'Granitic Integrity'

A reader has alerted me to a newspaper in Florida reviving the long-abandoned journalistic practice of publishing poetry. On Friday, the Ocala Gazette, in a weekly feature called “The Poet’s Corner” (my first newspaper, a weekly in rural Ohio, ran a feature called “Kegler’s Korner”), printed “The Moonlight” from Yvor Winters’ 1927 collection The Bare Hills. It is written in his early, Imagistic manner which he was soon to abandon in favor of traditional meters and rhyme. His onetime student Thom Gunn called the shift “demodernizing.” Most of the poems by Winters we value most would be written in the subsequent two decades. 

James Blevins is the reporter at the Gazette (I worked for two Gazettes, one in Ohio and now defunct, the other in upstate New York) who selects the poems, and he is himself a poet. I’m grateful to Blevins for choosing work by Winters, a great and widely forgotten or derided American poet and critic – one of our best.

 

I have only one quibble. Accompanying the poem is a photograph not of Winters but of one of his former students at Stanford, Turner Cassity (1929-2009) – another poet Blevins might want to investigate. Let me suggest “Crystal But Not Crystal Ball.” Cassity once praised Winter’s “granitic integrity,” a quality he shared with his teacher.