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Chapter 2: Robert Pinsky: American Laureate
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Chapter Two Robert Pinsky American Laureate Wintersians, Orthodox and Otherwise In 1963, Robert Pinsky arrived at Stanford to pursue his doctorate in literature. He had been writing poems for years, and he had enough confidence to publish some in The Anthologist, the literary magazine at Rutgers University, where he had studied as an undergraduate . Knowing little about Winters except that he was the senior poet on campus, Pinsky took a selection of his early efforts with him to an early meeting with Winters. This initial meeting was not auspicious, with Winters displaying his usual preference for honest disdain over tact when discussing student writing. The relationship soon improved, though, with Winters directing much of Pinsky’s reading and providing guidance for the dissertation on Walter Savage Landor that would become Pinsky’s first published book five years later. The Wintersian inheritance would play a crucial role in Pinsky’s rise to prominence in American poetry. But while much of his considerable early achievement was the direct result of his engagement with Winters, two circumstances have conspired to limit the public recognition of this link. It has been obscured by a general reticence in our literary culture when it comes to acknowledging influence and, more important, by the 35 need felt by Pinsky to disassociate himself from the most dogmatic followers of Winters. Inside the thorny, overgrown, Freudian-Longinian garden of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence lies at least one kernel of truth: it is often difficult for poets to give credit to their most vital influences. In a literary culture far from free of Romantic notions of the virtue of originality, poets can be a bit reticent about the role played by others in their development. And if originality is a virtue, professional courtesy dictates that poets should be very careful even when describing the influence of a mentor on other poets. This, I think, is the cultural matrix behind a comment by Thom Gunn, in which he dances very carefully around the issue of Winters’ influence on the poets who studied at Stanford: “Many others of his students, before and after . . . were to keep their poetic identities intact—Donald Hall, Edgar Bowers, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Alan Stephens, Scott Momaday, Kenneth Fields and so on—some even coming to reject him. But all of us learned from him, even the most reluctant” (690). With the one hand, Gunn giveth the Wintersian influence, with the other he taketh away. While Gunn’s circumspection is certainly the product of our Romantic inheritance, it also has to do with more local concerns. It would not be so important to stress the relative independence of poets such as Pinsky were there not another contingent of Stanford students who clung much more fiercely to Wintersian ideas. When Gunn describes the attitudes and motives of those students in the 1950s, they come off sounding like nothing so much as a cult: For some of [Winters’] students his formulations provided a refuge, a harmonious world where everything had already been decided in accordance with certain rules. It became a temporary or lifelong asylum for those who might otherwise have fallen into the hands of a church or political party. The attraction lay in the logical completeness with which he had worked out his ideas, and such students became disciples in a literal sense, limiting themselves to another man’s world. . . . I had seen the whole thing happen before, among the students of F. R. Leavis at Cambridge. (690) 36 | Robert Pinsky [54.235.6.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:53 GMT) Donald Hall, like Gunn a student of Winters in the 1950s, reports on the phenomenon in strikingly similar terms: Certain strong teachers and writers develop not students but disciples . Everyone compares Leavis at Cambridge to Winters at Stanford, teachers and students largely incomparable except in their relationships to students. Charles Olson was another. Intelligent leaders with power of character attract men and women who have a vocation for following, whose ecstasy is obedience or replication, whose bliss is to lose their identities in a leader or parent. (234) It was the meeting of two types of personalities—the naturally submissive follower and the magnetically charismatic master—that created the cult of Winters. The tendency of some of his students to take up Winters’ ideas with something like the gleam of fanaticism in their eyes continued long after the 1950s, even carrying on after his death in 1968. Alan Shapiro reports...