IGOR WEBB
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and falls: the fruit of death, despair, and disorder. The Serpent offers to the
glory of God the triumph of his own sadness; and the thirst which made
the tree gigantic exalts even to Being (or God) the strange Omnipotence
of Nothingness (the Serpent). The theme is the most inclusive of tragic
themes: one might describe it as the theme of tragedy."
Winters' paraphrase or summary of Valery's poem captures well the
qualities of his mind and his voice-and so fairly conveys the Winters who
spoke at the front of the lecture hall. His "delivery" was in the plain style
that he so deeply loved, simple but telling, apt, declarative, somberly disen–
chanted in its rhythms (this could be witty and even amusing), with a
suggestive-or,
better-persuasive
aura of tough-minded confrontation with
ultimate things. His summary of Valery displays something of what Winters
wanted you to appreciate as "method," an achievement of great importance
to him. For Winters, method distinguishes the professional or serious critic
from the amateur or dilettante. But his summary shows equally how much
his method is permeated by its presuppositions and predilections. A great
deal of what you learned to emulate in Winters' reading had to do with dis–
crimination and an eye for telling detail. But what drew the eye to a detail
had as much to do with a world of reference already in place-a world of
reference that as a student you had to go to some trouble to master-as
with any particular insight arising from a particular poem. The trouble here
for Winters as a teacher, and for any teacher, is that no poem, after all, can
be "mastered" beforehand; whatever you take mastery to mean, it depends
in each new case on sensibility, learning, intelligence, and perhaps adroit–
ness of experience as these can be gathered toward insight when confronted
with the new. Still, however unlikely it may be that the thing can be taught,
this is what Winters aimed to teach and what he succeeded in having you
struggle to learn.
Mter repeated encounters with examples of the plain style you began
to approach some semblance of familiarity with its terrain and its strategies.
In Winters' account of it, the plain style-from Gascoigne to J.V
Cunningham-enacts, probes, and discovers (and "utters") a particular
world view, one in which emotional control evinces a depth of disillusion,
in which sensousness and sanity seem ever at odds, and in which loss, with
its metaphorical reach towards death, rouses an intense sensory remem–
brance that in its very vividness both tempts the poet to escape and, since
escape is an impossibility for the plain style poet, also serves as the persua–
sive token of a hard-bought maturity-that tragic resignation which is the
hallmark of this kind of writing. How to read turned out to be intimately
bound, in short, with what to read for. In the Dionysian sixties this com–
prehensively lapsarian point of view seemed hugely archaic, but also to have
the size and solidity of a great monument. It stood there before you like the
