The Critical Theory of Yvor Winters

John Holloway

The Critical Theory of Yvor Winters

I N recent years the reputation of Yvor Winters, if not as a critic at least as what might be termed critical theorist, has risen I very considerably in Britain. This essay is intended to question

the cogency of his arguments and the validity of his findings. I should not wish to do this without also expressing admiration for much of his work. Winters’ general discussions of poetic metre are more exact and suggestive than those of any other critic, and his diagnosis of (to be brief) ‘modernist’ poetry demands admiration even when it most demands dissent. His writings leave an indelible impression of wide reading for perhaps the best of all purposes- to find neglected first-rate poems. (Whether this most praiseworthy purpose is pursued to good effect is another matter.) He has written as well as anyone on the proper relation of scholarship to critical judgement, and (though briefly) better than anyone on the place of the university in our culture.’ Most important of all, his critical theory, and the impressively comprehensive philosophical position which goes with it, at least seem to give literature (and in particular poetry) an absolutely central place in life, and to justify the major deployment of educational resources in its service. Those who reject the theory have to ask themselves whether they reject these things too. If (like myself) they doubt not only the validity of Winters’ views, but also whether those views do indeed give poetry the high status he supposes, then they simply have that much the more to prove. Finally, in noticing the quality and value of Winters’ achievement, it is right to salute the dry, spare authority and assurance of his prose and wit. I have only one thing against these: that they are too good for what he has to say. I cannot express my own views as well as Winters does his. Perhaps the reader will, for his own sake, make mine some allowance accordingly.

I1 In the Foreword to his major collection, In Defense of Reason,

Winters divides the critical theories he rejects into didactic, hedonis- tic and romantic. Since he then makes all three of these sound l h Defense of Reason (1947) p. 569; in future this title will be abbreviated to DR.

54

exceedingly implausible and unattractive, I had better begin by affirming that I cannot see this part of his discussion as (what he claims for it) an adequate historical survey; and that the criticisms I shall make of his views do not seem to me to put my own position with-or near-any of these. Moreover, it is easily possible to reject Winters’ main position while being fully in accord with him on a number of important issues. Thus my criticisms do not imply that the nature or the value of poetry is done justice to by seeing poetry as “self-expression”; nor that “literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience” (DR. 8); nor that words like ‘rational’, ‘statement’, ‘comprehension’ or ‘intelligence’ are any less opposite to the work of the poet than Winters supposes; nor (though this is a smaller point) that they imply dissent from his view of poetry as having a place for abstract diction and generalized assertion; nor that 1 am a hedonist. I mention these possible forms of caricature in order that readers may distrust and perhaps avoid them.

Those preliminary matters having been cleared aside, Winters’ “idea regarding the nature and function of literature”, the “theory of literature” which he “defends”, the “assumption” on which he “invariably proceeds” as a critic, may next be considered. I do not wish to labour the obvious, but these matters warrant recapitula- tion, in so far as possible in Winters’ own words, for a particular purpose. Winters’ curt and intellectualized style, his searching and indeed scathing examinations of the theories of other critics such as Crane or Ransom, and his general stress on precision and rationality, create an impression that his views are thought out and expressed with consistency and rigour. It is not difficult to find critics who manifest these qualities less than Winters does, but the fact remains that consistency and rigour do not have that place in his critical theory which they are thought commonly, and also by him, to have.

The “assumption on which (Winters) invariably proceeds as a critic” is: “a . . . work of artistic literature is a statement in words about a human experience”.l This sounds as if it means a particular experience undergone by the poet, in the way that Wordsworth’s The Daffodils might be considered to be a statement in words about one of Wordsworth’s particular experiences : that of seeing certain daffodils on a certain day. The interpretation could be confirmed from what Winters says elsewhere: “the emotion created by the original experience is immediate, provisional, and confused ; in so far as we succeed in clarifying our understanding of the situation. . .” (DR. 521: my italics, as in all subsequent quota- tions.). These remarks, especially as they come in a context of painting-and-the-object-painted, seem clearly to indicate that 1The Function of Criticism (English ed., 1962), p. 26; in future this title will be abbreviated to FC.

