So writes
Yvor Winters in a letter to Louise Bogan dated May 10, 1943 (The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, ed. R.L. Barth, 2000). Seldom is Winters
credited with a sense of humor, but the same is true of Swift, another
poker-faced, often comic writer. Few have been so thoroughly
misjudged and misunderstood (again, like Swift). I choose this letter to
examine because it’s typical of Winters’ manner but not a formal critical
statement, unlike some of the letters to R.P. Blackmur and Allen Tate. Also, by
1943, Winters was at the height of his powers as a poet. The letter is deeply
personal but the poet and critic remain ever alert. He opens by thanking Bogan
for her willingness to read poems by one of his students, Ann Hayes, whose work
he will include in Poets of the Pacific,
second series (1949), and who R.L. Barth will publish decades later.
Winters
tells Bogan that The Anatomy of Nonsense
has just been published (it will be folded into In Defense of Reason in 1947) and he expects New Directions to publish a
collection of his poems. It will include, he says, only a few pieces she hasn’t
already read, and he adds, “I have been pretty much paralyzed by the war.” He
is writing seventeen months after Pearl Harbor, and D-Day is more than a year
away. Victory was not assured. The passage quoted at the top is preceded by
these sentences:
“I tried
to get a commission in the army [as he writes, Winters is forty-two years old],
but was turned down because I had a touch of TB over 21 years ago [he spent
almost three years in sanitariums in New Mexico]. I could probably go into the
merchant marine as a crew member, but I can hardly take a job voluntarily that
will pay me too little to support my family. Janet [Lewis, the poet, novelist
and former TB sufferer] is not strong & the children are young. My friend
[the poet] Clayton Stafford is now a captain in the Signal Corps. Meanwhile I
sit around & watch the kids go.”
One is
struck by Winters’ conflicted impulses and by his patriotism, civic-mindedness
and devotion to family – not qualities commonly associated with poets today.
One of his sustaining attractions is his sense of independence, and
indifference to fashion and reputation. No Marxist, no bohemian, he’s a
middle-class guy trying to support his family, sustain a heavy teaching load at
Stanford, write some of the best poetry and criticism of the last century, and
worry about his obligations to the defense of his country and civilization. Reading
Winters is always bracing, like a splash of icy water after the sauna, and the
pleasure is heightened if you know something about the man. He closes the
letter to Bogan like this:
“I am glad
you liked Janet’s new book [the novel Against
a Darkening Sky, her best after The
Wife of Martin Guerre, 1941]. I do not think it quite so successful in its
total effect as the other two [novels – The
Invasion and Martin Guerre], but
think it contains much of her best work notwithstanding.”
A critic
to the end, even with his wife. Winters was born in Chicago on Oct. 17, 1900,
and died on this date forty-six years ago, on Jan. 25, 1968.
[On May
26, 1941, Winters had written to Bogan: “The note in The New Yorker was very kind, and, along with your letter, raised
me greatly in my own esteem. You are one of the very few living American poets
for whom I retain, in my old age, any very profound esteem, and of the lot you
are certainly the finest master of style, perhaps the only consistent master of
style ; so I value your good opinion.”]
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