“I believe that the work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth.”
Certain readers, perceiving
the confidence with which Yvor Winters utters these words, will be stricken
with philosophical apoplexy. Don’t worry. They’ll live. The rest of us will
think a little harder about Winters’ observation from the foreword to In Defense
of Reason (1947), and read a little further:
“The absolutist believes
in the existence of absolute truths and values. Unless he is very foolish, he
does not believe that he personally has free access to these absolutes and that
his own judgments are final; but he does believe that such absolutes exist and
that it is the duty of every man and of every society to endeavor as far as may
be to approximate them.”
In other words, Winters
makes no claims to revealed truth. He’s no know-it-all, philosophically or otherwise. The truth humbles all
of us. One can read his work in prose and verse as a lifelong pursuit of truth
– knowing it is there, seeing it in furtive glimpses, sensing its presence while
it remains elusive. “A Dedication in Postscript” is dedicated to “Agnes Lee
shortly before her death”:
“Because you labored still
for Gautier’s strength
In days when art was lost
in breadth and length;
Because your friendship
was a valued gift;
I send these poems—now my
only shift.
In the last years of your
declining age,
I face again for cold
immortal page:
The statue, pure among
the rotting leaves,
And her, forsaken, who
Truth undeceives.
Truth is the subject, and
the hand is sure.
The hand once lay in mine:
this will endure
Till all the casual errors
fall away.
And art endures, or so the
master says.”
At the end of “The
Unfleshed Eye,” his essay on one of Winters’ greatest poems, “To the Holy Spirit”
(Hermetic Light, 1994), John Finlay quotes a line by Dr. Johnson I am unable to
find in Johnson’s work: “One does not make truth; one can only hope to find it.”
Boswell does report Johnson saying:
“Hume, and other sceptical
innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth
will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken
themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more
milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.”
Winters was born on this
date, October 17, in 1900, and died on January 25, 1968.
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