55

Winters is seeing a poem as “about” a particular experience which really formed part of the writer’s biography. This would imply that another comment, “the poet. . . is actually striving to perfect a moral attitude toward that range of experience of which he is aware”, refers to the poet’s efforts not in any one poem, but over his writings considered as a whole: each particular poem would be “about” its own particular experience, and the sum of these particulars would comprise the range. It is true that he once says, “the subject-matter of poetry is human experience” quite generally (DR. 506); but this is not what he seems usually to wish to mean.

While we call to mind only such poems as The Daffodils, say, or The Extmie, or King’s A Contemplation upon Flowers, Winters’ account may pass or seem to pass. At all events, Winters has in effect no more to say about his invariable assumption than has now been summarized. Unfortunately, however, reflection soon shows that it will not pass. I do not know why, almost immediately after the first statement I quoted above, Winters went on “ . . . it seems obvious to me that The Iliad, Macbeth and To the Virgins to Make Much of Time all deal with human experiences”; but even if this should be obvious in some sense of the expression “human experiences”, it is obviously false in the sense defined in the last paragraph. This need not be laboured. It does not of course imply that the works in question, or any parts of them or any other works, are unrelated to human life, or that their authors could have conceived them before birth, or any other such extra- vagance; but it may simply be seen (once stated) to be incontro- vertible, that the three works mentioned can none of them be considered to be about single experiences forming items in their authors’ biography. There is really no more to be said.

I am sorry if this should seem a quibble; though even if it were, it would still point to a substantial defect in a critic as analytic and rigorous as Winters wishes to appear. But this is no matter where Winters’ account, though defective, could be freed from defect by simple reformulation. We cannot say that Macbeth and The Iliad deal with not one but a number of experiences which belonged to their authors’ biographies; or which are such as have belonged to the biographies of men in general; or at least which might have so belonged. In what sense, if any, are we prepared to say that men in general might have had the experience of meeting the Weird Sisters or of being abandoned by the god Apollo?-not, that is, as some diluted, sophisticated, modern-times re-interpretation of these events, but the events themselves as we find them and accept them, without sophisticated re-interpretation, in the works? Moreover, the natural way of speaking would be to say that the experiences that Macbeth and The Iliad are “about” are those not of the authors, but the characters. Yet these are not of course, in the original sense, experiences “of” anyone at all.

56

Certainly, they are not experienced, but imagined, by the authors; and whatever else may be in doubt, one thing at least is not so- which is, that Macbeth and The Iliad do not “deal with” their authors’ experiences as they imagined the contents of those works.

I11 Nor do these difficulties relate only to dramatic or narrative

works : though Winters in effect recognizes, elsewhere in “Problems for the Modern Critic”, that works of this kind have a “subject- matter” (his own term) which must be seen in some way other than that outlined already, because in a later discussion of Macbeth (FC. 51) he speaks not of experience at all, but first of “action” and then of “theme”. It is a remarkable thing that he should introduce both these terms, in a single paragraph, without in any way explaining how they are related. From the context, “theme” might be supposed to be in use as equivalent either to “action”, or to “imitation of an action”; but neither of these equivalences can be regarded as idiomatic, and the former, which appears the more likely from the context, is very far from idiomatic. The main point at present, however, is that it is exceedingly forced and unrealistic to attempt to put forward an experience or set of experiences, in the original sense, even for To The Virgins (let alone Macbeth and The Iliad). Even so simple a lyric as this (and what lyric, one might ask, is simpler?) can in no way be subsumed under that formula:

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day Tomorrow will be dying

The matter is set beyond doubt by this one stanza alone: of which the first line is an imperative, and not in any straightforward sense “about” anything at all ; the second a generalization applying (I am inclined to think) equally to all human experiences of whatever kind; and the third and fourth, probably best taken as a further generalization, relatively narrow in its range, which stands figura- tively for another one very much wider than itse1f.l How can we possibly take even this single poem as “a” statement about “a” human experience? (FC. 103).

