The Collected Poems Of Yvor Winters

by Yvor Winters

Collection of poems from yvor winters.

Genres: Poetry

230 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1952

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

[W.B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's the strangest thing. The Collected Poems allows one to see a poet actually take a wrong turn in his art from which he will never recover. This book starts out with a handful of gorgeous, natural poems. This lasts for about thirty pages. These are lyrics poems that could stand alongside W.C.W. or the writings of other, early twentieth-century masters of literary Modernism. Then it all goes over to a wasteland of insipid, prosodic verse with no illumination, no freedom, no soul-space for the reader at all.

This all parallels Winters' criticism of Hart Crane: https://poets.org/text/match-made-poe...

He championed Crane's White Buildings and then underwent a sea change into something un-rich and un-strange. He wanted poetry to mean not be, and doggedly. So his attack on Crane's ambitious The Bridge strike one as a sort of gang initiation ritual mugging. And boy did he become a member of that vapid gang of versifiers that made the forties such a boring time for American poetry. Possibly it was just another pendulum swing from the Dionysian to the Apollonian. It happens in art all the time.

But I want to rip out the first thirty pages or so of this book and just trash the rest.

It's a shame Yvor Winters couldn't learn to love the mystery at the heart of words. He really had his finger on the pulse for a brief moment in his life.

[justin, the geezer]

at his best in his shorter poems—imagistic, an echo, the remnant of a feeling; then regresses into a not-so perfect symbolist shtick; and somehow regresses even further into a matthew arnold clone? odd.

Alone:
I, one who never speaks,
Listened days in summer trees,
Each day a rustling leaf!
Then, in time, my unbeliëf
Grew like my running:
My own eyes did not exist!
When I struck I never missed!
Noon, felt and far away,
My brain is a thousand bees.

Song:
I could tell
Of silence where
One ran before
Himself and fell
Into silence
Yet more fair.

Noon:
Did you move, in the sun.

The Shadow’s Song:
I am beside you, now.

The Aspen’s Song:
The summer holds me here.

God of Roads:
I, peregrine of noon.

Sleep:
O living pine, be still!

Song:
Where I walk out
to meet you on the
cloth of burning
fields

the goldfinches
leap up about my
feet like angry
dandelions

quiver like a
heartbeat in the
air and are
no more

from The Row of Cold Trees:
To be my own messiah to the
burning end. Can one endure the
acrid, steeping darkness of
the brain, which glitters and is
dissipated? Night. The night is
winter and dull man bending,
muttering above a freezing pipe;
and I, bent heavily on books; the
mountain iron in my sleep and
ringing; but the pipe has frozen, haired with
unseen veins, and cold is on the eyelids: who can
remedy this vision?