The New Compass: A Critical Review
Winters on the Web
John Baxter
For Jonathan Swift, the battle of the
books happens in the library, though the definitive showdown—between the spider
and the bee—takes place in the upper reaches of its windows. With the internet,
the battle often moves out well beyond any library, through any number of
windows. There are, of course, still a great many spiders and even a few bees
in this web. The question is (borrowing Matthew Arnold’s understanding of the
honey and wax of Swift’s fable): how much is there of sweetness and light?
Yvor
Winters is, to use Thom Gunn’s phrase about him, “the maverick’s maverick,” so
it’s not too surprising that several mavericks of the internet are now finding
their way to his work. As of mid-May, 2004, a search for “yvor winters” on
Google yields some 3,940 results. Not all of these, of course, are very
radical; some are even decorous or staid: booksellers trying to get their books
into the library or even into the hands of old-fashioned readers, or The
Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org/academy),
with a prim biography of Winters, a selected bibliography, a shopping tip, and
a discreet referral to two other sites, one of which is the Modern American
Poetry Web Site (www.english.uiuc.edu/maps).
This
site, an online journal and multimedia companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (
Two
other academic sites are well worth checking out. The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Literary Theory contains a useful discussion of Winters’s criticism by Terry
Comito (www.press.jhu.edu). Comito sets
Winters apart from the New Critics (with whom he is often erroneously
identified) and also from the didacticism of the New Humanists, such as Irving
Babbitt. The moral intelligence that Winters prized in poetry is, Comito
argues, a form of pragmatism, and his “most striking and durable achievement is
his account of the morality of poetic meter.” Rhythm, in this view, is a form
of consciousness and a form of discovery. The other important (indeed
indispensable) site is the description of the Winters-Lewis papers held at
As
for the mavericks, they are (naturally) a lot more fun—and much more wildly
various and irregular in terms of quality. If you go to godofthemachine.com and
then type in the words “critical cults” in the selection box, you get a short
essay by Aaron Haspel which concludes that F.R. Leavis and Yvor Winters are
“the preeminent cult critics of the 20th century.” What Haspel, like
Swift’s spider, really likes is the vitriolic put-down. And I imagine that he
has plenty of company here, for unless you are the object of the put-down or
identify too closely with the put-downee, the critical demolitions are often
irresistible. Haspel also suspects that his cult critics (especially Winters)
are fundamentally right about most of the important points and that this
accounts for their staying power. Unfortunately, this way of speaking, with its
commitment to the notion of “cults,” is unlikely to get at either issue. It’s a
kind of security measure or defensive gesture. You don’t have to engage with the
followers (or the opponents) of a cult nor submit to the discipline of finding
out how Winters’s influence really operates. You need never venture beyond the
confines of your own website.
Greg Perry’s Poetry Blog, Natural
Ramble, and Pop/Wine Review (www.grapez.blogspot.com)
offers a different sort of buzz. If you don’t get it from the poetry, you can
always try the merlot. The site has so far posted six entries on Winters. What
Perry likes is the nature poetry, and in the entry for
If
you check out “The Rathouse: The Philosophy Site of Rafe Champion” (www.the-rathouse.com), you get a sense
of robust activity, for this is a site that boasts a total of 35,355 visitors
as of April 14, 2004, and if Perry were to look for help with the question of Winters
and rationality, he might try Champion, who posted a thoughtful essay on this
topic in 2002. The Rathouse, in spite of its unpromising name, is a commodious
dwelling. Champion’s site also features a separate section called “The
Revivalist,” an on-line journal (four editions so far) paying tribute to
important figures who have been “forgotten or overlooked.” The first note in
the first issue is on Winters. What Champion likes especially is the way he
“combined the careers of poet, critic, teacher, and scholar” and “insisted that
literature is too important to allow its various aspects to be hacked up and
distributed to different groups of specialists.” Champion offers, moreover, a
kind of rallying cry to the world at large: “the task of imaginative criticism
belongs to all thinking people, although it has been institutionalized with
certain organizations such as the universities and with occupational groups
such as academics, including philosophers.” And he follows this up with a
judgment on our current plight: “This process of institutionalization has
almost proved fatal. It sometimes appears that the institutions and groups who
have the most responsibility for the health and vigour of our thinking have in
fact done much to mutilate and debilitate our heritage.” Strong words, which go
some way to account for the positive side of internet networking: an
independence from said institutions and a strongly egalitarian and democratic
ethos.
