Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters (born October 17, 1900 in Chicago , Illinois ; died January 25, 1968 in Palo Alto , California ) was an American poet and literary critic . He was a full professor at Stanford University .

Life

Winters was born in Chicago and grew up in Eagle Rock , California. In 1917 he enrolled at the University of Chicago , but had to break off his studies because of a tuberculosis disease and went to a cure in Santa Fe , New Mexico , where the dry desert air alleviated the symptoms of his illness. From 1923-24 he worked as a teacher in mining towns in New Mexico until he enrolled in 1925 at the University of Colorado . In 1926 he married the writer Janet Lewis . After receiving his MA in Romance Studies, he initially taught for two years at the University of Idaho in Moscow . In 1928 he followed a call from Stanford University , where he was to teach until his retirement in 1966. He died two years later. In 1934 he received his Ph.D. , from 1949 he was a full professor there. In the 1950s in particular, he was involved there in programs - which at that time were also rare at American universities - in which he instructed budding young poets in poetic practice. In 1956 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1963 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Winters' students known today are Donald Stanford , Thom Gunn , Donald Hall and Robert Pinsky .

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In the tuberculosis sanatorium in New Mexico, Winters wrote his first poems, which thematically are strongly influenced by the mythology of the native American Indians , but the diction is strongly based on contemporary modernism. In addition to the imagism as him about HD or Ezra Pound propagated, it was above all the early work hard Cranes that winter in these years strongly influenced. Winters was in correspondence with Crane until the rift in 1930 when he tore up The Bridge , his friend's main work . Winters distanced himself radically from the linguistic experiments of modernity; his later works are shaped by formal strangeness. Winters saw this as an expression of moral steadfastness and demanded it from other poets as well. Although he wrote poetry until the end of his life, it was primarily his literary criticism that caused a sensation. Winters was attributed to New Criticism , since John Crowe Ransom devoted an entire chapter to it in his anthology The New Critics . Its moral and conservative formalism, however, clearly distinguishes it from New Criticism .

Winters wrote poetry occasionally until the end of his life, but it was mainly his literary criticism that caused a sensation. Occasionally it is assigned to the New Critics , as John Crowe Ransom devoted an entire chapter to it in his anthology The New Critics , which gave this school of literary theory its name, but it differs from these through its rather conservative formalism. So he changed from a modernist poet from around 1930 to one of the most prominent critics of today's canonical modernity - for example, his slipping of The Bridge , the main work of his friend Hart Crane , is particularly well known . He once called William Carlos Williams a "bore", he characterized Ezra Pound as a "man who is deeply moved by the sound of his own voice." Winters was a strong judgmental critic and suggested some canon revisions that were discussed by the academic mainstream but have hardly found expression in literary history. So he created as an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry, in which he detriment of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney was the "anti-Petr Archi's" seal help of the 16th century to more attention and reading of hitherto largely ignored poets like George Gascoigne stopped . Winters' criticism of 19th century poetry is equally idiosyncratic. Like the New Critics, he was a sharp critic of romantic poetry and did not shy away from criticizing “holy cows” such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson in the harshest possible manner, and in turn favored relatively unknown poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman , whose up to now then completely unknown work The Cricket he named "probably the best poem in English in the 19th century".

Works

Poems

• Diadems and Fagots (1921)
• The Immobile Wind (1921)
• The Magpie's Shadow (1922)
• The Bare Hills (1927)
• The Proof (1930)
• The Journey and Other Poems (1931)
• Before Disaster (1934)
• Poems (1940)
• The Giant Weapon (1943)
• To the Holy Spirit (1947)
• Three Poems (1950)
• Collected Poems (1952, 2nd expanded edition 1960)
• The Early Poems of Yvor Winters, 1920-1928 (1966)
• The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1978)
• Uncollected Poems 1919-1928 (1997)
• Uncollected Poems, 1929-1957 (1997)
• Yvor Winters: Selected Poems (2003)

Literary criticism

• Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)
• Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938)
• The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943)
• Edwin Arlington Robinson (1946)
• In Defense of Reason (1947)
• The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (1957)
• On Modern Poets: Stevens, Eliot, Ransom, Crane, Hopkins, Frost (1959)
• Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967)
• Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1976)

Secondary literature

• Southern Review 17: 4, 1981. [Special issue on Winters' work]
• Dick Davis: Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters . Ohio University Press, Athens 1983.
• Elizabeth Isaacs: An Introduction to the Poetry of Yvor Winters . Ohio University Press, Athens 1981.
• René Wellek : History of literary criticism 1750–1950 Vol. 4, Part I: The English and American literary criticism 1900–1950 . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1990. Therein Chapter 15: Yvor Winters , pp. 628-652.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Yvor Winters. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 4, 2019 .