Wrinkled in the Moon

"Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind."
……………………
“We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ’twere.”

Yvor Winters’ Quest for Reality

Perhaps mistakenly, Winters chose only two of Donne’s poems for inclusion in Quest for Reality:

 1. “Holy Sonnet VII” (“At the round earth’s imagined corners”). Pictured is a drawing by Fra Bartolommeo from about 1500 “One Angel Blowing a Trumpet and Another Holding a Standard,” in honor of this sonnet’s first line. It’s a pen and brown ink drawing, squared in red chalk for transfer on laid paper (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Woodner Collection, 2006).

2. “A Valediction: Of My Name In The Window”

I should point out, however, that Winters extensively discussed another Donne poem, “Holy Sonnet I,” “Thou hast made me and shall Thy work decay,” in his trenchant essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins (reprinted in The Function of Criticism), which happens to be one of his finest discussions of several individual poems in his writings. In that essay, Winters opens with a comparison of “Thou hast made me,” which he praises quite highly, and Robert Bridges’s “Low Barometer” (even more highly praised) to Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” a discussion which gives deep insights into his theory of literature. He mentioned this sonnet as well in one list of exceptionally great poems in his book on Edwin Arlington Robinson. We will come around in time to considering the poems of Donne’s that Winters chose for the Winters Canon, and at that time I probably will consider a couple other poems by Donne and the reasons Winters might have left “Thou hast made me” out (and whether it belongs back in).

Winters deemed Donne’s early work, that which remains famous, as experimental. You will have to read the essay “Poetic Convention” in his first book Primitivism and Decadence (reprinted in In Defense of Reason) to understand why. Winters’s simplest summary of the matter links Donne to others who might surprise you:

Experimental poetry endeavors to widen the racial experience, or to alter it, or to get away from it, by establishing abnormal conventions. In one sense or another Spenser, Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Laforgue, and Rimbaud are experimental poets of a very marked kind.

I find Winters’s argument for Donne’s classification as an experimentalist convincing, for the most part. But I have never read anyone else who has sided with him in great part on his account of the early Donne. In the same book, in the essay “Primitivism and Decadence,” Winters made a comment that revealed his once very high assessment of Donne’s Holy Sonnets in the 1930s, an assessment which he would gradually lessen, especially concerning the experimental work, in the decades to follow:

The gap between the sonnets of Shakespeare and the sonnets of Donne is not extremely great.

Yet though Winters came to distance himself from that judgment (of both poets, in fact), I would tend to agree with it still. I feel that Winters incorrectly downgraded Donne during the second half of his career. Thomas Mallon’s concluding sentence sums up his very high opinion of Donne:

[This biography] has juice and, best of all, a kind of fearlessness in approaching the “frequently convoluted” emotions of a poet who possessed, if not English literature’s greatest imagination, quite possibly its greatest intellect.

Those are certainly curious judgments to make -- and perhaps indefensible. I’d like to see the case for them made, though, since I like challenging ideas. But, sad to say, Mallon makes not even a brief attempt at a defense. Judging from what I know, Donne did not possess the “greatest imagination” in our literature. Shakespeare would, almost obviously, take that title, in my judgment and that of many, many others, though there are other contenders as well -- Dickens, say. It all depends, of course, on how you define and then apply the concept “imagination.” But I doubt that any case could be made that John Donne is the “greatest intellect” in our literature. My oh my, there are some great intellects that exceed Donne’s by a nautical mile or two: Sam Johnson, Ben Jonson, possibly Shakespeare again, Matt Arnold, Sam Coleridge -- Yvor Winters, for that matter -- and so on…   ~ Thomas Mallon, Yvor Winters Quest for Reality, NYT Book Review [Posted by Ben Kilpela]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Mallon-t.html?8bu&emc=bu

Nature and Function of Literature (Winters)

There have been various ideas regarding the nature and function of literature during the twenty-five hundred years or so that literature has been seriously discussed. One might think, offhand, that the possibilities were limitless; but they are actually limited and even narrowly limited-the ideas are all classifiable under a fairly small number of headings. I shall not attempt an historical survey but shall merely attempt a brief classificatory survey. The theories in question can all be classified, I believe, under three headings: the didactic, the hedonistic, and the romantic. I am not in sympathy with any of these, but with a fourth, which for lack of a better term I call the moralistic.

…

In the March 1922 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the most important poetry journal of the day, a correspondent complained, "Everybody is sentimental, even Mr. Yvor Winters." He was referring to an essay published the previous month, in which Winters, still a very young man, praised writers who had not yet become part of our canon--Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore--and made a characteristic, brilliant remark about Emily Dickinson, "one of the greatest poets of our language." She was, he wrote admiringly, "a terrible woman, who annihilated God as if he were her neighbor, and her neighbor as if he were God."

The letter writer, Baker Brownell, objected with some justice to what appeared to be Winters's aesthetic of fragmentation, that is, his habit of isolating individual lines and passages. As if to correct him, Brownell maintained that the two most distinguished poets of the day were Carl Sandburg and Rabindranath Tagore.

Winters, fully at home in the spirit of modernism, asserted in his essay that the greatest poets alive were Edwin Arlington Robinson and Wallace Stevens. It is worth noting that Stevens at that time had published no book--only poems in magazines--and Winters, writing from New Mexico, where he had gone to recuperate from tuberculosis, was just a few months past his 21st birthday.

Winters noticed such things, too, as when he found in the line masse de calme, et visible réserve from Valéry's "Le Cimetière Marin", the visible embodiment of potency and actuality, crucial concepts in the poem. In three lines from Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," he sees the kernel of the entire poem. For a woman enjoying coffee and oranges, the brightness of a leisurely morning is darkened by the thought of death and spiritual obligation: She dreams a little and she feels the dark/ Encroachment of that old catastrophe,/ As a calm darkens among water lights. Winters, I think, was the only reader to understand the specificity and function of that image. "If one has ever seen a calm darken among water lights on a large bay or lake, the image is unforgettable," he wrote. And he returned to the image at the conclusion of the poem: "In the first water-image, death encroached as a calm darkens among water lights; then the day was like water; then infinite space is water--bright, beautiful, inscrutable, the home of life and death--and earth is a floating island."

Winters's way with a poem was not to exhaust it, if such a thing were possible, but to point the way toward other perceptions. In his own poem, "The Slow Pacific Swell," the sea holds the reflection of the moon and at the same time is held in the moon's gravitational sway in the line, "Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind."

…The Dickinson is a marvel, a novel in twenty-eight lines. The second stanza:

“We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ’twere.”

The poem justifies Winters’ judgment of Dickinson in In Defense of Reason: “But except by Melville, she is surpassed by no writer that this country has produced; she is one of the greatest lyrical poets of all time.” Of course, Winters judges poems, not poets.