The New Compass: A Critical Review
Man at Work:
The Phenomenon of Yvor Winters’s
Criticism
Gordon Harvey
In his own day, it was the
phenomenon of the singular species: “no critic of comparable eminence,” wrote
Randall Jarrell in 1947, “has made so many fantastic
judgments.”[1] In our day, it’s the phenomenon of an order
gone extinct, the order of eminent critics. By the time of his death in 1968,
Winters’s judgments, and his direct way of making them, had hurt his chances of
long-term survival in bookstores and on syllabi; but we nonetheless find him at
the time, in the selection of his letters recently edited by R. L. Barth, beset by invitations to contribute and comment. The
near silence that has now greeted the publication of these letters, finally
unsealed after 25 years, bespeaks more than a mixed reputation; it bespeaks a
climate shift in literary academe.
Among other symptoms, one thinks of
the shift from criticism, considered as canon defining, to “critical thinking,”
with its attention to ideology and pluralism; from a focus on the classic
genres, poetry having pride of place, to an eclectic sense of “text” that
includes less self-conscious documents more responsive to critical thinking;
from debating theories of literature to a cooler, been-there done-that
historicism—not, to be sure, the history of ideas that Winters practiced, but
rather cultural, material, and institutional history, the new literary
historians having learned close reading from their literary-critic teachers and
turned it to analyzing the cultural logic of intellectual processes and
categories themselves, including those of literary critics. It’s not surprising, in this climate, that
most graduate students at Harvard or Yale or Berkeley know of Winters, if at all, as a specimen for classification. But
it’s disappointing to find their classifications so familiar. I recall, from
conversations in recent years, “a renegade New Critic,” “a throwback moralist
and rationalist,” “the most eccentric of the American formalists,” and “went
the way of Ransom, Tate, Blackmur, and the other belletristic poet-critics.” These clichés, of genus and
species, are more or less the ones applied to Winters in his own day, despite
the pains he took to distinguish his views from those of his supposed cohort,
and they seem just as uncontaminated by actual experience of his work, let
alone of the unclichéd accounts of it that appeared
in the decades after his death.[2] For a man for whom discrimination was
everything, among critical ideas as among literary works, it seems a cruel
fate.
Yet it hasn’t been his only fate,
and I don’t refer simply to the number of poems discovered by Winters that are now widely anthologized. Given the changed
climate, a gathering like the present symposium is itself a phenomenon.[3]
No following exists for Ransom, Tate, or Blackmur—one
knows without making a study—like the one that Winters commands, of students,
students of students, and diverse others; of poets and scholars, on both coasts
and in the middle, and abroad, for whom he is not only a critic but the critic, a force in their lives. This
kind of ardor is possible because Winters’s
work still lives on the page, is a phenomenon in the original sense of
apprehended subjective experience:
We read [him] . . . for the vigor that comes from a powerful mind and a profoundly
serious nature, and the weight that seems to be a matter of bringing to bear at
every point the ordered experience of a lifetime. . . . When we read him we
know, beyond question, that we have here a powerful and distinguished mind
operating at first hand upon literature. This, we can say with emphatic
conviction (the emphasis registering the rarity), really is criticism. The
critic knows what he means and says it with inescapable directness and force
(deliberately, not dogmatically), and what he says is clearly the expression of
intense and relevant interest.[4]
This experience—it is F.R. Leavis’s of Samuel Johnson—is the experience of genius for
getting to the heart of the matter, an experience impossible to explain to
someone who doesn’t experience it, and one is tempted to leave the matter
there.
Given the caricature by which
Winters seems in danger of being remembered, however, it seems at least worth
recalling how much of one’s experience of him is at odds with it—with both his
genus as new critic-formalist-moralist, and his differentia as a renegade or
eccentric. Winters lives on the page because he was closer both to the energies
of his time and to the universal energies of literature than anyone fitting
those classifications could have been, and because he was a great enough
literary artist himself to embody those energies in a compelling presence.
I
Many
of Winters’s admirers regard him not as critic,
primarily, but as a poet who from necessity also taught criticism and
literature. Certainly he was a poet first, and quick enough to reject
suggestions that his criticism determined his poems. And certainly that
criticism is distinguished above all by his practitioner’s expertise. Yet a
good many comments in the letters cut the other way, echo Winters’s 1949
response to Hayden Carruth on “The Poet and
University”: “Had it not been for my academic career, it is quite possible that
I should still be a minor disciple of W. C. Williams, doing little
impressionistic notes on landscapes.”[5] The very tone of Winters’s essays makes clear that he didn’t think of them as
“workshop criticism” (as Eliot called his—”a by-product of my private poetry
workshop”), or think of academe as his day job. “My art is poetry,” he put it
to Malcolm Cowley, “my profession is scholarship”
(273).[6] And although he somewhat cultivated
the image of writing from the rugged hinterland to the spoiled centers of
power, the idea of Winters as academic renegade or eccentric distorts his
actual relation to the university.
The background here is the struggle
in American universities, before and after World War I, between scholars and
critics, a struggle waged in faculty meetings, hiring debates, MLA addresses,
and elsewhere. The scholars,
upholding the standards of the German research university, are professionals of
philology, grammar, textual and historical fact. The critics are serious
amateurs, often literary journalists or writers themselves—like James, Pound,
Eliot—who find the usual responses of scholars to literature inadequately aware
of its function as (in Arnold’s phrase) “a criticism of life.” The scholars are
unwilling to admit as literature works being written by contemporary writers
(like the critics), or to admit as university colleagues people who deal with
older literature impressionistically, whose approach seems insufficiently
grounded in fact—in a consistent method for treating empirical detail—or in
evolutionary understanding. And so, with college enrollments
rising and teaching opportunities opening up, the critics professionalize: they
take on the challenge of giving rigor to their work, writing self-scrutinizing
essays with titles like “Is Criticism Possible?” and “The Present Function of
Criticism,” and eventually become an important minority in the literary professoriat.
Winters touches on these events
himself in “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature” in 1956; and indeed
this story, the move from outside the university to inside, is his own story.
