'An Inviting Alternate Route'

How often does one read a review of four books by four writers, all of which sit, well-thumbed and annotated, on one’s shelf? In a word, never. R.S. Gwynn bucks the odds in “The Trybe of Yvor,” published in the April 2000 issue of Chronicles. He reviews collections of poems by Yvor Winters, J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers and Turner Cassity – in short, most of the twentieth-century American poets I most admire. When the review was published, Winters and Cunningham were long dead (in 1968 and 1985, respectively), Bowers had died two months earlier and Cassity remained among the living (d. 2009). While admiring the core group of the Stanford School of Poets, Gwynn is not uncritical. Here he writes of Winters’ work: 

“In many ways, it is not an easy poetry to like, with many dry takes on mythical subjects and many more poems bearing the mustiness of the English department lounge.”

 

Gwynn rightly notes that Winters opposed many of the trends embodied in Modernism (think: Pound’s love of sloppy incoherence), yet he embraced such modern subjects as airports, freeways, the California suburbs and military rifles. Speaking of Modernism (or its post- repackaging), Gwynn elsewhere has suggested that Nabokov may have used Winters as a model for the poet John Shade in Pale Fire.  

 

It’s especially heartening to see Gwynn celebrate Turner Cassity, a poet whose accomplishment seems thoroughly scrubbed from cultural memory:

“Cassity, who has obviously traveled widely both in books and out of them (he was for years a librarian at Emory University), has an eye for the outrageous and an appetite for the bizarre. I am tempted to agree with Dana Gioia’s assessment that he is ‘the most brilliantly eccentric poet in America,’ but I would hope that the obvious attractions of his Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not approach to poetry do not completely overshadow the rare (and often toxic) beauties his poetry can reveal.”

 

The four poets Gwynn reviews are brilliant, yes, but also enormously enjoyable in their waywardly sui generis approaches to verse. The best of the Stanford School was never monolithic. There were, of course, plenty of Winters imitators. Gwynn concludes his review with a qualified hint of optimism:

 

“If readers of the next decades begin to see much of modernism as yet one more mistake fostered by a century of blood and error, then the clarity and balance that became dogma for this poet and text for his followers may ultimately be seen as less a detour from the main highway of literary history than as an inviting alternate route.”