I concluded that the assumption on which Winters invariably proceeds as a critic, viz., that “a poem. . . is a statement in words about a human experience” is one which is unintelligible or un- acceptable or both. We incline to concur in this assumption because to decline to do so would seem to commit us to the view that poems are perhaps not about anything at all (i.e., are meaningless) or ‘If lines 3 and 4 are taken (implausibly in my view) to be about some one flower that entered the poet’s experience, and not as making a general statement of the ‘Take any flower. . .’ kind, my point is established by reference to lines 1 and 2 alone.

57

are about something other than experience. But none of these disquieting consequences in fact follows. The situation is simply that the invariable assumption is unclear, and that attempts to make it clear make it false.

IV If this conclusion has importance, that is in the first place

because of how Winters’ own line of thought, in his critical theoriz- ing, does indeed invariably proceed. Having identified “a human experience” which he then refers to as “subject matter”, or “the subject” of the poem, he then proceeds to the second and third parts of his theory. If the first part, the “subject” has (as I have argued) not been satisfactorily identified, these subsequent parts of the theory simply fall to the ground. I believe that they also fall to the ground, reverberatingly, for other and independent reasons; but before I say what these are, I had better briefly recapitulate the remaining stages of the theory.

“My theory”, writes Winters, “rests on the observation that language. . . is dual in nature; that each word is both conceptual and evocative, denotative and connotative.. .” (DR. 502). Poetry, for Winters, draws on and exploits both of these powers that reside in words. Its “statement. . . about a human experience” is therefore no mere external description of the experience, but a “rational apprehension of the subject”, or an “understanding of action” (FC. 26; 60-61). In addition (and the evocative or connotative powers of language are now somehow at issue, though exactly how will be a matter for discussion) the achievement at least of a successful poem must be seen from two further points of view. One is that the “judgement” passed by the poem is a “moral” judgement. The other is that the poem “endeavours to communicate the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of (‘a given’) experience”-the “emotion which is appropriate to the rational apprehension of the subject” (FC. 26).

I must now introduce an assumption on which I invariably proceed myself. It is that if a statement is clear in meaning, we shall (marginal cases aside) know how to decide, in any given situation, whether it is true or false. In view of this, it seems beyond dispute that the last part of Winters’ theory is not clear in meaning. Since it is out of the question that rational understanding of a given (i.e., one particular) experience can exist only by means of writing or reading a poem about it, the matter may be considered by reference to the ordinary affairs of life and our reflections on them. Thus a man might have, or might imagine for himself, or might have described to him, a “given experience”. Most of us know what it is like to have a “rational understanding” of such an experience. If the meaning of “the emotion which ought to be

58

motivated. . . (etc.)” is clear, then (marginal cases aside) we should be able to give a definite yes, or no, to the question “Are you (or, Is he) feeling the emotions which ought to result from a rational . , . 1” and so on.

But a question of this kind cannot possibly be so answered. Undoubtedly there is another and related question, to which a clear answer may be given: the question as to the presence or absence of such a moral judgement of condemnation or endorse- ment as ought in some sense to go with rational understanding, or necessarily (it may be) comprises part of that understanding. But the judgement is one thing, and the emotion another; and if a man, asked whether his rational understanding of a given experience had “motivated” the emotion which it ought to have motivated, were to reply “certainly I condemn (or endorse) what occurred in the given case; but as for emotions, I am not an emotional man”, I do not see how we could object, or what we could find inappropriate. Moreoever, it is right to notice, at this point, something ambiguous in our whole way of speaking about these matters. Suppose one man to say, of another’s wrong conduct, “he deserves our sympathy, though. . .”. Suppose also that we agree. All the same, for us to ask whether the speaker was at that moment feeling emotions of sympathy would come near to being a kind of sarcastic witticism. He could properly reply, “what is going on inside me at this moment is hardly to the point: but if for example his case came to me for judgement, I should judge it sympathetically”. Part of the difficulty of the case is that many such expressions sometimes refer genuinely to emotions, to feelings, and sometimes not.