It’s the story of how his precocious intellectual appetites and energies, which
for three convalescent years in
Winters’s approach to the project is
deliberate and decidedly unbelletristic. He sets
himself the task, as we say today, of theorizing his discipline: “this
conception of literature has not been adequately defined in the past” . . .
[but only] loosely implicit in the inexact theorizing which has led to the most
durable judgments.”[7] He embarks on major taxonomic
projects, defining types of convention, structure, verse, and including
contemporary literature in his data. He rejects the impressionism of the
“spirit of the age” approach to literary history, which he finds in supposed
challengers of the status quo like Eliot and Ransom, whose manner he finds
genteel and “indeterminate,” and he replaces it with a style that is bracingly
down-to-business. He banishes their cosmopolitan allusions, woolly phrases
(“the religious imagination”), and winsome formulations (“they feel their
thought as immediately as the odour of a rose”), eschews not only their opening
gambits and leisurely development but structural and verbal cleverness of any
kind.
Instead
he starts an essay, “It is my intention to begin by comparing three poems,” and
works through his material text by text, by means of unsubtle transitions: “I
shall now endeavor to draw certain conclusions
regarding the poetic effectiveness of a few basic types of meter.” He makes his
claims sharply, without metaphors; rather than assume a genteel agreement about
terms and values, he supplies clear definitions and premises, sometimes
restating these verbatim from essay to essay. He appeals bluntly to evidence,
sometimes filling a whole paragraph with a line-by-line account of meter and
syntax (of which he does assume a
reader’s knowledge), or with a list of the best poems, or with a concise
summary of (not a knowing allusion to) the relevant background events or ideas,
these too sometimes repeated from essay to essay. He quotes inelegantly long
stretches of critical prose and subjects them to inelegantly logical analysis.
He
is, to borrow his own compliment to R. S. Crane, “a man at work.”[8] He adopts a vocabulary for that work that is pointedly
responsible, anti-impressionistic. He approves what is “serious” and “sound,”
disdains what is “foolish.” He speaks of “precision” and “principles,” signaling the impartiality of the enterprise. No writer is
to be granted special protection from the most serious bearing down upon, is to
be approached in a tone like this: “It is proper that we celebrate the
hundredth and fiftieth birthday of the birth of Keats by testing our powers of
reading him.”[9] For Winters it is Keats who must be
tested—and not as some wholesale entity that is the Major Figure, but poem by
poem and line by line.
It
was for not taking seriously this academic project of bearing down that Winters
criticized his academic colleagues—for their conformity to clichéd categories
and valuations, in the face of which he had to teach the young “corrosion and
distrust.” But the conformity was a symptom of a deeper lack of seriousness, an
inability to imagine how literature and ideas have implications for life, how
they can be life-determining, salvational, dangerous. On hearing of Hart Crane’s death in the spring of
1932 and suspecting suicide, Winters writes to Tate that “I had just completed
my book of criticism, & all my analysis of his work pointed that way: quite
hair-raising . . . . At least he had the courage of his convictions, whatever
cloudy notions they were based on, & definitely called the bluff of a
hundred odd years of hypocritical pantheistic mysticism” (184-5).
Against
the hypocrisy of Professor X, who spouts such ideas to students but wouldn’t
dream of acting on them, we may set the immediate relationship to ideas
displayed in Winters’s remark (to Donald Davie) on his
“personal struggle with the temptations of the romantic tradition”:
I am constantly being bewildered by
romantic lovers of the bucolic who have never milked a cow or goat, who have
never trimmed a terrier, who cannot tell a finch from a thrush, who have never
pulled a carrot fresh from the ground and eaten it raw, who have never had to
battle with a natural and impulsive love for too much alcohol, and who never
got any pleasure out of a fight with their bare fists. These things and others
loosely related have been the great temptations of my life. (301)
The range of what counts as a
temptation here suggests how hard Winters bore down on
his own character; one is reminded of his Sir Gawain describing himself as
having “lived in riot like a fool.” But one is reminded also of the note of
regret that concludes “At the San Francisco Airport,” where Winters
sees his daughter off to her future of vital experiences not yet mastered by
the mind, while he remains “In light, and nothing else, awake.”[10]
It’s
in view of the life pictured in this letter that we must understand Winters’s
responding, after his retirement, to an open invitation to visit campus, “I
never was an academic man, I merely had scholarly interests” (399). This is a
man exhausted, to be sure, by decades of conscientious university work, and the
social and bodily fatigue (a recurring topic in the later letters) that comes
with it. But it is also a man of the physical world, alive to natural rituals,
pleasures, and dangers that engage him as no purely intellectual life could—the
Winters who, as he reflects in one of his most
touching poems, might have been John Muir. It is also perhaps a man
acknowledging how much he remained, even after joining the academic community,
toughly self-sufficient, his tendencies in this regard having intensified during
his semi-isolation at Sunmount and later in the tough Western towns where he
taught school, where he had to think positions through for himself, from the
beginning, taking nothing for granted, working by trial and error.
What
“I never was an academic man” doesn’t
mean, however, is “I should have stuck to poetry.” Winters’s early isolation
and self-educating entailed a vulnerability—to both the zeitgeist and his own
idiosyncrasies—that it was his salvation to have escaped, and that he sought to
spare his own student poets. He came to see it as his main work as a teacher to
break down the prejudices dividing poets and scholars, to the detriment of
both; and many of his students—Baker, Stanford, Trimpi,
Helen Pinkerton, Gullans, Fields, and others—became
poet scholars. “Fill your head up with facts,” he tells Stanford, going off to
study at Harvard, “skip the appreciative stuff” (217). And to Carruth, again on the poet in the university:
I have trained people who (believe
it or not) will be among the permanent poets of our time and among the
distinguished scholars of our time; I have caught them young and shown them the
foolishness of being irritated by professor so-and-so because he is not as fine
a critic as God-Almighty, when he can teach them something about Renaissance
texts and the language of Chaucer. I have civilized a lot of young geniuses who
could easily have blown their tops at an early date. (287)
This “civilizing” came with a good
deal of a quality that Barth finds predominant in the
letters, “a radical generosity that neither asked for not expected anything in
return” (xv).
