"Yvor Winters: poet, professor, critic …" This original sequence still holds when one turns from critical theory to actual practice in the development of Winters' double career. One need always remember that he developed his particular theories of criticism as a result of certain necessary practices in the creation of his poetry. His first published works were all poems, and his later critical canon is the direct result of his practical poetic experiments….

It is ironic that he has been more widely acclaimed as critic than as poet since his controversial critical career was actually always secondary for him. He hoped people would read his poetry first and thereby better understand his criticism, since that was the order of its genesis; but few ever did…. It is a fact that his poetry was consistently read through the years only by other poets who understood how much might be learned here: Marianne Moore, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Louise Bogan, John Crowe Ransom, John Ciardi, Donald Justice, Thomas Gunn, J. V. Cunningham. (p. 65)

Before the poetry of Winters can be properly examined, it is necessary to review his own conception of the nature and function of poetry. "I believe that a poem is a statement in words about a human experience. In each work there is a content which is rationally apprehensible and each work endeavours to communicate the emotion which is appropriate to the rational apprehension of the subject. The work is thus a judgment, rational and emotional, of the experience—that is, a complete moral judgment in so far as the work is successful…. We regard as greatest those works which deal with experiences which affect human life most profoundly and whose execution is most successful." In every poem Winters ever wrote he literally stood trial for such a judgment, and he expected all serious poets to submit themselves in their work as he did. He could take the slightest subject … and develop it into a full-scale, universalized theme with carefully-wrought images and emotionally-controlled tones.

He sought for his own poetry that style which he was eventually to call "Post-Symbolist"—intellectual, plain, pure, precise, yet highly charged with emotional tension; he acknowledges that few readers will be able to comprehend it fully. After abandoning his early Symbolist-Imagist poetry of the thirties, he analyzed his later style as having been influenced by a disparate group including Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Robert Bridges, T. Sturge Moore, Lecomte de Lisle, Baudelaire, and Valery. He saw himself in a "counter-romantic" mode of writing and sought a final style that could use "abstract words in descriptive context."

For these demands he chose the medium of the short lyric poem—"the most essentially poetic, the most powerful, the most sensitive." This form left no room for the dangerous habit of reverie or associationalism. It could never allow the poetic mind to be casual or contingent, thereby denying its purposive nature in which he believed so completely. Rather, it cultivated the mind's better qualities: its stringent, economical, self-contained, restrictive, ascetic, orderly processes. Poetry from such a mind and spirit would reach its greatest heights, he thought, when its sensory perceptions and its philosophical themes were combined—not as ornamental background or metaphysical abstraction, but in simultaneous visual and intellectual synthesis. His ideal Post-Symbolism combined carefully controlled association with this new image "in which sense perception and concept were simultaneous, in which phrases contain certain image and idea together." These were the requirements for the ideal poems that he sought in his own creative practice. The final marks of the true artist were, for him, constant care and correction for reasoned control.

So Winters in his mature years set himself to the immense task of changing his style and developing it as inspired by the masters of the sixteenth century lyric. (pp. 70-1)

When one examines Winters' poetry to identify its various themes, there is one striking impression. Most of them are involved in one way or another with "moral" attitudes. His themes always reflect his seriousness of purpose, his assurance that he does know right from wrong, and his absolutist dicta. The "moral" quality of his art dictates his choice of poetic themes. He believed that the poet's chief end morally was to exercise judgment so that he could maintain a balance between his understanding of his experiences and his emotional responses to them—avoiding both the primitive and the decadent pitfalls. His system of absolutes centered around a half-dozen themes that recur from his earliest poetry to his latest. In a progressive sequence, half of these concern his own personal experiences and develop in the early poetry first; the other half evolve from them into universals and are more evident in the later poetry. They are all sufficiently interrelated to show the steady growth in this poetic and philosophical mind from groping adolescence to resigned maturity. One of his favorite definitions of poetry—"a spiritual exercise leading toward intelligence"—would make an excellent title for the sequential development of his six main themes. They exemplify the spiritual autobiography which his poetry collections comprise:

1) Perception of the artist's identity in the Universe

2) His appraisal of forces of truth, wisdom, and justice against evil, ignorance, and injustice

3) His humanistic relationship of man to nature: his artifacts versus Nature's laws

4) His development of stoic strength

5) His spiritual search for the ultimate mystery

6) His desire for timelessness

                                              (p. 73)

