138
A Literary Provincial
T
HE
literary historians ha':'e tak–
en all literature as therr pro–
vince and have failed to grasp par–
tic~lar
works very well for that rea–
son. Yvor Winters has reversed the
process and taken one provi.nce of
literature for the whole of 1t.
This province was once lyric po–
etry of a certain kind; and Win–
ters still maintains that a good
lyric poem is inherently better
t.ha~
any other literary work. But 1t 1s
the element of moral evaluation
in a literary work which has come
to mean more and more to Win–
ters. In
The Anatomy of Nonsense,
Winters proves by the use of what
he takes to be a moral criterion
that the later writing of Henry
Adams, the poetry of Wallace
Stevens, the poetry and the critic–
ism of T. S. Eliot and the criticism
of John Crowe Ransom are for the
most part valueless if not actually
sinister. These writers, declares
Winters, affirm a view of life and
literature which leads to con–
fusion, bad poetry, and, by an im–
plication which becomes explicit at
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CALLERY
EAST 57
MODERN ART
PARTISAN REVIEW
one point, to evil behavior. This
point is reached when Winters per–
mits himself to conjecture that the
suicide of Mrs. Henry Adams was
"the logical outcome" of Henry
Adams' own confusion of mind.
In one or another way, Adams,
Stevens, Eliot and Ransom all coun–
sel an abandonment of both mind
and will to the search for intense
excitement or to absolute despair.
They preach a surrender to the
difficulties of modern life. They
are determinists and relativists
when they are not merely con–
tradictory.
To prove his thesis, Winters en–
gages in logic-chopping, misquota–
tion, and a simple failure to un–
derstand the meaning of the words
he is quoting. One important ins–
tance, important because it is nec–
essary to a whole section of seven
pages entitled "Autotelic Art," oc–
curs in the essay on Eliot. The quo–
tation from Eliot is as follows: "I
have assumed as axiomatic that a
creation, a work of art, is autotelic;
and that criticism is about some–
thing other than itself." And then
Winters' comment is: "Art, then,
is about itself, but this answer does
not help me to answer my ques–
tion since I do not understand it."
The admission of inability to fol–
low Eliot's meaning is apparently
intended as a piece of Socratic
irony, yet it is clear that
Wint~rs
actually permits the context to mis–
interpret for him the term, auto–
telic. For there follows a long and
detailed refutation of Eliot, all
based on the illusion that Eliot had
said a work of art was
about
itself,
and not simply that it was an end
