274
PARTISAN REVIEW
library, you wound up reading the entire works of writers that even grad–
uate students fresh from fairly comprehensive undergraduate courses of
study in poetry-like mine at Tufts-were not very likely to have come
across earlier or even to have heard of. (And of course where you knew the
poet, what Winters had to say turned out to bear so little resemblance to
what you had been taught or had managed to ferret out for yourself, that
you might just as well never have heard of the poet.) So you were formi–
dably intimidated from the very start.
To make matters worse, all of Winters' classes except his writing class–
es were very large-it seemed usually of about two hundred students.
Although Winters complained of his years at Stanford as of years in exile,
years when no one paid him much notice, when few cared to study with
him, when the English Department did not hide the sentiment that they
would have preferred that he teach elsewhere and more or less persecuted
him-none of this was in evidence in the 1960s. His classes were packed.
He was the great man of the Department, one of the most sought-after pro–
fessors on campus.
You had to make your own way in these classes, especially since Winters
employed only one form of instruction: he lectured. Far from encouraging
discussion, he did not encourage questions. Often he read from his own
books of essays, without commentary. He was prone to insulting his stu–
dents. He made it abundantly clear that teaching was a chore: he was
unlucky not to have a private income, and he was unlucky not to have the
patron that, as the greatest literary mind of his generation, he naturally
would have found to support his art in a better age. Instead he was forced
to live out his days fulfilling the thankless, dry, dreary work of teaching. He
was bone-tired from his years of such drudgery, and he made sure you
knew it. The worst part of teaching was that you had to teach imbeciles,
perhaps well-meaning and even smart imbeciles, but imbeciles nonetheless.
The voluminous stupidity of most people, including of course most of the
Department of English, professors as a class, most other poets and critics,
and, alas, his hundreds of students, was the subject of many of his lectures.
What exasperated, exhausted, and not infrequently, one guessed, excited
Winters was that it seemed to be in the nature of things that the very great
majority of people lacked the intelligence and sensibility to appreciate life
at all-to feel deeply, to
see
what was there in front of their eyes, to
hear
the
sounds of a poem, never mind to be able actually to grasp what Yvor
Winters had to say. A great poet, for Winters, was not like us-but neces–
sarily rare, sensitive to ideas, impressions, the world in a way that the vast
majority of people could not glimpse and certainly could not approximate.
His lectures were peppered with the preface, "You won't understand this,
but ..." Talent is a gift, innate, and he said brutally that it is sentimental if