Throughout the entire Winters canon, a survey of his six themes shows the first to be his apprehension of the artist's self-identity, his perceptions as a "feeling" person. There is good reason to claim much of this early poetry as autobiographical; The Brink of Darkness showed to what lengths this self-awareness might be disastrously carried as the young artist's personality seemed to be gradually invaded by the powers of darkness. His earliest Imagist poetry is full of a young poet's absorption of sense impressions and perceptions for their own sakes; later he begins to worry about their effects, emotional and psychological. He is titillated by the sheer physical ecstasy of "hawk's eyes," "the immobile wind," "the pale mountains," "goats' hooves," "desert sands,"; and the early poetry builds on this "awareness" theme as it is related to its Imagist forms. One of the most beautiful of these simple poems is "Song" in which the form and images reflect the utter simplicity of the theme of artistic sensitivity. But even as early as the second poem in the first book there is the menacing "One Ran Before," where the theme involves more than more physical image…. The foreboding silence of this early poem and the "darkness" of the early short story are similar, audibly and visually, in the development of this theme; as the senses rise to higher and higher pitch, the mind is driven to contemplate a possible hysteria which might surrender to the invasion of unreason unless checked. Instantaneous perceptions of the artist's sudden or arrested movement against the universe's implacable background provide tense images for this theme…. In his later work, Winters was more complex in images and forms, but this same theme remains: the artist's highly attuned sensibilities confront the universe in time and space with a certain hysteria lest it either be lost to him or absorb him completely. The tightly reined later poetry shows the artist finally in control of both theme and form (see "The Vigil" and "The Proof") but with the same old haunting fear of the Imagists' juxtaposition of irrational, disparate associations. The theme suggests the artist caught up in the constant Heraclitean flux of his physical world: glorying in his super powers of perception; reeling in the terror of his romantic seriousness, but clutching firmly for balance to a classical control of his art form. (pp. 74-5)

One of his best mature poems, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," tells of the artist-hero's successful war within himself against such sensuality and epitomizes his spiritual salvation after having confronted nature and experience without evasion or submission. If Winters seems to some critics to have dwelt overlong on the control of such temptation, it is only because he recognized its great attraction for aesthetes like himself. The reader of his Collected Poems always gets the feeling that he was never able to omit completely this constant theme of the awareness of the artist's own private hallucinatory perceptions. It runs like a dark "remembrance of things past" from first to last as the most personal undercurrent in all of his writing. His sharp apprehension of the physical always seems to end in profound disenchantment. Two of his best, "The Longe Nightes When Every Creature …" and "Sonnet" at the end of The Proof, show him in complete control of this theme. His dedicatory poems to Melville and Emily Dickinson evidence his intense kinship with earlier writers using this same theme.

Winters' second theme concerns the artist's awareness of his position in the mundane world around him. This involves his appraisal of the forces of truth, justice, and wisdom as they battle in the here-and-now against evil, injustice, and ignorance. And since this is Winters at his most realistic level, it sometimes results in what critics have scoffed at as merely "occasional" poetry. But when one analyzes the total performance, it is obvious that any "occasion" merely serves the poet as touchstone for a full-scale treatment of man's inhumanity…. There is no impersonal occasionalism about such poems as "Postcard to a Social Muse." Its ponderous title bespeaks the high irony of the situation in which a naïve critic had engaged in an inexact search for wisdom and thus enraged this erudite poet by her shallow claims. Similarly, "On the Death of Senator James Walsh" expresses in formal sonnet cadence the tribute owed by all men to those … "whose purpose and remorseless sight pursued corruption for its evil ways." Another long-titled poem, "To a Woman on Her Defense of Her Brother …," rails against the "villainy of pride in scholarship" and in "cold impartial hate" debates a case in which Winters himself historically engaged. He uses his cool power here to appraise evil and to seek compassionate justice. "To a Military Rifle" condenses the futile problem of war into a fine, lean poem; "The Prince" laments the irony of a political establishment that breeds corruption from power. The most personal of many poems on this theme is his "Hymn to Dispel Hatred at Midnight" in which he seeks to exorcise his own heart's evil thoughts…. There is a tragic force about this poetry as he refuses to abandon the world, but attempts always to subject it to "a lasting proof." He resents each break or defilement of the moral order by general chaos or specific evil, and his poetry predicts doom for our civilization if these continue to pile inexorably on one another. So "occasional" verse becomes universal poetry; and "A Prince" of wisdom and good heart must be found to save us from our fatal drift toward self-destruction. (pp. 76-7)

