"The Marriage" by Yvor Winters

Mea culpa: Sorry about the little skip in the concluding reading-- don't know why that happened. 

Text of the poem here.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-"In Defense of Reason" by Yvor Winters

-"A Winters Tale" on SLEERICKETS

-"The Seriousness of Yvor Winters" by David Yezzi

-"The Absolutist: Yvor Winters" by Jan Schreiber

-"What You Need to Know About Yvor Winters" by James Matthew Wilson (also includes other cool links!)

-"Wisdom and Wilderness" by Dick Davis

-The morality of poetry and evaluative criticism

-The Wintersian legacy
-Yes, he really does sound like that

-The superiority of the heroic couplet

-Flesh, spirit, and sexual-religious vegetables

-Love vs. lust

-Poems that outlast everlasting love

Transcript

Versecraft 6-4: “The Marriage” by Yvor Winters

Immanuel Kant said that reading the philosophy of David Hume is what awoke him from his “dogmatic slumbers,” delivering a shock to his intellect which motivated him to develop the revolutionary philosophical system for which we know him today. Walt Whitman, speaking of the development of his unique poetics, famously remarked that he had been “simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” I cannot claim any comparison with Kant, and I would not even wish to be compared to Whitman, but I can say that I have an analogous Hume or Emerson in my life, and his name is Yvor Winters. If you have been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you will no doubt have heard me mention this remarkable critic and poet. If you have been listening since the beginning, you will already have an inkling of the degree to which I am indebted to him. This podcast might not exist without him, or if it did, it certainly wouldn’t have the content or the priorities that it does. The same is true of my own poetry, to which one might assign the chronological markers B.W. and A.W. 

Here is not the place to give an exhaustive overview of Wintersian thought. Instead, I will do three things. Firstly, I will urge you to read him yourself, starting with his magnus opus of literary criticism, “In Defense of Reason,” which is itself a compendium of smaller articles.  I can truly guarantee you, regardless of how much or how little you sympathize with his views, your own views will be expanded and challenged in invaluable ways by reading him, if only because he takes poetry more seriously than probably anyone who has ever lived. Secondly, I will direct you to my discussion of Winters with Matthew Buckley Smith on his podcast Sleerickets, as well as introductory articles and studies about him written by other passionate admirers of his, including former features David Yezzi, Dick Davis, Jan Schreiber, and James Matthew Wilson, the links to which you can find in the show notes. Finally, I will give you a bullet points version of what I believe are the most important aspects of his thought and legacy. 

We can begin with Winters’ own most basic definition of a poem: “a statement in words about a human experience.” Obviously, this distinction is general enough to encompass many pieces of writing that are not poetry, but it already implies more than we might initially give it credit for. It excludes, for instance, the idea that the poem is itself a mystical experience or an autotelic (that is, self-justifying) object of contemplation. Rather, it is a statement about an experience. It is a means, not an end in itself; a piece of communication that attempts to offer an accurate description or evaluation of something in life. We can already see then how a burden of responsibility, even moral responsibility, attaches itself to the task of the poet. This onus is increased once we get slightly more specific about a poem is: a statement in words about a human experience that makes use of both denotation and connotation to express and evoke an emotional response to the information conveyed. Now we are dealing not only with a piece of writing that is charged to make an accurate statement about human experience, but one which is charged to evince and evoke the emotion most proper to its object. A poem may be beautiful and even moving, but if it possesses these qualities at the steep price of communicating falsehood and promoting irrationality, it has failed. A truly great poem is one which is beautiful and moving, but also true and wise. The ability of a poem to communicate truth and wisdom with aesthetic and emotional power is its value for civilization. All else is dangerous, self-indulgent illusion. Far from idiosyncratic and outlandish, this view is merely an elucidation and expansion of the traditional, classical position—that a poem is charged to teach and please. 

