If you were to ask the nearest poet or critic about Yvor Winters, the response you'd most likely get would be "Ivan who?" But if your local man-or-woman of letters had in fact heard of Winters, and had not been one of Winters' own students at Stanford back in the 50s or 60s, you'd probably get a negative response to his name, something along the lines of "That reactionary!" or "Such a vicious and narrow man!" I've heard both of these responses, along with my share of "Ivan who's?" since I started working on a study of the poetry written by the last generation of Winters' students. It is too easy to forget Winters, who never much cared to work the literary publicity machine; and when we do remember him, it is too easy to forget that he was many things in his time: a formalist and an experimentalist; a recluse and a public-spirited man; discerning to the point of narrowness in his conception of an enduring tradition but adventurous in his reading and his sympathies; a traditionalist who was simultaneously an iconoclast.

Winters was a much more varied figure in his time than he is in our all-too-sketchy memory of him, and as both critic and poet he is an important figure for our times too, polarized as they have become by the rhetoric of formalism and the rhetoric of the avant-garde. As a critic Winters is important to our times because so many of his terms, concepts and critical inventions have an immediate bearing on the current state of American poetry. He has been called an "American Leavis" because of his ethical concerns and his sense of a narrowly-defined great tradition, but in truth Winters was a much more considerable thinker than Leavis ever was, a theorist of substance as well as an idiosyncratic and forceful critic. Whether one agrees with Winters' final, conservative conclusions about poetry or not, his theories of pseudo-reference and expressive form pertain to current debates between New Formalists and the various brands of experimentalists, and would do much to provide a more coherent framework for the discussion of the cold war between America's different poetries than is currently on offer.

As a poet, Winters presents us with a unique case: unless one of the senior LANGUAGE poets makes some immediate and radical announcement of a conversion to blank verse, Winters will prove to be the only substantial American poet in the twentieth century to have had a career that began with the avant-garde and ended with traditional formalism. Marjorie Perloff has called Winters "the great counter-critic" of his period, but in a century in which the master-narrative of the poet's life has been one of the breakthrough to new freedoms (Eliot's famous self-modernizing with The Waste Land, or Lowell's liberation of his line in Life Studies), Winters is also a counter-poet, whose career provides a kind of counterpoint to such stories of formal liberation. Again, one needn't accept Winters' conclusions about formal and experimental verse to find his career instructive. To read him is to see a man consciously, sincerely, and above all seriously struggling with alternatives that are now all too often taken up as unquestioned dogmas. There is much we can learn from Winters, and Swallow Press has made a real contribution to literature by putting a substantial selection of his poetry back into print.

R.L. Barth has given us a carefully yet unobtrusively annotated selection of the poetry, showing both Winters the experimentalist and Winters the traditionalist to good advantage. The early, experimental Winters has not always been well served by Wintersians, those passionate advocates of the theories Winters developed after his conversion to formalism, but Barth has been admirably ecumenical in his selections. He has also included an introduction by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, nearly thirty pages in length, which amply demonstrates both the virtues and the vices of the Wintersian approach to Winters.

Trimpi is tremendously well informed about Winters and his world, and an excellent reader of Winters' later poetry, which is treated in much greater detail than the early work, and clearly lies closer to Trimpi's heart. She follows Winters' own technique of careful formal analysis and equally careful moral or ethical analysis to good effect in her readings of such mature poems as "A Summer Commentary," "The Slow Pacific Swell," and that lost classic of American poetry "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills." But, like most Wintersians, she is too quick in accepting the master's own assessment of his early, self-consciously modernist work. Trimpi's charge is that the early poems, particularly the experiments in imagism, are unhealthily solipsistic -- a charge that echoes what Winters himself said in 1940 about the poems he had published in the twenties (this self-assessment is helpfully reprinted by Barth is his notes to the poems).

