Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters (1900 - January 26, 1968) was an American literary critic and poet, noted as a critic of poetry and embroiled in controversy. His critical style — dogmatic, moralising, dismissive — was comparable to that of F. R. Leavis, and in the same way he created a school of students (of mixed loyalty). His affiliations and proposed canon were though quite different: Henry James set below Edith Wharton in fiction, Robert Bridges set above T. S. Eliot in poetry. He attacked romanticism, particularly in American manifestations, and set about Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow. In this he was probably influenced by Irving Babbitt. He was sometimes and questionably associated with the New Criticism.

He was born in Chicago, Illinois and brought up Eagle Rock, California. He suffered from tuberculosis in his late teens, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he recuperated, wrote his early published verse, and taught. In 1925 he became an undergraduate at the University of Colorado.

In 1926 he married the writer and poet Janet Lewis, also from Chicago and a tuberculosis sufferer. After graduating he taught at the University of Idaho and Kenyon College, and then started a doctorate at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford, where his students included the poets Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, John Matthias, and Robert Hass, until two years before his death, from cancer.

He edited Gyroscope, a literary magazine, with his wife, from 1929 to 1931; and Hound Horn from 1932 to 1934.

He was awarded the 1960 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems.

Works

* The Immobile Wind (1921) poems
* The Magpie's Shadow (1922) poems
* The Bare Hills (1927) poems
* The Proof (1930) poems
* The Journey (1931) poems
* Before Disaster (1934)
* Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)
* Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938)
* Poems (1940)
* 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)
* Primitivism Decadence (1969)
* Uncollected Essays and Reviews (1976).
* The collected poems of Yvor Winters; with an introduction by Donald Davie (1978)
* Uncollected Poems 1919-1928 (1997)
* Uncollected Poems, 1929-1957 (1997)
* Yvor Winters: Selected Poems (2003) edited by Thom Gunn

References

* The Complex of Yvor Winters' Criticism (1973) Richard J. Sexton
* Hart Crane and Yvor Winters (1978) Thomas Francis Parkinson
* An Introduction to the Poetry of Yvor Winters (1981) Elizabeth Isaacs
* Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters (1980) Grosvenor Powell
* Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters (1983) Dick Davis
* In Defense of Winters (1986) Terry Comito

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