“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.)
1 comment:
Kirstein himself was a delightful low-down poet, in his Rhymes and More Rhymes of a PFC.
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