The upshot of this is that a second part of Winters’ theory turns out to be formulated in a way which seems unobjectionable at first, but on analysis proves to have no clear meaning: for the reason that we are simply unable to define just what emotions, and in what degree, “ought” to be motivated by “rational understanding” of the kind in question; and in large part we just do not think that there are determinate emotions or complexes of emotions which ought to result from, or accompany, rational judgements of the kind in question.

This is not to deny that we think that men ought to feel some emotions in their lives; nor on the other hand that we condemn emotional responses of certain kinds. Many condemn very extreme anger, for example, even if it resulted from rationally compre- hending a situation of very extreme evil. But we should not do so on the ground that it was a degree of anger inappropriate to the degree of evil: if that were the proper ground for our condemnation, it would not be easy to see how very extreme anger would be inappropriate, or at least how some other degree would be more SO. The ground of our condemnation would be that such extreme

59

anger was to be condemned in itself; and the conclusion reached with regard to Winters’ theory still stands.

Two further points arise in t h i s connexion. The fist is that this conclusion holds, even when the “given experience” or “situation” is not merely envisaged, but real. We can prescribe (or we think it legitimate to seek to prescribe) what judgements men should pass, or what action they should attempt, in any situation which might confront them; but not how they should feel. A man whose judgements and actions are satisfactory, but who in reply to a question like “did you feel real anger as you saw it ?I’ says, “I never allow myself to feel anger”; or to one like “were you really experiencing emotions of disgust?” says that he has been a social worker for twenty years, and it would take more even than that to disgust him, is guilty of no inappropriateness.

To be sure, the facts are not identical, as regards situations which we imagine on the one hand, and those we may encounter in reality on the other; and we might be surprised or even dis- quieted if an imagined situation resulted in feeling emotion beyond a certain degree of strength, or a real one did not do so up to a certain strength. But these responses on our part would relate to the general hypertrophy, or atrophy, of the subjects’ emotional nature. They would not be demanded of us, by any appropriateness or inappropriateness specifically in the situation envisaged (or confronted) on the one hand, and the emotions resulting from that on the other. It would not be a matter of what we ought to feel, even when it would certainly be a matter of what we ought to think or how we ought to act; and the fact that in many cases we should expect, and perhaps prefer, a difference in strength of emotional response, in respect of a situation confronted in reality, and precisely the same situation envisaged by the imagination, merely confirms from another direction what has already been established: that the idea of “the emotion which ought to be motivated by. . . rational understanding of (a given) experience” is not one on which an acceptable theory can be based.

v At this point I should like to interpolate, however, that what

is not true of experience, or situations, or “representative acts” (DR. 372) is true in part, though only in part, of poems. The general question of what emotions or feelings (the second word is probably the better) are in fact induced by, or at least are appropriate to, successful literary works is a complex one, and need not here be gone into fully. But on the other hand, while there are clearly no feeling-responses appropriate to any poem, in the sense that all those reading the poem ought to experience some specific feeling, and to an equal degree, it is nevertheless the case that in regard to such things as delight, exhilaration or admiration-admiration

60

not as an intellectual judgement but specifically as a feeling-we do indeed consider that these are responses appropriate to successful poems, or certain kinds of successful poems. That the reader of a poem should take appropriate action does not arise. But that he should merely judge appropriately without any appropriate feeling would leave us ill at ease. This is because the purpose of moral or immoral actions is not normally to induce feelings in those who judge them; but it is indeed (to speak, I admit, rather loosely) part of the purpose of a poem to induce feelings in its readers. Thus, a man who said that he admired a certain poem greatly, but was not in fact moved by it because he was an unemotional man, would not be in the same position as one who said that he condemned certain conduct strongly, but did not actually feel emotions of anger at it because he was an unemotional man. In the latter case (always assuming that his judgements and his actions were satisfactory to us) we should agree that his actual feelings were a private matter, one relating to his personality only; but in the former, we should wonder whether genuine, first-hand admiration for a poem could exist, or at least could have any value, in the total absence of admiration not as judgement but as emotional response. At all events, we should find such a situation unsatisfactory, as we should not find the parallel moral case unsatisfactory; and this once more makes clear the point now at issue- that we do not hold that there are emotions which ought to be felt in respect of experiences, but we do hold within limits that there are emotions which ought to be felt, which are appropriate, in respect of certain poems.

