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PARTISAN REVIEW
concentration on a few themes and a few poems from the sixteenth centu–
ry English and the modern American poets, while enforcing a disciplined
focus on the part of his students, also had the effect of making an over-insis–
tent case for a greatness that a slight shift of context or perspective could
deflate to something small, prim, morbid.
There is a Jansenist strain in Winters' taste for the virtues of disen–
chantment, as if the only thing to be said about God had been said by Pascal.
I am exaggerating. But any teacher who is tone-deaf to the fury of the
times, which is Fate to the young, risks speaking too little to them and too
much to himself. Winters made an art of such risks. He did not bestow on
his classes any higher or lower esteem than on the literary audience to
whom he addressed his often condescending essays. The Romanticism of
the young was, in any case, only a slightly exaggerated instance of what in
his view was an error besetting the whole intellectual culture. He stood
doggedly and defiantly apart from much of the modernist project, rejecting
The
J/J;&ste Land,
The
Cantos,
and
Paterson
as failures. These poems reached
too far, were too mannered, tried to encompass too much, and were way too
long. Forced by the inexorable logic of his position to dismiss the work–
so it sometimes seemed-of just about everyone, he nonetheless, by sheer
force of personality, persuaded many of us sitting in his classes that every–
one was in fact wrong and Adelaide Crapsey, Edgar Bowers, and
J.
V.
Cunningham were right. As a teacher, he willed victories from a stance and
a method and a series of judgments that in most other hands would have
guaranteed an embarrassing flop. He was smart, learned, lucid, and deadly
serious. He mattered. Short of condescending to him in turn, you could
hardly do otherwise than try to beat him at his own game. Even his pen–
chant for lists and judgments-these are the four best poets of the decade,
this line is good, that rhyme is weak-forced you to clarify your thinking,
systematize your intuitions, question your beliefs, tighten your slackness.
All of which made for a remarkable moral education. From the vantage
point of today's critical outlook, when poetry is too often seen as exempli–
fying something, or the product of mass sentiments or unconscious
ideology, or when the inner life is simply subjective, his combative aesthet–
ic, with its emphasis on judgment, reason, precise description and accurate
diction, on discrimination among subjects, on labor and learning, on per–
fectibility of form and statement, on the greatness of individual talent, on
the inescapably tragic dimension of human existence-all this seems pow–
erful and affirmative. Mter his all-too obvious flaws are noted,Winters still
looms large, calling upon our loyalty to a heroic Master in whom we never
altogether believed.
