Winters hid and refused to show
himself. It is not hard to see why.
If I have conveyed the impression that
Winters was uniformly small-minded and hostile toward eminent poets, I
have done him a disservice. He wrote habitually in a tone of irascible
self-confidence, but he often wrote with insight, and his judgments
offered a needed corrective to the pieties of his time. Even his
misjudgments were salutary for many readers: they demonstrated that genius
never deserves to be taken on faith but must justify itself, and that many
texts admired uncritically out of reverence for tradition might or might
not bear rigorous scrutiny but should at least receive it. For ordinary
readers, students, and aspiring poets, that was a liberating perspective.
Arguably Winters’ most important contribution to critical theory has
nothing to do with the moral basis for judgment, and only a slim
connection with emotion in poetry. It is his description of the
“post-symbolist method” that he finds in the poetry of Tuckerman,
Stevens, and few other writers in English, but most plentifully in certain
poems of Paul Valéry. A poet employing this method writes so as to invest
certain words and concepts with double meanings, so that they can apply
both to the sensory environment being described and to the underlying
conceptual or philosophic issues in which the poem’s meaning chiefly
inheres. This approach is not the same as metaphor, where a concrete
object is mentioned but is not understood to be a literal part of the
scene in the reader’s mind’s eye: when Wordsworth says he is “No
sport of every random gust,” the reader is not expected to visualize the
poet in a windstorm. But by the final passage of “Sunday Morning” the
reader has gained sufficient insight into the predicament of mankind
living in an “unsponsored” universe to perceive the resonance in
Stevens’ language: And in the isolation of the sky, Winters comments that isolation, casual, ambiguous, and darkness all take on extra meaning and freight the passage with import it could never have carried as pure description. “Their significance has been prepared by the total poem, and they sum the poem up.” (FD 276) By identifying the technique and praising its power to his students, he surely perpetuated its use by succeeding generations of poets.
The
Poems
By curious contrast to his influential prose, which is increasingly hard
to obtain, Winters’ poems, though still available in print thanks to his
admirers’ efforts, have had a far narrower influence, notwithstanding
that it was for his poems that he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1960.
On the evidence of the poems, Winters’ natural gift was for keen
observation and a portentous tone. Working in the pervasive imagist
environment of the nineteen twenties, he produced poems like this: When I walk out The
general observation is sharp, but the details and tone are puzzling. Why
are the fields “burning”? We can agree that the goldfinches resemble
dandelions, but why are they angry? Even without rational answers to these
questions, the poem’s vocabulary suggests (but does not explain) a
ferocity in the landscape that threatens the observer.
Beginning in the late twenties, Winters’ style underwent a mutation. He
began to subject his perceptions and his feelings to the more rigorous
formal constraints of rime and meter. Some early results of this process
show clear signs of the struggle that must have been involved. Here is the
beginning of “Sonnet”: The God-envenomed loneliness, the stain This
too was a style of the times, which also produced Allen Tate’s “The
Subway,” a poem of similar emotional violence. From the criticism
Winters was writing during the thirties and later, we can infer that he
began to find the emotional electricity of passages like this out of
proportion to the matter being treated.
In some ways poems like this are typical sins of the young, who are beset
by large and turbulent emotions to which they are often unable to assign
clear motivations. One stratagem for dealing with the problem is a retreat
into abstraction. This approach had attractions for a young academic
attempting to chasten a too sensuous and emotional style. It resulted in
poems like “The Moralists,” a sonnet that begins: You would extend the mind beyond the act, Phrases
like “the mind,” “the act,” and “the brain” (later in the same
poem) imply a kind of disembodied existence of human faculties as pure
phenomena, and while it is indeed possible and sometimes useful to
conceive them that way, readers and the poet himself can quickly lose
track of the underlying behavior being discussed. We can speculate on what
it might mean for someone to be forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact, but
the poem gives no concrete guidance, and thus all feeling that might be
associated with the poem remains uncertain and provisional at best. This
technique was one Winters continued to employ till the end of his writing
life, and its liabilities continued to dog him.
Now and then he was able to combine his talent for physical observation
with his sense of the somberness and menace of his environment in a way
that served to dramatize his struggle to retain intellectual control.
