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

Life

Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there until 1919 except for brief stays in Seattle and in Pasadena, where his grandparents lived. He attended the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the be ...

for four-quarters in 1917–18, where he was a member of a literary circle that included

Glenway Wescott Glenway Wescott (April 11, 1901 – February 22, 1987) was an American poet, novelist and essayist. A figure of the American expatriate literary community in Paris during the 1920s, Wescott was openly gay.Eric Haralson, ''Henry James and Queer M ...

Elizabeth Madox Roberts Elizabeth Madox Roberts (October 30, 1881 – March 13, 1941) was a Kentucky novelist and poet, primarily known for her novels and stories set in central Kentucky's Washington County, including ''The Time of Man'' (1926), "My Heart and My Flesh," ...

and his future wife

Janet Lewis Janet Loxley Lewis (August 17, 1899 – December 1, 1998) was an American novelist, poet, and librettist. Biography Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she was a member of a literary circl ...

. In the winter of 1918–19 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and underwent treatment for two years in

Santa Fe, New Mexico Santa Fe ( ; , Spanish for 'Holy Faith'; tew, Oghá P'o'oge, Tewa for 'white shell water place'; tiw, Hulp'ó'ona, label=Tiwa language, Northern Tiwa; nv, Yootó, Navajo for 'bead + water place') is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. ...

. During his recuperation he wrote and published some of his early poems. On his release from the sanitarium he taught in high schools in nearby mining towns. In 1923 Winters published one of his first critical essays, "Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image," in the expatriate literary journal ''

Secession Secession is the withdrawal of a group from a larger entity, especially a political entity, but also from any organization, union or military alliance. Some of the most famous and significant secessions have been: the former Soviet republics lea ...

''. That same year he enrolled at the

University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, and the University of C ...

, where he achieved his BA and MA degrees in 1925. In 1926, Winters married the poet and novelist

, also from Chicago and a fellow tuberculosis sufferer. After leaving Colorado he taught at the

University of Idaho The University of Idaho (U of I, or UIdaho) is a public land-grant research university in Moscow, Idaho. It is the state's land-grant and primary research university,, and the lead university in the Idaho Space Grant Consortium. The University ...

and then began the doctoral program at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

. He remained at Stanford after receiving his PhD in 1934, becoming a member of the English faculty and living in Los AltosLos Altos History Museum.
The Shoup Centennial 1910–2010
. Los Altos History Museum, 2010. Retrieved October 9, 2011. for the rest of his life. He retired from his Stanford position in 1966, two years before his death from throat cancer. His students included the poets Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity,

Thom Gunn Thomson William "Thom" Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, ...

Donald Hall Donald Andrew Hall Jr. (September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and includin ...

, Philip Levine, Jim McMichael, N. Scott Momaday,

Robert Pinsky Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of ...

, John Matthias, Moore Moran, Roger Dickinson-Brown and

Robert Hass Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection ''Time and Materials: Poems 1997 ...

, the critic

Gerald Graff Gerald Graff (born 1937) is a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford Univer ...

, and the theater director and writer

Herbert Blau Herbert Blau (May 3, 1926 – May 3, 2013) was an American director and theoretician of performance. He was named the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. Early life and career Blau earned ...

. He was also a mentor to

Donald Justice Donald Rodney Justice (August 12, 1925 – August 6, 2004) was an American teacher of writing and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr wrote, "In most ways, Justice was no different from an ...

, J.V. Cunningham, and Bunichi Kagawa. He edited the literary magazine ''Gyroscope'' with his wife from 1929 to 1931; and ''

Hound & Horn ''Hound & Horn'', originally subtitled "a Harvard Miscellany", was a literary quarterly founded by Harvard undergrads Lincoln Kirstein and Varian Fry in . At the time, the college's literary magazine ''The Harvard Advocate'' did not accept their w ...

'' from 1932 to 1934. He was awarded the 1961

Bollingen Prize for Poetry The Bollingen Prize for Poetry is a literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.

for his ''Collected Poems''.

As modernist

Winters's early poetry appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the Modernism, modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important ...

and

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

and was written in the

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

idiom; it was heavily influenced both by Native American poetry and by

Imagism Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometim ...