Winters’s generosity towards his students appears as an equally solemn care for
their living arrangements as for their souls, the latter sometimes manifest (as
care often is in Winters) in not-so-solemn bluntness—e.g. “Don’t be a
jackass”—but always quite sincerely signed “Best wishes, Arthur.”
The
care is manifest also in the judicious biographical sketches of his students
that Winters writes to others, which remind us that in
his generosity to individuals he is also looking out for the interests of
posterity. Hence the poignant solicitude of his letters to a young writer of
talent as yet uncorrupted by anti-academic prejudices like the Nisei fiction
writer Hisaye Yamamoto, whom he persuades to apply
for a Stanford fellowship, but who turns out to have just enough of those
prejudices to get cold feet:
I have just read your misguided
letter and am asking you to reconsider. Don’t go Zen on me; don’t go Whitmanian on me . . . The land is not the only
fundamental. It is O.K., if you don’t get mystical about it. But your mind is
important too. A year here would do a lot for your mind and your art; and at
the end of the year the land would still be there, and you would be better
prepared for it and for other things. (327-8)
The counterpart in Winters’s
criticism to such anxious concern is 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. This isn’t the
ungracious pulling down of the great that some have imagined; it comes from a
terrible gift for imagining what might have been, in a poem as in a career.
It would be going too far to say
that Winters’s later heroes are scholars, but when he writes to Don Cameron
Allen that “I have always thought of poetry as the highest form of
scholarship,” he is clearly paying a tribute to both (379). In his great poem
“Time and the Garden,” he presents poet and scholar as sharing the same drive
towards an intense, gathered awareness: the scholar, inheriting as an object of
study the poet’s passion to condense hard-won wisdom into lines, inherits also
a version of that same passion, “to condense from book to book / Unbroken
wisdom in a single look.” And one is struck, reading Winters’s work against
that of his cohort, by how much more affirming it is of the patient work of
teaching and learning, how studded the essays and later poems are with grateful
references to editors, literary historians, and other scholars—notably to the
two who most helped civilize him, W.
D. Briggs and J. V. Cunningham, the latter despite the fact (hard as it is to
imagine) that he came to Stanford as a gangly, uncouth prairie kid with
knowledge of classics but little of English literature. All the more generous
and honest, then, seems Winters’s dedication to
Cunningham of The Function of Criticism
in 1957 as one “whose work in prose and verse alike has been more valuable to
me than that of any other writer of our time.”
Winters’s
inclusion in Function of his review
of C. S. Lewis’ English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century suggests the complexity of his seriousness about
scholarship. He has learned from Lewis’s overview, yet he makes it a foil for
the idea at the heart of his own very different academic project: the idea that
literary history is necessarily critical, since it can only be (if one is not
to be bound by blinkered ideas of periods and schools and Major Figures) the
history of the best works. And yet again, he defends the expertise of
specialists: “It is the work of a man who has read most (perhaps all) of the
literature in the field but who is competent to discuss only a small part of it
professionally,” and further, “the first rate monograph, or the first rate
critical essay, is never superseded; it becomes part of literature; but the
text book is a hugger-mugger affair, no matter who writes it.”[11]
Some of Winters’s
staunchest defending of learning as necessary to criticism comes in the late
letters. By this point it has become depressingly clear to him that the
determination of which works and values are central is more likely to be based
on genteel consensus than on informed judgment. To Malcolm Cowley:
I
know you all regard me as an eccentric. But you are the eccentrics,
or
rather the provincials. . . you don’t know
enough. You know damned little except each other’s opinions and the prejudices
of your generation and of the preceding generation. . . . I have been grubbing
in this stuff professionally, while you people have been agreeing privately and
publicly with each other.” (356)
A few months later, in a few weeks
in the spring of 1958, comes a remarkable outpouring of a dozen letters to
Tate, compulsively responding and re-responding to Tate’s positive but
historically naïve and inaccurate essay on Winters’s poems (“You are writing
like one of my students on a final examination” 362). These letters, the most
detailed commentary we have by Winters on Winters, and his most direct
confrontation with a gifted former hero lamed by an unwillingness to educate
himself, also powerfully assert that a literary judgment isn’t a rubber stamp,
that even if basically right it can’t be true unless based on real understanding.
II
Winters’s
embrace of academic work in some ways parallels his shift in poetic method.
Both entailed accepting a larger sense of audience and mission, a deeper
awareness of shared enterprise with other minds throughout history. Where the
early free-verse poems tend to be private, their implied relation to audience,
and to meaning, skeptical and ironic, the later poems
in traditional meters and structures are forthright and stately, willing to
risk earnest sentiment. (“You people strike me as afraid not to be clever,” he
writes to
Both developments, however, strike
one as actualizing impulses that Winters felt from
early on. “The young romantic eventually understood,” writes Barth, “the limitations of his position, and began to
change himself,” and “this change was achieved only at great cost” (xii). And
doubtless it was, at the level of positions (“
It
is the mind, we should recall, of a self-made businessman’s son, whose first
passion was zoology, with its combined pleasures of observational specificity,
natural and evolutionary process, and classification (“at the age of 16 . . . I
knew
Winters’s
early judgments (including those of himself) swing wildly, but the crucial qualities
of mind are there: the interest in particular achieved works, rather than
wholesale Major Figures; the respect for exact knowledge and technical
competence; the conviction that one should be able to articulate one’s
principles, and that one should always act on them, however doing so may
conflict with social ease. These are the qualities, along with a capacity for
focused work, that would allow him to accomplish—as well as any one person
could—the work of his historic moment: to create a philosophically grounded,
evidentially precise and evolutionarily coherent account of past and present
literature.
Although
Winters’s account is primarily of poetry, and incomplete even as that, and
although its drift resembles the general anti-romantic drift of Eliot, Ransom
and others, it goes well beyond them in both evidential detail and historical
and philosophical coherence, and challenges comparison only with the work of Leavis and Scrutiny.
