Not deliberately, dogmatically

Ian Robinson

Uncollected Essays and Reviews Yvor Winters (Allen Lane £5.00) Shakespearian and Other Essays James Smith (Cambridge University Press £5.50)

The final fruit of that devotion to poetry to Which Yvor Winters several times and with transparent sincerity lays claim was Forms of Discovery (1967), a revaluation of English lyric Poetry from Wyatt to the present. This book consistently elevates ordinary plainness as the Poetic virtue and equally consistently dismisses the English poetry usually thought of as centrally dependable. So Marvell's 'Coy Mistress' is an academic exercise, Wordsworth a "very bad Poet", the 'Ode to a Nightingale' "a mediocre Poem with a very few good lines and some of the worst lines in the century", etcetera, but in the Romantic period Landor "offers a real, if minor, relief', poetry in the present century is partly redeemed this side the Atlantic by T. S. Moore and Bridges, and the real touchstones are in the "drab" writers of the sixteenth century — Gascoigne, Googe, Greville, beside whom Shakespeare's sonnets are faulty and disappointing. The view, is given theoretical foundation by Winter's doctrine of statements. "A poem says something in language about a human experience." A poem, therefore, since "language is essentially conceptual or denotative", must be a specially restricted kind of unverifiable proposition. Both the theory and the judgments seem to me wildly arid perversely wrong. Perhaps a great genius could bring off the revolution in sensibility expressed in Winters's picture of the English lyric. Blake's revolt against "prose and reason" did something comparable, in the other direction. But if the poets usually called great are as shaky as Winters thinks, can one be sure of any judgment of poetry? All judgment is, of course, individual, and critics forget that truism at their peril. But if one goes as far as Winters from any common sense of what or who matters, is not one destroying the context in which judgments can be made?

The sign that Winters couldn't bring it off is Just that his critical commentaries are unconvincing. Gascoigne as quoted by Winters remains irretrievably flat and dull, but "Earth has not anything to show more fair" remains the real thing despite Winters's comment "The line saYs nothing about the scene." Of course not! The doctrine about statements insulates the critic from what generations of readers have recognised as poetry, and leaves him with a Wilful preference for the merely prosaic.

The question is how Winters got into such a blind alley, and the answer may perhaps be suggested by this new collection of his occasional pieces. It comprises about forty essays and reviews, almost all about contemporary American poetry. Winters's response to a handful of his contemporaries began by being very sympathetic. He thought of himself as living in the greatest age of English poetry, and in the end the impossible history of Forms of Discovery is no more than a corroboration of that judgment. The new collection shows Winters often not changing his mind but hardening and restricting his judgments. Characteristically he will select a few poems as great, and the few will grow fewer, but Winters more certain, with the lapse of years. A rather comic example is William Carlos Williams. In 1928 he is "the most magnificent master of English and of human emotions since Thomas Hardy". In 1939, with Williams's corn

plete poems, many are "composed of perfectly unrelated items . . amusing but empty" yet still "In style, the poems are masterly" and he is "one of the two best poets of his generation". By 1965 Williams's best poems are "very minor indeed, but they come close to perfection in execution" and "he was a foolish and ignorant man, but at moments a fine stylist."

There is something badly wrong with Winters's later critical tone. He is sometimes, surely consciously, Johnsonian. Again of the Westminster Bridge sonnet, "Of the last two lines, the houses are good, the two exclamations are mere noise." (Because, he thinks, all exclamations are mere noise. Really!!) But applied to Winters we can reverse Johnson's famous phrase about himself: Winters at last came to write not deliberately but dogmatically. The origin of Winters's belief in decorum, restraint and statement was a genuine feeling for poetry. "It is the terrific discipline, spiritual and literary, of Baudelaire that so saturates his line with meaning." The "discipline" is then discussed as a way of contemplating the saturation. Fine. But that is from an essay of 1929; as Winters went on he slipped into seeing discipline as the cause of poetic intensity, and poetry to be explained by the critic's definition of discipline. In the same essay he says, "It is not what is said that weighs so heavily; but one feels behind the line, in all that is omitted, a lifetime of monstrous discipline, from which is born the power of absolute wisdom without evident additional effort." I'm not sure about the expressive power of omission, but let it pass: the last phrase is at least a gesture towards the reality of poetry, and what critic can do more? But later Winters seems to have felt that omission is itself a guarantee of absolute wisdom.