VI I have now shown that the first and the last main steps in Winters’

theory of poetry are unsatisfactory. The first asserted that “a poem was a statement in words about a ‘given’ human experience”; and I have demonstrated that while this might be an acceptable account of a small sub-class of poems, it was quite impossible to locate, in every case, the “given” or the “original” experience which was “the subject” of every poem. The last stage asserted that the poem endeavours to communicate the emotion appropriate to rational understanding of “the experience”; and I have demonstrated that this could not be true, because it asserts that the poem endeavours to communicate something which we should not know how to define, and on reflection cannot declare to exist.

The middle step of Winters’ theory is to associate the “rational apprehension” of the sub-experience with moral judgement in some form. I express this vaguely, but the vagueness is for a purpose: it is to do justice (if that is the word) to Winters’ own vagueness :

61

In each work there is a content which is rationally apprehemible, and each work endeavours to communicate the emotion which is appropriate to the rational apprehension. The work is thus a judgement, rational and emotional, of the experien-hat is a complete moral judgement in so far as the work is successful. (FC. 26.)

This is an obscure passage. On first reading it might be sup sed that Winters sees the “complete moral judgement” as having- %O constituents: first a rational judgement which is formed by rational apprehension; and second some other and “emotional” kind of judgement. Since “emotional judgement”, save in the irrelevant sense of biassed judgement, has no idiomatic and familiar meaning, this would be a pity. But on second reading Winters appears to mean something rather different. ‘He appears to mean that the original rational apprehension was itself moral; and by “judgement, rational and emotional” intends us to understand a judgement which is “rational” by virtue simply of its nature as a judgement, but “emotional” in that it has a further quality, that of being emotional, as an addition to its nature. On this reading the word “complete” in the expression “complete moral judgement” would have a rather unusual significance. In the strict sense, the judgement would be complete without the emotion, but there would be a loose sense in which it would be completer still, as it were, with the emotion.

If I may allow myself a facetious comparison, we should never call a man completely dressed, if he had omitted to put on his trousers. But we might well call him completely dressed, even though he was not wearing spats, or a hat, or apaulettes. If he had all three in addition to the straightforward complete dress- well, that would be very complete. On this interpretation, Winters’ “complete” would have a loose sense, and mean, perhaps something a little like “slap-up”. That “complete” means something of this kind is perhaps confirmed by another passage :

(2) In Mucbeth, we have not merely the imitation of an action, but we have a moral judgement of the action. The judgement occus in several ways . . . in the form of the action . . . in the comments . . . (etc.). The kinds of judgement thus far indicated, however, are explicit, or denotative judgements. We could have all these and still have no more than a good prose synopsis of the play. That which makes it . . . a living judgement is the emotion resulting from this rational grasp of the theme. (FC. 5 1 .)

“Living judgement” here seems to mean much the same as ‘‘complete judgement” in the other passage; and the implication need not, perhaps, be laboured.

What now appears, however, is that the last sentence in this passage contradicts the last but one. The “moral judgement of the action” (a judgement occurring in several ways), is something which we can have, says Winters, and at the same time have no

62

more than a good prose synopsis. We should therefore expect that the emotion, which gives us, once we have it, something vastly more than a good prose synopsis (viz., gives us the play itself), would come to us from something other than the moral judgement. But “this rational grasp” must mean the same as “the judgement” mentioned at the beginning of the quotation, and in the last sentence we are told that it is exactly “this rational grasp” of which the emotion is the result. But a result is that which, the cause being given, necessarily follows. In what sense, then, can we “have” the one and not the other? I conclude that the two sentences are indeed contradictions.

