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Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major
critical works--Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The
Anatomy of Nonsense--of the period in which he worked out his
famous and influential critical position. The works together show
an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance
of the individual essays. With "The Function of Criticism," a
subsequent collection, "In Defense of Reason" provides an
incomparable body of critical writing.
The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence
of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of
literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the
writer--as it is of very man--to approximate these truths insofar
as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also
by definite example--the technique of the "whole critic" who
effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a
penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.
The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises brings together
five essays by Yvor Winters: “Problems for the Modern Critic of
Literature,” “The Audible Reading of Poetry,” “The Poetry
of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” “Robert Frost, Or the Spiritual
Drifter as Poet,” and “English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century.”
With Forms of Discover, Yvor Winters completes his critical canon.
The distinguished poet-critic defines by analysis and example the
development of the method that he has called "post-Symbolist."
Starting with the styles of the English Renaissance, Winters
discusses at length the felicities and shortcomings of these
traditions, the main defect being that sensory imagery was little
more than ornament. This sets the problem: to discover a style
wherein both the conceptual and the perceptual are given their
fullest expression In the work of Charles Churchill, Winters
explores the development of a complexly controlled associational
procedure. Here is a richly varied conceptual method, though the
sensory is still almost totally absent. Churchill's methods and
those of the Renaissance masters are then contrasted with the work
of the Romantics, who wrote a great deal about nature without
bothering to look at it, and whose most lasting contribution would
appear to be pathetically sentimental fallacies. The turn of the
century, in France, Britain, and America, sees the beginning of the
post-Symbolist methods, while Yeats continues the retrograde
movement of the Romantics. It is in the work of poets like
Tuckerman, Hardy, Bridges, Stevens, T. Sturge Moore, and Paul
Valery that rational discourse combines richly with the perceptual
universe in which we live: the particular perception is enhance by
reference to general concepts, the general given substance by the
particular exemplifying it. The post-Symbolist methods result in a
poetry that unifies the diverse fields of human experience and
employs all aspects of language. Style in Winters' sense is not
simply a way of gracefully combining words. It is the way a man
lives, the method or art wherein he discovers to the best of his
ability the real nature of the world in which he lives. It is in
this sense that Forms of Discovery is a philosophical work, not a
miscellaneous collection of essays; this book is, as Winters
remarks, "an act of piety, not an act of destruction."
As part of the ongoing effort of the Ohio University Press/Swallow
Press to reintroduce the work of a number of significant
twentieth-century poets to a new generation of readers, we are
especially enthusiastic about publishing the selected poems of Yvor
Winters, whose work and influence was so central to the development
of the poetry list at Swallow Press.
Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to
poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J.
V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass,
Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. His impact on mid-to-late
twentieth-century poetry is profound. This stems in large part from
his poetry, which was a reflection of his critical thinking about
poetry, and which underwent substantive changes over his career as
a poet. His collected poems won the Bollingen Prize in 1960.
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