Poets

Yvor Winters was born in Chicago in 1900 and died Palo Alto, California in 1968. He was studying at the University of Chicago when he was diagnosed as tubercular and had to relocate to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for his health. His early experimental poems, the striking one-line works in the imagist mode as well as the formalist works of his first two books, published in 1921 and 1922, were all written at a tuberculosis sanitarium. In 1923-24 he taught in the grade school and high school in the coal-mining camp towns of Madrid, and Cerillo, New Mexico. About that experience he remarked, in an introduction to his early poems, in 1966: "Accidents, many fatal, were common in the mines, from which union organizers were vigorously excluded and sometimes removed; drunken violence was a daily and nightly occurrence in both towns; mayhem and murder were discussed with amusement." Winters’s 15-part Fire Sequence, published in American Caravan in 1927, was a Williams-like exploration in free verse of aspects of this devastated community. The sequence caught the attention of, among others, Hart Crane and Allen Tate.

In 1925, Winters enrolled at the University of Colorado (Boulder) where he obtained a B.A. and an M .A. in Romance languages. He married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis in 1926. His taught at University of Idaho in Moscow for two years, then entered Stanford University as a graduate student in 1927.

In the 1930s for literary scholars to attempt to criticize the work of..