IGOR WEBB
279
poem establishes the feeling that, as Wordsworth said, has by the time of the
writing become, for the poet, a memory. But in insisting on the poem as a
moral act and a moral judgment, Winters insisted on a kind of totality both
in composition and reading.
In
composition in the sense that at the moment
of writing the imagination so absolutely recreates the blow that death deliv–
ers to consciousness as to plunge the poet into the wordless void, the terrible
sound, of a full emotional realization of mortality. Out of the struggle to
make this groaning and wailing intelligible, from this straining of capabili–
ty, come the words and the form and that other sound, the beauty, which is
the poem. And to attend altogether to this creation of beauty is what the
poem asks of the reader and what Winters tried to teach his students.
For this reason, I believe, Winters the teacher was first and foremost, first
and last, a man reading. A "good ear" was for Winters the quintessential fea–
ture of poetic sensibility. His lectures always began with his oral rendering
of a poem, and his own reading encompassed his philosophy, oudook,
method, and theory of versification.
For Winters, the foundation of spoken English is the iamb.
In
his view,
consequendy, verse in English-poetry in English after its emergence from
Middle English-is the creation of writers like Gascoigne and Goodge who
discovered how to transform the natural beat of the spoken language into
rhythm, mainly in tetrameters and pentameters built with iambic feet.
Unlike classical meter or French meter or meter in Old English, modern
English meter, for Winters, is a matter of stress marked out in feet. And for
him almost everything spoken in English is a variant of the omnipresent
iamb. The founders of English verse deployed the iambic foot with the
fanatical regularity of the ideologues of a new dispensation, varying the
stress infrequendy and therefore with noticeable effect. On this dogmatic
foundation, according to Winters, all the poets in English have built their
church, beginning wi th the great poets of the sixteenth century-who
quickly assimilated the lessons of the founders and composed the lyrics that
ever since have dominated English poetic language-and including the
apostates of "free" verse.
In
this respect-as in all others-Winters steered well away from any–
thing in the least liable to be misinterpeted as meretricious (for this reason,
I think, he undervalued stylized writing, say in the Cavalier poets or in
Yeats). His reading, in a wholly American voice and accent, without much
trace of region or locale and also without any echo of English pronuncia–
tion or intonation, a kind of flat drawl, employed a slight elevation in tone
and a slight exaggeration of breath to distinguish it from ordinary conver–
sation. The music of his reading depended on a notable restraint whose
dramatic effects derived precisely from the subde excesses of a puritanical
formality devoid of pomp and display: once more, the plain style.
