'I Seldom Write Save in Exasperation'

“There are a great many fundamental facts that one has simply to get used to before one can begin to write seriously; one is America, one is our complex age, and one is the fact that life is tragic. Until one can begin to face these facts more or less indifferently, one will distort and sentimentalize nine-tenths of what one touches.” 

In our sentimentalizing age, when so many of all ages speak as children, the voice of a grownup carries a lot of weight. Yvor Winters is writing on June 29, 1930, to Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), poet and editor of the literary magazine The Hound and Horn. Kirstein had sent Winters Archibald MacLeish’s collection New Found Land (1930), and Winters replies:

 

“MacLeish is morally weak; by that I mean simply that he is too lenient with himself, tends to wallow in his feelings and to get pleasure from doing it publicly—it is a kind of unhealthy luxury.”

 

Winters might be describing the subsequent ninety years of American poetry. What’s remarkable is how early he perceived the growing self-centeredness of poets and the centrality of mere “feelings.” In his foreword to In Defense of Reason (1947), Winters defines a poem as “a statement in words about a human experience” and later says, “[S]pecial pains are taken with the expression of feeling.” He writes of “special pains,” not exclusion. In a review of poems by Turner Cassity, Richard Howard referred to “the Yvor Winters memorial frigidarium,” perpetuating the notion that Winters was an emotionally stunted iceberg. Howard had never read “At the San Francisco Airport.” Still thinking of MacLeish, Winters writes:

 

“This hullabaloo about being an American rather wearies me, besides, regardless of the form it takes. [William Carlos] Williams’ novel, A Voyage to Pagany, is one of the most ludicrous things ever penned. He substitutes for the classical struggle of to sin or not to sin, the question of to stay in Europe or go back to New Joisy. It becomes a kind of musical comedy parody. One ought to take one’s nationality as the Greeks took their liquor and their sex, without too much worry about it.”

 

Nice to see someone take a jab at Williams and his self-indulgent silliness. Winters’ sense of humor, pungent and dry, has for too long gone unrecognized. I think of him, especially in prose, as a considerable American humorist. In his concluding paragraph to Kirstein he writes:

 

“This letter is too long and too opinionated. You will observe that my prose has the defects that I attribute to the verse of MacLeish et al. I have ironed those defects out of my verse, but not out of my criticism; the reason is that I do not like to write criticism and do not take the occupation as seriously as I should—I seldom write save in exasperation.”

 

[See the complete letter in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, ed. R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000.)