VII The source of this ‘confusion is perhaps Winters’ fundamental

The word fire communicates a concept; it also connotes vaguely certain feelings . . . These feelings may be rendered more precise . . . as we come more near and near to . . . perfecting our poem . . . The concept represented by the mood, motivates the feeling which the word communicates. (DR. 363-4.)

Here Winters indeed writes as if the “thought” brought the “feelings” necessarily: though he denies much this same view when he finds it in Ransom (DR. 524-5). It seems hardly satisfactory, that a theorist should fail to elucidate the idea that some feelings are more precise than others, though employing it several times. Quite probably it is acceptable, but its significance is far from self-evident. But it is a plain error, to speak of the poem as simply engaged in the work of making feelings precise. Its prior task is to create feelings. To think that the words of a poem would evoke the feelings evoked by the poem, even if they were arranged as an alphabetical list, for example-evoke them full strength, as it were, but lacking all precision-would be grotesque. Winters of course cannot have thought this: my criticism is only that he happened to ignore the point, and that thinking of the poem’s task simply as that of ren- dering feelings more precise, without regard to the fact that it has first to create them, may have induced him never to think clearly about the relation between a statement or judgement, and the emotion about the relation between a statement or judgement, and the emotion which it “motivates” or which “results” from it. The original source of trouble was perhaps to take “fire” as an example. I suppose it is possible that this rather distinctive word (or concept) evokes feelings in some people (I am not for the moment con- sidering the ideas which might be associated with it). But if the experiment be tried with the other words in Winters’ quotation, it will be found to fail. Taken alone, few words have connotation; and it is certain that no poem is made up of those words.

63

belief about language :

VIII Perhaps there is a simple explanation why Winters says so little

of what one might call the emotional work done by the poem, and how it is done: not that he is insensitive to it, because this does not seem the case, but that he has little understanding of it and little professional interest in it, little interest as a critic. He seems often to give emphatic praise to local achievement in a poem: to a phrase or a turn of phrase. But praise as cursory as his is not truly praise at all. “He had a talent for great prose, of course” (Macaulay); “The writing is effective.. .” (Phddre); “brilliant writing”; “described with . . . genius”; “in this passage the emotional weight of the language is great” (Bridges); “the first line offers a major concept, in impressive phrasing” (Hopkins) ; “beautifully executed”; “lyrics in which the descriptive element is beautifully handled” (Frost). (FC. 30, 56, 57, 52, 113, 124, 147, 186). One further quotation sets this nonsense in perspective :

We regard as greatest those works which deal with experiences which affect human life most profoundly . . . I am assuming, of course, that the works in question are sufficiently successful in execution so that (sic) execution may be more or less negleckd in the comparison. (FC. 27.)

The execution of the greatest literary works is not something we can check, to see that it passes muster, before we neglect it and turn as if with relief to something else.

The essay on Emily Dickinson makes this limitation clearer. The first poem discussed turns out to be “abominable”; and to display “a quality of silly playfulness . . . diffused . . . throughout most of her work” (DR. 284). At the end of the essay she is “one of the greatest lyric poets of all time”. What bridges the gap? Phrases such as the following: (like those quoted above, they stand by themselves and are not expanded) : “major symbolism”; “brilliant strokes”; “clairvoyant and absolute . . . phrasing“; “remarkably beautiful” ; “most deeply moving” ; “great power”; “dignity and power” ; “tremendous power” ; “greatest power”. Emily Dickin- son’s three best poems receive a little adverse criticism, a brief comment on what they “deal with”, and 600 words on meter. So much for supreme greatness in Winters’ favourite genre.

IX To one who, exacerbated by such a discussion in proof of such a

finding, said that Winters was not really concerned about poetry, though he might be about morality, Winters could reply: “I believe, to be sure, that ethical interest is the only poetic interest, for the reason that all poetry deals with one kind or another of human experience, and is valuable in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates that experience” (DR. 505). But I should

64

welcome even greater lack of concern, if less concern could lead to less confusion. Why I use the word confusion is not simply that the wording “one kind or another of human experience” suggests yet another account, besides those catalogued above (p. 56), of the “subject” which the poem deals with-suggests this, though “one kind or another of . . .” might also be a confused way of expressing one, or more than one, of the accounts already catalogued-but also, because this statement is wholly at variance with Winters’ other views.

