Yvor Winters 201

from The seriousness of Yvor Winters by David Yezzi in The New Criterion:

Winters’s view of poetry, “the art of saying something about something in verse,” can be condensed to one often-quoted statement: “The poem is a statement in words about a human experience.” Even this simple aphorism, he realizes, draws a distinct line in the sand when “most of the philosophers of this century have been nominalists of one kind or another; they have written extensively to prove that nothing can be said in words, because words are conceptual and do not correspond to reality.” Winters points out, however, that if reality or “the realm that our ancestors took to be real” is an illusion, it nonetheless follows certain set laws that we violate at our peril. It is in this realm that “we pass our daily lives, including our moral lives. . . . this illusion is our reality. I will hereafter refer to it as reality.”

For Winters, poetry—and, in its concision, lyric, especially—is the highest linguistic expression because, in addition to the denotative aspects of words emphasized in other forms of writing, poetry makes particular use of the connotative ones, the two together composing the “total content” of language. For Winters, the purpose of poetry is to describe experience as precisely as possible. Connotation in poetry, then, acquires a “moral” dimension—to preserve clarity, connotation or “feeling” must be carefully controlled :



by Yvor Winters:

By the Road to the Air-Base

The calloused grass lies hard
Against the cracking plain:
Life is a grayish stain;
The salt marsh hems my yard.

Dry dikes rise hill on hill:
In sloughs of tidal slime
Shell-fish deposit lime,
Wild sea-fowl creep at will.

The highway, like a beach,
Turns whiter, shadowy, dry:
Loud, pale against the sky,
The bombing planes hold speech.

Yet fruit grows on the trees;
Here scholars pause to speak;
Through gardens bare and Greek,
I hear my neighbor's bees.