'One I Loved Taught Here, Provoking Strife'

When Yvor Winters retired from the Stanford English Department in 1966 after almost forty years, the university published a commemorative volume, Laurel, Archaic, Rude: A Collection of Poems. It gathers twenty-six poems written by former students, including Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis (Winters’ wife, not a student), Thom Gunn, Turner Cassity and Helen Pinkerton. 

Helen died in 2017. Her daughter, Erica Light, gave me a copy of Laurel, Archaic, Rude, one of three-hundred published. No editor is named but Erica tells me the book was largely the project of her mother. A brief “Dedication” at the front says of the poets whose work is included:

 

“Some of them came to Stanford with styles already formed and a history of publication; some came with only an obscure need to write, which [Winters] encouraged and criticized. Neither intellectual fashion, nor personality cult, nor publicity value has deterred his teaching from its only aim – the production of good poems from those writers in whom the potentiality lies. To discover the potentiality, to encourage the effort, and to judge the result are gifts of his, among others he possesses.”

 

The ability to write first-rate poetry is among the rarest of human gifts. Perhaps only exceptional ability in music and mathematics are rarer. I’ve said it before but the Library of America is long overdue to publish a volume devoted to the Stanford School. No other group in American literary history has possessed so many gifted writers who are so waywardly heterogenous. No one would confuse Cassity’s work with Pinkerton’s. The collection’s title is taken from Winters’ “On Teaching the Young”:

 

“The young are quick of speech.

Grown middle-aged, I teach

Corrosion and distrust,

Exacting what I must.

 

“A poem is what stands

When imperceptive hands,

Feeling, have gone astray.

It is what one should say.

 

“Few minds will come to this.

The poet’s only bliss

Is in cold certitude—

Laurel, archaic, rude.”

 

Winters’ understanding of teaching, and writing poetry and criticism couldn’t be less in fashion. Laurel implies triumph or distinction – notions today denigrated as elitist, as though the best poems were anything other than a triumph of distinction over mediocrity. Helen echoes her former teacher in “Autumn Drought” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002). The dedication reads “In memory of Yvor Winters—Stanford University 1976”:

 

“November brings no rain. Brown stubble blackens.

Torn paper litter, wind-blown with the leaves,

Piles up against dead stems. As traffic slackens,

Nightfall brings fear, and always now one grieves.

 

“Where I once listened, lonely as these young,

But with some hope beyond what I could see

That meaning might be mastered by my tongue,

Anonymous process now claims them and me.

 

“Perhaps the enterprise of mind is vain;

Where hucksters sell opinions, knowledge fails,

Wit pandering to the market, for gross gain,

Corrupted words, false morals, falser tales.

 

“Though one I loved taught here, provoking strife,

By speaking truth about the human word,

And died—as few men do—ready for life,

I, teaching in his absence, seem absurd,

 

“Seem almost unremembering, unawake.

And should his poems live—some consolation

To those who knew him and to those who take

His measure by their worth—their celebration

 

“Will not be here, not where the idle gaze,

Touristic, slides past phoenix palms to stare

Where Mount Diablo dominates through haze

The ever-diminishing waters and the glare.”

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900 and died in 1968 at age sixty-seven.

'Who Needs Your Stories?'

Have you ever read something – it might be a poem or a history book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading, ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with the remainder of the work. It happens to me not often enough. The passage stands as a discrete creation, sufficient unto itself, aphorism-like, even out of context. You’ve sifted from the surrounding text a nugget you commit to memory and wish to share with others. Consider this, by Dana Gioia: 

“One purpose of literature is to register the complexity of our response to people, ideas, and events.”

 

Dana has sent me a copy of his latest book, Poetry As Enchantment and Other Essays (Paul Dry Books, 2024). It includes “Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford,” a profile of the English poet and critic befriended by Dana. “My intention,” he writes, “is to portray him accurately. He would have flinched at a sentimental or platitudinous memoir. ‘Speak of me as I am,’ he would have said, ‘Nothing extenuate,’” followed by the excerpt transcribed above.

 

The writer I thought of immediately was Anton Chekhov, who was nagged in his day by critics, editors and common readers for not writing ideological tracts. He was accused of being morally irresponsible. In his well-known letter to Aleksey Pleshcheyev on Oct. 4, 1888, Chekhov writes:

 

“The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.”