That this is so may easily be shown. A poem, we are told, has value in proportion to the justice with which it evaluates an experience or kind of experience (or experience in general, for that matter). How then are we to estimate the degree of value that the poem has? By determining the degree of justice with which it evaluates the experience it deals with. And how are we to determine that degree of justness of evaluation? By obtaining, presumably, an independent evaluation of the experience, and comparing the two. Well, that is easy: everyone save a moral idiot has the capacity for independent evaluation of experiences. But in order (on Winters’ hypothesis) to evaluate the poem, we must not only, as the next stage, compare the two evaluations of the experience (that which we find in the poem, and that which we obtain from somewhere else); but we must also premise that our independent evaluation is the more reliable and more subtly dis- criminating, and therefore acceptable as a check on the other. You cannot evaluate the accuracy of something by what may be less accurate than itself. And we still have to do this even in cases where (as of course not infrequently arise) we concede that the poem offered a juster evaluation than our own initial independent evaluation: in these cases the poem does indeed stimulate us to fuller reflection, but in the end we once again test the evaluation of the poem against our own independent evaluation (or more strictly, re-evaluation) and treat the latter as a standard against which we evaluate the poem, by assessing the evaluation which the poem made of the experience.

But this is incompatible with Winters’ view that poetry has, as I put it earlier on, “an absolutely central and major place in life”. It is incompatible, because to say that this and only this (“the ethical interest is the only poetic interest”) is what gives poetry its value, is to say either that its value lies in telling us what we already knew (or even, what we already knew better than the poet); or, that its value lies merely in prompting us to avoid hasty moral evaluations and deploy more of our powers of evaluation than we necessarily always deploy. While much criticism (not only by Winters) does indeed read as if the critic in his heart of hearts thinks his powers of ethical evaluation superior to those of the poets he evaluates; and while educators do indeed, with reason,

65

see substantial utility for their professional purposes in something which prompts their pupils to‘ greater refledion; it remains the case that neither alternative offers poetry more than a modest and utilitarian place in our culture as a whole. The former makes it fodder for critics; the latter, ammunition for teachers.

X Winters’ views as expressed elsewhere offer him a way of escape

from this difficulty. Elsewhere (as has been discussed already) he frequently mentions that there are emotions which result from the evaluation performed by the poems; and it would of course be open to him to say that although the evaluation itself is of no value (since we know better already) or is at best a minor convenience (as a substitute for engrained habits of sound thinking), nevertheless the emotions it brings with it are of high value. I am intrigued by the prospect of a critic who begins by attacking as “fallacious and dangerous”, the view that “literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience”, but seems forced, by the logic or lack of it of his argument, to embrace this very pokition as the only way to give literature any substantial importance; more par- ticularly because, since t h i s paradoxical opinion cannot possibly be attributed to any of “the Romantics” to whom (without argument) Winters does attribute it, he is unlikely to find himself obliged to hold it all alone, But even an isolated and paradoxical position may be better than none. This expedient, however, is not open to one who says that the only poetic interest is evaluation, unless evaluation means something emotional. But Winters has repeatedly said that it is rational.

At one point, to be sure, when Winters wishes to prove the moral significance of metre, he writes “the expression of feeling is part of the moral judgement as I have defined it” (DR. 551). This suggests an interpretation of his views other than any of those briefly tried out above (pp. 58-60), and might indeed enable him to claim out- standing value for one part of the moral judgement: viz., the expression of feeling. But it would bring difficulties of its own. For if the expression of feeling is truly a part of the judgement, such that the judgement is incomplete without it, not in the loose sense suggested earlier, but in a fully literal sense; since further- more the expression of feeling, in Winters’ terms, is what is carried out by the poem; it would then folIow that all moral judgements made otherwise than in poems would necessarily be incomplete. Worse still, however, we should be little better off even if, on being confronted with a real-life problem of moral conduct, we had a moral judgement expressed in a poem, instead of in plain prose. For it would not be enough to have the poem. We should need to know that it was a successful poem before we relied on the moral judgement (including the emotion-part) which it made. This knowledge,

