Yvor Winters

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521300124.015

13 - Yvor Winters

from THE NEW CRITICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

Louis Menand and

A. Walton Litz: Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Louis Menand: Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Lawrence Rainey: Affiliation:
University of York

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Summary

In 1983 Donald E. Stanford, the justly esteemed editor of Edward Taylor's poems, published Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry. Subtitled ‘Studies in Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Yvor Winters’, Stanford's book rates the five poets in this sequence on a rising scale of merit from first to last. The book went largely unnoticed, as was customary with critics of Stanford's persuasion: the judgements that he arrived at were so far from those commonly accepted, that the majority seemingly could not find any common ground that would make dispute profitable. Yet Stanford reached those judgements out of a coherent understanding of the poetic tradition in English over the centuries. As he declared in the Southern Review in 1987:

the ‘mediative short poem’,written from a fixed mental point of view but not necessarily from a fixed point in the landscape, that achieves coherence and unity of thought and feeling by means of rhythms derived from traditional meters (in English usually the iambic), that speaks in a single, not a multiple voice, is I believe the finest instrument available for examining and evaluation human experience, simple or complex. It has been employed by such poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Valéry, Wallace Stevens, Winters and Cunningham. I think they are better role models for the future than Jeffers, Whitman, Pound…

Winters would have named Ben Jonson along with Herbert, and would have reversed the rankings of Pound and Eliot in Stanford's hierarchy. Yet we hear in these comments Yvor Winters still speaking twenty years after his death. Before dismissing such views as merely crotchety, it must be noticed that they come to terms with certain figures that the current consensus is uncertain about. One such is Edwin Arlington Robinson. Another is J. V. Cunningham. And a third is Paul Valéry. More generally the consensus is uneasy with the assumption that poetry is an instrument for evaluating experience; and it is reluctant to legislate for the future, as Stanford does with his concern for ‘better role models’.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 260 - 266

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300124.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2000

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References

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13 - Yvor Winters

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