The third theme—man's humanistic relationships in nature—begins to move away from personal references but not completely deny them. Rather it contrasts the human condition with the vast imponderables of the natural world. It shows the frail human highlighted against the backdrop of nature's vast panorama, contrasts his puny artifacts with nature's laws, and is sometimes reminiscent of the nineteenth century's pathetic fallacy in its longing for nature's kinship. But this poetry often abandons that romantic longing for a thematic irony that is akin to Hardy or Dickinson. This man sees himself in perspective against the flat immensity of cosmic forces and examines his own small niche maintained by scientific technology…. His theme reflects the dignity of man's reason, his commitment to his preservation in spite of his limitations. A poem may take off from any single person, place, or thing; but it will always return to the one great ironic cosmic fact of man's boundaries. Such a Winters poem will usually be a combination of perception first and meditation second, with a highly sharpened focus as the one is juxtaposed against the other. In "Quod Tegit Omnia" one finds the cosmic background given first—"Earth darkens …;" then "… the mind, stored with magnificence, proceeds into the mystery of Time." An early poem in Fire Sequence entitled "The Bitter Moon" opens with traditional Imagist background and ends with the narrator swearing wistfully, yet recognizing his own futility…. In the poetry of his later mode he sets the same theme—"Before Disaster," "By the Road to the Air Base," "At the San Francisco Airport"—where the small artifacts of man take on limited significance as great relativistic ironies are developed. His sharp apprehension of man-made, physical things against the mysterious screen of eternity etches the mind of the reader in such poems as "The Streets" ("I met God in the streetcar but I could not pray to him …") and "Rows of Cold Trees."… (pp. 77-8)

The next theme develops naturally in the sequence toward some search for salvation and reconciliation with maturity. In several poems Winters examines the possibilities of a religious experience—even a Christian experience. He wrote as an absolutist in his late criticism that he felt such an experience was impossible for any thinking man in the modern world; yet a good deal of the poetry hints at an active religious hope. In one of his wilder (and worst) poems, he shrieks "Belief is blind!" His sense of the mystery of the universe runs throughout all of the poems: from the early perceptual ones (such as the hedonistic "Song of Advent") to the sophisticated metaphysical ones of the Collected Poems ("To the Holy Spirit," "A Fragment," and "A Song in Passing"). These last three indicate his stern compulsion for a religious experience…. They seem to represent some sort of milestone in his spiritual development. And yet its source seems to elude him…. It is obvious that he was attracted by the ultimate mystery of the Christian experience, but as an avowed rationalist he could go no farther than the profound knowledge that the mystery exists; and he is never sure that it exists for him. In "To the Holy Spirit," he achieves a kind of reconciliation with the mystery and accepts his own ignorance of it; he finally dismisses the pain and anxiety of his search…. (p. 81)

In the absence of traditional religion, he sought timelessness and perpetuity for his artistic productions—whether in his garden or his poems. His perceptive earliest poems had concerned the timeless present as opposed to the fleeting past; his later poetry repeats this theme as it reaches for the future timelessness that he desired. The theme is often revealed through the use of particular images: the association of stone with the non-living and wood with the living runs throughout many of his poems. As the one is compressed into the other by time, so is timelessness achieved as this poetry is compressed. In "Hill Burial," for instance, such finality is given to the imagery of the last lines. In some of the early poems of Fire Sequence the sheer quality of incantation compresses this theme into a reiterated order. "Quod Tegit Omnia" shows the only true timelessness or renewal to be found in the individual artist's transforming new experiences. If his identity is to be preserved at all, it must be in his art. Hence the poet becomes more alive and "timeless" as his perceptions are more uniquely his own. If Winters were any sort of theist at all, his god would probably be a poet, and a rational one. (p. 82)

Choice of poetic subject matter for Winters might be any interesting thing that was significant enough to evoke the moral concepts that his critical theory demanded. According to this theory, the poet makes a judgment—final and unique—that the subject of his poem will be a strong enough vehicle to carry the more important theme—"the concept"; and it will be a "moral" poem if all the chosen elements are technically able to produce the proper emotion. This leaves the poet a wide latitude for choice of subject matter, but restricts his use of it stringently. (p. 83)

