In Defense of Reason is a three-volume work of literary criticisms by the Americanpoet and literary criticYvor Winters. First published in 1947, the book is known for its meticulous study of metrical verse and for its examples of Winters' system of ethical criticism.
The collection consists of three books of critical essays that Winters had written earlier. The first, Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry, is Winters' revised doctoral dissertation on the classification and analysis of poetic structures. The second, Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism, is a study of seven prominent American novelists and poets of the 19th century. The third, The Anatomy of Nonsense, is a study of several prominent writers associated with modernism. The book also contains three general essays that are crucial to understanding Winters as a critic and poet: the Foreword to the whole collection, "Preliminary Problems," which is in effect the introduction to The Anatomy of Nonsense, and "The Significance of 'The Bridge,' by Hart Crane, or 'What Are We to Do with Professor X?'".
Though he started his poetic career in the early 1920s as a free-verseimagist, by late in that decade Winters had become a modern classicist, of a sort.[1] He argued that poets should use metrical verse more often in their compositions. He also argued that poems should have rational structures and favor discursive language rather than the loose, associationist structures and styles favored by the moderns, which emphasize the emotions and personal expression.[2] As is explained in these essays, Winters considered the moderns the literary descendants of Romanticism.[3]
Content
The study of the structure of modern poetry in Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry is complex and challenging. Winters presents an elaborate and unique classification system of structures and methods, with an assessment of each kind of structure or approach to help readers understand how poets write in the modern age. In the course of his discussion, Winters also lays out his moral theory of literature, along with his close study of metrical verse and his unusual and difficult theory of free verse, in which he first composed his poetry.[4]
Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism offers erudite short studies and appraisals of the writing careers, work by work, of James Fenimore Cooper (moderately favorable), Nathaniel Hawthorne (moderately favorable), Herman Melville (strongly favorable), Edgar Allan Poe (sharply unfavorable), Emily Dickinson (favorable, with qualifications), Henry James (favorable, with qualifications), and the little-known AmericanpoetJones Very (favorable), who was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Winters' evaluations of these writers and their works are sometimes unusual, if not eccentric.[4]
The third work in the collection, The Anatomy of Nonsense, offers short, crisp, but detailed overviews and interpretations of the writings of Henry Adams (moderately unfavorable), T.S. Eliot (unfavorable), and Wallace Stevens (favorable, with qualifications). In addition, this section contains an essay on American critic and poet John Crowe Ransom that serves as Winters' defense of his own critical concepts, which Ransom had judged to be wrongheaded.[4]
The collection is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize in summary. Winters was opposed to the ascendant Romantic theory of literature, as he understood it. He strove to foster a particular kind of classicism in literature, his own brand of stately, polished, rational, discursive poetry (as well as controlled, stately fiction) that emphasizes ideas and concepts. Across this collection he also reveals his growing penchant for rating individual works of literature and for the centrality of literary evaluation to criticism, as well as his nascent interest in revising the canon of literature to conform to his ideas of classical greatness, or near perfection in poetry. (Winters uses the term, great, frequently in these writings, and elsewhere, to refer to artworks that he judges to be nearly perfect literary achievements of one kind or another.)[5]
The three general essays in critical theory mentioned in the introduction are crucial to understanding Winters' general theory of literature and his misgivings about and opposition to Romanticism. In the "Foreword," Winters gives a lengthy and learned summation of his theory of poetry, which he calls the moral theory of literature. Winters contrasts this theory with his explications of the didactic, hedonistic, and Romantic theories, which he holds to be the three main critical strands of thought in western literary criticism.[6] In the "Preliminary Problems" essay, found in The Anatomy of Nonsense, he gives a trenchant, painstakingly logical, step-by-step summary of the criteria he uses in evaluating poems and assessing their greatness, particularly precise diction that subordinates emotion to conceptual content and rational structure.[7]
In the concluding "Bridge" essay, also found in The Anatomy of Nonsense, Winters examines the literary and psychological dangers facing poets who push Romantic ideas to what Winters believed to be their logical limits, one of whom was, in his judgment, Hart Crane. ("The Bridge" referred to is a famous poem by Hart Crane, with whom Winters briefly corresponded about poetry shortly before Crane's death in 1932.) The essay considers Crane as a disciple of Walt Whitman, whose romantic concepts of life and literature Winters discusses at some length.[8]
Style
Yvor Winters' memorable prose is highly polished, formal, and exacting. He was a fine stylist and a strikingly scrupulous interpreter of literary artworks. He was often and sometimes still is mistakenly considered one of the New Critics because of his many careful readings of individual works of poetry, fiction, and drama. But, unlike the New Critics, his close reading was performed in the service of his moral theory of literature.[9]
In Defense of Reason also features Winters' acerbic comments in opposition to, and sometimes strongly disapproving of, various writers and critics usually held in high esteem in modern literary culture. For such comments he has been often called "brutal," which, however, appears to be an exaggeration. Winters wrote like most other hard-hitting critics who waged battle in the critical wars surrounding the New Criticism in the middle of the 20th century.[10]
Comments
The irony is that his criticism could have been produced only in America and nowhere else in the world; it is as distinct a product of American life, though in the opposite direction, as any number of items of our popular culture. In its wrongheadedness, idiosyncrasies, rancorous eccentricities, and provincialism, it takes its place in the long line of that pathetic and peculiarly American phenomenon: the wandering off of superior gifts into private byways.[11]
