“A critic may even be specifically wrong yet theoretically right. Paul Elmer More, for instance, damns all modern literature with one irritated and uncomprehending gesture; he is academic and insensitive. The tragedy of it is, that most modern writers could learn a great deal from him if they did not find his irritation so irritating.”
When he wrote these lines, in 1930, Yvor Winters was a young instructor at Stanford University, and a poet well regarded in avant-garde circles; his first book of criticism was still seven years in the future. Yet in describing More, a sage of the neo-Humanist movement, Winters gave an oddly precise verdict on his own career as a critic of poetry. Of all the eminent poet-critics of his generation—John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur—none is more often “irritating,” “insensitive,” and “specifically wrong” than Winters. These qualities made him a figure first of controversy, then of mockery. But it is also true that, thirty-five years after his death, poets and readers of poetry have important things to learn from Winters—as long as we are prepared to be irritated.
For to read Winters with profit means reading him with suspicion, even resistance. His personality on the page is unpleasant—arrogant, sarcastic, brutal in controversy— and his views are not argued but promulgated, like papal bulls. Indeed, Winters presents himself as poetry’s anti-Pope, relentless in his heresies about the nature and history of the art. Any poet conventionally regarded as major Winters treats as a buffoon or worse: Wordsworth, for instance, is “notable mainly for a handful of fine lines and short passages and for his infinitely tedious pomposity and foolishness.” Poets the educated reader has never heard of, however, are precariously elevated: Jones Very and F. G. Tuckerman replace Emerson and Whitman as the nineteenth-century American masters. Whole centuries are put under interdict:
If I were to say that there was little or no English poetry of real distinction between Chaucer and Wyatt, few people would be surprised: the text-books tell us the same thing. I am telling my reader now that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were low periods in the history of English poetry; the text-books will convey this message to my reader’s grandchildren.
Winters wrote as if he were separating the saved from the damned, and he demanded total adherence to his creed. Over his long teaching career, he assembled a coterie of true believers, for whom he propagandized vigorously. Of these, Edgar Bowers, J. V. Cunningham, and Thom Gunn went on to win wider acclaim, but most of the others are remembered, if at all, only for their association with Winters. Sometimes—as in the pages of Quest for Reality, the anthology Winters co-edited—this makes his canon seem like a toy kingdom, a Monaco of poetry existing in placid unrelation to the empire all around it.
Rather than submit so completely to Winters, any sensible reader would choose to join the distinguished ranks of his opponents, which included Stanley Edgar Hyman (“We find Yvor Winters … an excessively irritating and bad critic”) and Delmore Schwartz (“Mr. Winters … displays prejudices which are wholly arbitrary”). But in the history of criticism there has not been so much intelligence that we can afford to ignore any of it, even when it is buried as deeply as Winters sometimes buried it. He deserves to be read sympathetically, with attention not just to his outrageous conclusions but to his serious and still compelling motives.
To understand how Winters ended up at his peculiar critical terminus, it is crucial to see where started out. Born in 1900, the son of a stockbroker, he was raised in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago, where he enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1917. But his studies were immediately derailed by tuberculosis, which sent him to a New Mexico sanatorium for nearly three years. The result was that Winters was largely an autodidact; though he made literary friends (including the young Glenway Wescott) and had an extensive correspondence, his sensibility was formed in nearly complete isolation. This was unfortunate, not so much for his knowledge—he read furiously and widely—as for his temperament. As early as 1921, he admitted to Marianne Moore that he had “a rather dogmatic nature,” and dogmatism quickly hardened into arrogance. At the age of twenty-four, for example, he told Harriet Monroe that “I have, in the past few years, conducted investigations into the nature of poetic method farther than anyone else, past or present, has ever done.”
Much of what is objectionable in Winters, then, can be chalked up to simple provincialism. Even after he left the sanatorium, he remained far from the centers of culture: he taught school in a mining camp, studied at the University of Idaho in Moscow, and finally earned a doctorate at Stanford, where he spent the next forty years. At the age of thirty-two, he wrote to Lincoln Kirstein that “I have never been east of Wolf Lake, Indiana, and have lived mostly in obscure and remote villages.” One result was that, as he admitted, “there may be much in modern urban life that I do not understand.” (This may explain his entire failure to grasp the power of “The Waste Land,” which he called, on its publication, “by all odds the worst thing Eliot has done.”) More profoundly, his isolation meant that Winters was always his own greatest authority. He redrew the map of American literary culture, so that Palo Alto became the capital and New York the boondocks; as he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1957, “I know that you all regard me as an eccentric. But you are the eccentrics, or rather the provincials.”
While isolation bred eccentricty and resentment, however, it also gave Winters the confidence to dissent completely from the standard literary opinions of his day—which have become the standard literary history of our own. And this dissent was founded, not on bad temper, but on a principled objection to the basic assumptions of modern poetry.