Any one piece of Winters’s account would be for most academics a triumphant
life’s work: the historical and re-seeing of the Renaissance short poem in the
1939 Poetry essays; the seeing of
American literature whole in Maule’s Curse
(arguably the inaugural text of American Studies) and The Anatomy of Nonsense; the re-connecting of romantic and modern
poetry in “Poetic Styles Old and New” and other essays of the mid fifties,
through the concept of post-symbolist imagery. And this is not to mention the
many other essays that lay technical and theoretic groundwork, or clear away
bloated Major-Figure reputations obscuring the true shape of history (e.g. of
Frost, Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, Eliot), or bring to light particular obscured
poems and poets (Churchill, Tuckerman, Bridges, Sturge-Moore, Cunningham,
Bowers). Whatever its gaps, the assemblage that is Forms of Discovery soars above the poetry criticism of its era in
the explanatory power of the map it offers of turning points, intellectual
forces and stylistic alternatives, decisively compared key figures and
decisively clear examples.
III
Historically,
then, the Winters phenomenon is the phenomenon of the
great academic critic: the professor with the genius, energy, and confidence to
develop a comprehensive evaluative vision. It was a phenomenon of the formative,
expansive days of English departments; the anger that Winters
inspired had much to do with the threat his kind of bearing down posed to the
expansion, with its assumption of unassailably permanent Major Figures. It may
be that, in the mid 20th century, the great critic had to be an academic one, the work
requiring a slow digesting of literature and scholarship and history that seems
at odds with the life of the literary journalist, at-large man of letters, or
workshop critic. The work was surely helped more than hindered by the
conditions of teaching: the need to assemble survey courses, to decide what
works to teach and how the works relate, to re-read works year after year, to
articulate and demonstrate ideas clearly enough to hold an audience of students.
The
fact that circumstances of his period made Winters
possible, however, doesn’t make him period-bound, any more than it does Samuel
Johnson, for readers who care about the works he discusses. Indeed, if one
appeal of Winters’s criticism is the energy of
progress and adventure—forging a new unity in the profession to meet the
challenge of the times—another is the energy of re-grounding, of broadly
familiar and commonsensical notions reinvigorated.
Winters’s
characterization of his view of literature as “moral” has allowed easy
dismissals by those who conflate the term with “moralistic,” but this seems
another refusal to let literature connect with real life. To call literature a
moral act is to say that writers work their medium so as to treat their subject
as justly, exactly, and completely as possible, that they inevitably do this
with judgably greater or lesser success, and that
this judgment matters. It matters because just, exact, and complete acts of understanding,
discovered in the works of others or arrived at in one’s own struggles, make
one more aware and alive. To call this situation “moral” is to stress the
deliberate, independent acts of weighing and deciding involved, and the
deliberate effort. Since one’s natural impulse is to settle for the good
enough, to let one’s thinking go slack, blurry, clichéd, and since external
nature tends no less to such entropy than does internal, subtle acts of
discovery and understanding aren’t likely to result from surrendering to or
going with the flow.
It’s
hard to see how this view isn’t basic to writing generally. Even the fear of
surrendered will, though indeed temperamentally strong in Winters, isn’t far
from Orwell’s vision in “Politics and the English Language” of the politician
in a “state of reduced consciousness,” having surrendered his thinking to the
verbal atmosphere around him: “the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and
turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.”[12] And Winters’s view seems relevant to most kinds of writing, precluding as it does
any magical divide between poetic or literary composition and other forms (such
as the historians that Winters taught as literature). “My idea of a writer,” he
tells Malcolm Cowley, “is somebody who has something
to say which will interest superior adults and knows how to say it” (375), and
this practical attitude is at the heart of his project. Despite the special
kinds of work his criticism does—historical, formal, ethical, metaphysical—it
never seems in danger of devolving into one of them; nor, although Winters was
active in social causes, does his criticism tend outward to the kind of
contemplating of culture that we find in Eliot, Leavis,
the Agrarians. It keeps returning, rather, to the work of bearing down on
specifics of composition.
I
don’t refer here to the more obvious compositional remarks, like the
punctuation lesson Winters gives Tate in the letters, or like his review of
Jarrell that finds an “utter incapacity to state anything memorably”: “Had I
received this description, written out as prose, from a student in freshman
composition at Stanford, there is scarcely a phrase in it which I should not
have underlined as either trite or clumsily obvious; furthermore, I think that
there is scarcely a teacher of freshman composition at Stanford (I should
hesitate to speak for the teachers in the great universities of the east) who
would not mark it similarly.”[13] I mean,
rather, that the criteria implied in Winters’s evaluative comments, and in his
key concepts—poem as statement, understanding vs reflecting experience, denotation grounding connotation,
relationship of motive to emotion, rational form, the plain style, the
imitative fallacy, and so on—are familiar criteria that he, or anyone, might in
different language offer up to a composition class.
Your
subject,” he might tell his students, “should be one you care about; but don’t
give me a report of your impressions or feelings, or a compilation of
observations or facts, however interesting you may find them. Give me your
understanding of these experiences, some shareable insight into them that isn’t
trivial or obvious, and persuade me that your understanding is just. You’ll
discover the nuances that will make your idea compelling only in the act of
writing; but everything in your finished piece should clearly bear on it; no
bits should be merely striking in themselves, or allowed to run on beyond their
relevance. You’ll need some general terms in which to formulate your
understanding (although in patches of description or narration, if the context
is clear, you can also imply it) and a structure that organizes your thoughts
and details and guides your reader through them. This structure will to some
extent arise out of your material, but it won’t reflect the private logic of
your mind; it will develop through one or more of the standard kinds of
rational progression, which will allow your composition to be more considered
and economical than is your conversation or your everyday flow of thought, and
more shareable by others.”
