The New Compass: A Critical Review
Winters and the Aesthetics of Recuperation, or “The Hypersensitivity of
Convalescence”[1]
Kenneth Fields
Reading Yvor Winters is a special
pleasure. His books, lectures, and conversations are spiky with a wealth of
eccentric and essential detail. He liked Airedales, goats, boxing, and
home-cured olives. He preferred Churchill to Pope, he thought Donne was a great
poet, but oversexed. He considered James’ Gabriel Nash “a figure more perverse
and astonishing than any other save Christina Light or possibly her poodle.” He
and Hart Crane traded lines, a fact not generally noticed, and they recommended
crucial books to each other,
For
someone who has been considered a recluse, his writings show his abiding
concerns with communities. He was a lifetime member of the NAACP. He played a
decisive part in the defense of a man unjustly convicted of murder. He was in
charge of the Civilian Defense in his community during the Second World War,
and when the Southern Agrarians published their manifesto for a return to
agrarian values, he wrote them, asking if any of those Southern gentlemen had
ever milked a cow. Winters had.
He
liked Ring Lardner, though not the ubiquitous “Haircut.” And he admired writers
who are now out of fashion or who were never in: W.H. Hudson, Charles M.
Doughty, and R.B. Cunninghame-Graham. He championed Edith Wharton at a time
when Stanley Edgar Hyman could ridicule him for arguing that Wharton was
superior to James. Winters didn’t actually argue that point, though today no
one would raise an eyebrow if he did. He could recall the wild mustard growing
above the horses’ heads in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, and other western writers held a place in his mind. Bret
Harte, Richard Henry Dana, Frank Norris, and John Muir were, like Winters
himself, California writers.
His
tastes and insights were his own, and he often provoked dissenting responses.
W.R. Johnson was offended by Winters’s preference for Ojibway songs over Greek
lyrics, implying that the judgment itself was too ridiculous to consider; and
Philip Levine, a poet who studied with Winters, ridiculed his remark that he
found Kafka’s Metamorphosis comic,
which sent me to Guy Davenport’s prediction that “some genius of a critic will
one day show us how comic a writer Kafka is.”
Winters
lets us see more of these quiddities, these essential quirks, than any other
critic. Later I’ll comment on the possible function of this large body of
specific references in his work. For now, I want to consider some of the
consequences of another important circumstance, Winters’s tuberculosis,
contracted when he was eighteen years old.
When
he enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1917, Winters became a member of
the Poetry Club, a group that included Glenway Wescott, “who, like myself,” he
remembered, “had discovered most of the unknown moderns in high school,”
Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Maureen Smith, and later, Janet Lewis. About
one-quarter of all deaths worldwide was due to tuberculosis at the beginning of
the century, and this group of poets was acutely aware of this and other
diseases. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, nearly twenty years older than the others,
had already had tuberculosis, which, with other diseases, was to afflict her
for the rest of her life. The fatigue that was a central feature of the disease
seems to have produced in certain people inward states bordering on
hallucination. Roberts wrote poems from the point of view of an acutely
sensitive, somewhat removed child, and repeated the procedure in some of her
novels, most pointedly in My Heart and My
Flesh.
Among
the poets the members of the Poetry Club read was Adelaide Crapsey, who had
died of tuberculosis in 1914 at the age of 36. Looking back on her poems,
Winters, who was to contract tuberculosis after he had been at the University for
a year, says, “The disease filled the body with a fatigue so heavy that it was
an acute pain, pervasive and poisonous,” and he characterized Crapsey’s poetry
as hypersensitive. “Amaze,” he comments, “deals with a sudden and almost
hallucinatory realization that she is leaving life…”:
I
know
Not
these my hands
And
yet I think there was
A
woman like me once had hands
Like
these.
Maureen
Smith, who died of paresis—that is, congenital syphilis—at the age of 23, read
Crapsey avidly, and spent the last stages of her illness so disoriented that
she sometimes wondered if she had written her poems or taken them from Crapsey.
There’s nothing of Crapsey in the chapbook of Smith’s poems that Winters
published, though the title poem, “The Keen Edge,” probably came from a
sentence in the editor’s preface to Crapsey’s collection: “The keen and shining
blade of her spirit too greatly scorned its scabbard the body, and for this she
paid the ultimate penalty.” Smith, deformed and dying of a disease that must
have seemed shameful, transforms a pedestrian observation into a triumphant,
even defiant, invocation to Aphrodite, especially moving given the nature of
her illness:
The
keen edge of my pride
Has
cut the shroud that bound me
And
I have come forth,
Flawless,
Aphrodite.
Sometimes death is recuperation.
