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Yvor Winters is far better known as critic than as poet, and in the decades since his death in 1968, his reputation as both poet and critic (but especially the latter) underwent a rapid series of reversals, from rejection and dismissal to an unusual kind of acceptance. By the turn of the 21st century, most of the articles to be found on him were likely to be some variation of “In defense of…” But even his defenders rarely defended his actual rigid, antimodernist stance, his dogmatic adherence to a self-proclaimed dogma. Instead, Winters became remembered as man with the courage (and arrogance) to stand up for his convictions in the face of virtually the entire literary world. Winters was born 17 October, 1900 in Chicago, Illinois. He began his education at the University of Chicago, where he became friends with Poetry founder Harriet Monroe. Tuberculosis forced him to relocate to the Southwest in 1921, where he was a patient at Sunmount Sanatorium in Santa Fe, NM, and later taught (ironic for a tuberculosis sufferer) in nearby coal mining camp towns, and then at the University of Idaho in Moscow. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Colorado in 1925-26, and then went on to Stanford University in 1828, where he would remain on the faculty until his death, earning his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1934. In 1926, he married poet Janet Lewis, whom he had met at the sanatorium. He died of throat cancer 25 January 1968 in Palo Alto, CA. He published five books of poetry: The Immobile Wind (1921), The Proof (1930), Before Disaster (1934), Poems (1940), and To the Holy Spirit (1947). As criticism and his own critical theories became more important to him, he grew away from the writing of poetry, but collected editions of his work were published, and the 1960 edition of his Collected Poems won the Bollingen Prize. His most important book of criticism, In Defense of Reason (1947), is a compilation of three earlier published studies. Later critical works included The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (1957), On Modern Poets: Stevens, Eliot, Ransom, Crane, Hopkins, Frost (1959), Forms of Discovery (1967). Posthumous collections of essays and letters have been published, as have several critical studies, including Thomas Parkinson’s. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence (1978), which contains Crane’s letters to Winters, though the latter’s replies have been lost. In addition to the Bollingen, he won Poetry Magazine’s Oscar Blumenthal Prize in 1945, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1952, the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Award for 1960-61, and the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award for Poetry, 1963. He was the recipient of Guggenheim (1961-62) and National Endowment for the Arts (1967) grants. He is also remembered for his contribution to teaching. During his tenure, Stanford University became one of the first important centers for the study of creative writing. In his early years at Stanford he faced considerable resistance to the traditionalists who ran the English department, and who went so far as to denounce him as a disgrace to the program. In later years, he became a champion of academic scholarship against the “pure inspiration” arguments of the Beats and others. His students included J.V. Cunningham, Robert Pinsky, Philip Levine, Thom Gunn, Donald Justice (who went to Stanford to study with Winters, never actually took a course with him, but still felt his influence), and Donald Hall. Winters’ earliest work, mostly written at the Sunmount Sanatorium, is in the Imagist style which was popular during the era. Like fellow Santa Fe transplant Witter Bynner, his Imagist work was strongly influenced by Oriental and Native American poetry. The young Winters was a powerful champion of free verse, declaring that it could do anything that rhymed verse could do. His relationship to literature, during this period, was very much that of an autodidact. He had spent most of what would have been his college years in the isolation of his illness. But as enthusiastic a supporter of the trends of the day as Winters was, he rapidly became their most intense antagonist. By the end of the 1920s, he had recoiled from Imagism, free verse, and everything to do with Modernism. Although he was hardly the only poet of his generation to write formal verse, he was that rare exception to the trend, a poet who began in free verse and then renounced it completely for formalism. As Winters’ work was reissued in collected form, and readers and critics had a chance to examine the earlier and later work side by side, his early poems found their champions. James Dickey compared them favorably to the best of William Carlos Williams. But his turnabout was swift, savage and complete. What Dickey and others admired in his free verse—movement, energy, questioning—were no longer part of his aesthetic. Instead, in both his poetry and criticism, he championed precision, order, and moral certainty. He rejected his own early work, in his essay “The Poet and the University,” as “little impressionistic notes on landscapes.” As both poet and critic, Winters rejected the modern, not in itself unusual. What was striking about Winters’ rejection was the breadth of its inclusiveness. He did not