A brief summary upon finishing Winters' book, In Defense of Reason, a collection of essays on American poetry and the poetic tradition:
Winters is an absolutist. He believes in the existence of absolute truths and values. We can’t have direct knowledge of these truths, and our judgments about them are never final, but they exist, and Winters believes that “it is the duty of every man and of every society to endeavor as far as may be to approximate them.”
Such judgments constitute a moral act. That is, there is a right and wrong way in going about understanding truth. We use our faculties of reason and intuition to guide us in the right direction, toward what Winters calls “the greatest happiness which the accidents of life permit: that is, toward the fullest realization of our nature, in the Aristotelian or Thomistic sense.”
He applies this philosophy to literature, too. Art, he says, is moral.
“According to my view, the artistic process is one of moral evaluation of human experience, by means of a technique which renders possible an evaluation more precise than any other. The poet tries to understand his experience in rational terms, to state his understanding, and simultaneously to state, by means of the feelings which we attach to words, the kind and degree of emotion that should properly be motivated by this understanding. The artistic result differs from the crude experience mainly in its refinement of judgment.”
Likewise, our judgments about a poem are moral judgments, and we can come to an understanding about what makes a poem good and what makes it bad.
A proper critique, according to Winters, involves an evaluation of four things:
(1) The historical or biographical knowledge needed to understand “the mind and method of the writer”
(2) The literary theories under which the author is working
(3) The paraphrasable content, or what Winters calls the “motive” of the poem
(4) And the “feeling motivated—that is, the details of style, as seen in language and technique.”
Winters’ critique of modern poetry (he focuses on the American experimental poetry of his time, particularly Crane, Eliot, Pound, Stevens) is that by and large it suffers from a combination of mystical thinking, which he traces back to Puritan New England through such writers as Emerson and Henry Adams, as well as a theory of literature inherited from the Romantics that views emotional expression as the ultimate goal of poetry.
Both of these traditions lead to confusion in writing and ultimately harm the quality of their authors’ work. Although Winters readily admits that many of the writers are talented. He says Stevens’ "Sunday Morning” is probably the best poem of the 20th century. He calls Crane a genius. All of them, he admits, have created exceptional poetry. All except for Pound. His beef with Pound is an amusing undercurrent throughout the essays.
Their work, he argues, is ultimately limited by the ideas and theories they operate under. Winters’ evaluation of the tradition these writers inherited is that it’s immoral (or amoral) and therefore deficient.
“Emerson eliminated the need of moral conviction and of moral understanding alike, by promulgating the allied doctrines of equivalence and of inevitable virtue.”
Speaking of Henry Adams: “he propounded the aesthetic theory that modern art must be confused to express confusion.”
Winters says this kind of thinking leads to “the imitative fallacy of form,” and that much of modern poetry works under this deficient assumption.
“The attempt to express a state of uncertainty by uncertainty of expression; whereas the sound procedure would be to make a lucid and controlled statement regarding the condition of uncertainty, a procedure, however, which would require that the poet understand the nature of uncertainty, not that he be uncertain.”
The Romantic insistence that literature “is mainly or even purely an emotional experience” likewise neglects the rational faculty at the expense of understanding. “If we are bound to express our emotions without understanding them, we obviously have no way of judging or controlling them, but must take them as they come.”
His conclusion is that a poetry that tends toward the formless is a mistake.
“To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification of bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to ‘express’ the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one’s form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and is so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything.”
What are your thoughts?
Will take some time to think this over.
My first observation is that he is contrary to Formalism and New Criticism, and closer to Historicism—which I like.
'His conclusion is that a poetry that tends toward the formless is a mistake.'
I'm inclined to agree, but then I would...
I would say the greatest criticism of the tendency towards formlessness - necessary though that experiment was - is where it has got us today.
Ironic though (and very telling) that the poets he singles out (e.g. Stevens, who I love) look positively *ornate* by today's standards!