“Your
language,” he might go on, “should at every point clarify your particular take
on your subject and reflect your emotional attitude towards it—the attitude
you’re inviting me and other readers to share as a just one. So bear down: stay
in word-by-word control of your tone, syntax, rhythm, sound. Make your style as
forthright and concise as possible, your diction sharp and clean: avoid the
sentimental and journalistic clichés and the predictable details that will
first come into your head. But don’t over-write: dramatic or ingenious effects,
unless they’re warranted by the understanding of the topic that you’re
articulating, will seem mannered and will call attention away from your subject
to themselves, or evoke feelings and associations that your understanding
doesn’t warrant, or that obscure what you’re trying to say.”
To
suggest that Winters invokes these basic criteria—of
relevance, clarity, coherence, economy, and so on—isn’t to suggest that poems
are essays, or as easily come to terms with. Winters’s judgments everywhere
reflect his account in Primitivism and
Decadence of how the features of a line of poetry—meter and rhythm,
compression of statement, conventions of feeling—exist in an “almost fluid
complex” of inter-relationships.[14] But even the subtlest
of these relationships, he is concerned to show, has its significance in the
context of a certain understanding that the whole poem is trying to
communicate, which, as an understanding
and not just an experience, is answerable to the basic criteria for
communicating ideas. It’s surely the centrality of these criteria that Winters
has in mind in telling Cowley and Tate that they are the eccentrics, and in
responding to an evidently large compliment from Charles Gullans
(“this Great Man business gives me a pain in a place I won’t mention”) that “if
the principles which I have taught you kids . . . are correct . . . they are
not my property but are universals. Jan thinks that I have damaged all of you.
What I was trying to do was knock a little common sense through your skulls”
(338).
This
last hardly captures the effect Winters’s critical prose (though it captures an
element of it), but the common sense of his principles does help explain why
that prose still lives on the page, where discussions by his cohort of
“tension” in poetry or “pure and impure” poetry do not. The presumption of
these principles is what allows us to readily grasp the significance, in Winters’s account, of Shaftesburian
deism, romantic organicism, and modernist ideals of
eliminating the author and imitating a streaming consciousness or the texture
of modern life. Winters was singularly sensitive to the elusive nuances, the
effects of sensory intensity and emotional suggestiveness, that such
conceptions produced; but these become valuable for him, in particular poems
and in the history of poetry, to the extent that they participate in a larger
act of communicated understanding that involves ideas or implied ideas. The
mind’s presumption of this rational basis, indeed, is what makes extra-rational
effects perceptible.
The
younger Winters sometimes seems to take such effects as the basis, to regard poetry as working not by sequential
statement but bursts of epiphanic implication: “a
poem for me is the condensation into more compact and consequently more intense
terms of the facts or suspicions of one’s existence (97); or “the best poems of
Williams or Hardy lay the complete world naked at a stroke” (88). The appeal of
this stroke in art, Winters later acknowledges in
“Time and the Garden,” derives from a common fantasy in life of all-at-once
knowing, whereas real knowing is won only through time and in articulated
statement. Here again, however, the early thinking looks forward to the late:
from early on he wants a sharp structure or “noticeable outline” (78), and he
values in the epiphanic poems above all their
compression, or what he in several letters calls “specific density.” A remark
like the following from 1931 points ahead, but also seems no dramatic break
from what has come before: “The theme is definite, the procedure is economical,
the feeling is exact, each detail contributes a
definite and necessary part to the statement” (191).
And
the remark could be made, my point is, about most
pieces of good writing. The coherence among human attempts at understanding
that Winters conveys is one of the pleasures of reading him, as is the
experience of revitalized common sense one gets from his engagements with
particular works, on which he brings to bear familiar criteria that one brings
to many exchanges in life. If a poem is
a statement about experience—rather than a fiction, a drama with a speaker, an
ironic construct of opposing forces —it should be a statement worth making (“It
seems to me the business of a poet to arrive at an attitude he can offer
without apology” [181]) that requires the resources of poetry to make well.
Notwithstanding
the elaborate forms of apology that some poets write into their style, or that
some critics offer on their behalf, a good many famous poems simply don’t have
much to say that will interest superior adults. It’s liberating, and startling,
to come across Winters calmly observing that most of Shakespeare’s sonnets
display “an attitude of servile weakness on the part of the poet in the face of
the person addressed that renders a sympathetic approach almost impossible,”
and that even Herbert’s better poems exhibit “a cloying and almost infantile
pietism . . . that leads him into abject clichés,” and that “To His Coy
Mistress” is “an exceptionally brilliant academic exercise on a set theme, but
it is no more than that.”[15] One may at first resist,
having perhaps written clever papers on these Major Figures; but even in
resisting one knows that Winters has cut through to something true, which our
better self may even have dimly recognized before our clever, conformist self
suppressed the recognition.
Winters’s
boldest profession of the “statement about life” criteria comes in “Problems
for the Modern Critic of Literature,” with its comparison of literary genres in
terms of their potential as intelligent statements about life. The comparison
shows the man at work, bearing down on the materials of the profession and
following out the logic of his premises—to the conclusion that the short poem
is inherently a greater form than forms like the novel, since the poet need not
limit his intelligence in portraying less than fully intelligent characters.
The fact that this conclusion, by the time Winters arrives at it, collides with, rather than revitalizes,
common-sense experience, suggests one kind of limit to his criticism: he had
neither the time nor the inclination to do the systematic work on prose
fiction, the re-reading and scholarly steeping, that would have allowed a just
treatment of its effects and potentials.
To
be sure, his treatment in Maule’s Curse of
Hawthorne, Cooper, Melville, James is permanently illuminating and alters the
way one reads those writers. And that treatment does take its bearings from the
basic criteria for articulated understanding, about which these writers have
inherited some Calvinist-inspired skepticisms, which
manifest themselves as a desire to seize the Big Meaning in a stroke, to leap
or plunge directly into experience, to use a private vision and language, to
focus intensely on small details at the expense of larger significance, to
allow moments of deliberately obscure motivation. But however coherent may be
Winters’s account of the literary tradition that is his immediate inheritance,
one wouldn’t turn to him (as one would to Leavis) for
an account of the fluid complex of inter-relationships in a novel that would
match the account he can give of those in a poem. His conclusion that the novel
is a lesser vehicle for intelligence seems abstract and arid, in view of Middlemarch or The Rainbow. It also seems, given the infinitely many and
infinitely fine judgments of appropriateness such works make in delineating the
relationships between characters and between characters and their world, and in
expressing these relationships as plot, strangely at odds with Winters’s own
notion of literature as moral judgment.
