Charters and Poets: Winters, Swallow, Drummond

Abstract

Essay Review Charters and Poets: Winters, Swallow, Drummond The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion. By Grant Webster. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. 381 pages, $22.50.) New and Selected Poems 1938-1978. By Donald Drummond. (Kansas City, Mo.: The Book Makers, 1979. 84 pages, $4.95.) Grant Webster holds that the history of literary criticism is the history of revolution. Authoritative “exemplars,” “followers,” and “codifiers” are replaced in time by radically different “exemplars,” “followers,” and “codi­ fiers.” So runs the thesis of Webster’s impressively documented Republic of Letters. The author’s tough-minded positivism and livelyexposures are indeed persuasive. But criticism as well as politics makes strange bedfellows. Appar­ ently the history of criticism reveals more continuity to me than to Webster. Literary critics (even “revolutionary” exemplars) do not, after all, rise out of the sea on half shells. And surely, even out here in the mythic-minded West, Webster’s report of the New Criticism’sdissolution is an exaggeration, as ishis pronunciamento that “there is no truth by which critical views can be judged to be mistaken.” With delusive impunity, Webster then judges the careers of “New Critics” (Eliot, Tate, Blackmur, Winters, Burke, Wellek, Warren, Krieger) and “New York Intellectuals” (Trilling, Rahv, Kazin, Howe, Wilson). The author appraises them under neat but constricted “charters” inspired by the “para­ digms” in Thomas S. Kuhn’s fashionable Structure of Scientific Revolu­ tions (1962). Pertinent to readers of this journal is the section entitled “Yvor Winters: The Critic as Puritan Narcissist.” Webster correctly notes that Winters lived most of his life in the West and that as editor of Seven Poets of the Pacific and contributor to west coast magazines he was a leader of the regional movement. Providing evidence for the Stanford professor’s bad temper, self-pity, and poor judgment, Webster likens Winters’s maverick behavior to F. R. Leavis’s and his moralistic dogmatism to Irving Babbitt’s. Though Winters lacked the support of Eliot’s Church or Tate’s Old South, Webster (who equates “New Criticism” with “Tory Protestantism”) sneers at what he 310 Western American Literature sees as Winters’s “Tory Mentality.” But if Webster’s scheme is right, why, one wonders, does Winters so often blast his “exemplar,” T. S. Eliot? Webster qualifies many of his assertions, cites exceptions, and acknowledges ambigui­ ties— which strengthens his book but weakens his thesis — but why, again one wonders, does Webster not mention Winters’s regard for Edmund Wilson, someone in the “other” charter? At any rate, Winters has explained that his absolutism — a good poem is short, a good poem is in metrical or measured language, a good poem makes a defensive rational statement about a given human experience — developed from his criticism, not the other way around. I myself suggest that Winters’s absolutism developed (as it seems to develop for most poetcritics ) from his own poetic practice. Of course, Webster easily demonstrates Winters’s profound contempt for Romanticism — that is, for obscurantism, decadence, automatism, mindless experimentation. Though I see more to admire than to condemn in loyal teacher-student ties, Webster feels com­ pelled to charge two of Winters’s former students, Gerald Graff and Don Stanford, with puffing up their mentor’s declining reputation. In his Forms of Discovery (1967), Winters was moved to complain: “It has been a com­ mon practice for years for casual critics to ridicule my students in a paren­ thesis; this has been an easy way to ridicule me.” But not content, Winters fares forth: . . Six or seven of my former students are among the best poets of this century.” Doubtless Winters had in mind J. V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, N. Scott Momaday, Howard Baker, and possibly Edgar Bowers ^nd Donald Drummond. Drummond dedicated to Yvor Winters his fourth book of poetry, The Drawbridge (1962), a National Book Award nominee the year another western poet, William Stafford, won with Traveling Through the Dark. Drummond noted in his preface that he began reading contemporary litera­ ture in high school. “The year was 1931 and we had given up on Silas Marner and A Tale of Two Cities.” Drummond attended the (then...