 

Further evidence of Chekhov’s  anti-ideological bent is supplied by the Russian painter Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939), who wrote a brief memoir, “My Encounters with Chekhov,” published in English in 1973 (trans. Tatiana Kusubova) and included in The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972 (1977), edited by Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel Jr. The scene is a Moscow hotel room in 1883. The players are Korovin, Chekhov (twenty-three and studying for his final exam to become a doctor) and other students. The exchange could have been recorded this morning on an American college campus:

 

“The students were different from Anton Pavlovich. They loved to argue, and they were in some peculiar way opposed to just about everything.

 

“’If you have no convictions,’ said one student turning to Chekhov, ‘you can’t be a writer.’

 

“No one can say, ‘I have no convictions,’ said another. ‘I can’t understand how anyone could not have convictions.’

 

“’I have no convictions,’ replied Chekhov.

 

“‘You claim to be a man without convictions, but how can you write a work of literature without any ideology? Don’t you have an ideology?’

 

“‘I have no ideology and no convictions,’ answered Chekhov.

 

“These students had an odd way of arguing. They were apparently displeased with Anton Pavlovich. It was clear that they could not fit him into the didactic turn of their outlook or into their moralizing ideology. They wanted to guide, to instruct, to lead, and to influence. They knew everything. They understood everything. And Anton Pavlovich was plainly bored by it all.

 

“‘Who needs your stories? Where do they lead? They don’t oppose anything. They contain no ideas. The Russian Bulletin, say, would have no use for you. Your stories are entertaining and nothing else.’

 

“‘Nothing else,’ answered Anton Pavlovich.”

 

Karlinsky’s introduction to Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, 1973) and his comments throughout are the best place to start learning about Chekhov’s resistance to ideology and politics generally.

 

The essential word in Dana’s sentence quoted above is “complexity.” Ideologues and other busybodies aren’t interested in complexity. Their understanding of the world is quite simple, thank you.

'Personal Affections'

Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most snobberies, it seems arbitrary and silly. 

Much of my education started with the poetry anthologies edited by Oscar Williams (1899-1964). With a few exceptions – Shakespeare, Whitman, Kipling, et al. -- that’s where I first encountered the English-language poets, major and minor. I specifically remember reading Karl Shapiro’s “Scyros” in one of Williams’ collections while standing in James Books on Ridge Road in Parma, Ohio. I bought the Washington Square Press paperback.    

 

Good anthologies are literary smorgasbords, an opportunity to sample many writers and develop taste. How else is a young reader to make up his mind, learn the tradition and sharpen his critical judgments?  He’ll encounter plenty of dreck, of course, but that’s inevitable. Bad poetry helps us identify and appreciate the good stuff.

 

T.S. Eliot devoted much of “What Is Minor Poetry?”, published in The Sewanee Review in 1946, to the subject of anthologies. The essay is collected in Vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946 in the eight-volume Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition (2021). I’ve been reacquainting myself with Eliot’s work, poetry and prose. He was an early and influential favorite, and is more than merely “democratic” when it comes to anthologies. He is clever and insightful and perhaps remembers his own early experience with them:

 

“The value of anthologies in introducing us to the work of the greatest poets, is soon over; and we do not go on reading anthologies for the selections from these poets, though they have to be there. The anthology also helps us to find out, whether there are not some lesser poets of whose work we should like to know more—poets who do not figure so conspicuously in any history of literature, who may not have influenced the course of literature, poets whose work is not necessary for any abstract scheme of literary education, but who may have a strong personal appeal to certain readers.”

 

The subsequent passage sounds deeply personal: “Indeed, I should be inclined to doubt the genuineness of the love of poetry of any reader who did not have one or more of these personal affections for the work of some poet of no great historical importance: I should suspect that the person who only liked the poets whom the history books agree to be the most important, was probably no more than a conscientious student, bringing very little of himself to his appreciations.”

 

I find Eliot’s sentiments here rather touching, and they come close to describing the evolution of a lifelong devotion to literature. I’m tempted to name some of the “minor” poets whom I often read again, though I’m afraid that might come off as condescending.

'Gleams Like a Warm Homestead Light'

Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as Martial: 

“In private she mourns not the late-lamented;

If someone’s by, her tears leap forth on call.

Sorrow, my dear, is not so easily rented.

