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In the Haze of Pondered Vision
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203 In the Haze of Pondered Vision Yvor Winters as Poet if you were to ask the nearest poet or critic about Yvor Winters, the response you’d most likely get would be “Ivan who?” But if your local man-or-woman of letters had in fact heard of Winters, and had not been one of Winters’ own students at Stanford back in the ’50s or ’60s, you’d probably get a negative response to his name, something along the lines of “That reactionary!” or “Such a vicious and narrow man!” It is too easy to forget Winters, who never much cared to work the literary publicity machine, and when we do remember him, it is too easy to forget that he was many things in his time: a formalist and an experimentalist; a recluse and a public-spirited man; discerning to the point of narrowness in his conception of an enduring tradition, but adventurous in his reading and his sympathies; a traditionalist who was simultaneously an iconoclast. Winters was a much more varied figure in his time than he is in our all-too-sketchy memory of him. As a poet, Winters presents us with an almost unique case: he is virtually the only substantial American poet in the twentieth century to have had a career that began with the avantgarde and ended with traditional formalism. Marjorie Perloff has called Winters “the great counter-critic” of his period (2), but in a century in which the master-narrative of the poet’s life has been one of the breakthrough to new freedoms (Eliot famously modernizing himself with The 204 The Poet Resigns Waste Land, or Lowell liberating his line in Life Studies), Winters is also a counter-poet, whose career provides a kind of counterpoint to such stories of formal liberation. Again, one needn’t accept Winters’ conclusions about formal and experimental verse to find his career instructive. To read him is to see a man consciously, sincerely, and above all seriously struggling with alternatives that are now all too often taken up by his admirers as unquestioned dogmas. The early, experimental Winters has not always been well-served by Wintersians, those passionate advocates of the theories Winters developed after his conversion to formalism. Most have been too quick in accepting the master’s own assessment of his early, self-consciously modernist work as unhealthily solipsistic—a charge that echoes what Winters himself said in 1940 about the poems he had published in the twenties, about which he said “the earliest poems vacillate between an attitude—it was hardly more than that—of solipsism and one of mystical pantheism” (Poems 58). The later Winters broke with the earlier Winters for reasons that are characteristically complex and serious: he felt that the Imagist and other experimental poetics he had been working with were not capable of engaging all of consciousness, that they privileged sensation over rationality and encouraged a dangerous solipsism. The change in Winters’ poetics is evident as earlier as 1928, but it was solidified after the 1932 suicide of Winters’ correspondent Hart Crane, whose dangerously selfdestructive state of mind seemed to Winters to be linked, at some level, to his experimental poetics. The wrong approach to poetic language came to seem immoral to Winters, and the juxtaposition of images without a context making clear the social meaning and value of sense experience came to be distrusted. The Winters whose work had appeared alongside that of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in such periodicals as Broom,Pagany, and transition, the Winters whom Kenneth Rexroth had called a cubist, was no more: the brooding sage of Palo Alto had taken his place. For this new Winters, poetry was to tell, not show; poetry was to mean, not be. This approach later made Winters the most unfashionable of poets in the age of workshop poetry with its fetishizing of the simple image, but it allowed him to write some of the finest meditative poems [54.160.244.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:04 GMT) 205 Poetry in a Difficult World of his generation. It also created a climate of expectations among Winters’ most committed advocates in which the early work could not possibly get a fair hearing. But is the middle-aged Winters’ charge of solipsism a fair assessment of the young Winters’ poetry? Certainly not, if we take the word ‘solipsism’ in anything like its strict, metaphysical sense, as the belief that the world exists only as a...