Biography
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Allen Tate once commented on Yvor Winters the poet thus: "If he has been neglected—when he has not been ignored—the reasons are not hard to find. He has conducted a poetic revolution all his own that owes little or nothing to the earlier revolution of Pound and Eliot, and that goes back to certain great, likewise neglected Tudor poets for metrical and stylistic models." Winters commented to Contemporary Authors: "Tate is wrong about this, but in general my admirers have read me as carelessly as my detractors."
Winters' early poems are written in a highly imagistic free verse that was admired by many of the experimentalists of the 1920s and 1930s. In a major mid-career re-orientation, he abandoned free verse entirely, and took up the formal austerity on which his current reputation—and in some circles his notoriety—now rests. But near-mystical identifcation with the natural world and immediate physical surroundings in which his early verse was steeped remained a characteristic of much of his later verse."
Winters writes, says William Troy, "like a combination of a medieval scholastic and a New England divine." ("Twaddle," said Winters.) Keith F. McKean asserts that "Winters defends reason and warns against certain aspects of romantic philosophy," and explains Winters's approach thus: "First, Winters believes, the critic should record any historical or biographical data necessary to understand the mind and the method of the author; second, he should analyze the literary theories that are relevant to the work; third, he must make a critique of the paraphrasable content; and fourth, he must make a critique of the feelings motivated by the experience; and last of all, he must judge the work."
Though his approach to literature has been called "narrow" and "dogmatic," he has, as Troy admits, sharpened the focus on certain problems and formulated useful distinctions. Poet Hayden Carruth has the highest praise for him: "I admire Winters, and what he has done for American literature; no one else could have done it—I mean aside from his own poems, some of which are superb. There's no one like him for making a simple declarative sentence crackle under your eyes like a burning apple-bough. Such magnificent wrath. . . . Of course, Winters is as insane as the rest of us, but he has made a whole career out of covering it up. . . . Winters is able to prove—demonstrate irrefutably with step-by-step arguments and copious illustrations from line and stanza—that our favorite poets are idiots, and in the process show us just why we like them so much."
Winters recorded his poems for the Library of Congress and the Yale Series of Recorded Poets.