“The Slow Pacific Swell” is a reflective poem that poses a perceiving
individual against the vast and impersonal backdrop of the Pacific coast. The rain has washed the dust from April day; In
a semi-allegorical reflection he recalls a threatened loss and willful
recapture of intellectual control: Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea While
allegory can be a less than satisfactory mode for treating personal
experience, because the experience itself remains masked behind the
representation of it, it is still superior to a mode that relies on pure
abstraction. Here, at any rate, the physical terms in which the experience
is presented are vivid enough to draw empathic feeling from the reader:
“Yes, I can imagine what that must have been like.”
Then in a passage of inspired description he represents the vast,
impersonal, brute natural world that serves as backdrop and qualifier to
his moral and intellectual struggle. … From the ship we saw At
that point the rimed couplets, the rhythm of the verse, and the syntax of
the sentences are beautifully coordinated. It is the high point of the
poem.
In the poem’s last section, Winters makes clear that he, the
intellectual creature, stands at the edge of a potentially engulfing sea
representing all that is irrational and uncontrollable: “… one may
come / Walking securely till the sea extends / Its limber margin, and
precision ends.” The last image in the poem is the sea, resembling its
most magnificent denizen: The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand, Some
readers might find the allegory a bit too neat, might object to the
Cartesian fractionation of the individual into mind and body, intellect
and emotion, especially when body and emotion are seen as inimical to
reason, but Winters has long and eminent precedent, including Herman
Melville, and the poem is very well executed. It is one of his most
distinguished achievements.
The personal struggle depicted in this poem, not incidentally, was to be
Winters’ obsession throughout his life as poet and as critic. In another
context he characterized it as “the pull against gravity, against earth
and those determined by it, and against the qualities one shares with
them; self-direction, self-organized out of chaos.” (Poems,
60) It is undeniable that this struggle was real, momentous, and on-going
for him. It explains his impatience, as a critic, with writers like
Stevens, Frost, and Yeats, who in their different ways appeared to him to
indulge aspects of their natures that he had ruthlessly suppressed in his
own.
A much later poem, “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight,” deals with the
same theme in a different allegorical setting. This time the poet casts
himself as Gawaine, and in reframing the outline of the medieval poem, he
makes the Green Knight and his lady represent the irrational and the
sensuous, which must be rejected in spite of all temptations. Again the
specifics of the motivating experience are veiled. We must assume that a
threatening real crisis, or set of crises, underlay the poet’s anxiety,
but we are asked to take this on faith. Winters seems to be saying,
“Surely every intelligent person will understand that intellectual
autonomy is always under threat from the physical and the sensual.” But
experience is far more various, and solutions to the mind-body problem
have more breadth, ingenuity, and complexity than the rather straitened
morality of this poem suggests.
There is another issue that surely deserves attention in light of
Winters’ first principles. Repeatedly he reminded readers that a poem is
a statement about a human experience. Everything starts from that. Yet in
his own poems the motivating experience is often suppressed or disguised.
Granted, every experience offered in a poem is to some extent abstracted,
derived, or otherwise filtered through the memory, sensibility, and art of
the poet, with the result that it is generalized and typified. But such
“filtered” experiences may still retain much power in the eyes of
readers if they can be discerned. In Winters’ work we get some
intimations, in poems like “The Journey,” which recounts a four-day
train trip from Boulder, Colorado, to Moscow, Idaho, where he took up his
first teaching job. But in many poems and passages the techniques of
allegory, abstraction, and plain mystification close off the primary
experiences from readers and to that extent muffle the effect.
