We must never lie, or we shall lose our souls.
                                                          — Yvor Winters

               The tears held back – barely held back – his voice would
               frequently almost break when he was reading the poems that
               he loved.
                       — Thom Gunn, recalling Yvor Winters in the classroom

               Well, intensity with ignorance – what do you want worse?
                                            — Henry James, The Ambassadors

In 1947, Yvor Winters published a volume of criticism called In Defense of Reason, from which is excerpted his essay "The Experimental School in American Poetry: An Analytical Survey of Its Structural Methods, Exclusive of Meter."¹

In the essay, Winters harshly assesses poets he termed Experimental (Moore, Crane, Eliot, H.D., Pound, Stevens) whom we recognize as the geniuses of Modernism.

It takes time for literary criticism to turn literary text, but turn it does. Winters's essay now reads as a tragicomic monologue spoken by an exceptionally nervous and absolutely defended man.

The essay takes the form of a taxonomy. It could easily be outlined by a fourth-grader.

What are the structural methods possible in poetry? Winters attempts to list and rank them.

Repetition is OK in small doses but lax and diffuse in longer forms (e.g., Whitman).

Narrative is acceptable; logic ("coherence of form and content that gives the poem a clearly evident expository structure") is preferred.

Pseudo-reference is despicable. Moore, Crane, and Eliot are guilty of it. Poems organized by pseudo-reference retain the form of logic or narrative but without rational coherence or content.

Qualitative progression makes no attempt or show at a rational progression. Pound's Cantos are the perfect example, since their progression is that "of random conversation or of revery."

Non-rational progression is "a vice wherever it occurs."

So is irony, a doubleness of mood that should have been resolved by the poet before he / she committed the poem to paper, an "admission of careless feeling, which is to say careless writing." Wallace Stevens a culprit here.

                                                   •

Yvor Winters was born in 1900 and diagnosed with tuberculosis while he was studying at the University of Chicago. He wrote his first two books, experiments in free verse published in 1921 and 1922, in a sanitarium:

From The Magpie's Shadow (1922)

From Part 1. "In Winter"

No Being
I, bent. Thin nights receding


From Part II. "In Spring"

Spring
I walk out the world's door.

Song
Why should I stop for spring?


From Part III. "In Summer and Autumn"

The Aspen's Song
The Summer holds me here.

Alone
I saw day's shadow strike.

What happens in tuberculosis is this: A specific bacterium is transmitted from one person to another through the air. As the bacteria multiply, they attack and destroy tissue primarily in the lungs, but they also can spread to the brain, kidneys, or bones. During the first stage, the immune system fights the disease by walling off most of the bacteria in fibrous capsules. Some of the encapsulated bacteria remain alive and may reactivate if the person becomes stressed or depleted. If the disease proceeds to the second stage, lung damage reduces ability to breathe.

The body fights off multiplicity and chaos, that which doesn't belong. In Winters's time, a retreat to an orderly, white, dry environment was part of the cure.

Which is easier to attain, sickness or health? Which is easier to accept? "Early in 1928 I abandoned free verse and returned to traditional meters...."²

After which:

Sonnet to the Moon

Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.

The lucent, thin, and alcoholic flame
Runs in the stubble with a nervous aim,
But, when the eye pursues, will point with fire
Each single stubble-tip and strain no higher.

O triple goddess! Contemplate my plight!
Opacity, my fate! Change, my delight!
The yellow tom-cat, sunk in shifting fur,
Changes and dreams, a phosphorescent blur.

Sullen I wait, but still the vision shun. Bodiless thoughts and thoughtless bodies run.

                                                   •

"The problems of unity and form became the obsession of the New Critics."³

Incredibly, Winters's logic led him to the conclusion that he could "find few implicit themes of any great clarity, and fewer still that are explicit" in Pound's Cantos.

Pound replied (this a footnote in Winters's essay): "The nadir of solemn and elaborate imbecility is reached by Mr. Winters... [who] deplores my 'abandonment of logic in the Cantos'... [He] thinks logic is limited to a few 'forms of logic' which better minds were already finding inadequate to the mental needs of the XIIIth century."

Winters shot back: "... the abandonment of the denotative, or rational, [power of language]... results in one's losing the only means available for checking up on the qualitative or 'ideographic' sequences to see if they really are coherent in more than vague feeling. Mr. Pound, in other words, has no way of knowing whether he can think or not."

For Winters, a poem that yielded to a good paraphrase was very desirable; it allowed him to check up on. This need to check is a sort of critical OCD, which stems, we know, from fear and rage.

The critics became obsessed with meaning because meaning was perceived to be under attack. It is difficult to believe that one good hard look out the window wouldn’t have convinced them that their ideas of logic were inadequate to the mental needs of the XXth century.

It is a frightening thing to take a good hard look out the window.

What is the relationship between this type of denial and chaos?

It is thought defended against feeling (i.e., everything else).

What pleasure is being denied? The pleasures that are not filtered through intellect/reason.

