The youngest poet included by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields in Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969) was M. Scott Momaday, a former Winters graduate student at Stanford who was then thirty-five years old. Winters, who died in 1968, also considered three Momaday poems in the last book he published in his lifetime, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967). In it he called Momaday a “great poet: a poet who has written at least one great poem.” I learned from R.L. Barth that Momaday died on January 24 in Santa Fe at age eighty-nine.
I read his
first novel, House Made of Dawn, when
it was published in 1968. At the time, I didn’t know he was a poet nor had I
ever heard of Winters. Despite Winters’ reputation as an unforgiving crank,
Momaday once described him in an interview as “not only a man who was
inspiring, but [who] turned out to be a great friend.” Here is the third stanza
from the title poem in Momaday’s first chapbook, Angle of Geese (1974), written on the occasion of another death and
sounding very much like Winters:
“Almost of a
mind,
We take
measure of the loss;
I am slow to
find
The mere
margin of repose.”
Bob Barth writes
in his introduction to the volume of Winters’ letters he edited: “If any single
theme predominate in these letters, it is Winters’s generosity, a radical
generosity that neither asked nor expected anything in return.” That will
surprise Winters’ critics, some of whom have gone so far as to call him a bully
and even a “fascist,” that fallback cliché used today to defame almost anyone.
Anecdotal
Evidence started eighteen years ago today -- February 5, 2006. I’ve kept it
updated daily expect for that spell in April 2019 following spinal surgery. From the start,
Winters was among the blog’s tutelary spirits, along with Dr. Johnson, Vladimir
Nabokov and a few others. Together, they helped evolve my literary conscience. I’m still hoping the Library of America publishes a
volume representing Winters and members of the so-called Stanford School of Poets – J.V. Cunningham,
Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity, Helen Pinkerton, Janet Lewis, Charles Gullans –
and Momaday. A separate volume of Lewis' work alone -- novels, poems, stories -- would also be appropriate.
[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]
6 comments:
Congratulations, Patrick, on 18 years of Anecdotal Evidence: superb writing about superb writers.
Congratulations- a daily visit is always required. And rewarding.
Although not always agreeing with your assessments (is that true for anyone), they are interesting, informative, and civilized in the best sense. Reading your blog has contributed to the stack of books making walking in my study a hazardous endeavor.
18 years is the amount of time it takes a newborn to reach legal age. It's been a pleasure to read here for the better part of your blog's history. Thank you.
18 years! Congratulations. This remains my favourite stop on the internet. Sometimes the only one worth making.
Congratulations on your most recent blogging anniversary. I didn't know about it soon enough to have read it from its beginning, but once I discovered it (maybe ten years ago?), I've read Every Single Blogpost (not daily, but in repeated catching-up spurts). And, as I've mentioned in previous comments to previous blogposts, your writing is responsible for many, many tracking-downs of books I'd otherwise have never heard of, or thought worth pursuing (mostly via Interlibrary Loans, given the sad state of most public library collections and bookstores where I live). I hope there will be many more blogging anniversaries, for all the delights and discoveries your faithful readers will thereby enjoy!
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