Like
Rafe Champion, Ben Kilpela operates a site that has every appearance of being a
hive of activity and of independent thought. “The Yvor Winters Web Site” (www.msu.edu/user/kilpela/WINTERS-LIFE1.htm)
is an offshoot of the Ben Kilpela Web Site, but it has grown to massive
proportions. It opens with an introduction entitled, “Answers to Frequently
Asked Questions About Yvor Winters.” Given that Kilpela presents himself as
rescuing Winters from a nearly total obscurity, one might pause for a moment to
wonder who is asking with such frequency? The other sections include “The Major
Writings of Yvor Winters” (a bibliography, with Kilpela reviews attached to
each entry), “The Winters Canon” (the table of contents for Quest for Reality, with a short
preface), and “The Winters Issues Page” (only partly up and running, though the
longest part, “How did people discover the thought and writings of Yvor
Winters?” has the feel of a fan club in the making, but also, on the evidence
of the first entry, with the potential to be something more important and more
serious than that). But the longest and most ambitious section of the site is
“A Year with Yvor Winters: a day by day selection of his writings with comments
from Ben Kilpela,” and yes, there are 365 days, each with about a page, divided
fairly evenly between quotation and commentary. It’s impossible not to feel a
kind of awe. Kilpela’s passion, energy, and admiration are evident on every
page.
And
yet, though he aspires to be a bee, Kilpela is still three-fourths spider in
disguise. And Winters, who more than anyone devoted his life to “long search,
much study, and true judgment of things,” is rather entrammeled in this web.
Kilpela’s principle for selecting quotations is more or less random: ‘I like
this, and this, and also this’—there’s something genuine and touching about his
method but also something self-defeating. The principle tends to obliterate a
sense of Winters’s development. So impressed is he with the coherence of
Winters’s thought that Kilpela has little sense of its tensions, its mobility,
its dynamic. And because the passages are random, there is no argumentative
momentum. The arguments caught in this web have nowhere to go. Kilpela acknowledges
that his method is “un-Wintersian,” but it may in a sense (and contrary to his
obvious intention) be anti-Wintersian. The essence of Winters’s criticism is
on-going argument, pushing forward—agreement and disagreement are both obliged
to work hard to keep up. Furthermore, the principle tends to undermine a sense
of Kilpela’s own development, or developing understanding, and without this the
site contains unfortunate echoes of the “cult” mentality of thegodofthemachine.
Partly
the problem is a matter of the difficulty, even the impossibility, of simply
taking over a judgment from someone else. Winters himself comments on the
“unique” nature of a critical judgment. Kilpela, for example, in his entry for
January (1/19) credits Winters’s comments on Ben Jonson’s “To Heaven” as
decisive for converting him “into a Wintersian.” It’s an impressive choice, and
it reveals something rather noble (or potentially noble) about Kilpela’s
project. But he doesn’t really offer to show what in the poem moves him, how it
challenged or re-organized his own mental and emotional economy. What is he
being converted to?—a certain critical approach to poetry or to Christianity?
To Jonson, or simply to Winters himself (the shadow of the cult again)?
He speaks dismissively about Renaissance
studies and Jonson specialists, and while these folks may well continue to
deserve censure for failing to give the poem its due, the judgment here is
second-hand Winters, frozen in time. It appears unaware of the influence
Winters did have. The poem is now available in a number of the standard
anthologies (Norton, for example) thanks in no small measure to Winters. And as
for Jonson specialists, well, there is, to start with, Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain
Style (Stanford, 1962). There’s a
short circuit in Kilpela’s critical process here: ‘this was Winters’s judgment,
I see immediately that it was right, now it’s mine.’ Though this is offered as
a climactic and decisive moment, it takes place more or less in a vacuum. There
is little testing out, of Winters or of Kilpela himself, and no real engagement
with anyone else either, and the judgment in this context (however accurate in
others) remains inert, web-bound.
Similarly,
with comments on the poems, the judgments are often highly appreciative but
also highly impressionistic—and too easily content with generalizations. On
“The Slow Pacific Swell,” for example, compare Kilpela (January 1/7) with
Richard Hoffpauir, The Contemplative
Poetry of Edwin
Now, at this point I can imagine an
objection to my comparisons that would run roughly as follows: what you
summarize from the book is academic writing; the website is a popular venue;
Kilpela is perfectly free to voice his opinion (popular or unpopular). And so
he is. But he is also engaged in proselytizing, in trying to persuade others to
attend more closely to Winters, and for that I honour him. The honour of the
cause, in fact, is exactly why it calls for more adventuring forth, less
hunkering down, fewer retreats to one’s own turf—a miniature, backyard academy.
Pop culture and the academy, as Rafe Champion sees, are interconnected, or
ought to be. Why stall out at the undergraduate level when the web offers you
the great wide world? The moral seems clear. Kilpela needs to get away from his
own website more often. He needs to pay closer attention to the advice of his
master (know more, write less). He needs also to visit the library and find out
more about the range of possible questions (some frequently asked, some not).
Finally,
of all the busy bees on the web the busiest may well be John Fraser (www.jottings.ca), though his name pops up
during a Google search of “yvor winters” only after the first 140 results. This
is no doubt because the site is focused primarily on other things. One half is
devoted to the splendid paintings of Carol Hoorn Fraser. The other now contains
the equivalent of four web books by John Fraser, the last of which, Voices in the Cave of Being, includes a
good bit of material of interest to those interested in Winters. This book
deserves a review of its own, but I have time here for only a few remarks on
selected portions. Fraser has well-established credentials in the world of
regular print (three books with Cambridge University Press and a long list of
essays and reviews), but he has thought hard about the special demands of web
publication. His book is reader-friendly, written in a lucid, lively prose that
is sectioned off so that you can take it in screen by screen.
