The School of Winters

Somewhere a scholar is writing the history of Yvor Winters’ influence on the poets who were among his students at Stanford University. This informal School of Winters includes two of my favorite poets, Edgar Bowers and J.V. Cunningham, as well as Thom Gunn, Robert Hass, Donald Hall, John Matthias and Robert Pinsky, among many others. Now I can add Lee Gerlach to this impressive list. Gerlach is 86 years old and, like Winters, taught for years at Stanford. I’ve been reading his Selected Poems, and what Gerlach obviously shares with Bowers and Cunningham is language crafted with concision and precision, in which intellect and emotion intertwine like a double helix. Here’s Gerlach’s “Lake De Noon”:

“Sunk to the oarlocks a green boat
hangs in the clear water. Hardly a ripple,
not one breath of cool air all day long,
and I sit reading Darwin on the porch.
Look up, across the lake. Even flies rest.
Waiting for the last summer of the thirties to end.
Bluegill and sunfish lie in the sandy shallows,
breathing among the motionless, dark reeds.”

So much is left unsaid, as it should be. The sixth line casts a shadow across the rest of the poem and transforms it from than a conventional meditation on nature into something darker and more beautiful. By the end of “the last summer of the thirties,” Hitler had invaded Poland and the world was at war. Gerlach would have been 19 – 21 by the time of Pearl Harbor – and ripe for the draft. Another poem in the collection, “On Leave: 1943,” implies that Gerlach, like Bowers, saw service during the war.

As Gerlach cites Darwin, Cunningham uses Georg Cantor, the German mathematician and creator of set theory, in this epigram with a punning title almost as long as the poem: “Cantor’s Theorem: In an Infinite Class the Whole Is No Greater Than Some of Its Parts”:

“Euclid, alone, who looked in beauty’s heart,
Assumed the whole was greater than the part;
But Cantor, with the infinite in control,
Proved that the part was equal to the whole.”

In a similar scientific vein, here’s a late Bowers poem, “Ice Ages,” from a 14-poem series titled “Mazes”:

“Lonely at night, I read the book of science.
It tells that what seems permanent will change
Slowly or by catastrophe, that warm
Savannahs kind to trusting birds and trees,
Grasses and beasts, will build a house of ice,
Ice leave behind it crevice, stone, and waste.
Such harshness you have taught me. Unsurprised,
Beyond my ken I follow many worlds
Perishing in the circumstance of time,
My mind is numb and void as far as they are.”

In 2003, shortly before his death, Thom Gunn edited a selection of Yvor Winters’ poems for inclusion in the Library of America’s American Poets Project. In his introduction, Gunn writes:

“What should be emphasized about Winters’ poetry is that the leash and the training were never more important than the animal itself. Far from conservative politically, he knew very well that good poetry is more than a matter of simple good manners. The life of poetry is not just contained but is defined by its form.”

Gunn’s final point might be taken as the banner flown by this great informal school of American poets – Winters, Bowers, Cunningham and Gerlach.