Yet
one isn’t sorry for the experiment, that Winters
pushes his logic—and our own—as far as he has. It is what we expect and want
him to do. And this suggests a final aspect of the Winters
phenomenon worth remembering: the extent to which the experience of his
criticism is one of character, as embodied in style.
IV
Criticism
on Winters’s scale, however it may be anchored in
passages of close analysis here and there, must be largely a matter of
establishing authority and trust regarding the greater mass of material that
the critic can’t treat, but can only invite extrapolation about or characterize
in a way that invites the reader to follow up. The great critic, that is, must
have a great style.
Here
again, comparison is revealing. Where many a sentence in Tate, Ransom, Jarrell,
& co. might be mistaken for a sentence by one of the others, a Winters sentence is always recognizably his. Many critics
might have written “the dimension in which a poem moves is not one which
excludes ideas, but one which includes attitudes,” or “the total complex of
sensibility and thought, of belief and experience, in the society from which
the poetry emerges is the prime limiting factor,” or “the poet imposes unity on
his variety, form on his matter, just as the mind imposes order on the
universe.” But none is sharp enough to possibly be Winters. Nor is this:
Both odes are constructed
pictorially in spatial blocks, for the eye to take in serially. Though to my
mind this method is better suited to the subject of the Grecian Urn, which is
itself a plastic object, than to the Nightingale ode, I take the latter, in
spite of the blemishes of detail (only some of which we have looked at) to be
the finer poem. If there is not so much in it as in the Grecian Urn for the
elucidation of verbal complexity, there is nowhere the radical violation of its
set limits that one finds in the last stanza of the Grecian Urn.[16]
Though not untypical of 50s
criticism, such prose discourages serious attention, the result of which could
only be to expose the sources of discouragement: the muddiness of “pictorially”
(and its ugly pairing with “serially”), “spatial blocks,” and “plastic object,”
the latter also inviting an absurd image that then draws out the physicality of
“blemishes” even as it clashes with the tone of genteel triviality carried by
that word and by “the finer poem.” And then the pseudo-exciting cliché of
“radical violation” completed by the flat and vague “set limits.”
This
isn’t a style that sends one back to the poems in question, so little inward
acquaintance with them does it display, and so little confidence that what is
being said about them matters—so little, that is, of what is everywhere present
in Winters:
The remainder of the poem is
stereotyped, but the rhythm of the third line of the third quatrain is fine; the
anapest in the third position, a very light one, followed by the very lightly
accented syllable of the subsequent iamb, makes the sliding perceptible,
however subtly. The couplet is commonplace, but honest. The subject is serious;
the language is the small change of Christian moralizing, but it is sincerely
felt and gracefully arranged: the rhythm is beautiful. The poem is moving but
essentially second rate.[17]
In its assured assembling of
relevant perceptions, this is the man at work, although no ordinary man at work
could deliver them with such persuasive authority. The very austerity of
assertion, in conjunction with the precise metrical notations and scrupulous
qualifying, manifests long and close acquaintance with the poem—as teacher and
working poet steeped in scholarship—and
with many other poems that make up its immediate comparison group, and with the universe of poems in
English. “Essentially second rate” isn’t dismissive—in fact this style does send one back to the poem—but
merely exact. The style is more that of
a man at work than Johnson’s, but it has the weight that Leavis
feels as a “bringing to bear at every point the ordered experience of a
lifetime.”
The
passage was indeed composed near the end of Winters’s
life, when he was racing to finish Forms
of Discovery before his painful cancer finished him, which makes the
achieved sense of ordered experience fairly heroic. But it’s typical in the way
it achieves definitiveness. Although Winters can turn out memorable
formulations at will (Frost is “a poet of the minor theme, the casual approach,
and the discreetly eccentric attitude”[18]), he usually
lets his language gather weight by its spare simplicity, its avoidance of even
the mildest jargon (“plastic object”) but also of lexical brilliance (such as
sometimes flashes out in Leavis). He puts his
rhetorical energy rather into syntax, in sentences that are often longer than
their directness would suggest, and that are assembled not by accretive or
parenthetical constructions (such as in Leavis
suggest exploratory energy) but by sharp oppositions and firm cadences.[19]
Winters’s
gift for syntax, and his attunement to its effects in
poetry, was augmented by his reading of the great historians. His comment about
one of them is apt to himself:
Hume, in common with the best
stylists of his century, possessed a command of the rhetorical possibilities of
grammatical structure. Accumulation, climax, antithesis, the ironical
by-thrust; the exact identification of causal, temporal and other relations by
means of grammatical form; perfect clarity at every moment in the process of
difficult stylistic maneuvers, variety and precision
of rhythm: such mastery is the norm of his style.[20]
A command of balance in particular,
often antithetical, accounts for a good deal of Winters’s
own mastery. It is mutedly present in the passage on
The inept deism of the “Essay on
Man” was not forced upon Pope by the
age: Pope himself, by virtue of his inability to think and his ability to write
as if he thought perfectly, did at least as much as Shaftesbury
to impose it on the age; and had he
possessed as sharp a mind as Samuel Johnson the history of the age might easily have been greatly different from
what it was.[21]
Such organizing of thought by
balances within balances reminds one more of Johnson, indeed, than of most
modern critics—except that the balancing is tamed to the purposes of the man at
work by a plainer diction than Johnson’s, by a movement closer to speech
(Johnson wouldn’t have used the insistent repetition of “age” to bring out the
words I’ve emphasized, or come to rest on “was”), and by a favorite Winters
construction, whereby a balance hinged on and
or but or on a paratactic semi-colon
or colon is immediately extended by a third, usually co-ordinating element.
