Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters Poems

This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
...

2.

I, one who never speaks,
Listened days in summer trees,
Each day a rustling leaf.
...

Where am I now? And what
Am I to say portends?
Death is but death, and not
The most obtuse of ends.
...

My mother
Foresaw deaths
And walked among
Chrysanthemums,
...

Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.
...

The calloused grass lies hard
Against the cracking plain:
Life is a grayish stain;
The salt-marsh hems my yard.
...

The grandeur of deep afternoons,
The pomp of haze on marble hills,
Where every white-walled villa swoons
Through violence that heat fulfills,
...

8.

Where I walk out
to meet you on the
cloth of burning
fields
...

The night was faint and sheer;
Immobile, road and dune.
Then, for a moment, clear,
A plane moved past the moon.
...

The branches,
jointed, pointing
up and out, shine
out like brass.
...

God spoke once in the dark: dead sound
in the dead silence. I turned
in my sleep.
      I slept and sank away.
...

I could tell
Of silence where
One ran before
Himself and fell
...

Immeasurable haze:
The desert valley spreads
Up golden river-beds
As if in other days.
...

I was the patriarch of the shining land,
Of the blond summer and metallic grain;
Men vanished at the motion of my hand,
...

Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
...

Beyond the steady rock the steady sea,
In movement more immovable than station,
Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes,
...

I now remembered slowly how I came,
I, sometime living, sometime with a name,
Creeping by iron ways across the bare
...

Impersonal the aim
Where giant movements tend;
Each man appears the same;
...

Reptilian green the wrinkled throat,
Green as a bough of yew the beard;
He bent his head, and so I smote;
...

Who knows
Where my sight goes,
What your sight shows---
Where the peachtree blows?
...

Yvor Winters Biography

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 their contemporaries was looked upon as bizarre and strange, and possibly even irresponsible and subversive. English departments were dominated by philologists and grammarians who saw their goal as instructing students in ways to write properly and by scholars whose life work often resulted in the production of an annotated edition. Like his distinguished contemporary in England, F. R. Leavis (whose professional future at Cambridge was severely damaged by his 1930 book on Eliot, Pound and Hopkins), Winters’s career did not proceed smoothly as a result of his interest in contemporary experimental poetry. The chair of the English Department at Stanford, in a notorious confrontation, denounced Winters for having written works that were a "disgrace to the department." Ironically, the studies that proved so disruptive to philologists, grammarians and scholars of the British tradition – Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Maule’s Curse (1938) and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943) – were themselves harsh in their appraisal of both the poets of the 1920s and the 1930s and the texts that have now become American "classics." Winters developed a criticism that morally engaged with authors. For him, formal balance was the product of an ethical stability. From that perspective, both the free verse by Williams ("By the Road") and the blank verse by Crane ("The Dance") could fall under suspicion, inadvertantly displaying a variety of flaws that pointed beyond the text to a culture that inadequately transmitted proper moral guidance. Winters could be disarmingly blunt and remarkably judgmental. His harsh review of The Bridge in Poetry devastated Hart Crane (though not enough to discourage Crane from writing a dazzling reply). Winters agreed with D. H. Lawrence’s assessment of much of American literature, which he saw as heavily burdened with a self-indulgent romanticism. And yet even as Winters’s readings condemned these works, his energetic presentations paradoxically made them remarkably engaging. It was not simply that Winters was a useful critic with whom to disagree: rather, he himself seemed to be always on the edge of converting himself as he displayed such interest in what he termed aberrant. His expanded review of The Bridge, appended to a collection of his first three books of criticism in 1947 in In Defense of Reason, ends with an astonishing reversal in which he embraces the vitality and courage of a poet whose work he has just spent the last 20 pages denouncing. As Winters aged, however, his focus hardened, and in his final books he was adamant in his insistence on the aptness of only a handful of works, many by figures others deemed marginal. Though Winters’s own interest in writing poetry dwindled as he grew older, his role as a remarkable teacher of young poets expanded. Stanford had, in the 1950s, one of the few programs that openly encouraged young poets to write within a scholarly program. Iowa, Washington and Utah had similar programs, but Stanford was where the MFAs from these programs went for further study. A number of poets emerged from the Stanford program, some with admiration for Winters, others with dislike of what they perceived as his autocracy: Thom Gunn, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky are among the most well-known)

The Best Poem Of Yvor Winters

At The San Francisco Airport

This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
The metal glitters, deep and bright/
Great planes are waiting in the yard-
They are already in the night.

And you are here beside me, small.
Containted and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall-
Yet going whither you are bent.
I am the past, and that is all.

But you and I in part are one:
The frightened brain, the nervous will,
The knowledge of what must be done,
The passion to acquire the skill
To face that which you dare not shun.

The rain of matter upon sense
Destroys me momently. The score:
There comes what will come. The expense
Is what one thought, and something more-
One's being and intelligence.

This is the terminal, the break.
Beyond this point, on lines of air,
You take the way that you must take;
And I remain in light and stare-
In light, and nothing else, awake.

Yvor Winters Comments

Sylvia Frances Chan 16 October 2021

CONGRATULATIONS being chosen as The Poet Of The Day, by Poem Hunter And Team, excellent choice! Hooray!

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Sylvia Frances Chan 14 August 2021

Congratulations being chosen as The Poet Of The Day, by Poem HUnter And Team, excellent choice!

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Jason Leary 23 April 2020

That little known great writer wrote amazing verse, The lines he wrote have the slow intensity of slow yet vividly bright lightening or depth charges that plummet what Alexander Pope (with hasty pessimism) called 'caverns measureless to man'! Much of what he wrote had the quality of the poems of Holderlin. He was a type of avant-garde classicist!

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