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Epilogue
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Epilogue The shortest answer one could offer, if asked where Yvor Winters and his last students are now, would be, “all over the map.” The map here would be David Kellogg’s chart from “The Self in the Poetic Field,” and the poets whom we have been reading continue to be spread across broad portions of the poetic landscape staked out by Kellogg. Some continue along the same trajectories they have been following for years, while others have, to a greater or lesser degree, shifted course. Winters’ posthumous reputation remains overwhelmingly that of a poet of traditional formalism. With a few notable exceptions, the major works in Winters studies remain those written by critics who were his students in his mature phase, and these tend to reflect what we might call a Wintersian view of Winters. The most significant contribution to this view in recent years has been Helen Pinkerton Trimpi’s introduction to the 1999 Selected Poems of Yvor Winters. Her long essay, destined to be read by a good part of his followers, is not overtly partisan in its favoring the mature Winters over the younger poet, but her preference for the Augustan Winters shows in a number of places, as in the following passage: Winters appears in retrospect not to have lost much through his early experimental poetry, though he personally regretted the years he lingered under the ignis fatuus of poetic “immediacy.” Rather, one positive result clearly was a carryover of a lifelong 227 solicitude for exact sensory detail in any phrase or descriptive line within a poem written in traditional meter and form. (xxx) In Trimpi’s view, Winters’ early work was not a total loss: it added a certain visual precision to his later work. This is not hardcore antimodernism , but it is a continuation of the mature Winters’ dismissal of the young Winters. If all you can say of his experimental period is that he had not “lost much” from having done the work, your own preferences are clear enough. Interestingly, the book that Trimpi introduces opens up the possibility of a different evaluation of Winters. The poems selected for that collection by R.L. Barth include a few of the early works—“Two Songs of Advent,” “One Ran Before,” “Alone,” and “Song of the Trees.” The engagement with Imagism, Native American poetics, and Japanese poetry is clear and shows us not only the brooding moralist of the late years, but also the young poet whose work appeared in avantgarde journals alongside that of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. If this side of Winters becomes part of his public image, it is possible that he will be claimed by advocates of innovation as well as tradition. Such a development could lift his stock higher on the great posterity exchange board. It remains for some ambitious critic to take advantage of the opportunity for a reappraisal. If Winters remains, for the moment, a poet of tradition, then Robert Pinsky remains very much a poet of community, with the community in question being a large, populist, national one. His Favorite Poem Project is an excellent example of the kind of inclusive American community that Pinsky imagines for himself. The poems in the project ’s two anthologies were chosen by a broad cross section of people. The community envisioned in the anthologies, like that envisioned in An Explanation of America, is general, rather than specific. The only group deliberately excluded consists of poetry professionals, poets, and critics: an exclusion that emphasizes Pinsky’s populism and his aversion to a poetic economy based on the principle of production for producers. Pinsky’s collection Jersey Rain often traffics in topics and images with a broad and rather populist public appeal. “A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties,” for example, uses as its muse an old 228 | Laureates and Heretics [52.205.218.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 15:05 GMT) version of perhaps the only book that can be found in every American household. “To Television” praises the medium that appeals most strongly to the vast majority of the population, taking a balanced view of it as a “Homey miracle, tub/Of acquiescence, vein of defiance” rather than condemning it from a cultural elitist’s perspective. The elegy “In Memory of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan,” as public a poem as can be written, mourns the loss of a well-known and well-loved figure in national politics. While there are deeply personal poems in...