Selected Poems

by Yvor Winters, R.L. Barth (Contributor), Helen Pinkerton Trimpi (Contributor)

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. His impact on mid- to late-twentieth-century poetry is profound. This stems in large part from his own poetry, which was a reflection of his critical thinking about poetry, and which underwent substantive changes over his career as a poet. His collected poems won the Bollingen Prize in 1960. This retrospective of one hundred poems, edited by the poet and publisher R. L. Barth, is compiled from Winters’s published and unpublished work and features an introductory overview of his life and career by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, a former student of Winters’s and a distinguished scholar of American literature.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1999

About the author

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a poet, critic, and Stanford University professor of English literature. He won the Bollingen Prize in 1961.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall except for a handful of poems Winter's poetry just did not resonate with me.

Introduction: Yvor Winters as Critic and Poet by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi - 3 Stars

Two Songs of Advent - 2.5 Stars
One Ran Before - 2 Stars
Song for a Small Boy Who Herds Goats - 2.5 Stars
Alone - 2 Stars
Winter Echo - 1 Star
Spring Rain - 1 Star
The Aspen's Song - 1 Star
God of Roads - 0.5 Star
A Deer = 0.5 Star
The Precincts of February - 1 Star
Jose's Country - 2 Stars
The Upper Meadows - 2 Stars
Moonrise - 2.5 Stars
The Cold - 2 Stars
Digue Dondaine, Digue Dondon - 2 Stars
Nocturne - 2 Stars
Quod Tegit Omnia - 2.5 Stars
Song ("Where I Walk Out") - 2 Stars
April - 1 Star
The Cold Room - 1 Star
The Barnyard - 2 Stars
The Rows of Cold Trees - 2.5 Stars
Prayer beside a Lamp - 3 Stars
Vacant Lot - 2.5 Stars
The Deep A Service for All the Dead - 2 Stars
Demigod - 1 Star
Orange Tree - 2.5 Stars
Song of the Tree - 2 Stars
The Goatherds - 2 Stars
The Vigil - 1 Star
Simplex Munditiis - 2.5 Stars
Sonnet ("This God-envenomed loneliness, the stain") - 1 Star
The Moralists - 1.5 Stars
The Realization - 2 Stars
To William Dinsmore Briggs Conducting His Seminar - 1.5 Stars
The Invaders - 2.5 Stars
The Castle of Thorns - 1.5 Stars
Apollo and Daphne - 2 Stars
The Empty Hills - 2.5 Stars
Moonrise - 3 Stars (different poem from one titled Moonrise on p. 9)
Inscription for a Graveyard - 2.5 Stars
The Last Visit - 3 Stars
Howard Baker - 2.5 Stars
The Slow Pacific Swell - 3 Stars
The Marriage - 3 Stars
On a View of Pasadena from the Hills - 3.5 Stars
The Journey - 3.5 Stars
A Vision - 2 Stars
Anacreontic - 1 Star
To a Young Writer - 1 Star
For My Father's Grave - 2 Stars
By the Road to the Air-Base - 2 Stars
Elegy on a Young Airedale Bitch Lost Some Years Since in the Salt-Marsh - 2 Stars
Midas - 1 Star
Sonnet to the Moon - 2 Stars
Before Disaster - 2.5 Stars
The Prince - 1.5 Stars
Phasellus Ille - 1.5 Stars
Orpheus - 1.5 Stars
On the Death of Thomas J. Walsh - 1.5 Stars
Dedication for a Book of Criticism - 2 Stars
A Leave-Taking - 3 Stars
On Teaching the Young - 1 Star
Chiron - 1 Star
Hercules - 2 Stars
Alcmena - 1 Star
Theseus: A Trilogy - 3 Stars
Socrates - 3 Stars
John Day, Frontiersman - 2.5 Stars
John Sutter - 2 Stars
The California Oaks - 2.5 Stars
On Rereading a Passage from John Muir - 3.5 Stars
The Manzanita - 3.5 Stars
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight - 3 Stars
An October Nocturne - 2.5 Stars
Much in Little - 3 Stars
The Cremation - 2.5 Stars
An Elegy - 2.5 Stars
Time and the Garden - 3 Stars
A Prayer for My Son - 3 Stars
In Praise of California Wines - 2 Stars
A Summer Commentary - 3 Stars
On a Portrait of a Scholar of the Italian Renaissance - 2 Stars
A Winter Evening - 2 Stars
Summer Noon: 1941 - 1.5 Stars
To a Military Rifle - 2 Stars
For the Opening of the William Dinsmore Briggs Room - 1.5 Stars
At the Site of the Murphy Cabin - 1.5 Stars
Moonlight Alert - 3 Stars
To the Holy Spirit - 1 Star
A Song in Passing - 2 Stars
At the San Francisco Airport - 3 Stars
To Herbert Dean Meritt - 2 Stars