Winters’s mature view of poetry grew out of his encounter with Hart Crane. The two men were already friends when, in 1927, Winters wrote a review praising White Buildings as a masterpiece. Specifically, he valued Crane for being representative of the age, essentially modern: “a poet who accepts his age in its entirety, accepts it with passion, and who has the sensitive equipment to explore it.” Three years later, however, the friendship collapsed when Winters published a profoundly negative review of The Bridge in Poetry. It was not that Winters had lost respect for Crane’s abilities: the difference was that, where Crane had previously been significant for his virtues, he now seemed still more significant for his vices. The Bridge was a “public catastrophe,” a document of intellectual chaos, and it showed that Crane was “headed precisely nowhere.” Winters predicted, accurately as it turned out, that Crane would “develop a sentimental leniency toward his vices and become wholly their victim.” In other words, Crane still “accept[ed] his age in its entirety,” but now it seemed to Winters that the age itself was killing him.
All of Winters’s later criticism can be seen as a diagnosis of Crane’s sickness. Indeed, the matter was still more urgent, for Winters himself felt the allure of disintegration. As he wrote to R. P. Blackmur in 1936, “I had a capacity for going under and might have done it.” His confrontation with Crane and with modernism was almost literally an exorcism, as he wrote in his most moving essay, “The Significance of ‘The Bridge’ by Hart Crane: or What Are We to Think of Professor X?”: “If we enter the mind of a Crane, a Whitman, or an Emerson with our emotional faculties activated and our reason in abeyance, these writers may possess us as surely as demons were once supposed to possess the unwary.”
In linking Crane to Whitman and Emerson, Winters suggests the basis of his new critique of modern poetry. All three were ruined, in his view, by what he defines as the Romantic theory of literature, which “assumes that literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience.” Because the Romantics believe that human nature is essentially good, they see poetry as a matter of letting the emotions speak for themselves, freed from the interference of rational thought. “Literature thus becomes a form of what is popularly known as self-expression. It is not the business of man to understand and improve himself, for such an effort is superfluous: he is good as he is, if he will only let himself alone, or, as we might say, let himself go.”
Winters’s best criticism—it is collected in the volume In Defense of Reason—traces the effects of this Romantic error on modern American literature. Crane represents the extreme case, a man who deliberately deranged his own intellect in order to make contact with the irrational sources of poetry. As he implored the Indian medicine-man in a famous passage from “The Bridge”: “Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn!” But Winters sees more subtle taints in virtually every major modern poet. In a brilliant essay on T. S. Eliot, he shows, through sustained attention to Eliot’s criticism, that this self-proclaimed classicist is in fact a Romantic fatalist, who believes that “our individual natures are determined for us, and our actual way of feeling cannot be changed.” To Winters, this represents a dangerous abdication of reason: “if we are bound to express our emotions without understanding them, we obviously have no way of judging or controlling them.”
Control, in fact, is the key word in Winters’s aesthetics: “The spiritual control in a poem,” he writes, “is simply a manifestation of the spiritual control within the poet.” With an intensity that approaches the neurotic, he fears losing control, and fears the poets who seem to approve or abet such a loss. In The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Crowe Ransom are all prosecuted for their encouragement of emotional irresponsibility. In Maule’s Curse (1938), he traces the same vice through the nineteenth-century American classics. Mostly free from the personal abuse and polemic of his essays on living writers, it is his most appealing book of criticism; the studies of Poe, Melville and James are especially fascinating and perceptive.
Fear of loss of control sharpens Winters’s critical senses, but it also leads him to an exceedingly narrow understanding of what poetic control means and looks like. He proposes that, for a poem to respectably rational, it must explicitly repudiate anything irrational, overly emotional, vague, or obscure. Primitivism and Decadence (1937) is largely a catalog of such prohibitions, with illustrations from contemporary poets. Finally, the only acceptable poems seem to be those which demonstrate “a feeling of dignity and of self-control in the face of a situation of major difficulty”: that is, what Winters called in a letter “the good bitter stoicism of Hardy and Emily Dickinson.” It is in obedience to this criterion that Winters prefers Tuckerman’s poem “The Cricket” to “Song of Myself”; and purely on his own terms, he is right to do so.
But faced with such a preference, we cannot avoid the conclusion that somewhere along the line there has been a mistake. Winters makes an a priori judgment, based on sound moral arguments, about what poetry ought to do, and then judges individual poems by that standard. But real critical judgment is dialectical; it proceeds not just from rule to example, but also from example to rule. The reader’s actual, albeit suspect, reaction to a poem may be refined in the course of critical judgment, but it cannot be simply negated or ignored. In other words, if it comes down to a theory or two centuries’ worth of the most beloved poems in English, it is the theory that must yield.