, being described as 'arriving late at the Imagist feast'.Schmidt, Michael, Lives of Poets ,Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1999 His essay "The Testament of a Stone" gives an account of his poetics during this early period. Although beginning his career as an admirer and imitator of the

Imagist Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is someti ...

poets, Winters by the end of the 1920s had formulated a neo-classic poetics. 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, with most of his poetry thereafter being in the accentual-

syllabic Syllabic may refer to: *Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words **Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable *Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables *Abugida, writing system ...

form.

As critic

Winters's critical style was comparable to that of

F. R. Leavis Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis (14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York. Leavis ra ...

, and in the same way he created a school of students (of mixed loyalty). His affiliations and proposed canon, however, were quite different:

Edith Wharton Edith Wharton (; born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and interior designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray ...

The Age of Innocence ''The Age of Innocence'' is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her twelfth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine ''Pictorial Review''. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appl ...

above any one novel by

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

Robert Bridges Robert Seymour Bridges (23 October 1844 – 21 April 1930) was an English poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is ...

above

T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biog ...

, Charles Churchill above

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...

Fulke Greville Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, ''de jure'' 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke KB PC (; 3 October 1554 – 30 September 1628), known before 1621 as Sir Fulke Greville, was an Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and statesman who ...

and

George Gascoigne George Gascoigne (c. 15357 October 1577) was an English poet, soldier and unsuccessful courtier. He is considered the most important poet of the early Elizabethan era, following Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and leading to t ...

above Sidney and Spenser. In his view, "a poem in the first place should offer us a new perception . . . bringing into being a new experience."''Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry'' Arrow Editions , New York , 1937 He attacked

Romanticism Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

, particularly in its American manifestations, and assailed Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow. 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 Irving Babbitt (August 2, 1865 – July 15, 1933) was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thou ...

. Winters was associated with the

New Criticism New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned ...

. Winters is best 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."

Bibliography

*''Diadems and Fagots'' (1921) poems *''The Immobile Wind'' (1921) poems *''The Magpie's Shadow'' (1922) poems * ''Secession certain Notes on the Mechanics of the Image'' (1923) a magazine *''The Bare Hills'' (1927) poems *''The Proof'' (1930) poems *''The Journey and Other Poems'' (1931) poems *''Before Disaster'' (1934) poems *''Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry'' Arrow Editions, New York, 1937 *''Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism'' (1938) *''Poems'' (1940) *''The Giant Weapon'' (1943) poems *''The Anatomy of Nonsense'' (1943) *''Edwin Arlington Robinson'' (1946) *'' In Defense of Reason'' (1947) collects Primitivism, Maule and Anatomy *''To the Holy Spirit'' (1947) poems *''Three Poems'' (1950) *''Collected Poems'' (1952, revised 1960) *''The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises'' (1957) *''On Modern Poets: Stevens, Eliot, Ransom, Crane, Hopkins, Frost'' (1959) *''The Early Poems of Yvor Winters'', 1920–1928 (1966) *''Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English'' (1967) *''Uncollected Essays and Reviews'' (1976) *''The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters''; with an introduction by

Donald Davie Donald Alfred Davie, FBA (17 July 1922 – 18 September 1995) was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes. Biography Davie was born in Barnsley, Y ...

(1978) *''Uncollected Poems'' 1919–1928 (1997) *''Uncollected Poems'' 1929–1957 (1997) *''Yvor Winters: Selected Poems'' (2003) edited by

As editor *''Twelve Poets of the Pacific'' (1937) *''Selected Poems'', by Elizabeth Daryush (1948); with a foreword by Winters *''Poets of the Pacific, Second Series'' (1949) *''Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English'' (1969); with, and with an introduction by, Kenneth Fields

References

External links

''Yvor Winters: The American Literary Rhadamanthus'' (an Yvor Winters blog)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Winters, Yvor 1900 births 1968 deaths 20th-century American poets American literary critics Bollingen Prize recipients Formalist poets Stanford University faculty University of Chicago alumni University of Colorado Boulder alumni University of Idaho faculty Writers from the San Francisco Bay Area American male poets Writers from Chicago Writers from Los Angeles Poets from Illinois Poets from California 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers American male non-fiction writers Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters