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Chapter 1: Yvor Winters: A Journey into the Dark
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Chapter One Yvor Winters A Journey into the Dark Two Men at Midlife Poet-Critic A and Poet-Critic B are both fifty-nine years old. But what else do they have in common? Not much, it seems, when you look at where their careers have led them. Earlier this year, Poet-Critic A began an unprecedented third term as Poet Laureate of the United States of America. His books are issued by the most prestigious literary publishers in New York and are well reviewed in the literary and popular press. He has been one of the most frequently appearing living poets in the bigleague anthologies during the fifteen years since he made the cut for the Norton Anthology of American Literature. He has credibility with academics, too: punch his name into the subject-search line of the Modern Language Association (MLA) database and you will find dozens of references. He has, too, what most of us in academe would consider an enviable job at an eminent university in a major East Coast metropolis. His position has, inevitably, made him a power broker in the poetry world, with a great deal of influence over publications and prizes. He ought to know about prizes: he has managed to collect nearly all of them. Poet-Critic B, whose poetics have much in common with those of Poet-Critic A, began his fifty-ninth year in much humbler 7 circumstances. While he is tenured at a reputable institution, he has not been the star of the department. In fact, some of his colleagues wish they could let him go. The department kept him teaching Freshman Composition as long as it could, and the chairman once told him his publications were a disgrace. No university press will put out his criticism, so his just-completed work on Yeats will appear next year in pamphlet form. His poetry has not done well lately, either: he had to publish his collected poems on his own letterpress. He has taken a drubbing from the critics, and the growing view of him is that he is outmoded, outdated, and more than a bit outlandish in his views. Poet-Critic A is, of course, Robert Pinsky. The year is 1999. And his much-less-popular companion in the art is Yvor Winters forty years earlier. The story I want to introduce here is how the poetics of Yvor Winters put him out of step with the cultural movements and institutions of his time, and how Robert Pinsky later rose to fame by using those same poetics. The poetics did not much change; they were handed down from Winters to his Stanford graduate student, Pinsky. What changed was the field of poetic production, and the more general field of cultural production, in response to shifts in American culture from the 1960s to the 1990s. Winters’ way of “creating his time,” in Gertrude Stein’s phrase, was rejected by his contemporaries. Later in the century a powerful set of culture brokers, prize givers, reviewers, and fellowship committee members happened to “need” that same way of creating the times. By then, though, Winters was gone, and the exemplar of that way of creating was his student, Robert Pinsky. The New Augustans The banner to unfurl when discussing the poetics shared by Winters and Pinsky is that of neo-Augustanism. Winters and Pinsky hold a number of significant ideas in common with the Augustan poets of the eighteenth century. Broadly speaking, these ideas can be described as elaborations of four main principles: the idea that art is largely, even primarily, an ethical enterprise; the idea that emotional impulse is not to be trusted; the idea that there is a general nature (a common human 8 | Yvor Winters [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:57 GMT) nature shared transhistorically and transculturally); and the idea that clear discursive statement is a literary virtue. “We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance,” wrote Samuel Johnson in Lives of the Poets (95). Paul Fussell, in The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, glosses Johnson ’s statement by saying that, for the Augustans, “our nature in itself does not oblige us to function as geometricians—or patriots, or Tories , or consumers, or other kinds of exclusive specialists—but it does oblige us to function as moral adjudicators.” The Augustan humanist, says Fussell, “sees man not primarily as a maker or even as a knower, but rather as a moral actor” (7). This...