For that reason we come upon “A Leave Taking,” a poem dealing directly
with a personal sorrow, with relief, and respond with strong feeling both
to the poem and to the obviously genuine grief underlying it: I, who never kissed your head,
Later Winters wrote another poem that abandons the screens and masks he
had used on many occasions to shield himself from scrutiny. “Time and
the Garden, ” though marred by somewhat careless diction in some
passages, represents a frank summing up of his life as a writer and
critic, and a bittersweet assessment of his achievement. The poem places
its author in his garden, aware that time is slipping away from him: And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: He
reflects on the great Elizabethan figures—Gascoigne, Ben Jonson,
Greville, Raleigh, Donne—who have gone before him. They are his
models, and he admits he would like “to seize the greatness not yet
fairly earned.” He remains true to his ideal, to “condense …
unbroken wisdom in a single look” much as he had wanted to concentrate
the fruits of his trees. But he recognizes that, even if that should be
possible, his personal fate is sealed: “The mind’s immortal, but the
man is dead.” The poem provides probably the most candid self-portrait
in all Winters’ writing. Uncharacteristically, it represents not just a
personal struggle (something depicted in many of his poems) but a struggle
he was bound to lose: a likely loss in the pursuit of “greatness”; a
certain loss in the struggle with death. “No one hears,” he writes
plaintively, “And I am still retarded in duress!” His evident
vulnerability makes this one of his most affecting poems.
Overall, however, Winters’ influence as a poet was
transient. In the twenties and thirties he attracted significant notice;
even by the time he arrived at Stanford as a graduate student in 1927 he
was, as Helen Trimpi observes in her biographical introduction to the Selected Poems, “well known as a modern poet and critic.” (SP
xix) But as the years went on, Winters grew increasingly dissatisfied with
his early poems; he included only a few of them in his Collected Poems, published in 1952. He began to concentrate more of
his energies on criticism, and as a result published relatively few poems
during the last two decades of his life. And he never found a mature style
that matched the intensity of his early imagist work while embodying the
critical principles for which he was widely known.
Indeed, the core problem in Winters’ poetry concerns, ironically, the
relation between the matter at hand and the poet’s emotional treatment
of it. As previously noted, the emotion arises from a sense of menace and
near disaster which the poet (or his persona) narrowly overcomes, even
though the details of the crisis are not disclosed. Many of the poems ask
the reader to take on faith the gravity of the situation, while providing
little evidence to support it. Thus the “judgment” made by the poet in
such poems cannot be evaluated.
It is likely that this reticence about personal details, together with an
unwillingness to embrace a more conversational style (or at least to
abandon the present subjunctive, as in “when this fix the head”),
worked against the popularity of Winters’ poems, even as interest in
formal verse was reviving. Although Hayden Carruth included poems by
Crane, Tate, and Winters in his influential anthology The
Voice That Is Great Within Us, published in 1970 (two years after
Winters’ death), a generation later R.S. Gwynn’s anthology Poetry
(Longman, 1998), which is sympathetic to poems in form with solid
intellectual content, includes Crane along with Winters’ one-time
students Philip Levine and Thom Gunn, but omits both Winters and Tate. Yet
the poems and passages I have cited, and possibly a few others (such as
“At the San Francisco Airport” and “The Manzanita”), still reward
the thoughtful reader and should be preserved. Selections of Winters’
poems in both the Barth edition and the Library of America series will
keep them accessible for at least the near future.
The Legacy
Early in the twentieth century, as American writers were testing
themselves against the English and European tradition (Frost, Pound, and
Eliot, among others, first achieved a reputation abroad), American readers
and academics were working to develop a coherent sense of a native
tradition and to establish canons of both poetry and fiction that had
weight, dignity, and durability. Concurrently a revolution in style was
underway. Poets were throwing off what they saw as restrictions imposed by
meter, rime, and traditional content. As a result there was a perceived
need for critical guidance. What should now be the criteria for judging
poetic value? What was an appropriate education for a poet, and for a
discerning reader? What poems and poets should be models?
Allen Tate attempted to answer these questions. So did R.P. Blackmur and
John Crowe Ransom. So did Yvor Winters. Their books and articles over a
period of about three decades comprised a continuous and often contentious
dialogue over the nature of literature in general and poetry in particular—what it was and how it was supposed to be written, read, and taught.
Because all four men were teachers, they had opportunities to create protégés
and disciples through personal contact, as well as through the written
word. As is often true in such cases, the strength of the critic’s
personality was at least as important as the strength of his ideas in
furthering his agenda.
Winters’ personality was neither hesitant nor retiring. His critical
ideas have radiated out into American literary culture through
generations of his students who became teachers, writers, and editors themselves.