This position only seems outlandish to those who have been raised to believe, without any argumentative support, that poetry is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and that powerful feelings are somehow both their own justification and enough justification for verbal expression, which should itself be deranged to heighten the emotion further. I myself was a naïve Romantic of this stripe before reading Winters, and had never even considered the possibility that poetry might have a moral dimension, a yoke of responsibility. Far from discouraging or enraging me, the fire of Winters’ rhetoric lit a sympathetic fire within me and filled me with inspiration. Poetry, which had come to take a more and more central place in my life, was not some idle pastime or extravagant self-indulgence. It was a tool of civilization which demanded rigorous thought and craft, and vigorous ambition. Though it would be a gross exaggeration to say, with Shelley, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world— a statement which in our postmodern, prosaic society seems especially grotesque— it is true that poets have the potential to be spokespeople for humanity, whose words may shape the identities and philosophies of generations, as can be seen in the case of Homer, Vyasa, the Psalmist, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and countless others. Even on a much smaller scale, a poet may be a guiding light for a select group of readers, and that is a virtuous thing. Winters taught me not just that poetry matters, but how it can matter. He is also one of the only modern critics with the spine to say: “Poet X is objectively better than Poet Y, here are the reasons.” A fact I appreciate immensely, even when I disagree with him. He is one of the greatest practitioners of that rare discipline, evaluative criticism, in all of civilized letters. 

I will now go ahead and steal a very helpful list made by Jan Schreiber of the core tenets of Wintersianism, which runs as follows:

1.     That the writing of poetry is one of the highest endeavors to which a person can aspire.

2.     That the process of poetic composition engages the whole person—intellect and emotion.

3.     That poems need to be understandable, to have a rational core.

4.     That the progression of ideas in a poem should be governed by rational principles, not private meanings or arbitrary personal associations.

5.     That sharp and incisive language, close observation, and fresh expression are always desirable, but verbal ingenuity or elaborate rhetorical figuration for its own sake is suspect.

6.     That the aim of every poem is, in relation to the experience it deals with, to present a complete understanding of that experience, intellectual and emotional, to the extent of the poet’s powers.

7.     That the traditional devices of meter and rime offer the best way of concentrating language and emotion to make a poem both forceful and memorable.

8.     That no poem—and no poet—should be accepted without question, but each should be scrutinized and required to satisfy the reader’s critical intelligence.

It remains to say a few words on Winters’ legacy, which is manifold. To begin with, he was a renowned and charismatic teacher who had a great deal of success impacting his talented students with his own point of view. I have previously covered the five brilliant poets whom I believe best exemplify and extend the Wintersian tradition, and who are proof that that a foundation in Wintersian poetics produced excellent poetry: Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, Janet Lewis, and Helen Pinkerton. However, Winters also taught and had a profound effect upon many other prominent poets, including Donald Justice, Donald Hall, N. Scott Momaday, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Robert Mezey, and Robert Hass, among others. Through Edgar Bowers, his influence reached poets like Dick Davis and Joshua Mehigan; through J.V. Cunningham, poets like Timothy Steele and Jan Schreiber. Through Helen Pinkerton, James Matthew Wilson and other Catholic poets. It is only a slight simplification to say that the American New Formalist movement was founded on two pillars: an East Coast pillar of academic formalists like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, and John Hollander, and a West Coast pillar, the Wintersians. 

Winters also had a considerable influence on the poetic canon. For one thing, he rediscovered and promoted valuable poets like Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Jones Very, Adelaide Crapsey, and Sturge Moore, and enhanced the reputations of known poets like Robert Bridges and Paul Valery. For another, he convincingly argued in what is probably his single most famous essay, entitled “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” that the superior strain of English Renaissance lyric was not the flowery Petrarchan tradition of Sidney and Spenser, but the native plain style tradition of poets like George Gascoigne, Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the later Fulke Greville. This exact argument was later taken up by a fervent admirer of Winters, the great novelist John Williams, in his influential anthology of English Renaissance Poetry. 

      Finally, Winters has coined at least two terms that have entered the larger critical lexicon: the term “post-symbolist poem,” which I’ve defined ad nauseam, so I won’t do it again here, and “the imitative fallacy,” the notion that to use formal incoherence or fragmentation to express an incoherence or fragmented state of mind is never artistically justified. 

