'These Remarks Are Heretical'

Like Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,” published in the Summer 1955 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (Swallow Press, 1957): 

“At this point, I would like to interject one word of warning to the professors. Poets are not fools (I mean good poets); they are capable of perceiving in their early twenties facts which professors may or may not manage to perceive in their sixties or seventies. I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is ‘arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing, which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these remarks are heretical.”

 

Winters’ essay is a review of three academic volumes including English Literature in the Sixteenth Century by C. S. Lewis. The footnote was added to the book and doesn’t appear in the journal article. As always, Winters focuses his attention on individual poems not individual poets. He uses the occasion to celebrate the “plain style” of poetry, as he does in his poem “Time and the Garden”:

 

“I would expand to greatness. No one hears,

And I am still retarded in duress!

And this is like that other restlessness

To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.”

 

The plain style is the most exclusive in the history of English literature, shunned by or unknown to most contemporary poets. A convenient example is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature who, strictly speaking, is not a poet at all but an assembler of au courant bric-a-brac. Readers of Winters’ final book, Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967), will recognize the poems Winters names, including George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” Henry Vaughan’s “To His Books” and Fulke Greville’s “The world that all containes.”

 

The footnote quoted above has proved prophetic. Most of our best poets are part of an “underground.” Not in the self-congratulatory, politicized Sixties sense but apart from the big publishers and name-brand critics. They often rely on Twitter, Substack, various blogs, small publishers and self-publication. Winters closes his review like this:

 

“[O]ne reads and reads and reads, and one does one’s best to remember. It is a messy business, any way one takes it; but it is also fascinating.” 

 

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