“The inept Deism was not forced upon Pope; Pope imposed it on the age; and the
age might have been different.” And, “The language is the small change of
Christian moralizing, but it is sincerely felt and gracefully arranged: the
rhythm is beautiful.” The effect is to moderate the settled effect of the
balance by immediately pushing forward from it, so as to suggest unfettered
alertness to implication but at the same time give a clinching completeness to
the thought. Thus also: “Any such attempt would be the work of the lifetime,
and my life is nearly spent; and I have written other books.” Or:
The pigeons cannot be separated from
the idea: they are part of the universe which the poet is trying to understand,
and at this point they are an efficiently representative part. The rational
soul and the sensible soul are united: we do not have the purely rational soul
of Jonson nor the purely
sensible soul of Pound; and there is no decoration. The universe which Stevens
describes is ambiguous in its ultimate meanings. But there is nothing ambiguous
in the style; ambiguity is rendered with the greatest precision. And the
universe is one which we can recognize as our own.[22]
Any writer can make this kind of
move, of course; but in its fit with Winters’s mind
and purposes it creates particular energy and presence in the prose, the
presence of a mind at work.
V
And not just a mind but a person. This person emerges in
part because, to a degree rare in academic criticism, his personal world emerges. To finally read Winters’s
letters, full though they are of new information, is to realize how much one
already knew, how much a picture of his life coalesces in his criticism. This
critic, we are aware, has a job, at which he has worked hard and steadily, at a
place in a provincial relation to “the great universities of the east”; has
students, freshman and graduate; has exasperated and exasperating colleagues,
keeps Airedales and goats and fruit trees, writes poems, follows boxing, is
married to a modest but considerable writer, has been through an extended
illness and some life changes, has walked up to the abyss and hung on sheer
cliffs of the mind.
But
Winters is also thickly present as a distinct
character. Although his prose is funnier than is acknowledged
[23], the character in it clearly isn’t the genial sophisticate projected
by most “lively” writing, with whom one is to imagine
oneself conversing. In fact the Winters character
emerges in his moral difference from us, in the fact that his bearing down and
following through consistently go beyond what we could do or perhaps would want
to.
One
thinks, again, of the way he bears down on his own life, so that a prefatory
personal sketch like his introduction to the Early Poems, which for most poets would be an off-duty occasion for
relaxed and self-ironic remembering, for Winters
requires a display of grave exactitude in recounting only the relevant facts of
his life. One thinks also of his strict following through to conclusions, no
matter how off-putting they may be for readers otherwise well disposed—so that,
for example, this natural-born empiricist, not remotely likely to join Tate and
others in Catholicism, is led by logic to declare himself a Thomistic
absolutist. And there is his perfectionism, apparent in observations like “the
remainder of the poem is stereotyped, but the rhythm of the third line of the
third quatrain is fine,” which requires that one or two faultless poems be
singled out from a life’s work that may contain twenty astonishing pieces with
a small lapse here or there (he finds Larkin’s lovely “At Grass” “all but
ruined” by a difficult juncture of two consonant sounds in the last line of the
fourth stanza [376]). And there is his extreme sensitivity to the mind’s
precariousness and the dangers lurking in ordinary activities, evident in his
interest in the themes of dissolution and invasion of identity, for example, and
in the language of catastrophe that runs through his literary and historical
analyses: “disastrous,” “damage,” “collapse,” “failure,” “destroyed.” Granted
that the times—Depression, World War, atomic bomb and nuclear détente—were
indeed perilous, it’s striking that one so sensitive to melodrama in the works
of others could title one of his own “The Brink of Darkness.”
Here,
it may seem, one can speak of
eccentricity: the character in Winters’s criticism is
eccentrically serious, is serious in excess of the mean, is extreme. And yet if
this is true of Winters, it is true in the same sense it is of Socrates, whose
character, following through on his premises all the way to the hemlock (“the
test,” as Winters treats it in his poem, of his “long / Uncertain labor to discern the best”), is at once extreme and exemplary, enjoining us in its very
extremeness to a seriousness that we will never achieve but should strive for
more often than we do.
As
similarly enjoining characters, one thinks perhaps of
And
although the Great Man business may give Winters a pain in a place he won’t
mention, one feels him in the criticism quite as aware as Jonson that his style and
comportment exemplifies and enjoins to an attitude towards life. One feels it,
for example, in moments of self-consciously unfashionable, didactic
earnestness: “I have tried to understand this for my own improvement and for
the improvement of my students.”[24]
One feels it also, as a more ironic playing to type, in
some of his reported conversational remarks: “An Airedale can do anything any
other dog can do, and then kill it.”[25]
Such moments remind us how much
tougher, lonelier, and more vigilant is the character in Winters’s
criticism than the one in “Inviting a Friend to Supper” or the “Preface to
Shakespeare.” He can’t speak as a participant in a common classical tradition,
nor even as a participant in a national tradition, as Tate could as a
Southerner, or Leavis could as an English cultural
critic in the line of Eliot, Arnold, Ruskin, and others.[26]
But Winters’s lone vigilance, motivated as it is by an obvious love for
poetry and the beauties to be found in it (“beautiful” appearing quite as often
in his criticism as “intelligent”), is what gives him such a strong existence
in one’s mind, even when one isn’t recalling something specific that he has
said. He is one of those powerfully consistent characters for whom we can
imagine what he might say about a
certain topic, or about the sloppy thoughts we ourselves are saying about
it—who commands a place on the small committee of inner consultants we each
retain as spurs to our ever-failing integrity.
However Winters
is remembered, and by whom, it will be a crime if his criticism is remembered
as a crotchety, cerebral backdrop to his poems. Whether he is greater as a poet
or critic is difficult to say; but whether he matters more as one or the other
isn’t an idle question, nor one answerable by
acknowledging that criticism is by definition a derivative and secondary
activity. For if criticism depends on poetry, so do poems—for their very
existence as available and influential objects—depend on criticism. ("I
was prevented from reading Verlaine for three years
by the quotations I had seen in anthologies and essays. When
I read the Romances sans paroles I could have wept" [79]). And
though it may be bearing down too hard to say, as Winters does, that only
Johnson deserves to be called a a great critic, there
are distinctly fewer great critics in English than there are great poets. As a
poet Winters has many equals, as a critic maybe two or
three. Without Winters’s criticism, moreover, we
wouldn’t understand how great his poems are—no other critic could have equipped
us to see.
