In a 1986 essay called “Responsibilities: Contemporary Poetry and August Kleinzahler,” Thom Gunn announced his dissatisfaction with the Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Helen Vendler. According to Gunn, Vendler had made the mistake of favoring poets of “anxious urbanity” (like Merrill and Bishop, in Gunn’s view) at the expense of “two of the most important lines of tradition in contemporary poetry.... You might call them the Open and the Closed.” For Gunn, the “Open” school included sprawling poets like Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, the “Closed” such cinched-in versifiers as J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers. Of course, as with most binary oppositions, this scheme cries out for a unifying figure. But who could unify two such contradictory impulses? Who could possibly sound like a cross between Allen Ginsberg and J.V. Cunningham? Why, he’d have to be...he’d almost seem...he’d look sort of like...Oh, right. Thom Gunn.   

So, did Gunn like to imagine the field of contemporary poetry as stretching between Olson and Cunningham because it made his own poetry seem more essential? Or was the shape of Gunn’s poetry determined by his belief that these, truly, were the forces a good poet needed to respect, if not reconcile? Do we love the things we love for what they are, or for how they make us feel? These questions are unavoidable (if unanswerable), and they’re worth repeating here because Yvor Winters is the ultimate personification, if not the ultimate source, of Gunn’s so-called “Closed” school. Winters (1900-1968) was for forty years a professor at Stanford, where his students included Gunn, Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, and Philip Levine. As Gunn’s sympathetic and engaging introduction to this volume puts it, Winters was “a maverick’s maverick”—he taught The Waste Land before almost anyone else, and was nearly fired for it, then rejected Eliot before almost anyone else, and was treated like an oddball by many for that.   

Like most systematic, serious, deeply learned, and conscientious theories of poetic practice, Winters’s ideas were, at bottom, absurd—which is not to say they were more absurd than alternate systems with better PR machines. Essentially, Winters believed that, as he put it, “It is the business of the poet...to make a statement in words about an experience: the statement must be in some sense and in a fair measure acceptable rationally: and the feeling communicated should be proper to the rational understanding of the experience.” Further, “The theory of literature I defend...is absolutist. I believe that the work of literature, insofar as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth.” This ultra-rationalist approach places a tremendous ethical burden on poetry, a burden Winters came to believe could be borne only by traditional, formal work. So aside from some early experiments, that’s what he wrote. As you might expect, the result is often clickety-clack moralizing, as in “To a Woman on Her Defense of Her Brother Unjustly Convicted of Murder”:

Yet may you two, bound in a stronger whole,
Firm in disaster, amid evil true,
Give us some knowledge of he human soul
And bend our spirits to the human due!

“Amid evil true”? An archaism is annoying; an archaism with a dose of preachiness is actionable. Still, notwithstanding low moments like the above, Winters emerges from this volume as a reliably skillful and generally interesting poet. Like many moralists, he’s also a sensualist; the iron bars of his best poems are swaddled in velvet. Notice the lush variations in the final three stanzas of “A Summer Commentary”:

Now summer grasses, brown with heat,
Have crowded sweetness through the air;
The very roadside dust is sweet;
Even the unshadowed earth is fair.

The soft voice of the nesting dove,
And the dove in soft erratic flight
Like a rapid hand within a glove,
Caress the silence and the light.

Amid the rubble, the fallen fruit,
Fermenting in its rich decay,
Smears brandy on the trampling boot
And sends it sweeter on its way.

Poems like “A Summer Commentary” demonstrate that, however ferocious and dogmatic Winters may have been as a critic, his own poetic gifts were quiet, almost fragile, and decidedly minor key. But maybe “minor” is too loaded a word. As a teacher, Winters inspired several talented poets, and his own poems are often solid examples of their admittedly limited type. That’s no small achievement. In our fixation on who’s “major” and who’s “minor,” and who’s “major minor,” we sometimes forget the debt that many of our best poets owe to an early encounter with a mind intensely committed to poetry. However peculiar his theories, Winters had such a mind. And in that, there’s a considerable dignity—and a not-quite-greatness that is perfectly good.

— David Orr