'I Have Known His Voice Quaver'

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.”

 

Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the formal sense, and dozens of lousy or indifferent ones. The good ones made it clear they had expectations of me. Since then, I’ve known several people I’ve informally adopted as teachers, beginning with Guy Davenport.

 

Gunn’s portrait of Winters is taken from a lecture he gave in 1977 at Lake Forest College in Illinois. The recovered transcript, titled “An Apprenticeship,” was first published in Winter issue of The Threepenny Review in 2022.

 

In 1954, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his first poetry collection, Fighting Terms, and came to the United States to study with Winters at Stanford.

I’m always touched by Winters’ thoughtfulness and hospitality. He met Gunn at train station, invited him home for dinner and made sure he had a place to stay. More from Gunn about Winters:

 

“Winters emphasized that poetry has to engage the whole self. He saw it as the prime art-form, into which one concentrated as much of one’s experience and intelligence and emotion as possible.”

 

“We were brought to feel a direct continuity between ourselves and other practicers of the art, like Corbière, Williams, the American Indian poets, and George Herbert.”

 

“There were two compelling things about Winters. One was his great personal warmth, his charm and good humor. The other was that he had a deeper love of poetry than I have ever come across in anybody else. I have known his voice quaver almost into tears while reading a poem to which he was especially attached.

 

“The love was behind his increasingly strict conception of what a poem should and should not be. It seemed to him an insult to the poem that it should be used as a gymnasium for the ego. Poetry was an instrument for exploring the truth of things, as far as human beings can explore it, and it can do so with a greater verbal exactitude than even good prose can manage. Large generalized feelings (as in Whitman, whom he abhorred) were out, and rhetoric was the beginning of falsification.”

 

Gunn offers an alternative to stereotyped notion of Winters as a reactionary crank. Years after being his student Gunn would write “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” which concludes:

 

“Though night is always close, complete negation  

Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,  

Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,  

Still it is right to know the force of death,  

And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,  

Raise from the excellent the better still.”