What is reason? Thinking that follows certain familiar rules or forms. It is usually contrasted with feeling/emotion.

Well, what produced this split in Yvor Winters? Fear. Of chaos.

While his body was shutting off and encapsulating the tuberculin, his mind was rejecting the chaos of emotion.

But emotion is not the right word. There is no word I know of for the miniverse of feeling, sensation, causation that falls outside the capsule of reason and logic.

"Winters came to realize that accumulated and juxtaposed intensities of image do not amount to thought."⁴

(He wasn't alone: "Feelings do not belong in a thought-work.... In the serial progress of a piece of thinking we may be treating a great many objects about which we have stored-up feeling-responses, but we do not release the feelings.... Thinking is a game of suspense, like holding one's breath when we dive, in which we postpone feelings and attend to our undertaking, at least until we have achieved the specific goal and can relax." Said John Crowe Ransom in a piece from the same critical anthology.)⁵

Winters wanted poets to analyze feelings rationally before they wrote, which he believed would result in thought.

Actually, though, the thoughts tell you what the feelings are.

Winters' rational, thought-based argument against Experimental poetry revealed his feelings about change (fear, rage).

Also: Where there is hostility that has not been provoked by hostility, there is usually envy.

                                                   •

"In the 1930s for literary scholars to attempt to criticize the work of their contemporaries was looked upon as bizarre and strange, and possibly even irresponsible and subversive. English departments were dominated by philologists and grammarians who saw their goal as instructing students in ways to write properly and by scholars whose life work often resulted in the production of an annotated edition... Winters's career did not proceed smoothly as a result of his interest in contemporary experimental poetry. The chair of the English Department at Stanford, in a notorious confrontation, denounced Winters for having written works that were a 'disgrace to the department."⁶

He had his controversy and ate it too. He had his conservatism and ate it too.

                                                   •

When the modernists exploded the notion of "argument" in a poem (Yvor Winters' real objection) it would seem to have been a change not in aesthetics but in technology.

Aesthetic fashions swing pendulum-wise; but technology goes only forward. Thus: technophobia, the effects of a loss akin to mourning, but defended against intellectually.

Winters demanded not logic, not reason: but reassurance. He required not coherence but explication. Comfort, really.

Winters thought he was attacking bad (scary) writers but really he was showing himself to be a technologically obsolete reader. He did not want to admit what he already knew.

                                                   •

Proposed: A poem without a present vulgarity has no legs. If a poem does not put off its reader to some degree, it is probably no more than a conglomeration of received ideas about beauty (or literary expression). Ideas withering even as we read them on the page.

                                                   •

Update on pseudo-reference (retaining the form of logic or narrative but without rational coherence or content): it is rampant, in life and in poetry. It has been acknowledged (but not officially). It won.

Winters said: "This kind of writing is not a 'new kind of poetry,' as it has been called perennially since Verlaine discovered it in Rimbaud. It is the old kind of poetry with half the meaning removed. Its strangeness comes from its thinness."

Now this hits home. Or at least it makes me nervous.

It is amazing how much current prose poetry sounds exactly like passages out of Ulysses.

Winters spent so much time wondering how a poem works. Is our how so transparent?

How could we describe the present period style, various as it is? Varnish of Modernism applied to the wall of Romanticism?

Also tragic, and also inevitable and necessary, is the wash of irony on every word, image, sentiment. A split self. I grieve it. But I don't trust my nostalgia.

                                                   •

If we can know what we want from a poem before the fact, and we can know it definitely and in a very clear way, we may feel comforted or vindicated when we get it, but we won't feel ecstatic.

When we read a poem, are we looking for ecstasy or an opportunity to check up on?

There is something titillating about a theory of poetry. Read a polemic and you start to think "Poetry can do that! But then go and read the poetry of the person writing.

Because a poem costs and earns nothing, it seems to invite judgment. Judgment, serious judgment, the more judgmental the better – the thinking maybe goes – will justify the importance of this money-free product.

Do we want to understand poems, or do we want poems that understand us?

What strangenesses, scarinesses, are we closing ourselves to?

Notes

¹ The essay discussed here may be found in Approaches to the Poem: Modern Essays in the Analysis and Interpretation of Poetry, edited by John Oliver Perry (Chandler Publishing Company, 1965). My title owes a debt to the title of David Yezzi's essay "The Seriousness of Yvor Winters" (The New Criterion: www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/jun97/winters.htm).
² Prom YW's introduction to The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920-1928 (Swallow Press, 1966).
³ Arnold L. Goldsmith, American Literary Criticism: 1905-1965 (Twayne Publishers, 1979).
⁴ From Thom Gunn's introduction to Yvor Winters: Selected Poems (The Library of America, 2003).
⁵ John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: The Formal Analysis" in Perry.
⁶ Modern American Poetry website of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/winters/bio.htm).

Gulf Coast
University of Houston

Executive Editor: Mark Doty
Managing Editor: Sasha West
Associate Editor: David Ray Vance

Copyright © 2005 by Gulf Coast.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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