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Robert Lashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a surprise to read Winters' "juvenilia" and how it was so influenced by the writers he spent so much of his career as a critic despising ( Eliot, Stevens, Sandburg, and Crane); Surprising in how it remains more alive and interesting than the bulk of his verse; those five-but-really-two finger line exercises in which he dedicated himself to being form poetry's man of propriety.

I could care less that he was mean( and to be honest, his bouts of rational liberalism align him with my politics more than most poets). So there are a lot bigger assholes in my library. However, those assholes knew about dissonance assonance, breath, sprung rhyme. Those assholes knew about slant rhyme, off rhyme, blank verse or any of techniques that could have kept the bulk of Winters' verse from being so stentorian and painful to read.

[John Reis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not recall where I heard of this poet’s work. Winters(1900-1968) was an imagist and experimentalist in the William Carlos Williams vein at the start of his career. He made an abrupt change to traditional forms when he found he could not say what he wished in the new, modern way.

The early poems in this collection are experimental and I must say, unintelligible. He was living in New Mexico and they are filled with mystic references and chants. Perhaps, I am too dense or old.

The later poems while focused on dour themes are quite good.

[Steven Severance · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a few good poems in this book, but none of his translations are here. (boo-hoo)
He started as an imagist, writing of the New Mexico desert in that style.

Then in his 30's he switches to a formalist - meter and rhyme.

His rhymes and meter get more and more cliched the older he gets. Eventually some of his poems are unreadable despite possible interesting content. A major clash of style and meaning.

Throughout his poetry career he is obsessed with the moon and with honey bees - neither of which intrigue me. Perhaps Virgil would have liked it though.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winters could have leveled the same criticism at his own work as he did at Stevens, Eliot, and Frost, among other Modernist poets: “He has loosely thrown together a collection of disparate and fragmentary principles,” uttering his own moralizations about Modernism and his contemporaries in rhymes, seemingly unaware of his own contradictions and “private spiritual laziness” which inform his prejudices, judgments, and discriminations.

Favorite Poems:
“The Slow Pacific Swell”
“The Grave”

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wished I could be kinder but more grumpy dumpy pretensions being spewed onto paper in the early 20 th century! Ohh well!

[Renée · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to write about Ivor Winters. While I'm glad I read him, I'm not sure I personally connected with his work, and this seems like a terrible criteria, anyway, to use as a review. The short story at the end of the collection was interesting, but unlike other readers of Winters, I didn't find that it particularly informed my reading of his poems. If one reads Donald Hall's excellent collection of essay/memoirs *Their Ancient Glittering Eyes,* I would highly recommend reading this book first, if for no other reason than for context on his section on Winters.

[g026r · Rating 3 out of 5]

My opinion of this work is admittedly biased by the fact that I'm not a huge fan of strict formalist poetry. So the first 60-or-so pages that began this volume, consisting of Winters' work in modernist and imagist styles, was for the most part heavenly to me, while the subsequent 80 pages — following Winters' shift to a very strict formalism — failed, with a few exceptions, to really hold my interest.