They are true tears that without witness fall.”

 

Martial’s epigrams read like a cross between a syllogism and one of La Rochefoucauld’s maximes. Like the latter, it packs a psychological or ethical punch. The essence of an epigram is brevity and torsion, like a spring tightly wound. Martial’s translator here from the Latin is J.V. Cunningham, himself a master epigrammist. Here is his version of 4.69:

 

“You serve the best wines always, my dear sir,

And yet they say your wines are not so good.

They say you are four times a widower.

They say . . . A drink? I don’t believe I would.”

 

In his edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1997), Timothy Steele includes nine of Martial’s epigrams translated by Cunningham. I returned to them while reading The Classics in Paraphrase: Ezra Pound and Modern Translators of Latin Poetry (1988) by the classicist Daniel M. Hooley. Despite more pages devoted to Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Hooley praises Cunningham’s versions of Martial as “nearly literal, minor perfections,” and adds:

 

“His original verse is conventional in all the old ways; regularity of meters and rhyme enjoy unusual modern prominence as do clarity and precision of diction. Paradox, ambiguity, symbol, and the rest do not wend their difficult way and conflicting courses through this verse. To the reader of modern verse weary of the struggle for orientation and certainty, Cunningham’s poetry gleams like a warm homestead light in a black Montana nightscape, visible for miles and welcome.”

 

Hooley notes that distinguishing the “disquieting differences” between reading Martial and reading Cunningham “may lead to interesting conclusions.” He cites what may be Martial’s best-known epigram, 1.32, as rendered by Cunningham:

 

“Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why?

Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

 

Hooley contrasts it with the more familiar version produced in the seventeenth century by Tom Brown about John Fell, dean at Christ Church, Oxford:

 

“I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,

The reason why – I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”

 

Hooley writes: “Does Cunningham succeed in a way Brown cannot . . . In spite of the crude bluntness, one’s answer may be affirmative. For one thing, Cunningham’s  is demonstrably closer to a ‘translation’ than an ‘imitation’ (to revive for the moment that generally useless distinction). . . . Cunningham is very near Martial in several ways. His terse phrases mimic the compression of the Latin and allow him to keep to the single couplet . . . Cunningham’s rhymed pentameter couplet, weightier in effect than Brown’s easy tetrameter, is an appropriate analogue to the elegiac couplet.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek epigramma, “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today. In 2011, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, a friend of Cunningham’s and mine, and a fellow protégé of Yvor Winters, wrote to me:

 

“Epigrams are very hard to write well. Cunningham did so, because, I think, he worked so hard at it and wrote a great number. For many poets they are only a sideline. Also, as he notes somewhere, brevity was characteristic of his temperament and style from the beginning. No epics for him. I praised his work once to him when he was visiting us in Palo Alto and he responded quite self-deprecatingly that he hadn't written anything long or ‘major’ or words to that effect. Some critics (I can't recall who just now) have made an argument that his ‘To What Strangers What Welcome’ should be regarded as a unified sequence somewhat equivalent to a single poem. I find that hard to do. He really loved the Renaissance epigrammatists, More, George Buchanan, and John Owen, besides the Romans, and learned from them.” 

'An Ill-Assorted Collection'

A friend has broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty emails in her direction. As prose they are better than average. There have been no threats of violence and little profanity. The ex’s weapon of choice is a detailed critique of every aspect of her existence. We’ve all been dumped. It can be bruising but you get over it. This guy is performing an ongoing explication de texte not of a book but a human being. He has even taught me a new word: kludge. 

The OED describes it as “an arbitrary formation” and “jocular invention.” That is, it was coined by a specific person -- Jackson W. Granholm, an engineer with Boeing and General America Corp., in an article titled “How to Design a Kludge” in the February 1962 issue of Datamation. In Granholm’s words, quoted by the Dictionary, kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole” The OED adds, “especially in Computing, a machine, system, or program that has been improvised or ‘bodged’ together; a hastily improvised and poorly thought-out solution to a fault or ‘bug’.”

 

The Dictionary gives six citations, all from computing or electronics publications. It seems related to such phrases as “jury-rigged” or “jerry-built” – in other words, improvised, and probably badly. It’s a comically ugly word I would like to see a writer of light verse work into a poem. Think of the rhyming opportunities – budge, fudge, judge, nudge, sludge, smudge, trudge. And remember Dr. Johnson’s definition of lexicographer: “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

[ADDENDUM, 10-13:

An old friend rises to the occasion:

"There once was a dandy named Fudge

Whose groin was an unsightly kludge.

