Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 - January 25, 1968) was an American poet and literary critic.

Life
Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and brought up in Eagle Rock, California. He attended the University of Chicago where he was a member of a literary circle including Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and his future wife Janet Lewis. He suffered from tuberculosis in his late teens, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he recuperated, wrote his early published verse, and taught. In 1925 he became an undergraduate at the University of Colorado.

In 1926, he married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, also from Chicago and a tuberculosis sufferer. After graduating he taught at the University of Idaho, and then started a doctorate at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford until two years before his death, from throat cancer. His students included the poets Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Jim McMichael, N. Scott Momaday, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, and Robert Hass and the critic Gerald Graff. He was also a mentor to Donald Justice and J.V. Cunningham.

He edited Gyroscope, a literary magazine, with his wife, from 1929 to 1931; and Hound & Horn from 1932 to 1934.

Poetry
Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American poetry and by Imagism. His essay, The Testament of a Stone, gives an account of his poetics during this early period.

Around 1930, he turned away from modernism and developed an Augustan style of writing, notable for its clarity of statement and its formality of rhyme and rhythm.

Criticism
Winters's critical style was comparable to that of F.R. Leavis, and like Leavis he created a school of students (of mixed loyalty). His affiliations and proposed literary canon, however, were quite different: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence above any one novel by Henry James, Robert Bridges above T.S. Eliot, Charles Churchill above Alexander Pope, Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne above Sidney and Spenser.

He attacked Romanticism, particularly in American manifestations, and set about Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow. (Ironically, his first book of poems, Diadems and Fagots, takes its title from one of Emerson's poems.) In this he was probably influenced by Irving Babbitt. Winters was sometimes and questionably associated with the New Criticism, largely because John Crowe Ransom devoted a chapter to him in his book by the same name. He bestowed the sobriquet "the cool master" on the American poet Wallace Stevens. (See the entries for Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, and Floral Decorations for Bananas.)

Winters is known for his argument attacking the "fallacy of imitative form:" "To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything." (Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry, 1937).

Recognition
Winters was awarded the 1961 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems.

Poetry

 * The Immobile Wind. M. Wheeler, 1921.
 * The Magpie's Shadow. Chicago: Musterbookhouse, 1922.
 * The Bare Hills. Four Seas Co., 1927.
 * The Proof. Coward, 1930.
 * The Journey. Dragon Press, 1931.
 * Before Disaster. Tryon Pamphlets, 1934.
 * Poems. Gyroscope Press, 1940.
 * To the Holy Spirit. California Poetry Folios, 1947.
 * Three Poems. Cummington, MA: Cummington Press, 1950.
 * Collected Poems. A. Swallow, 1952
 * revised edition, 1960.
 * The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920-1928. A. Swallow, 1966.
 * The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters. Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University (Athens, OH), 1999.
 * Selected Poems. New York: Library of America, 2003.

Non-fiction

 * Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image. Vienna, 1925.
 * (With Frances Theresa Russell) The Case of David Lamson: A Summary. Lamson Defense Committee, 1934.
 * Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry. Arrow Editions, 1937.
 * Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism. New York: New Directions, 1938.
 * The Anatomy of Nonsense. New York: New Directions, 1943.
 * Edwin Arlington Robinson. New York: New Directions, 1946.
 * In Defense of Reason: Primitivism and decadence: A study of American Experimental poetry. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1943.
 * 3rd revised edition, A. Swallow, 1960.
 * The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises. A. Swallow, 1957
 * 2nd edition, 1966.
 * (Contributor) Modern Literary Criticism (edited by Irving Howe). Beacon Press, 1958.
 * On Modern Poets: Stevens, Eliot, Ransom, Crane, Hopkins, Frost. Meridian Books, 1959.
 * The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (pamphlet). A. Swallow, 1960.
 * The Poetry of J.V. Cunningham (pamphlet). A. Swallow, 1961.
 * The Brink of Darkness (pamphlet). A. Swallow, c. 1965.
 * (Contributor) Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (edited by Paul J. Alpers). Oxford University Press, 1967.
 * Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. A. Swallow, 1967.

Edited

 * Twelve Poets of the Pacific. New York: New Directions, 1937.
 * Elizabeth Daryush, Selected Poems. Swallow Press, 1948.
 * Poets of the Pacific, Second Series. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1949.
 * (Compiler with Kenneth Fields) Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English. Swallow Press, 1969.

Letters

 * The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters. Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.