Susan Sontag has documented the
popular association of sexuality and tuberculosis in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Norman Bridge, in a series of lectures given at the
University of Chicago around 1903, makes this clear, warning against the
“dissipating of powers by unwholesome pleasures,” which he specifies as
“indulgence of the passions.” Rather forbiddingly, he says about the tubercular
patient, “If a young man, he ought to live the life of a person of forty-five.”
Now, we would translate this as “a person of 80.” Moreover, incredibly, he
asserts that “overstimulation plays a part in causation.” It’s worth noting
that Winters’s phrase for the power of evil was “immersion in sensation.” These
ideas, coupled with the contagious nature of the disease, naturally led to
intense feelings of isolation, expressed powerfully in a great line from
Winters’s early poem, “Death Goes Before Me”: “I am that strange thing that
each strange eye sees.”
While in Sunmount sanatorium near
Santa Fe, Winters wrote “Two Dramatic Interludes for Puppets,” and carved the
Giacometti-thin figures, black, blue, and white. The black puppet refuses to
poeticize death, and he violently strikes out at the puppet who does, killing
him. Winters once remarked, “The black
puppet is the only honest one.” The puppet concludes, “My hair is smooth with
death / And swirls above my brain.”
One small effect of Winters’s illness
is that his stay in New Mexico intensified his interest in American Indian
songs, important to him from his earliest poems to his last critical book. The
same may be said for the work of Janet Lewis, who also contracted tuberculosis
and was treated in the Sunmount sanatorium. The first Stanford Ph.D.
dissertation Winters directed, though he was not allowed to sign it officially
because of his rank, was A. Grove Day’s The
Sky Clears, an anthology of American Indian poetry, with commentaries and a
bibliography; it’s still in print and still useful. This interest culminated
with N. Scott Momaday coming to Stanford to study with him. Reading through
accounts of sanatoriums in the Southwest, one is struck by odd connections with
the early poems. George B. Price speaks
for nearly all commentators when he recommends “altitude, sunshine, and the
pure, antiseptic air,” and Bridge describes an ideal orientation: “High hills
to the east should be avoided, as they make a late sunrise,” calling to mind
one of Winters’s six-syllable poems, this one influenced by Southwest Indian
dawn songs—Alone: “I saw day’s shadow
strike.”
What interests me most about this
subject is the way one may see the effects of Winters’s recuperation in his
readings of poems, and in his own poems. Recuperation, or recovery, is a
central metaphor for him. The phrase that gives me one of my titles occurs in
his discussion of T. Sturge Moore’s “To Silence.” Silence, for Plato, was not the absence of sound,
but the presence of all sound; it was the music of the spheres. The sounds you
are hearing right now are depriving perfection. For Kafka, the song of the
Sirens was silence. For Winters, as for Moore, romantic-symbolist silence was
Mallarméan purity—pure quality, pure sensation, pure connotation freed of its
defining complement, even pure disintegration—and was akin to death, the
intimation of which Winters often treats as hallucinated. While at Sunmount,
Winters had written this trance-like song, well before he read French:
I could tell
Of silence where
One ran before
Himself and fell
Into silence
Yet more fair.
A wonderful rhetorical moment—he
could tell, but won’t. In Moore’s poem, Winters observes, the “immersion has
actually led to rejuvenation, to an inexhaustibly fascinating freshness of
perception.” Further, this “remarkable freshness of sensitivity […] might
almost be characterized as the hypersensitivity of convalescence: the poet is
minutely sensitive to dangers and meanings past but imminent […].”
Moore’s poem is similar to (and may
derive from) Leconte de Lisle’s “Midi,” in which the moment of noon is treated
much like silence; it is a pure moment. Again, Winters, as a very young man,
wrote “God of Roads” without French; in his poem, Hermes as hawk flies down a
road (actually all roads), wandering around in the moment of noon, at the speed
of light, all in six syllables: “I, peregrine of noon.” Leconte de Lisle warns the wanderer into this
realm that “Rien n’est vivant ici,”
nothing is living here. But the traveller who, not consumed, comes back, can be
renewed: “Come! The sun speaks to you in sublime words; In its implacable flame
be endlessly absorbed; and return with slow steps toward the abject cities,
your heart seven times bathed in the divine void”—“le néant divin.” Hart Crane makes a similar request, to postpone
ultimate bliss, in favor of one closer at hand, in the second “Voyages”: “Bind
us in time, O seasons clear, and awe!”
