"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]
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.
