IGOR WEBB
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not criminal to think or act otherwise. He would tell the story of his youth–
ful
ambition to be, of all things, a boxer-except that try as he might other
men were faster and stronger than he. There was nothing to be done about
it. As in boxing, so in poetry: between the great, who are very few and
swift-he among them-and the rest of us there yawns a vast divide.
Under the circumstances, only one pedagogy made sense: he rendered
judgment. Most of the judgments were negative. He took especial pleasure
in quoting passages of prose or poetry from writers others considered to be
masters-for example, Yeats-that in themselves, as literal statements of an
idea, appeared absurd. And so the judgments: Yeats was a very silly man; Hart
Crane gifted but misguided; Williams at least could
see;
poor Ezra....
His main ideas were simple, and simply expressed. In Isaiah Berlin's
famous distinction between two types of intellect, the fox for whom many
strategies, ideas, methods are always open, and the hedgehog possessed of
one big idea, Winters was emphatically a hedgehog. He knew one big thing,
which was that a poem is an act of moral judgment.
This one big idea can be expanded to a train of reasoning something
like this:
Life is a serious business, best understood through art. In art as in life,
the point is to strive for perfection. Poetry is the highest, most complete,
and most perfectible art. In the poem the visual and the auditory, the intel–
lectual and the emotional, the denotative and the connotative, logic and
imagination, the private and the public, reflection and sensation, judgment
and apprehension--are one. The short poem, because of its brevity and its
formal constraints, provides the best possibility of achieving perfection.
Poetry, thus, is a complete moral judgment of life expressed through a
disciplined language. The rational element of this judgment can be para–
phrased as, and ought to reflect, a logical proposition and must stand up as
a proposition to merit attention. The sound of the language, and its conno–
tative painting, ought precisely to suggest the emotion appropriate to the
poem's rational statement. In this sense, a poem is an
act.
Although the subject of a poem can be anything, the more profound
the subject the greater the poem and the greater its demands on the ratio–
nal and emotional intelligence of the poet. Therefore, for Winters, poems
about the great facts of the human condition, in particular our mortality, are
potentially the greatest poems, assuming the subject is deeply engaged, and
the poet's gift is equal to the subject. To achieve greatness in such poems
requires exceptional intelligence, sensitivity, and art. The most "mature"
and "civilized" achievement of such greatness, in Winters' judgment, occurs
in the "plain style" of poetry, for such a style, as for example in Sir Thomas
Wyatt, exemplifies the greatest seriousness of attitude and the greatest dis–
cipline of form, or the highest possible marriage of intellect and sustained