The experience of recovery or
recuperation is at the heart of Winters’s favorite poet, Paul Valéry, who was
endlessly absorbed in his master, Mallarmé, whose crystalline systems, he said,
struck the terror of perfection in him. Then Valéry wrote no poems for twenty
years, and came back with “Le Cimetiére Marin” and “Ébauche d’un Serpent,” both
of them poems of recuperation from the symbolist vision, bringing Mallarmé into
broader contexts.
I don’t wish to suggest that Winters
languished in illness. His letters show him vigorously engaged in his writing,
even in the sanatorium. Elizabeth Madox Roberts wrote that after Winters and
Wescott had left the University for New Mexico, they continued to exercise more
influence on the literary community than any professor. Winters’s epistolary
voice, which is close to his critical voice, is clearly established by the time
he is eighteen. Like Crane, he was a great letter writer.
The process of recovery—a word he
uses—depends on his view of literary history. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, writers began to abandon older structures of
investigation for looser, associative structures. This does not mean that he
advocated a return to the Renaissance, even if such a thing were possible. Winters’s characteristic style, contrary to
nearly universal belief, was not the plain style, nor did he write like Ben
Jonson. To make this point, Winters imagines a circle with equally spaced
points marked A, C, E, G standing for the experience of the classical poetry
already written. “We can then imagine a breakdown, a period of confusion, in
which these points are lost, but after which a new set of points, B, D, F, and
H, […] not the same points, are established. These new points would give a
comparable balance, or intelligence, perhaps, but an altered view of the
detail, that is, an altered quality of perception, of feeling.” What is gained
for this altered environment is a shift in the feeling of a poem. This modern
environment he calls “post-associationist” or “post-symbolist” poetry. Quite
simply he says, “I demand only that the poet keep what he started with and add
to it.”
The issue of feeling is important
here, because for Winters rationality did not ignore the emotions. He did not
set himself up as “the Apollonian antidote to Crane’s Dionysian disorder,” as a
recent petrified article asserts. Winters knew with Valéry that “the world is
perpetually threatened by two disasters: order and disorder.” Perception, feeling, moving—these
are words that he uses throughout his career when describing the poems he likes
best. I have argued elsewhere that he was not a Stoic. In a crucial passage, he
observes that “because the Stoics denied the emotions completely, in favor of
the intellect, they failed to make any provision for them and so became easily
their victims, as of an insidious consumption.” Note the simile. He then quotes
Aristotle approvingly: “speaking generally, it is not the case, as the rest of
the world thinks, that reason is the guide to virtue, but rather the feelings.”
Winters’s structures are rarely
thesis-bound or logic-ridden. He would have had no use for a computer outline
program. (Does anyone?) His most famous title, In Defense of Reason, might encourage some people to align him with
that recent enemy, linearity, but they would be wrong. Has anyone noticed how loosely structured his
essays are? Except for his book on E.A. Robinson, his only single-author book,
his prose collections are as loosely structured as the individual essays. This
makes sense if the method involves him moving from poem to poem or passage to
passage. And there’s nothing in his poems as rigorously logical as J.V.
Cunningham’s “If Wisdom, as it seems it is, / Be the recovery of some bliss,”
and so on. As he explained to Allen Tate, his best poems have a general overall
structure, but proceed from detail to detail by way of association. This is
true of “The Slow Pacific Swell,” and it’s true of poems like “To the Holy
Spirit” and “The Marriage” as well. The availability of charged natural detail
and freer, associative structures made it possible to write poems, he thought,
that might be greater than all but the best written in the Renaissance. In one
of his last essays, he asserts “From first to last, most of my favorite poems
have been relatively modern, and my matter and my methods have been modern.”
The relationships among the parts of a poem, including meanings, cadences,
suggestions, he called “a fluid complex,” and these relationships “partake of
the fluidity and unpredictability of experience.”
Even “Heracles,” a classical poem if
there ever was one, does not move in a straight line. Winters used the Classical Dictionary of the
nineteenth-century American, Charles Anthon, which describes the hero as a Sun
God. “Allegorically,” Winters says, “he is the artist in hand-to-hand or semi-intuitive
combat with experience.” Semi-intuitive ought to take the edge off of someone
looking for predictive or exclusive artistic rationality. As a Sun god,
Heracles represents the stuggle against the powers of darkness, but also the
alternation of strength and weakness, as the sun moves further from the
earth. The artist is anything but in
total control of his fate. He labors under the curse of Hera and is also
subservient to the will of the polis
in the person of Eurystheus, the king. As in his poem “Theseus” (who, according
to Plutarch, was a second Heracles), the obsession of the hero (Winters once
called it a monomania) wreaks havoc in his family. Driven insane by Hera, he
accidentally murders his children, and commits at least two other murders. Ah,
the rational life! Even after performing his labors, “Compelled down ways
obscure with analogue / To force the Symbols of the Zodiac”—and notice that the
artistic activity is energetic, physical—he is undone by resentment and by
love. And by Justice, too.