'Is it really so foul?'

Asked his girl with a scowl,

So he undressed and said, 'you be the judge.'"]

'It Bubbles and Chuckles Along'

“Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.” 

A truth I had been waiting to hear for much of my life. Willful obscurity (which is not the same as complexity) is favored by writers contemptuous of readers. Avant-gardistes often fancy themselves superior to people who merely like reading books. The sentence above and the slender volume in which I found it -- On Philosophical Style (1954) – were my introduction to the American philosopher Brand Blanshard (1892-1987), which in turn introduced me to Dave Lull, who is more deeply read in Blanshard’s work.

 

In the July 4, 1953 issue of The Saturday Review, Blanshard wrote about H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, originally published in 1926. His review begins:

 

“The story is told that a friend of an old lady who was known as a great reader gave her a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary. Meeting her later, he asked what she thought of it. ‘Very instructive indeed,’ said she, ‘but I did seem to notice a trifling want of connection.’ That objection would veto all dictionaries I know as general reading matter—all, that is, except one.”

 

That would be Fowler’s, of course, and Blanshard tells us he read it sequentially, start to finish. Dictionaries, especially Johnson’s and the OED, are good, addictive reading. One entry leads to another and then the afternoon is shot. Blanshard explains some of Fowler’s charm:

 

“[I]t is not written like a dictionary at all, but like a letter. It bubbles and chuckles along as if it were so much wayward talk, indulging in little digs and naughtinesses, and breaking out into little ‘whoops of blessing’ as it goes. Yet none of this is really irrelevant. Fowler swam about so easily in linguistic learning and so delighted in it that it made him feel like cutting capers to get back into his element; he wrote on other things, but never with the ease and mastery he showed in discussing usage.”

 

I’m puzzled by writers who show little interest in their medium and remain indifferent to the stuff  they're working with. Subject matter is inert without the fizz of language. Polonius: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” Blanshard reminds us that language is fun:

 

“Did it ever occur to you that isle and island have no connection with each other etymologically? Are you under the illusion that that and which are to be used in the same way? See also his articles on Cannibalism, Love of the Long Word, Sturdy Indefensibles, Hyphens, and Wardour Street.”

 

Joseph Epstein is a contemporary admirer of Fowler:

 

“On usage nothing surpasses H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1926 and, mirabile dictu, a modest bestseller when it first appeared in America. Good writing is about more than mere correctness, yet without correctness no good writing is possible. Fowler everywhere offers specific instructions. He was what is known in the business as a prescriptivist, believing in standard English (rather than a descriptivist, who believes that popular use should set the standard), but he is never rule-bound, often technical, but never stuffy. On split infinitives, as on ending sentences with prepositions, his sensible line is to avoid both if possible, but always break both rules rather than write anything awkward.”

'The Soul of Reading!'

Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will digress out of sheer rambling confusion and indifference to his audience. My father was like that. We arrived at some destination and he would promptly relate the details of the journey, correcting himself along the way: “We turned left at the gas station and then . . . no, we turned right . . .” and so on. It was insufferable. 

Well-done digressiveness, circling back in the narrative to relate a tangentially linked bit of story – sometimes returning to the original thread, sometimes not -- is usually comic in effect. Digressions within digressions can proliferate. Almost by definition, digressions in fiction, as in jokes, are comical. This is characteristic of much Irish storytelling, as in Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien – a variation on the shaggy-dog story. Other gifted deployers of digression include Erasmus, Montaigne, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Swift and Melville. Perhaps the master of the device is Laurence Sterne, who was born in County Tipperary.

 

A reader tells me he has tried again – his third attempt -- and failed to read Tristram Shandy. “There’s no plot. Nothing happens,” he writes. “I know you like the book but he keeps digressing and it goes nowhere.” True, but that’s the idea. No one has so pointedly made a stalled, endlessly deferred narrative the object of his comedy. If you don’t get it, don’t feel bad. Some people are immune to certain approaches to humor. Tristram digressively celebrates his love of digressions in Book I, Chapter 20:

 

“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer -- he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.”