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PARTISAN REVIEW
Sphinx, challenging everything you inchoately believed by its very indiffer–
ence to everything you believed.
Obviously the passage I have quoted is prose and not poetry, but it has
some of the qualities of poetry. There is often in poetry, especially great
poetry, a moment when the verse seems to skip a beat into a deeper, more
intense range of meaning and feeling, that quality of revelation that Emily
Dickinson perhaps had in mind when she said that you can tell a good
poem because it knocks the top of your head off. You might say this is a
joyful though infrequently a happy moment. One of Winters' sentences
offers an approximation of what I mean:
Eve falls, and the Serpent is saddened.
The "skip" occurs here at the apparently temporal conjuction, "and," since
"what follows" from Eve's fall is not in time but in meaning. The reader's
conventional expectations are disturbed. Why is the Serpent not pleased?
That his seduction creates sadness is, as Winters (or Valery) says, a triumph,
which he offers to the Glory of God, even as his (and our) tragic fate is most
amply revealed. His sadness (his self-aware and overreaching, his "prodi–
gious" imperfection) provides our epiphany.
Of course just when a poem knocks the top of your head off and when
it doesn't, is notoriously difficult to convey, and something about which
there seems to be no end of argument. At best the teacher can point, a
method to which Winters, like
F.
R . Leavis, often resorted. Central in
Winters' illustrations was his repeated effort to get you to notice the con–
trary pulls of the emotions attendant on loss and the desire to put
understanding into words.
For Winters, as for Wallace Stevens, "Death is the mother of beauty,"
but in the sense that it stuns you into wordlessness even as the mind works
on to lasso a chaos of pain into language. The stunned consciousness is
wordless, does not attend to the mind's dogged insistence on sequence and
order, is overcome by sensation, which assumes a brief but extraordinarily
acute articulateness, akin to the fierce immediacy of a certain kind of paint–
ing, or to a desultory, agonized music, like the jazz of a New Orleans funeral
procession. The mourner groans, weeps, or wails, loses awareness of time and
place, or is absently intent on minute particulars. The world's plethora is
now almost unbearably single and immediate.
So different from language, which distances, rationalizes, approximates,
inhabits duration and contains recollection, and wishes to make sense.
In the poetry that Winters most admired, sound, tending towards word–
lessness and chaos, is at once contained and articulated by the denotations of
language into music. Out of this simultaneous compression and release the
