'Call Him the Maverick's Maverick'

“Beware of rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, alligators, Mississippi dogfish, bad liquor, and characters out of Faulkner. Beware also of tellers of tall tales. Do not allow your speech to be corrupted, no matter what strange predicament you may encounter. And above all, keep a diary, so that you may read it to me next fall.”

The recipient of this wise counsel is Thom Gunn. His adviser, it will surprise those who hold stereotypes dear, is Yvor Winters, writing on July 21, 1956. Two years earlier, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his first collection, Fighting Terms, and came to the United States from his native England to study with Winters at Stanford. I’m always touched by Winters’ thoughtfulness and hospitality. He met Gunn at train station, invited him home for dinner and made sure he had a place to stay. In the 1954 letter confirming all of the above, Winters writes:

“I don’t know whether to be pleased or not that you will see the Atlantic seaboard first, but I don’t know how to prevent it either. It is a dismal province, and you will like the west the better, I suppose, for having seen the worst the first.”

Which quality is more often misunderstood, or missed entirely, by readers and critics: Winters’ compassion and basic human decency or his sense of humor? For the rest of his life, Gunn remained grateful to Winters, publicly acknowledging the debt he owed the older poet. Among the earliest was “To Yvor Winters, 1955” (The Sense of Movement, 1957), in which he writes:

“[I]f we use

Words to maintain the actions that we choose,  

Our words, with slow defining influence,  

Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.”

In an interview published after Gunn’s death in 2004, he suggests that his conception of poetry relies heavily on what he learned from his Winters: “My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand—not that one can succeed in understanding, but the attempt to understand. That’s Yvor Winters.” And the year before his death, Gunn edited Winters’ Selected Poems for the Library of America. In the introduction, Gunn writes: “I can attest to his being the most exciting teacher I ever had; even to disagree with him was exciting.” And this: “I heard someone calling Yvor Winters a maverick. I would go further than this and call him the maverick’s maverick.” He might, of course, have been writing of himself.

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by R.L. Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]