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quotes Winters:

1946

The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve a kind of mystical union with the Divinity: this for example is the doctrine of Emerson. Literature thus becomes a form of self-expression. . . .

The theory of literature I defend . . . is absolutist. I believe that the work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth.

Yezzi goes on,

[I]t is just Winterss brand of seriousness and his emphasis on logic and reason in poetry that contemporary verse sorely wants. The current neglect may have as much

to do with the notorious critics crabbed, sometimes contradictory and dogmatic style. Winterss stern call for a moral poetry was provocative, while his more cracked judgments earned him the opprobrium of many who, like Stanley Edgar Hyman in The Armed Vision (1947), saw Winters as an excessively irritating and bad critic of some importance

If Winters exalted some unexpected candidates to his personal pantheon, he regularly barred those generally thought to be of the first water. While by no means exhausting the list, Ren Wellek has compiled a roster of Winterss broadest condemnations. A snippet from just those dealing with the nineteenth century argues that Coleridge . . . is merely one of the indistinguishably bad poets of an unfortunate period,; Tennyson has nothing to say, and his style is insipid; Browning is fresh, brisk, shallow, and journalistic;

sentimental to the point of being lachrymose. Here one perceives the glint of genuine insight flashing from those bared teeth, though the uniformity of Winterss denouncement of the nineteenth century is unlikely to find many wholeheartedly sympathetic readers.

Emerson was Winterss long-standing bte noire, a propounder of such untenable notions as no man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations. Winters characterized Emersons view of art as resting on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment. The dangers to poetry from self-expression of this kind are both technical and thematic: the poet is caught between the rocks of a first thought best thought brand of automatism, where every word is judged worthy that reflects a spontaneous impression, and the whirlpool of ideas linked only by loose association, where extemporary performances overbear the desire to deepen ones understanding through carefully reasoned contemplation.

Emerson receives such exhaustive attention from Winters in part because he is American, and thereby a localizer of Romanticism, but Emerson is not the watershed of such views, merely a tributary onto native soil. Winters traces the antirational traditionthe genesis of which he places in the early 1700sto two basic doctrines:

the sentimentalism of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (later summarized by Pope, along with other ideas, in the Essay on Man), and the doctrine of the association of ideas, a psychological doctrine having its beginnings in Hobbes and formulated by Locke, a doctrine translated into literary theory by Addison and discussed interminably in the eighteenth century.

To say nothing of the nineteenth, where, for Winters, such ideas undermined an entire school of poets who had turned away from the study of experience through reason. The rise of the subjective view of art in the eighteenth century was radicalized in the nineteenth as Romanticism, of which Emersons is an extreme American version. As

1946

far as Winters was concerned, of the Romantic poets the less said the betterunless, of course, one spoke up to denigrate them.

Perhaps haunted by the madness and death of his friend Hart Crane (whom he called a saint of the wrong religion), Winters identified the psychic destruction at work on three centuries of poets:

From the eighteenth century onward, and not, so far as I can recollect, before, we have had a high incidence of madness among poets of more or less recognized talent: Collins, Gray, Chatterton, Smart, Blake, and others later; the same thing happens in other languages. A psychological theory which justifies the freeing of emotions and which holds rational understanding in contempt appears to be sufficient to break the minds of a good many men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.

In 1932, the same year [Winters friend Hart] Crane ordered a large breakfast before slipping over the side of an ocean liner, Winters published his only short story, The Brink of Darkness, which has taken on the resonance of a spiritual manifesto. In it he describes a hostile supernatural world, at once pernicious and unknowable, in which darkness hovers just beyond the illumination of the rational: It was as if there were darkness evenly underlying the brightness of the air. This darkness he would later relate to such practices as hedonism, obscurantism, associationism, and incontinent emotionalism. In Notes on Contemporary Criticism (1929) from Uncollected Essays, Winters puts a diamond point on these insidious forces:

The basis of evil is in emotion; Good rests in the power of rational selection in action, as a preliminary to which the emotion in any situation must be as far as possible eliminated, and, in so far as it cannot be eliminated, understood. . . . the end is a controlled and harmonious life [italics mine].

For Winters, the purpose of poetry is to describe experience as precisely as possible. Connotation in poetry, then, acquires a moral dimensionto preserve clarity, connotation or feeling must be carefully controlledThe critics detractors who feel that Winters, through his adherence to logic, has squelched emotion have lost the gistThe morality of poetry as Winters understood it lay in how emotion was not obliterated but managed. Emotion in excess of the motivating argument was contrary to the purpose of poetry, as it obscured the experience under consideration: In so far as the rational statement is understandable and acceptable, and in so far as the feeling is properly motivated by the rational statement, the poem will be good.

Winters interest in madness is mirrored by many during this periodincluding Allen Ginsberg, whose poem On Burroughs Work includes the line, Dont hide the madness.

Emotion in excessa kind of madnessis the very basis of poetry for William Everson; and for Michael McClure poetry is the language of a state of crisis. When, in 1956, Stuart Perkoffs wife Suzan flips, her behavior becomes a focal point for the entire

community: so unbelievably magic & meaningful for so many people around here (see Perkoff entry, 1956).

Kenneth Rexroth was deeply aware that his friend Yvor Winters rejected what Rexroth called Cubist poetry because such work appeared to be the deliberate courting of

1946

madness. Yet Rexroth insists in Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems (New Directions, 1969) that when the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we assume to be the result of causal, or of what we have come to accept as logical sequence, and then an abnormally focused attention is invited to their

apprehension, they are given an intense significance,...they seem to assume an unanalyzable transcendental claim.

*

In Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays (Carcarnet Press Limited, 2000), British poet-critic Donald Daviedeeply influenced by Winters and a close friend of Edward Dornsuggests that Edward Dorn and Yvor Winters, neither of them Westerners by birth, choose to live in the West and to celebrate it in their poems, not at all because they had chosen to sink their roots there (as Wordsworth chose to root himself in the English Lake

District), but because the history of the Western Statesboth the brief recorded history, and the much longer unrecorded history of the indigenous Indian peoplesis a history of human movement; and the still largely empty landscapes of those territories are images of nomadic life, an arena for human life to which the imaginative response is still (as it always has been) to move, to keep moving.

See also Thom Gunns assessment of his old teacher in The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography, originally published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber in 1982:

I had come to

armed with a bunch of conclusions that I had arrived at over the previous three or four years. They derived partly from my decade of the twentieth century, partly from my

education, and partly from my own observation and reading. Many of them implicitly contradicted one another, but I saw no

need to reduce them into consistency, since I wanted above all to keep myself open to books and experienceand in particular to poetry and its