'Poets in an Age of Prose'

Yvor Winters published his final book, Forms of Discovery, in October 1967, three months before his death from cancer at age sixty-seven on January 25, 1968. Read his late correspondence in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, 2000) for an understanding of the suffering and frustration he experienced in his final year. It’s no stretch to suggest that the poet-critic wanted to live long enough to finish his book -- subtitled Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English – so he could die. 

Included in Knowing That Most Things Break (David Robert Books, 2023), David Leightty’s new collection of poems, is “Terminal,” subtitled “to AYW [Arthur Yvor Winters] writing Forms of Discovery”:

 

“Your frail flesh posed the impasse you must face—

Your life strength could just see this last work through.

Greatness, a master who would brook no grace,

Held your last breath as wager for the true.

 

“You culled your wisdom for one final look,

Cast final judgment on both foe and friend,

Bartered your life to consummate this book,

And entered knowing to the utter end.”

 

Leightty is an attorney living in Louisville, Ky., and it occurs to me that “forms of discovery” doubles as a legal term. He has issued two chapbooks of poems (published by Barth) and in 1998 brought out Kentucky Employment and Labor Law (Data Trace), but Knowing That Most Things Break is his first full-length book of poems. Its title is borrowed from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party”:

 

“Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child

Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,

He set the jug down slowly at his feet

With trembling care, knowing that most things break.”

 

Leightty’s is often a world of imminent breakability. We are fragile beings, just as Mr. Flood’s jug (and sobriety) are fragile. William Maxwell once spoke of “the fragility of happiness.” In “Forecasting,” Leightty refers to “Our world, a lonely mote of loveliness / Where life, and our small sentience, have throve . . .” And “Manifesto” is a caution:

 

“Sometimes the only thing is – hunker.

Turn inward when life’s urging slows;

Chestnuts in time of blight, goldfinch in winter,

Poets in an age of prose.”

 

In his note to me, Leightty describes Winters as “the greatest single influence on my writing of poems,” and adds: “Winters’ prose also had a strong influence on my written advocacy as a lawyer, and on my spoken advocacy in one jury trial. When I quoted in my closing statement a slightly modified version of one of Winters’ other Lamson-related poems, ‘To a Woman on Her Defense of Her Brother Unjustly Convicted of Murder.’ There have been too few who recognize the profundity of Winters’ work, and I want to get the book in the hands of as many of those few as I can.”

 

Winters, a pugilist as a critic who seldom avoided a good dustup, sometimes seemed like the sole grownup in a world of poetic children, as did Robinson on occasion. Leightty, too, writes like an adult, albeit a poetic “isolato,” to use Melville’s coinage describing the crew of the Pequod. In his introduction to Forms of Discovery, Winters writes:

 

“The great poet resembles the great boxer in the ring. Joe Louis was trained by a great scholar, Jack Blackburn. He was taught every move and when to make it; he was born with the ability to make it instantaneously and with great precision. His knowledge did not bind him; it set him free -- with the result that he seemed to move by instinct with the great poets.”