For Winters, the subject—however simple or esoteric—should carry a new perception, not only of the exterior universe, but of human experience as well. It should, in his words, "add to what we have already seen." And the fact that he so often took commonplace subjects "already seen" is evidence that he asked the sensitive reader to take a second look with him at all the important metaphysical perceptions of the artist. He was often accused by superficial critics of using banal, everyday subjects that were beneath the level of his highly abstract themes. This very juxtaposition was often a careful part of Winters' deliberate technique to force the philosophical reader to see the macrocosm around the microcosm. He discussed this technique in his essay entitled "Poetry, Morality, and Criticism."… (pp. 83-4)

The subject matter of Winters' early poetry was suffused with an imagistic ecstasy as the young poet examined every single cause for his own perceptual reactions. The subjects of the first three volumes come mainly from the poet's physical environment; their content was actually a description of feelings and reflections attendant upon a scene, an animal, a plant, a seasonal change, a shift of light. By the time The Journey was published in 1933, he had abandoned these acute perceptual moments with their attendant nervous tensions and begun to concentrate on more earthly subjects of a broader appeal. While much of this earlier poetry was apt to use geographical, historical, or seasonal materials, his mature poetry concentrated on more mundane subjects (family relationships, friends, hobbies, events in his professional life, colleagues, students). The Collected Poems shows him by the end of his career using cosmic, philosophical subjects. This sequence parallels the development of his themes; however it should be noted that these divisions are based only on tendencies, and that a variety of all types actually occurs in all three periods in his career.

Winters' use of geography and history as subject matter varies widely from the early perceptual poems, such as "Aspen's Song" or "Jose's Country," to the later fully orchestrated "Winter Evening" or "Summer Moon." Early in life he developed into an amateur biologist and was widely read in esoteric fields of this subject. No item of the natural world was too small to escape his use in poetry. Some of the most beautiful examples of the early free verse in The Immobile Wind … used desert and mountain animals as subjects for the one-line nature poems. (pp. 84-5)

Perhaps the most important category of his subjects is that which is religious or aesthetic in temper. The stated subject itself may be, as in the early poetry, a well-known place or artifact, but the actual subject is its poignance for the poet that sends him off into a religious perception of higher relevance. Such specific content turns later to abstract subjects: from "Hill Burial" to an individual's death, from "The Invaders" to an individual's solitude, from "The Empty Hills" to his fears. Finally in the most mature poetry, this same sort of transformation becomes the subject of "To the Holy Spirit" and "Time and the Garden." These subjects ultimately symbolize the tension between mortality and immortality, and they represent the peak of his virtuosity. (p. 87)

["Form"] is what makes "great" poetry for Winters. His main themes and subjects all evolve eventually from one concept: his confrontation with confusion. His horror of instability of all sorts—from the purely personal, through the mundane and social, to the cosmic—is the total and constant preoccupation of this man. His biography as "poet-teacher-critic" is dominated by it: his one short story reveals it; and all of his poetry reflects it. He turned gratefully at midpoint in his poetic career to the security and discipline of form in "good verses," and he developed his particular "morality" around it. He chose to clarify confusion by imposing an order on it; that order was form.

The major primary source for the critical development of this theory comes from his fifth essay in Primitivism and Decadence, entitled "The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention." Here he states his basic premise: "The morality of poetry is inextricably involved in its form and is related to the norm of feeling." If the poet makes a wise choice (or is happily intuitive) with a "form" which can best control the theme and evoke the proper emotional feeling toward the subject, then the poem is aesthetically "moral." It is then under the control of the poet's reason. By "form" Winters means primarily verse pattern, meter, and rhythm, though he does include in his theoretical remarks some random comments regarding rhyme and syntax.

His own shift from his early style of free verse to his later formal verse was made because of what he conceived to be the paradoxical fact of greater freedom in traditionally patterned verse…. When Winters first rebelled against the Pound-Eliot associational school of free verse in Primitivism and Decadence, he condemned experimentalism for its incompleteness, its confusion, its ultimate emptiness: a poetry without either proper subject or form, no matter how hallowed its theme. He called for a reiteration of objective substance and the proper forms to preserve it: in other words, he wrote "in defense of reason." (pp. 88-9)

Winters' scrupulous dedication to all aspects of "form" seems to stem from his philosophical desire to set his poetic world in rational order, however fragmented may be the rest of it. He felt himself living in an age "in which the insistence of the contemporary has obscured the vision of the permanent." He saw other poets of his age writing formlessly with overemotional, irregular, rhymeless regularity. He diagnosed their problems as symptomatic of the great artistic malaise that came from social and moral decay. (p. 104)