Paradoxically, even though many readers who manage to locate the texts
will find in the experience of reading Winters’ prose about equal
measures of discovery and exasperation, the ideas probably play a stronger
role today than at any time since they were promulgated. This is partly
due to a historical pendulum swing that has brought formal verse back into
favor, but it is likely that the incremental influence of many writers,
editors, and teachers who once had contact with Winters helped the
pendulum to swing when it did.
It is worth noting, in the interest of balance, that though Winters could
be extremely harsh with writers he felt were overvalued, his judgments
tended to be too generous with two categories of poet: those he had
discovered or rediscovered, and those who had studied with him. His
interest in promoting his discoveries led him to praise extravagantly the
nineteenth-century Americans Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Jones Very,
and the English poets T. Sturge Moore and Elizabeth Daryush. Each of these
writers has real virtues, but all are more minor talents than Winters
asserted, and his attempt to promote Moore at the expense of Yeats (to
take a salient example) seriously undermined his credibility with many
readers. Among his own one-time students, J.V. Cunningham received the
highest praise, but while Cunningham’s best poems are very fine indeed,
it is probably an exaggeration to say that he was at any point in his life
the most consistently distinguished poet writing in English, a claim that
Winters unabashedly made (FD 299). (The claim might have more credibility
had Winters ever so much as acknowledged the existence of W.H. Auden.)
Winters did not praise bad poems or bad poets. But like many people he did
not always retain a sense of proportion where his own emotions and
interests were engaged.
By stressing the need for poems to have a solid intellectual core and
the importance of fitting the feeling conveyed by the words to the content
of the statement, Winters helped to rescue poetry from the self-indulgent
fantasies of the late Romantics, but also from the recondite
mystifications of his contemporaries. Poetry could become once again a
respectable pursuit for a rational person with feet planted firmly on the
ground. Students able to look past Winters’ own blind spots and
eccentricities valued and emulated his ability to “find the poems”—to identify excellent and moving work they might otherwise have
overlooked. The trick was to separate the usable principles from the dogmatism. It is not necessary—and this cannot be emphasized too strongly—to adopt an absolutist philosophy or personality in order to accept and apply Winters’ insights. Even while acknowledging that judgments evolve and are negotiated in every culture at all times, large numbers of readers and writers can converge on the following central tenets, championed by Winters, that remain durable, though not immutable, over a long stretch of literary history: That the writing of poetry is one of the highest endeavors to which a person can aspire. That the process of poetic composition engages the whole person—intellect and emotion. That poems need to be understandable, to have a rational core. That the progression of ideas in a poem should be governed by rational principles, not private meanings or arbitrary personal associations. That sharp and incisive language, close observation, and fresh expression are always desirable, but verbal ingenuity or elaborate rhetorical figuration for its own sake is suspect. That the aim of every poem is, in relation to the experience it deals with, to present a complete understanding of that experience, intellectual and emotional, to the extent of the poet’s powers. That
the traditional devices of meter and rime offer the best way of
concentrating language and emotion to make a poem both forceful and
memorable. That no poem—and no poet—should be accepted without question, but each should be scrutinized and required to satisfy the reader’s critical intelligence.
All these precepts can be derived from Winters’ writings, and though
individual readers and writers would doubtless take issue with notions
like “complete understanding,” “rational progression,” the
centrality of meter and rime, or the mistrust of verbal ingenuity, they
still constitute an excellent primer for poets, and a trustworthy means of
orientation in the vast, overwhelming store of English and American verse. It is true that for some, Winters’ opinions became a new orthodoxy. For a while the pages of the Southern Review and other journals edited or influenced by former students became havens for poems, articles, and reviews perceptibly modeled on his precepts, and some graduate students disdained Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hopkins and Yeats, because Winters had treated them dismissively. But some of the stronger poets like Gunn and Levine forged successful styles that incorporated Winters’ ideas without becoming enslaved to them. And some found a larger stage on which to perform and to teach. When Robert Pinsky, as poet laureate, launched his “favorite poem” campaign to collect and publicize the poems that had fastened themselves to the hearts and memories of Americans, the unegalitarian ghost of Yvor Winters, his one-time mentor, surely gnashed its teeth. Yet on reflection Winters might have seen the virtues of Pinsky’s idea—or he might have mused on one of death’s ironic mercies: that a poet and critic can influence but cannot control his wayward progeny. |