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cato vivacity; but his good clean writing doesn't of itself require--what
he doesn't give-verse, let alone poetry. I see no reason, short of the
claim to status, why he shouldn't have printed himself as prose. Had
he done so, he might be acclaimed as a sort of counter-Baedecker, offer–
ing guidance to be 'read with caution' but provocative of self-educative
rebuttal or assent.
Having rather too often found Yvor Winters' critical writings un–
convincingly dogmatic, his 'best poems' lists offered in his bare
ipse
dixit
affronting, and his influence on young poets inhibiting, I had sur–
prise-yet more pleasure, since Winters is an honest maverick-in think–
ing well of his
Collected
(i.e., Selected)
Poems.
His polemic and idio–
syncratic are left for prose, as Landor (chiefly) managed to confine
them to
his
life.
Winters' own 'best poems,' however, are not marmoreal exercises
(my recollection of
Twelve Poets of the Pacific)
but avowedly and pa–
tently personal tributes and affirmations-like those to David Lamson
and Lamson's sister and to Stanford's (and Winters') teacher, W. D.
Briggs. It is
academic
to write as though one didn't practice the pro–
fession of professor; it is unacademic, and sound, of Winters to make
poems out of his livelihood and life-what, believingly, he does. The
poems to Briggs are meditations on teaching as a faith, and so are
"Chiron" and "On Teaching the Young." The latter I want to quote:
The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust,
Exacting what I must.
A poem is what stands
W hen imperceptive hands,
Feeling, have gone astray.
It is what one should say.
Few minds will come to this.
The poet's only bliss
Is in cold certitude–
Laurel, archaic, rude.
The other best poems in Winters' book (if, under the plea of space, I
may adopt his own bare listing) are two translations ("Death's Warn–
ing" and du Bellay's "Rome") and "The Moralists," "The Invaders,"
"To Emily Dickinson," "The Fable," "To A Young Writer," "Time and