An analysis of Winters' use of image shows an historical development in his management of its varying levels: image, metaphor, symbol. The imagery in his first book is defined mainly in terms of the landscape of the Southwest, to which he had gone for physical cure. The young poet's images here are recorded with a sense of hallucination; he seems unable to get beyond his own private perceptions, and he fears them as he savors them in a kind of youthful romanticism. In the first poem, "Two Songs of Advent," he records two precise images, one visual and one audible, then warns his readers: "Listen! Listen! for I enter now your thought." All through this volume he seems to wonder whether or not his perceptions are more than his own; and in "The Morning," his exquisite, painful, solitary identity is contained in the image of the directionless insect, with no meaning beyond its beauty…. (p. 106)

Winters' philosophical theory and artistic practice of imagery are best defined by an actual classification of his favorite images. These fall into three categories and seem naturally related to the classifications of his themes and subjects. Together they all reveal the personality behind the poetry. His images come first from the world of nature, of which he was a close observer with highly attuned senses. An ever-abiding interest in science—from botany, through protozoology, to physics—shows in his careful descriptions. The second category includes images that come from the human, mundane world around him: everyday things such as doors, lamps, newspapers, automobiles, houses. Finally, the third category has to do with the visionary imagery of the spirit: those recurring hallucinations that were always returning to him in a certain form. These seem to hold more than merely sensual quality for him, and they are the main source of the metaphysical and philosophical poetry of his later years, though predictable from certain early poems. (pp. 111-12)

[However, his] use of imagery from the everyday world … are used for more than mere local color. Always there is the added human dimension involved in juxtaposition to the image. The poem that uses newspapers also involves the newsboy—as "muezzin"; the puppets become their puppeteers; the narrator who observes the portrait on the wall finds himself reflected back in its image; and the compassionate observer finds his own loneliness increased by the drab, austere exterior of the miners' shacks or the farmers' houses…. In one poem he identifies his title character—"Bill"—with accurate profanity and coarseness; in another he describes "A Miner" with "granite strength"; and he obviously patterns "The Schoolmaster in Spring" on himself…. (pp. 114-15)

In many poems the physical images of the mundane world are elevated to symbols. In "To a Military Rifle," the gun, which is minutely described in all of its physical characteristics, becomes by the end of the poem the symbol of all modern warfare. In "Before Disaster," the contemporary auto becomes the lethal symbol of contemporary civilization. In "On a Portrait of a Scholar," the physical aspects of the single painting eventually become the symbol of all mankind's ephemeral transition from flesh to spirit. (p. 115)

Winters' practice of diction [as defined in In Defense of Reason] shows his choice of language for "what one should say" to be in keeping with the doctrines of his sixteenth century masters and yet highly contemporary. It is an "open" diction in the modern mode, using the everyday patterns of speech of our time ("muscles," "sediment," "traffic," "mineral," etc.). It is unmannered and unidiosyncratic except for a few archaic abbreviations and contractions in his early writings before he was sure of his rhythms. When appropriate, he varies the diction to the subject and its time. His directives in "To a Young Writer," for instance, are couched in the plain language he would have his pupil use in today's businesslike, no-nonsense world ("arrears," "discreet," "knowledge," "discern," "dispel" etc.). On the other hand, the poem "Anacreontic" is full of old words that give a sense of the ancient tradition of dignified classicism from which the substance and the form of the poem comes. ("Tuscan," "Grecian," "swathed," "august," etc.) In both cases the diction has been chosen "morally" to fit content and form with appropriate language.

Choice of diction is also directly related to tone and may well be its determining factor. Although Winters' poems generally use contemporary language, they do not partake of any particularly contemporary idiom or jargon. Their diction is neither innovationist nor tricky; neither is it dated. Generally it has a rather formal tone as befits its high seriousness, but it is never anachronistic. Often it is a direct blunt "masculine" diction uniquely suited to the movement of its plain speech style. In Winters' mature poetry, he works as hard at achieving just the right rational word in this terse, nonfigurative language as he had worked for the exact, colorful imagist word in his earlier verse. (pp. 124-25)

After his emotional experimental early verse (whose tone was mainly terror and uncertainty), his poetry began to take on the tone of authority as it adopted formal patterns. He achieved this mood in a variety of ways: declarative statements, short, cryptic lines, tight stanza patterns, periodic sentences, formal diction, rhetorical questions and climactic exclamations, close rhymes (such as those of the heroic couplet), etc. All of these devices added to the image of the "single physical whole"; and all were set off by the "tone" of pure reason in concept or "motive," so that the total effect was one of dignified verse, ex cathedra. His defense of reason in these later poems was not always successful, though he strove for rationality constantly; sometimes the prevailing temper seems to be a strong stoniness, a bitter stoicism, a resigned endurance that is not actually reasonable at all; but it is authoritative. Critics whom he has antagonized have called it "priggish, and pedagogical"; others, who admire it, go so far as to call it "mystic." Whatever the term, Winters knew he knew. But when he was absolutism, he wrote some of his most successful poetry out of the stoicism to which he turned in his despair. Having passed beyond foreboding, he turned to authority for endurance.