Second,
the book comes at the nature of poetry from a wide variety of angles. The
concluding section, “Resources,” for example, contains three different parts: a
“Reservoir” of poems difficult to find elsewhere; “Aurals,” a selection of 21
poetry readings; and an annotated “Bibliography.” The annotations are often
quite extensive: the one on The Selected
Letters of Yvor Winters runs to four or five pages and amounts to a short
(and astute) review. The introduction contains, among other things, a brief
autobiographical description of Fraser’s first encounters with Winters’s
criticism in the early fifties (material, perhaps, for the “Winters Issues
Page” of Kilpela’s site). Fraser’s accomplishments, in fact, include seminal
reviews of both The Function of Criticism
and Forms of Discovery when they were
first published. And in the decades that followed he went on to a highly
original series of essays comparing the criticism of Leavis and Winters.
But
Voices is not a book that rests on
past laurels; it is in several ways a new and groundbreaking work. Like
Kilpela, Fraser thinks that Winters is fundamentally right about which are the
greatest poems in English, but he repeatedly tests the claims, particularly in
a remarkable essay called “Inner Spaces: Voicing Church Monuments.” It
illuminates Herbert’s greatness by taking you inside the experience of reading
the poem, and not merely of reading it but of memorizing it, and of finding
(even so) that some of it still eludes comprehension. And this adult experience
is set alongside a comparable one from boyhood in “Poetry and the Headmaster’s
Wife” with a section from near the close of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. These essays give a fascinating account of the
process of arriving at a personal judgment, however indebted the reader is to
the prompting of Winters (or the Headmaster’s Wife).
In
contrast with these vividly concrete explorations, other essays range more
broadly over a series of theoretical issues—“Powers of Style,” “Language and
Being,” “Vision and Analogy”—though Fraser’s discussions of theory are always
peppered with a wealth of striking or even peculiar examples. Consider this,
from the opening of the essay on “Winters, Leavis, and Language”:
As William Booth, the founder of the
Salvation Army, said about its brassy music, “Why should the Devil have all the
good tunes?” Meaning, here, what chutzpah
it is to imply that “theory,” literary theory, didn’t really begin until
Derrida and DeMan, in their twin act, hit East Coast American academe like the
Beatles.
The whole of the essay, along with
much else in Voices, demonstrates
conclusively the sophistication of Winters and Leavis about language and meaning,
and it shows why (to return to the point that Aaron Haspel intuits) they have
staying power—and why the cult of
literary theory does not.
But
Fraser is not simply a propagandist on behalf of his favourite critic (or
critics). A middle section of Voices
is given over to defining “A New Book of English Verse,” and it includes “an
introduction and a table of contents for an unpublished anthology.” This is a
project that he worked on years ago with Donald Stanford, but this new (and
expanded) version is prompted in part by a reaction to what Kilpela calls the
“Winters’s Canon.” In fact, the original project was also something of a
reaction to the anthology “Quest for Reality,” a desire for a fatter anthology
but one still based on Forms of Discovery.
“A New Book” continues to wrestle with the question of what exactly Winters’s
principles are and which poems may be thought to meet them—and whether there
are further principles (of comparable weight) and other poems (of comparable
standing). Kilpela, on his site, reports on an interesting exchange with an
unnamed critic (almost certainly Fraser) on these issues.
Finally,
however, since the battle of the books is about the moderns as well as the
ancients—and it’s significant that Winters had a foot in both camps—I conclude
with a few gems from Fraser’s lovely conclusion, “Lagniappe and Leftovers.” He
explains the unusual term (with a little help from Webster): “Lagniappe,
lagnappe (lan-yap, lan’ yap) [Creole] [Dial], a small present given to a
customer with a purchase.” The section is a sort of commonplace book (like
Jonson’s “Discoveries”), and it’s full of small presents and even some not so
small: an analysis of the lyrics from musicals (Cole Porter, Irving Berlin),
with interesting comments on Winters’s sensitivity to minor as well as major
poetic achievements; notes on teaching (George Elliott Clarke’s Whylah Falls); recent discoveries of new
poems, both in free verse (Susan Goyette, “The Season of Forgiveness”) and in
the form of a villanelle (Martha Collins, “The Story We Know”); meditations on
Fichte, Schelling, and Coleridge, and so on. Such gifts are a demonstration
that the windows of the web can lead back into the library as well as out from
it and that to take one’s bearings from Winters is to acknowledge, as Fraser
puts it, “the vitality of modernism (however you define that term)” along with
the energies of more traditional writing.
Baxter, John. “Winters on the Web.” The New Compass: A Critical Review 3
(June 2004) <http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/baxter.html>