The
number of great poets who were also great critics is smaller still, of course.
The number of these who were married to a considerable poet who was also a
considerable novelist must be exactly one. And to the fact that this
poet-novelist could at the same time somehow maintain a household we owe, in no
small measure, the work of the man at work that is the phenomenon of Yvor Winters’s criticism.
What if there were
some odious drudgery in teaching? Who expects to get by without odious
drudgery? My wife, who has never been strong, has gone through 23 years of the
odious drudgery of keeping house, and has managed in the process to produce
three novels, a nouvellete, a book of short stories,
and a book of poems; she thinks I lead the life of Riley, and in comparison, I
do.[27]
[1]
“Corrective for Critics” (1947), in
Kipling, Auden, and Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964,
143.
[2] Among
other items are illuminating summaries in Grosvenor
Powell’s Language as Being (1980) and
Dick Davis’s Wisdom and Wilderness
(1983), and a recent essay by Wesley Trimpi that
vivifies the idea of post-symbolist imagery by linking it to the ancient ideal
of the educated sensibility (International
Journal of the Classical Tradition (2001-2002), 195-204. But the most moving and vital response to Winters’s criticism has been that of John Fraser, originally
in articles published just before and after Winters’s death, more recently on
Fraser’s website http://www.jottings.ca/john/site.html. See especially “Yvor
Winters: Perils of Mind” and the five essays comparing Leavis
and Winters (which pairing, should anyone ever really
do a critical history of criticism in the 20th century, will have to
be central). Citations to these are on
Fraser’s website, along with a remarkable array of different responses by
Fraser to Winters’s critical promptings, including
commentary, audible readings, alternative anthologies.
[3] An
earlier version of this paper was given at the Winters Centenary Symposium at
the
[4] “Samuel
Johnson,” in The Importance of Scrutiny, ed. Eric
Bentley (New York: NYU Press, 1984), 51-2.
[5] “The Poet
and the University,” Uncollected Essays
and Reviews, ed. Francis Murphy (Chicago: Swallow, 1973), 308. See Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” in On Poets and Poetry (NY: Farrar Strauss,
1961), 117.
[6]
Parenthetical page numbers refer to the splendid Selected Letters, ed. R. L. Barth (
[7] In Defense of
Reason (Denver: Swallow, 1947), 3.
[8] The Function of Criticism: Problems and
Exercises (Denver: Swallow, 1957), 19.
[9] Allen Tate, “A Reading of Keats,”
in The Man of Letters in the Modern World
(New York: Scribner’s, 1955), 193.
[10] Poems
are quoted from the Collected Poems,
ed. Donald Davie (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978).
[11] The
Function of Criticism, 197-8.
[12] A
Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1953), 166.
[13] Uncollected Essays and Reviews, 22.
[14] In Defense of
Reason, 19.
[15] Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical
Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (Chicago: Swallow, 1967),
53, 88, 104.
[16] The
sentences are by Brooks, Tate, and Jarrell, respectively; the passage is by
Tate from “A Reading of Keats,” 206.
It’s only fair to add that Tate’s prose, although consistently hurt by
its attempt to imitate Eliot’s ease, has better moments than this, and that, if
one never finds such bland and sloppy passages in Winters, neither can one find
a charming literary performance like Tate’s “Miss Emily and the
Bibliographers.”
[17] Forms of Discovery, 34, in the account
of
[18] The Function of Criticism, 159.
[19]
Although the sentences become shorter in some of the hurried writing for Forms of Discovery, the care Winters put
into the longer constructions is evident, among other places, in his remark to
the editor who broke some of them up, in the essay on James: “You seem to have found my sentences in many
cases too long; but the sentences were correctly constructed and said what I
had in mind fairly accurately and concisely. Your
shortening of the sentences results in sloppy relationships, redundancies, and
from time to time nonsense” (Letters, 247).
[20] In Defense of
Reason, 417.
[21] In Defense of
Reason, 488.
[22] Forms of Discovery, xi, 267.
[23] Which is why it comes as no surprise to
find Winters’s letters shot through with humor. In the criticism the humor
usually comes as flashes of deadpan that play off or exaggerate his normal
formality. These sometimes involve
emotional hyperbole: “The ignorance both of philosophy and theology in such
ideas is sufficient to strike one with terror” or “I believe that nothing but
confusion can result from mistaking the
There
are memorable moments of exasperated sarcasm, as about the last line of The Waste Land, and Eliot’s even more
pretentious footnote on it: “Surely there was never another great sentiment
expressed with such charming simplicity!” (IDR 500). And occasional opportunistic pounces on a
lapse, the observation that Ransom’s observation “’the deaths of little boys
are more exciting than sea surfaces’ . . . seems worthy of a perfumed and
elderly cannibal” (IDR 518). And there is even, in a discussion of famous
metaphors using Richards’s tenor/vehicle terminology, a terrible pun made funny
by a straight delivery that continues on without missing a beat, and by the
fact that the statement is also literally true:
“The most famous Renaissance vehicle, as far as I know, has been
Marvell’s chariot. It functions in much
the same way as Donne’s gold and compasses” (FD 73).
[24] Forms of Discovery, xi.
[25] Ken
Fields, personal communication, May 1982.
[26] Ian
Robinson’s study of this tradition in The
English Prophets might also be regarded as a contribution to it, so well
does the book deliver on the promise of its subtitle: A Critical Defence of English Criticism (Edgeways Books, 2001).
[27] This
was 1949. Janet Lewis produced a fourth
novel (1959) and several more collections of poetry.
Harvey, Gordon. “Man at Work: The
Phenomenon of Winters’s Criticism.” The New Compass: A Critical Review 3
(June 2004) <http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/harvey.html>