'Wisdom As a Kind of Courtesy'

While running errands on Saturday I listened in the car to Yvor Winters Reading Poetry, the CD produced by Helen Pinkerton and Wesley Trimpi for the Yvor Winters Centenary Symposium at Stanford University in 2000. In recordings made in 1953 and 1958, Winters reads thirty-one of his own poems and a selection by Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson and others, including seven by J.V. Cunningham. Helen sent me the CD in 2011 and I hadn’t listened to it in some time. Unlike most who read poems aloud, Winters’ delivery is straight – no orating or other self-centered shenanigans. Winters positions himself as the delivery system for the poet’s words, a conduit, and stays out of the way. No attention is drawn to Winters, who might be speaking to an agreeable gathering of friends. Winters spells out his thinking on the subject in his essay “The Audible Reading of Poetry” (The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises, 1957):

“A poem should, on the contrary, be conceived as having a movement of its own, an autonomous movement, which should be rendered as purely and as impersonally as possible. The reader has no more right to revise the rhythms in the interest of what he considers an effective presentation than he has a right to revise any other aspect of the language. The poem, once set in motion, should appear to move of its own momentum.”

What sent me back to Winters’ reading was a poem by Dick Davis, “Janet Lewis, Reading Her Poems” (Devices and Desires, 1989):

“The tape begins. A few pages are shuffled

Then her voice is there -- old now, clear, unruffled,

Unassertive, going again among

Words given order when the heart was young:

The cadences are like that vanished race

They would evoke, leaving almost no trace

On the after air; gentle, evasive,

To modest to accuse or to forgive,

Declaring simply this was here, and this,

Which is gone now—the bright frail edifice

O summer stripped in time’s storm.

But I share –

As the tape plays – her sense of sunlit air,

Of glades where uncoerced humanity

Knew wisdom as a kind of courtesy.”

Lewis (1899-1998) was married to Winters (1900-1968) for almost forty-two years. She is a good poet but her more acute gift was for fiction. All five of her novels are worth rereading and one of them, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), ranks among the best American novels. Davis is right: “her sense of sunlit air,” perhaps because of her long residence in California, is present everywhere in her poems, as in this line from “Paho in Walpi” (Poems Old and New 1918-1978, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1981): “The sunlight pours unshaken through the wind.”