464
JOHN GOODE
methodology, and it seems to me to be factitious in two ways.
In
the
first place, even
if
we accept Winters' insistence on the supremacy of
"the short poem" as a genre as a critical postulate, it is totally artificial
to write a history of poetry based entirely on the modification of its
norms. You cannot account for the influence of Spenser and Milton by
a discussion of "The Epithalamion" and "Lycidas" because it is obvious
that the longer poems have been decisive influences on
all
poetry, long,
short or any other size; the same is true of other "genres" - the drama,
for example, or prose narrative. This artificial specialization leads Win–
ters to ignore completely the obvious fact that "rational structure" can
only be studied in relation to other "structures" - narrative and
dramatic. The fallacy of imitative form (the notion that a poem about
boredom has to be boring) is an anathema to him (rightly, I think)
but he seems to confuse this with forms which
legitimately
imitate
(through a properly maintained distance) human actions, relations and
states of mind. Perhaps this failure explains his abhorrence of the
Romantics, though it is difficult to say since his critique is simply
crude and unaware of modern discussion. He gets rid of Wordsworth
and Shelley, for example, because they were not what the Victorians
thought they were (a task performed a generation ago, and more effi–
ciently, by Pound, Leavis and Eliot), but there is no account of Words–
worth's narrative poems or Shelley's political satires. His objection to
Blake is largely to his political ideology because it wasn't gradualist
enough. Which only goes to show that Winters hasn't much idea of his–
tory, and which points to the second factitious feature in his historio–
graphy - its isolation of "literature" as though it were discussable his–
torically without a deep awareness of its whole context. Again, this is
likely to become obvious in any discussion of literature after 1789: you
can't understand the Romantics unless you understand the Fernch
Revolution. This point no doubt smacks of another of Winters' ana–
themas, historical relativism, but, as Winters has taught consistently, the
judgment of literature has to be based on its relationship to human ex–
perience, and experience changes. Ultimately his failure to recognize
this is a critical failure: part of our experience is reading poetry, and
it is an experience which Winters seems determiend to resist. Neither
his taste nor his ideas seem to have changed over thirty years, and
one begins to wonder how invulnerable to poetry he had really become.
Stanley Hyman, in a very hostile essay on 'Winters, called him "a
bad critic of some importance." I find this unfair, but I feel that Winters
might have preferred it to a response which feels bound to dismiss the
whole and remain grateful for the particulars. His critical criteria are
relevant to all poetry, but they are incomplete. They enable him to offer