Winters stands in the peculiar position of a critic who uses the methods of analysis of the New Critics but rejects their evaluation of major trends in 20th-century poetry, in particular their high evaluation of Eliot's work. Winters often enough seems dogmatic and limited in his evaluations, but his analyses of poems are always perceptive and his theories, if not acceptable, have the virtue of being challenging.[12]
Still there is no question of the soundness of many of Winters' judgments or the rightness of his desire that art be moral. The views have influenced various excellent writers and critics. Among them stand Robert Lowell, J. V. Cunningham, John Williams, Ann Stanford, N. Scott Momaday, Donald Davie, Wesley Trimpi, and Janet Lewis. Winters' belief that, run on whim and emotion, art would become directionless gains credibility from much of the poetry currently published. Under a banner of cultural pluralism, views are developing neither within the canon of a writer nor across canons, and, as with the weather in places, a reader has only to wait a few moments if he doesn't like what he now has.[13]
Perhaps Winters' most striking and durable achievement is his account of the morality of poetic meter (In Defense of Reason, pp.103–52, The Function of Criticism, pp.81–100). The identity of a poetic line or of a whole poem, its "soul," inheres not primarily in ideas or images but in the way it moves. Rhythm sounds at once in the "sensual ear" and in the "mind's ear" and in itself constitutes a mode of consciousness that facilitates certain mental operations and precludes others.[14]
Of [modern poet-critics], Yvor Winters, perhaps, has fallen furthest. This is a great shame, for it is just Winters’s brand of seriousness and his emphasis on logic and reason in poetry that contemporary verse sorely wants. The current neglect may have as much to do with the notorious critic’s crabbed, sometimes contradictory and dogmatic style. Winters’s stern call for a "moral poetry" was provocative, while his more cracked judgments earned him the opprobrium of many who, like Stanley Edgar Hyman in The Armed Vision (1947), saw Winters as "an excessively irritating and bad critic of some importance."[15]
The essay on [Henry] James shows a comparable power for summoning up characteristic particulars that suggest qualities of the whole work, as does the marvelous evocation of the psychology of Henry Adams, whose great history Winters champions as a major work in our literature. Very few critics have Winters' ability to vivify in prose the range of their reading — all of Cooper, Melville, James, and Adams, for examples — and the tone of his essays sometimes reflects the irritation and strain of an essentially self-taught man, an artist of the first rank, who explored American literature before it became a specialized field of study. The concerns of these central essays are drawn out, as variations on some themes, in the subsequent essays on Ransom and Crane, works of great rigor and insight.[16]
Sexton, Richard J. (1973). The Complex of Yvor Winters' Criticism. The Hague: Mouton.
Stanford, Donald E. (1983). Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry: studies in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Yvor Winters. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press. ISBN0-87413-197-9.
Stanford, Donald E. (Winter 1981). "Yvor Winters Issue". Southern Review. 17 (3).
Free verse is an open form of poetry, which in its modern form arose through the French vers libre form. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social philosophy, and interdisciplinary themes relevant to how people interpret meaning. In the humanities in modern academia, the latter style of literary scholarship is an offshoot of post-structuralism. Consequently, the word theory became an umbrella term for scholarly approaches to reading texts, some of which are informed by strands of semiotics, cultural studies, philosophy of language, and continental philosophy.
Literary criticism is the study, a genre of arts criticism, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues. He was also an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, and supported the concept of state-regulated secondary education.
Donald Alfred Davie, FBA was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.
John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.
Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has been hailed by playwrights, poets, and literary critics alike, as being one of the most influential poets of his generation.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
Thomson William "Thom" Gunn was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, free-verse style. Gunn wrote about his experience moving to San Francisco from England. He received numerous literary honors, and his best poems are reputed to possess a restrained elegance of philosophy.
The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature begun at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called Neo-Aristotelianism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle's concepts of plot, character and genre. It was partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity and a strong classical basis of evidence for criticism. The New Critics regarded the language and poetic diction as most important, but the Chicago School considered such things merely the building material of poetry. Like Aristotle, they valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Despite this, the Chicago School is considered by some to be a part of the New Criticism movement.
Elizabeth Daryush was an English poet.
Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney and Thomas Kyd.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
"The Frontiers of Criticism" is a lecture given by T. S. Eliot at the University of Minnesota in 1956. It was reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, a collection of Eliot's critical essays, in 1957. The essay is an attempt by Eliot to define the boundaries of literary criticism: to say what does, and what does not, constitute truly literary criticism, as opposed to, for example, a study in history based upon a work of literature. The essay is significant because it represents Eliot's response to the New Critical perspective which had taken the academic study of literature by storm during Eliot's lifetime. It also presents an analysis of some of its author's own poetic works, an unusual characteristic for modern criticism—it has become far more usual today for poets and critics to be in separate camps, rather than united in one individual. Perhaps even more importantly, it demonstrates the progress and change in Eliot's own critical thought over the years between 1919 and 1956.
The Bridge, first published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press, is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at a long poem.
An Apology for Poetry is a work of literary criticism by Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney. It was written in approximately 1580 and first published in 1595, after his death.
Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic. He is on the seminar faculty of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, and has taught at YIVO.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