66

however, we could have only through a judgement about the success of the poem; and this judgement would itself (“ethical interest is the only poetic interest”) have to be an ethical-i.e., a moral judgement. But if incomplete moral judgements are unsatisfactory, and complete ones, including their feeling-part, are expressed only by poems (or at least by literary works), we should require a second poem (or something like it) in order to give us a not-incomplete judgement on the first: and so on ad infinniturn. Such are the incon- veniences of defining “moral judgement” as Winters alleges he has defined it. Such, to sum up and speak plain, is the jungle of confusion, half-definition and half-argument with which we are confronted by this scorner of the rigour of his opponents. The fact is, that in spite of the impression of rigorous thinking which emanates from his work, by virtue of its cold, aloof style and its constant profession “In Defence of Reason”, Winters has scarcely written a paragraph which is clearly and unequivocally expressed or which pursues a cogent train of thought.

I need not remind the reader that as a negative, destructive discussion, this present essay enjoys one not insignificant advantage over the sometimes more rewarding kind which advances views of its own. When a view is being argued for, one error of reasoning invalidates all that follows it. But when it is being subjected to critical analysis, this is not so. I should be rather surprised if there were no slips of reasoning in the long and somewhat intricate discussion which I have now, with relief concluded. But Winters’ “theory of poetry” is not to be vindicated merely by locating a few, or even a good many, slips of reasoning in this discussion: it will be vindicated only if all of these criticisms, or at least a large majority of them, are refuted one by one.

XI I hint in conclusion at two matters where I should myself wish

to develop a “theory of poetry” different from Winters’: though I do this, in the present blighting context, only because I find almost unbearable the unrelieved dereliction which the destructive analysis seems to have left behind it.

First (and this is connected with the stress earlier, on the crudity of Winters’ conception of a poem as “dealing with” an experience), I should reject Winters’ boredom with the particular: “my own interest in the particular is mild indeed. . . as we grow older we become less interested in details and more interested in such con- clusions as can be drawn from details” (FC. 37). Winters reproves Ransom (whose critical theory it is not part of my purpose to defend) for saying: “Art celebrates the concrete, the richly sensible”; and retorts “such a position . . . leaves him with some need to justify the existence of art in a world which without its help is already teeming with uniqueness” (DR. 519). It occurs to me that although

67

the world may teem with uniqueness, it by no means teems with vigorous awareness of it; and on the other hand that most of the major poets of history (I do not, I admit, have the “immortal” Adelaide Crapsey in mind; nor Elizabeth Daryush, the finest British poet since T. Sturge Moore; nor even the great Fulke Greville) have not lacked interest in, but have shown a delighted awareness, and an encyclopaedic knowledge, of life’s teeming uniqueness.

The second, and perhaps greater matter may be brought to notice by a simple observation: that we are able to read certain verse with the highest interest and admiration (the Paradiso is my example) before we can even identify, in any plain sense, the experience it “deals with”; much less adjudge its evaluations of that. If so, it seems that the experience of the reading itself has qualities, has an importance, done less than justice to by Winters’ “brilliant writing”, “beautifully handled”, “most deeply moving”, “great power”, and the like. The fact (noted earlier) that we do indeed consider certain emotional responses appropriate to reading certain poems (if not to judging real situations), has importance in this context. But I shall not pursue the point further.

These two seem as it were to be among the very dimensions in which poetry exists, but in which Winters’ critical sensorium does not operate. They do not, of course, imply that rational comprehension and moral evaluation have no place in poetry. Such a View would be absurd: on this head, all that is clear is that they are most unlikely to have the place assigned to them by Winters: insofar, that is, as he may be said to assign to them any recognizable place at all.

68

Documents

The Critical Theory of Yvor Winters