'We Take Measure of the Loss'

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).]