This tone of authority often put off his critics and readers, and Winters was well aware of their resentment. He seems to have intended this tone to emphasize the validity of his judgments, but it frequently impeded or irritated his audience instead. Taken in large doses, it may well grow wearing; but in the individual poem, it most often succeeds in evoking respectful attention from the reader who is attracted by the highly intellectual theme. It is the quality of his tone that establishes his esoteric coterie of readers who would not be interested in lesser matter taken less seriously. (pp. 132-33)

It is a fact that this one element of tone, more than any other, has earned for Winters his most negative criticism. To some he has seemed dogmatic, bigoted, and sullen in his pronouncements. And yet what he actually says is that we know we cannot know. Though a shy man personally, he felt impelled to a public stance of bravado. He is a sort of contemporary Socrates without the grace of the Greek. Yet he speaks with such knowledgeability and authority that the message is often confused by those who mistake tone for them. If no solution is offered to our mortal problems save endurance, at least this is proposed vigorously and with conviction…. (p. 134)

What can be said in final assessment of Winters' poetic practice? It is natural—even tautological—that it follows the tenets of his criticism because his criticism was literally developed as a result of his practice. His final "style" was ultimately determined after years of experimentation with free verse, Imagism, supercharged perception, emotional and psychological orgy. When he finally selected "everything I wish to keep," he printed mainly the poems that were characterized by a deliberate leanness of line, a careful neatness with studied sharpness of expression, and a formal epigrammatic tone of authority. It is a poetry that has been guided by a rigorous and isolated critical intelligence, in almost direct opposition to the patterns of his contemporaries. From his earliest one-line poems to his most complex formal sonnets, he has sought to arrest both intuition and sensory perception in one stroke; then to make the idea and its physical realization coincide with a "moral" accuracy of judgment which makes for truly metaphysical poetry.

Allen Tate first wrote that Winters had as few mistakes to live down as any living poet, but it is true that there are some. It would seem that most of them stem from his effort to be too purely reasonable and too firmly controlled. It is true that this taut technique gave him a firm sense of order and direction, but it has also limited his freedom of movement, for all his sense of variation. Sometimes the poems are too full of abstraction, tiring in their pontifical tone and diction; but these are all faults of the lesser poems, and since even they are full of high gravity, his faults, as such, merely point up the serious, courageous intelligence behind them. As a matter of fact, many of the poems wrestle with this absolutist tendency, and sometimes the didactic treatment robs the meaning of the symbol … or taints the imagery … to unfortunate distortion.

When one looks on the positive side of the Winters achievement, one finds that rare species—a poet who works by limitation rather than by expansion. He does not reach out through deliberate symbolic echoes or ironic parallels of associational techniques. His references are crystal-clear and refined for one particular citation only; hence the meaning of each poem is precise, restricted, and technically controlled. He is in no sense a sterile formalist yearning for the past though he adopts classical forms. His is a completely contemporary conservative poetry whose conservatism is so original and radical that his poems are still not reprinted in any great quantity in anthologies. Some of his best poetry is that which comes out of the world of formal occasions, in touch with the tragic circumstances of our public times as they reveal the personal terrors of our private psyches. This poetry reveals a fine fusion between the personal and the universal. (pp. 136-37)

This is, after all, a poetry of self-preservation: the preservation of the poet's identity by the very act of writing…. His main theme is always the predominant mystery of existence, particularly his own. It is his "style" to be preoccupied with his own unique relation to the universe and to seek his rational position in it. As such he is completely contemporary. In Maule's Curse, Winters wrote: "Poetry is truth and something more. It is the completeness of the poetic experience which makes it valuable." Praised by such brothers in the priesthood of poetry as Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, J. V. Cunningham, and Donald Justice Winters—who always prized poets over critics or scholars—could be justly proud of his poetic accomplishment. (pp. 137-38)

Elizabeth Isaacs, in her An Introduction to the Poetry of Yvor Winters, Swallow Press, 1981, 216 p.