The later Winters broke with the earlier Winters for reasons that are characteristically complex and serious: he felt that the imagist and other experimental poetics he had been working with were not capable of engaging all of consciousness, that they privileged sensation over rationality and encouraged a dangerous solipsism. The change in Winters' poetics is evident as early as 1928, but it was solidified after the 1932 suicide of Winters' friend and correspondent Hart Crane, whose dangerously self-destructive state of mind seemed to Winters to be linked, at some level, to experimental poetics. The wrong approach to poetic language came to seem immoral to Winters, and he came to distrust the juxtaposition of images without a context making clear their social meaning and value. The Winters whose work had appeared alongside that of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in such periodicals as Broom, Pagany, and transition, the Winters whom Kenneth Rexroth had called a cubist, was no more; the brooding sage of Palo Alto had taken his place.

For this new Winters, poetry was to tell, not show; poetry was to mean, not be. This approach later made Winters the most unfashionable of poets in the age of workshop poetry with its fetishizing of the simple image, but it allowed him to write some of the finest meditative poems of his generation. It also created a climate of expectation among Winters' most committed advocates in which the early work could not possibly get a fair hearing.

"Solipsistic," Winters' derisive word for his imagistic poetry, echoes throughout Trimpi's introduction. But is it a fair assessment of that poetry? Certainly not, if we take the word 'solipsism' in anything like its strict, metaphysical sense, as the belief that the world exists only as a content of the subject's consciousness. And not, I think, if we take it in the much looser and more vernacular sense in which it becomes a mere synonym for self-obsession. In fact imagism, for its first practitioners, was meant as a riposte against the self-obsession of symbolism. While symbolism shunned referentiality and the external world in favor of hermetic castles of the interior, imagism set out to place consciousness in a real, external, physical world, through acts of devout attention to that world. It is world-obsessed or other-obsessed rather than self-obsessed, and represents a philosophical position at a far pole from metaphysical solipsism.

The essential imagist position is that we are cut off from the real by walls of discourse and dead language, and that a poetry of clear images can return us to an awareness of the world of things. Pound wrote that the imagist poem is a record of "the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective." It is not self-obsessed, nor is it, as the later Winters and some of his followers have implied, a loss of consciousness in a moment of pantheistic union. Instead, it is a call for a consciousness rooted in the world rather than in our habitual ways of thinking or speaking about the world, an attempt to make language and consciousness new by basing them on the immediate experience of the world. This sense of an external world that takes priority over our received thinking is at the heart of many of Winters' early poems, whether strictly imagist or imagist-inflected, like the remarkable "Jose's Country" in which the stark, hard, physical reality of "A pale horse,/ mane of flowery dust" running far away across the dry New Mexico landscape presses in upon "the haze/of pondered vision." The poem aims to ground the otherwise isolated consciousness in a real world "Where a falling stone/Would raise pale earth," a world of things "beyond a child's thought." Lonely it is, and unsociable, but it is not dangerously solipsistic.

The change that strikes one most in the evolution of Winters' poetry, besides the conversion from experiment to form, is the growing sociability of the poems. Poems like "To William Dinsmore Briggs Conducting His Seminar," "To a Young Writer," and "On the Death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh" all emerge from and speak to particular social contexts in an almost Augustan manner completely alien to Winters' early work. It is in this quasi-Augustan mode that Winters emerges as a political poet, too, one to rival the later Auden in such poems as 1942's "To a Military Rifle," which begins:

The times come round again;
The private life is small;
And individual men
Are counted not at all.
Now life is general,
And the bewildered Muse,
Thinking what she has done,
Confronts the daily news.

Another part of the increased sociability of Winters' poetry in his later period can be seen in his treatment of landscape. While the early work is stark and eerily depopulated, the later work increasingly gives us humanized landscapes: the Pasadena hills; the San Francisco Airport; the highways and the vineyards outside Palo Alto. As Donald Davie observed in his introduction to the now out-of-print Collected Poems of Yvor Winters, there is something approaching a Virgilian pietas toward local places evident in such lines as these from "In Praise of California Wines":

With pale bright leaf and shadowy stem,
Pellucid amid nervous dust,
By pre-Socratic stratagem,
Yet sagging with its weight of must,

The vineyard spreads beside the road
In repetition, point and line.
I sing, in this dry bright abode,
The praises of the native wine.

                                                      --Robert Archambeau