stop with his contemporaries or their predecessors. He rejected not only the 20th century, but also the 19th and much of the 18th, choosing for his model the “plain style” of the 16th and 17th centuries—the style associated with Sir Walter Raleigh, and Ben Jonson, and one of Winters’ literary heroes, Barnabe Googe, as opposed to the more ornate style of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. One of his own most celebrated poems is his retelling of the medieval masterpiece “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight.” He wrote in careful and precise metrics, preferring simple whole rhymes and received forms. Winters’ poetry, including his later poetry, retained its admirers, including Allen Tate, who thought him one of our major poets. Winters, with his characteristic thorniness, rejected praise and criticism alike, telling Contemporary Authors (Permanent Series vols. 10-11, 693), “in general my admirers have read me as carelessly as my detractors.” But he is more remembered for his criticism, opinionated, powerful, dogmatic, frequently standing as an army of one against the 20th, 19th and 18th centuries. Winters demanded a moral inflexibility of poetry, and his demands were absolute. Atop his list of pernicious influences on American poetry were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Winters stated his critical doctrine most forcefully in his 1947 book, In Defense of Reason. He argued for a closely guarded canon, with entry granted on the basis of not simply moral instruction, but moral absolutism. To Winters, one ethically sloppy phrase was reason enough to reject a poet. One of his first famous salvoes came at the expense of Hart Crane. In 1927, he had been one of Crane’s early champions, praising White Buildings as a masterpiece of Modernism. He and Crane were, if not close friends, at least collegial, exchanging letters and expressing respect and admiration for each other. But by 1930, having completely rejected Modernism, he had reversed his opinion on everything he had admired in Crane, and he wrote a scathing review of The Bridge for Poetry, in which he laid out the foundation of his quarrel not only with Modernism, but with the modern world. Crane, the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, any writer privileged emotion over reason and individual sensibility over moral rigor: "If we enter the mind of a Crane, a Whitman or an Emerson with our emotional facilities activated and our reason in abeyance, these writers may possess us as surely as demons were once supposed to possess the unwary." In general, Winters’ critical principles were these: The purpose of literature is to instruct, not to express emotion; in fact, emotion is the enemy of instruction. A poem must have a “governing theme” which is moral in nature, and must never stray from that theme (he rejected Marianne Moore, e.g., on the grounds that though her poems had governing themes, she was too easily seduced away from them). Control must then be the artist’s principal too, which means it must also be the artist’s cardinal virtue. “Spiritual control in a poem is simply a manifestation of the spiritual control within the poet.” This made it easy for him to dismiss many poets, harder for him in the case of a few. He could not understand how Williams, “eminently virtuous” and a devoted family man, could still fall under the insidious influence of Romanticism. Winters’ challenging, dogmatic and contrarian pronouncements about literary figures remain his most widely known legacy. As Hayden Carruth said in (xxx), he " is able to prove…irrefutably…that our favorite poets were idiots, and in the process show just why we like them so much (xxx)." Carruth’s summary, loving and respectful but almost totally dismissive, perfectly captures the judgment of succeeding generations on Winters. It is virtually impossible not to relish the sting of his rapier on our major poets, equally difficult to agree with them. In Forms of Discovery, in which he summarized a lifetime of opinion, he said of Pound: “One would call the style verbose, except that by definition verbosity is the use of words in the excess of the occasion, and here there is no occasion…all save a little of the writing is insufferably dull; there is something pathetic about Pound’s slogan: ‘Make it new’(317)”; and of Whitman (via Crane): “The ideas which destroyed Crane’s talent were the same ideas which one can find in Whitman, but they seem less destructive in Whitman…because Whitman is utterly lacking in literary talent, so that the effect of the ideas never becomes clear (315).” Equally odd, today, is his list of major poets, which includes (in addition to mainstream figures like Edward Arlington Robinson and Emily Dickinson) Googe, Robert Bridges, T. Sturge Moore, F. G. Tuckerman, Jones Very, Adelaide Crapsey and Elizabeth Daryush. Many of the writers Winters champions, interestingly, were either recluses or invalids. A number of them, including Crapsey and his own wife, Janet Lewis, were tubercular. Of his own influence, Winters said, in reference to an early essay, “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” “[i]t has influenced a good many books and articles which have given it at most but passing acknowledgement (Forms of Discovery 314).” This self-assessment may well be the best summation of this unique figure in American letters. |