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.