'One I Loved Taught Here, Provoking Strife'

When Yvor Winters retired from the Stanford English Department in 1966 after almost forty years, the university published a commemorative volume, Laurel, Archaic, Rude: A Collection of Poems. It gathers twenty-six poems written by former students, including Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis (Winters’ wife, not a student), Thom Gunn, Turner Cassity and Helen Pinkerton. 

Helen died in 2017. Her daughter, Erica Light, gave me a copy of Laurel, Archaic, Rude, one of three-hundred published. No editor is named but Erica tells me the book was largely the project of her mother. A brief “Dedication” at the front says of the poets whose work is included:

 

“Some of them came to Stanford with styles already formed and a history of publication; some came with only an obscure need to write, which [Winters] encouraged and criticized. Neither intellectual fashion, nor personality cult, nor publicity value has deterred his teaching from its only aim – the production of good poems from those writers in whom the potentiality lies. To discover the potentiality, to encourage the effort, and to judge the result are gifts of his, among others he possesses.”

 

The ability to write first-rate poetry is among the rarest of human gifts. Perhaps only exceptional ability in music and mathematics are rarer. I’ve said it before but the Library of America is long overdue to publish a volume devoted to the Stanford School. No other group in American literary history has possessed so many gifted writers who are so waywardly heterogenous. No one would confuse Cassity’s work with Pinkerton’s. The collection’s title is taken from Winters’ “On Teaching the Young”:

 

“The young are quick of speech.

Grown middle-aged, I teach

Corrosion and distrust,

Exacting what I must.

 

“A poem is what stands

When imperceptive hands,

Feeling, have gone astray.

It is what one should say.

 

“Few minds will come to this.

The poet’s only bliss

Is in cold certitude—

Laurel, archaic, rude.”

 

Winters’ understanding of teaching, and writing poetry and criticism couldn’t be less in fashion. Laurel implies triumph or distinction – notions today denigrated as elitist, as though the best poems were anything other than a triumph of distinction over mediocrity. Helen echoes her former teacher in “Autumn Drought” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002). The dedication reads “In memory of Yvor Winters—Stanford University 1976”:

 

“November brings no rain. Brown stubble blackens.

Torn paper litter, wind-blown with the leaves,

Piles up against dead stems. As traffic slackens,

Nightfall brings fear, and always now one grieves.

 

“Where I once listened, lonely as these young,

But with some hope beyond what I could see

That meaning might be mastered by my tongue,

Anonymous process now claims them and me.

 

“Perhaps the enterprise of mind is vain;

Where hucksters sell opinions, knowledge fails,

Wit pandering to the market, for gross gain,

Corrupted words, false morals, falser tales.

 

“Though one I loved taught here, provoking strife,

By speaking truth about the human word,

And died—as few men do—ready for life,

I, teaching in his absence, seem absurd,

 

“Seem almost unremembering, unawake.

And should his poems live—some consolation

To those who knew him and to those who take

His measure by their worth—their celebration

 

“Will not be here, not where the idle gaze,

Touristic, slides past phoenix palms to stare

Where Mount Diablo dominates through haze

The ever-diminishing waters and the glare.”

 

Winters was born on this date, October 17, in 1900 and died in 1968 at age sixty-seven.