No one aware of Yvor Winters’s reputation for brawling literary criticism will be taken aback by his letters’ ability to inflict a blow. Readers unfamiliar with his deadpan, gravel- voiced style, however, may be surprised to discover its wry and often generous good humor. Regularly salting his letters with levity as well as curt judgments, Winters maintained robust exchanges with Allen Tate, Lincoln Kirstein, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Harriet Monroe, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Louise Bogan, and Theodore Roethke, among others. Winters, who taught at Stanford for most of his career, might have sequestered himself in “Castle Adamant on the Pacific” (in Richard Howard’s phrase), but, as his letters attest, in his influence and associations he remained very near the center of American poetry.
With Monroe, the founder of Poetry, he developed a precocious candor. Not yet twenty, Winters wrote that he feared her magazine was “sliding rather too rapidly, and [would] soon be, as the saying goes, among the dogs.” Winters accused her of printing “things that are absolutely dull and without excuse and abominably done.” Despite Winters’s rebarbative tone, Monroe continued to correspond with him and kept his poems and essays appearing in her pages. “I have known the old woman for fourteen years,” he later wrote to Linclon Kirstein, who made Winters western editor of his landmark journal, Hound & Horn, “and fought with her steadily and until fairly recently amicably.” The extent to which Monroe responded in kind remains uncertain; Winters routinely destroyed the letters he received, and he even encouraged others such as Tate to do the same with those he wrote to them. This ample collection provides the measure of their noncompliance.
The greatest epistolary exchange of Winters’s career—the one with Crane—constitutes the greatest irony as well: Winters sedulously preserved Crane’s letters, while his, presumably in Crane’s possession, were lost or destroyed. As a result there is no vestige of the correspondance in this collection. But that theirs was one of the essential dialogues in modern poetry is clear from Crane’s letters, which appear in Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, by Thomas Parkinson (1978). Parkinson follows their initial friendship and eventual falling-out, while attempting to mortar up the hole left by Winters’s lost letters. Relying on contemporaneous correspondence from Winters to Allen Tate, a common friend, Parkinson fills in what gaps he can, and the result is well worth reading.
Winters’s dispatches are striking in their lack of pleasantries. He loved to talk shop, and a typical letter jumps right in. To Tate, he begins: “Eliot, my dear man, is something left over from your youth, a habit of feeling that you have never understood clearly enough to eradicate, like a nostalgia for Santa Claus.” Similar aperçus on poets and poetry abound: echoing Shakespeare, he pronounces that late Joyce, “despite the expense of genius, is a waist of verbiage.” To Kirstein in 1933: “Auden and his friends strike me as pretty muddled.” On Yeats: “I feel as Chesterton felt about Blake, that if he is really bent on keeping company in the other world, he ought to be more particular about the company.” He wrote that Stevens, whom he greatly admired, “really could handle only one theme: that of the isolated nominalist, in an impersonal universe, confronted by death.” Winters’s bluntness, which he could play for comic effect, completely nonplussed Marianne Moore, who regularly wound her letters in skeins of aggressive decorum. No sooner had Moore and Winters begun their verbal dance than they realized the mismatch and hobbled off to look for other partners. (Moore later wrote a poem for Winters in which she called him “something of a badger-Diogenes.”)
Of the extant correspondence, Winters’s letters to Tate hold the most consistent literary interest. Tate seems to have held his own, even with someone as ornery as Winters occasionally proved. Winters clearly admired Tate, calling him the best critic of his generation and lauding his poems, though candor not praise remained his primary M.O. When the first reports of Crane’s death reached him, Winters wrote to Tate that “if it was suicide, he at least had the courage of his convictions, whatever cloudy notions they were based on, & definitely called the bluff of a hundred-odd years of hypocritical pantheistic mysticism.” What ever happened to De mortuis nil nisi bonum? Yet, behind Winters’s brisk appraisal there exists an overtone of loss and genuine sorrow. Winters had considered Crane a friend and a great poet. He felt that if it weren’t for his boundless romanticism he could have been even greater, that it had been ruinous for him personally as well as artistically. He may have been right.
In the end, Winters’s letters present him less as a firebrand critic than as a poet writing to other poets. His discoveries—in criticism, in life—were often inextricably linked to discoveries in verse, and this sense of a maker at work informs nearly all of the letters in this collection. R. L. Barth, who has edited the selected poems of both Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis, has performed an exemplary service in presenting another aspect of one of the finest poet-critics of the last hundred years.