The New Compass: A Critical Review
Editorial:
“This Act of Weighing”
Sarah Emsley
To be critical means, according to
the OED, to be “Given to judging; esp.
given to adverse or unfavourable criticism; fault-finding, censorious”
(definition 1). Critics, literary or
otherwise, often find themselves characterized as censorious—none moreso than
American poet and critic Yvor Winters (1900-1968), who is featured in this
issue of The New Compass [1]—but there is much more to criticism than the finding of
faults. To be critical in the sense of
being “Occupied with or skilful in criticism” (definition 3a), means to
practice “The art of estimating the qualities and character of literary or
artistic work; the function or work of a critic” (“criticism” definition
2). Estimating the qualities and
character of a work involves judging what is excellent as well as what is
faulty. Adverse criticism can seem to be wholly destructive, but a healthy
criticism, which can distinguish the negative from the positive (even when the
latter is wholly hypothetical), which can describe the true character of a
work, and which can offer a reasoned account of its significance, gives life to
literature. Some, even much, critical work will be unfavourable, but it must
give reasons for the faults it finds, and it should offer alternative visions
of what could be or could have been.
The
criticism of Winters finds faults, but, as Gordon Harvey points out in his
essay on t he critic at work, Winters
also had a “terrible gift for imagining what might have been, in a poem as in a
career.” Harvey argues that “the
recurring note of regret at how poets of genius— Williams, Pound, Stevens,
Crane, and other heroes of his youth—were in the end limited by their lack of
intellectual perspective […] isn’t the ungracious pulling down of the great
that some have imagined.” The strength of Winters’s criticism is instead his ability
to see both what is good in a work or body of work, and what could have made it
better. It is generosity that motivates
such criticism: as
Like fiction and poetry, criticism
is a process of discovery, or, in terms of Winters’s last book, all are “Forms
of Discovery.” The critical art, like the creative art, is not simply a thing
or an attitude, a judgment or a fact, but a living process; hence Winters’s
important questions in In Defense of
Reason about the precise nature of that process as it unfolds.[2] Winters, like F.R. Leavis, is often criticized for making
monolithic judgements, but just as Leavis’s detractors tend to minimize the
importance of the “Yes, but…” response that he insisted was essential to any
critical discussion of “This is so” judgements, critics of Winters may not
always give him credit for the extent to which he emphasized process. In The
Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by R.L. Barth and reviewed by
Jeffrey Goodman in this issue, Winters describes what he calls “this act of
weighing”; that is, the full process of making a critical judgement, weighing
knowledge, theory, motive, and style.
In
this third issue of The New Compass,
several of our contributors participate in the process of weighing Winters’s
weighing, in his poetry, criticism, and letters. Richard Hoffpauir compares the poetry and
pessimism of Winters and Thomas Hardy, Kenneth Fields focuses on “the
aesthetics of recuperation” in his discussion of the relation of Winters’s work
and his early experience of tuberculosis, and Gordon Harvey analyzes Winters’s
criticism and letters to show how “the experience of his criticism is one of
character, as embodied in style.” All
three of these articles were first delivered as talks at the Yvor Winters
Centenary Symposium held at the
In addition to Jeffrey Goodman’s
review of The Selected Letters of Yvor
Winters and John Baxter’s survey of Winters-related sites on the internet,
our review section includes Jennie Batchelor’s assessment of Anne Stott on the
relationship between conservatism and radicalism in her sympathetic biography
of the complex woman of letters Hannah More—whom Stott calls the first
Victorian—and Bruce Stovel’s assessment of Beth Lau’s New Riverside Edition of
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
(2002) against Claudia L. Johnson’s Norton Critical Edition of the novel,
published in the same year.
Baxter’s
exploration of “Winters on the Web” demonstrates that Winters studies
flourish—in several different forms—in cyberspace, even as the poetry and
novels of his wife continue to be all too often represented as a footnote to
his work. We can hope that in future more readers and critics will investigate
Janet Lewis’s fiction and poetry, and in the meantime we’re pleased to publish
Bradin Cormack’s poem in memory of her, “July in the Garden (1996),” along with
poems by Jeffrey Goodman, Carmen Bugan, and David Sanders.
We conclude, in the spirit of
critical debate, with replies to Ian Robinson’s article on Conrad’s Victory and to Pat Menon’s article on
Wharton’s The Reef (both of which
appeared in our last issue). The process
of debating, arguing, and weighing is central to the practice of living
criticism, and we continue to encourage our readers to join our conversation. Send us your “Yes, but…”—or even your “No, in
fact…”. You can reach Michael at mdisanto@dal.ca, and I am at semsley@fas.harvard.edu.
[1] The photograph of Yvor Winters is
from the collection of Daniel Lewis Winters.
[2] See especially page 372 (Yvor Winters, In
Defense of Reason [Chicago: Swallow Press, 1947]).
Emsley, Sarah. “Editorial: ‘This Act
of Weighing.’” The New Compass: A Critical Review 3 (June 2004)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/editorial.html>