I am not well read in the American poets discussed in these Uncollected Essays and I am afraid 1 am unimpressed by Winters's quotations. J. V. Cunningham, for instance, looks to me academically dull — though I do perceive some sparkles of life in Randall Jarrell, who for Winters writes verse that would be disgraceful as a first yearstudent's prose. On the poets I know I am sui-e he is wrong. Bridges is well beyond any critical kiss of life. Winters loves Bridges because Bridges's verse is acade

mic and dead. Elsewhere he writes, "It is my intention to begin by comparing three

poems • . . with reference to a particular theory of poetry. The poems by Donne and Bridges conform to this theory and illustrate it perfectly; the poem by Hopkins deviates sharply and I believe suffers as a result." (The Function of Criticism, page 103.) The theory, not the feeling for poetry; Is now the criterion for the poetry. And it is a hopeless theory, causing wrong judgment.

Winters's forcefulness goes with a wilful self-restriction. He is not like Johnson laying down the law but out of a well-stored ominivorous mind and with the printer's devil at the door. Winters's devotion to poetry was thinking about nothing else. Devotion thus became academic specialism. Johnson was not an academic specialist. Winters answers the charge in The Poet and the University' reprinted here, but doesn't understand it. He says he is not in the ivory tower but knows people of widely differing experience, has been active for civil rights, forecast Truman's election victory and organised civil defence. He has bred airedales;

his wife, moreover, has led Girl Scouts. Solt. But Winters also concentrated an energetic

mind wholly upon the definition of a style of

poetry, and never worried much about any of the neighbours of poetry in speculo mentis or

related any of his other interests to his devotion to poetry — in contrast with Leavis's conception of literary studies as a liaison centre and his public inability to leave the world alone. Winters suffered a kind of ossification.

He tried to make the judgment of poetry literary judgment. Poetry, as Eliot said, must be itself and not another thing, but to let it be itself is to take it into life and judge it in life, not by 'literary standards'. Winters paid the penalty of

his academic devotion in his unsoundness of judgment: it meant that he was not even an expert on the style of English poetry.

But he was not a hollow man or a fraud, and his criticism, even when it is irritating or plain wrong, is never merely showy. Actually Winters was himself the kind of poet he desiderates, and his best poems do, I believe, confer a kind of authenticity even upon a book as bad

as Forms of Discovery. His Collected Poems occupy one hundred and thirty five pages, with

in some cases only one line to the page. In a concluding note he says that the "principle issue" in them too is a "definition by example of the style" he has been trying to achieve for thirty years. The best poems are better than that formula suggests and have the passion and density of meaning — there in the lines, not omitted — of real lyric poetry.

The late James Smith, who has a reputation rather like Yvor Winters's, is quite different.

Like Winters he produced a small amount of deeply considered work; and his later works, after a long exile in Fribourg, do sometimes display whimsicality of judgment (Arnold a better poet than Keats) and uncertainty about what needs saying and at what length (the

laboriousness of his case against Eliot's "ob

jective correlative"!). The present volume, an unfinished book on Shakespeare comedy plus a reprint of half a dozen very well-known essays, might, too, have been smaller: the Shakespeare part is two hundred and sixty one pages, of

which over a hundred on The Tempest, could

have come out on its own. But what a fine and genuine work it is! — far too good for me to

say much about it as a mere reviewer. I mean that this is a real work of judgment and intellect which one needs to allow to sink in and to mull over as one re-reads Shakespeare. I actually regret, unfeignedly, that the essay on Measure for Measure is incomplete. What there is of it is quite enough to shock the current

orthodoxy about the play. Smith is also deeply right about Caliban and Prospero (though had he been able to get the book ready for press himself he would presumably have been just as right in half the number of words).

James Smith is as much a stylist as Winters: but his very individual elegance is a mode of concentration on poetry which conveys a sense of the value of what he is discussing. James Smith did not finally grow away from the common reader — and I hope, if it doesn't sound outrageously inconsequential, that he will be read in universities. Smith's editor Professor Wilson and the publishers, anyway, deserve our gratitude for the labour that has made a beautifully produced book out of what was evident ly a very unfinished manuscript; and Professor Wilson's report that this unproductive critic wrote out masses of lectures on English litera ture, in full, whets one's appetite. Do they still exist in a publishable form? Whereas with Yvor Winters one finally lacks any sense of an appeal to that "common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices" by which "after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours."

Ian Robinson. who teaches at the University College, Swansea, has most recently written The Survival of English.