Like many other heroes, Heracles was
trained by the Centaur, Chiron, a perfect emblem of a divided nature, man and
horse. His specialty was music, but the Centaurs were notoriously bad drinkers,
and because during one of his labors Heracles slaughtered a band of them, he
runs afoul of Nessus, a Centaur, who attempts to rape Heracles’ wife, Deianira.
At this point, it’s worth noting that wine, associated here with destruction,
is overdetermined, because Deianira’s father was Oeneus, to whom Bacchus first
gave the grape for cultivation. Even today, if you have enough money, you can
be an oenologist rather than a wino. Nessus carries a grape branch, a thyrsus,
which is a phallic staff carried by Dionysian revellers, and a wineskin. He
attempts the rape of Deianira in the middle of a stream.
Nessus the Centaur,
with his wineskin full,
His branch and
thyrsus, and his fleshy grip—
Her whom he could not
force he yet could gull,
And she drank poison
from his bearded lip.
Heracles shoots Nessus with his
arrow, which is tipped with the Hydra’s blood, and this renders all wounds
incurable. Nessus, dying, tells Deianira that if she takes his blood it will
act as a philtre against Heracles’ infidelity. Later, out of love, she
impregnates a tunic with the poisonous blood, and Heracles finds he cannot
remove the burning garment, though he tears off pieces of his own skin trying
to do so. He puts himself on a pyre, and the gods translate him to heaven,
making him immortal. “By love and justice I at last was slain.”
At this point I want to revise
something I said a few minutes ago. Because Apollo is one of Heracles’s
sponsors, the poem does enact a Dionysian confrontation, but not in the rigid
way suggested. If this is a poem of recuperation, it ought to be cold comfort that
the hero is now perfect, considering what has happened to the people who have
loved him. Recuperation, in this case, is death. As the sun descends, the
shadow of Deianira, who killed herself out of guilt, lengthens away from him.
The tone of melancholy regret concludes the poem:
Grown Absolute, I slew my flesh and
bone;
Timeless, I knew the Zodiac my span.
This was my grief that out of grief
I grew—
Translated as I was from earth at
last,
From the sad pain that Deianira
knew,
Transmuted slowly in a fiery blast,
Perfect, and moving perfectly, I
raid
Eternal silence to eternal ends:
And Deianira, an imperfect shade,
Retreats in silence as my arc
descends.
Briefly now. I promised to say something
about the quirks that color Winters’s criticism. I think they ought to serve to
specify the observer who is pronouncing the counsels of perfection. Without
setting aside his judgments (which he brought to bear on cats and dogs as well
as poems), I believe the comic aspect of his work needs acknowledgment. He’s
telling us, “I’m making these pronouncements, not you!” Like Ben Jonson, he
mght have said, “You won not verses, madam, you won me.” After all, he worked
with no book at his elbow telling him
what to think. Among the things that specify him is the knowledge that he had
read every poem by every poet of consequence from Chaucer through Hardy and
Bridges and Pound and Williams, and he had formidable powers of recall. When he
pronounces that a certain poet only wrote four or twelve or seven great poets,
or none, he has a certain authority. When others, who have not even read all
the poems of that particular poet (and may not even like chili), repeat the
same pronouncements, they sound foolish.
The interplay of the essential and
the existential may seem perplexing or humorous in his criticism, but it’s at
the core of his poetic enterprise, as I hope at least to have hinted at.
Whatever Winters means by rationality—and I’m not aware of a comprehensive
definition—he strikes me as close to Stephen Toulmin’s account in Human Understanding: “a man demonstrates
his rationality, not by a commitment to fixed ideas, stereotyped procedures, or
immutable concepts, but by the manner in which, and the occasions on which, he
changes those ideas, procedures, and concepts.”
Against the dynamic nature of
Winters’s mind, as I read him, one might put equal measures of detractors and
supporters alike, who seem to believe that literary judgments are like horse
races, over and done with—though people are still lining up to place their bets
on their versions of modernism 70 or 80 years after the race is over. That
approach is retrograde and conservative and, finally, unintellectual. But what
if the race is never over? What if the race is still being run?
[1] This essay was a talk given at the Winters Centenary
Symposium at Stanford on
Fields, Kenneth. “Winters and the Aesthetics of Recuperation,
or ‘The Hypersensitivity of Convalescence.’” The New Compass: A Critical
Review 3 (June 2004) <http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/fields.html>