This does not mean, however, that Winters’s reasoning must be entirely abandoned. What is needed is a more sophisticated and supple concept of poetic control, which can yield more accurate and fruitful judgments of individual poems. In writing about Allen Tate’s sonnet “The Subway,” Winters suggests that the poet’s “feeling of dignity and self-control” is “inseparable from what we call poetic form,” since “the creation of a form is nothing more nor less than the act of evaluating or shaping (that is, controlling) a given expeirence.” But this suggests that only the feeling of self-control is compatible with poetic expression, which is patently untrue. Poetry can also give form to embarrassment (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), despair (Hopkins’s “terrible” sonnets), nervous exaltation (Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”), or still more questionable emotions.
In fact, the only tenable criterion of a poem’s merit is fidelity to experience, including the most ambiguous and troubling phases of experience. Winters faults poets like Laforgue and Eliot for expressing “a state of moral insecurity which the poet sees no way to improve”; but often, perhaps most of the time, we do not see a way to improve our weaknesses, and to say otherwise would be artistically dishonest. This is why, as great writers from Plato to Thomas Mann have reminded us, there is something essentially immoral about poetry. The only possible compromise between the standards of art and the standards of ethics is a version of Aristotle’s: that the experience of pity and terror benefits the reader as a purgation or, what is more likely, as a consolation. If a reader is so far gone in moral invalidism that poetry is an immediate danger to him—as Winters thought it was to Crane, and feared it would be to himself—then the only solution is for him to avoid poetry altogether. What makes Winters seem perverse is that he will neither avoid art for the sake of morality, nor silence his narrow morality for the sake of art; instead, he tries to make art conform to the demands of morality. It is a Procrustean solution, and leads him to amputate much of the corpus of English poetry.
If Winters is wrong to demand that the poem “control” the experience it treats, however, he is right to ask that the poem “shape” that experience. Some of Winters’s sharpest criticism was directed at poets who took the opposite approach, believing that a poem’s subject matter should dictate its form—so that, for instance, mental confusion should be expressed in a confused and disjointed poem. This error, which he named “the fallacy of imitative form,” is still more prevalent in our own time. Many of today’s most ambitious and highly praised poets take as their subject consciousness itself, with the goal of mimicking in verse the precise motions of intellection. In very different ways, the metaphor of the transcript guides the poetry of John Ashbery and of Jorie Graham. But neither of these poets, not to mention their many epigones, succeeds in capturing “the way it feels to think,” since this kind of mimesis is foreign to the very nature of poetry. They do succeed, however, in destroying the subtle music of verse, which can only exist within a highly organized form; still worse, they destroy their acolytes’ ability and desire to hear that music. The best argument for formal poetry remains Winters’s pragmatic one: “the absence of a metrical frame accounting for the agreement or variation of every syllable … makes exact and subtle variation and suggestion impossible.”
In making this defense of form, at a time when form was increasingly seen as outmoded, Winters set another important example for today’s poets and critics. He refused to engage in the extreme historicism, sponsored by Eliot, which made a god of the “modern” and demanded that poets try to express it. This is simply another version of the fallacy of expressive form—the belief, as Winters summarized it, “that [the] age must give [the poet] not merely his subject matter but his entire spiritual shape, as it were, so that the form of his art will be determined by the quality of his age.” As we have seen in the generations since Modernism, competition for the favors of the Zeitgeist leads to a self-annihilating series of schools and styles, each claiming to be “what comes next.” This itch for novelty reduces the reader to the status of a consumer, keeping up with the latest makes and models. Worse, it leads the poet to neglect the mastery of traditional form, which alone allows meaningful departures from tradition.
At the same time, Winters’s career also serves as a warning about the cost of battling the idols of the age. Bitterly aware that his views were considered outmoded—that he was “not a recipient of the grace of the Zeitgeist”—Winters responded by retreating into a ghetto of his own making. We find in Winters the first example of what might be called, echoing his own coinage, the problem of defensive form. Increasingly over the last hundred years, poets have been haunted by the knowledge that to write in traditional meters is to take a position, how- ever unwillingly, in the sterile combat of “conservative” (or “formalist”) and “avant-garde.” And since this contest was defined, waged, and to most appearances won by the avant-garde, the conservative position is a thankless one. To drown out the accompanying self-doubt, Winters turned his criticism into a roar. Indeed, his last book, Forms of Discovery, published just before his death, ends with something very like a curse on the age, looking forward to the day when “my distinguished reader, his favorite poets, his favorite subjects, and all the members of his elite group will have turned to dust.” It is the critic as Coriolanus, impotently banishing his banishers.
But this proud isolation is, finally, just as much a victory for the Zeitgeist as the most slavish submission. Winters allowed the thesis of modernism to turn him into a mere antithesis, where what was needed was the nimble transcendence of the old opposites. That remains the challenge for poets and critics today, and it is no easier now than it was for Winters. Serious poets still seek to master the traditional forms and subjects, without becoming reactionary or antiquarian; to be of their moment naturally, not deliberately; to shape experience without tyrannically controlling it. In all of these tasks, we should not miss the opportunity to learn from Winters’s insights, from his example—and from his mistakes.