Arthur Yvor Winters, who lived from 1900 to 1968, was born and raised in Chicago, where he met and befriended Harriett Monroe, and was thus able to become a frequent early contributor to Poetry Magazine. Partway through his undergrad at the University of Chicago, he became stricken with tuberculosis, and was sent to a sanitarium in Santa Fe for two years to recover. There, he was eventually joined by his old friend from Chicago, Janet Lewis, who was also afflicted. The two would fall in love, and eventually marry. The New Mexican setting affected both of them profoundly. Both developed a fascination with Native American religion and poetry, and an affinity for the desert landscape, elements which Winters would fuse with his then Imagist preoccupations to form his initial poetic style and sensibility, which fused minimalist precision of natural detail with a kind of pantheist mysticism. After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees simultaneously at the University of Colorado, Winters taught briefly at the University of Idaho before beginning his doctorate at Stanford University in Palo Alto, where he would stay for the rest of his life. 

It was at Stanford, around the year 1930, that Winters made his dramatic turn from Imagist mystic to neoclassical moralist. It is not clear exactly why or how this happened, but there were probably several coalescing factors. First and foremost was the rigorous study of Renaissance poets that he undertook at Stanford, which convinced him of the superiority of the logical structure and plain style of those he most admired. Second was the trauma and grief caused by the suicide of Hart Crane, who had been a close friend of Winters’, and whom Winters considered an emblem of neoromantic excess. Thirdly, the bleak conditions of the rural poor that Winters encountered in Idaho disturbed him greatly, and led him to conceive of nature as a hostile, chaotic force which was always threatening to encroach upon and consume the human psyche. The human psyche, in response, was obligated to fortify itself with moral reason and dedicate itself to building order in the world as a kind of fortress against insanity. This generation of an Apollonian imperative out of a borderline Gnostic worldview became Winters’ signature theme, which shows up again and again in his work. 

Once he graduated from Stanford, Winters stayed on as a professor, and it was from this perch on the West coast that he to build up his critical and pedagogical legacy, establishing himself as the “sage of Palo Alto:” equally worshipped, derided, and wondered at by students and faculty alike. Despite his condemnation of self-destructive hedonism, Winters was an incorrigible pipe smoker, a habit which led to his early death from throat cancer at the age of 67. In the words of Hamlet: “He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.” 

Our poem for today, “The Marriage,” is one of my favorites by Winters, and probably my favorite poem on the marital subject, along with Dick Davis’s “Marriage As A Problem Of Universals.” It goes like this: 

The Marriage

Incarnate for our marriage you appeared,

Flesh living in the spirit and endeared

By minor graces and slow sensual change. 

Through every nerve we made our spirits range.

We fed our minds on every mortal thing:

The lacy fronds of carrots in the spring,

Their flesh sweet on the tongue, the salty wine

From bitter grapes, which gathered through the vine

The mineral drouth of autumn concentrate,

Wild spring in dream escaping, the debate

Of flesh and spirit on those vernal nights,

Its resolution in naïve delights,

The young kids bleating softly in the rain—

All this to pass, not to return again.

And when I found your flesh did not resist,

It was the living spirit that I kissed,

It was the spirit’s change in which I lay:

Yea, mind in mind we waited for the day.

When flesh shall fall away, and, falling, stand

Wrinkling with shadow over face and hand,

Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust

And know you as a faithful vestige must.

And in commemoration of our lust,

May our heirs seal us in a single urn,

A single spirit never to return.

Just for fun, I’m going to read the first fourteen lines again, this time in my best Yvor Winters impression. 

Appropriately enough, this poem about a coupling is cast in heroic couplets. Despite his ideological coldness toward most 18th century poetry, Winters believed the heroic couplet was, in its more open variations, the greatest and most versatile of poetic forms, capable of modulating between the sinuousness of stichic blank verse and the musicality of tightly chimed stanzas. Winters used the heroic couplet for several of his greatest poems, and he has a claim to being the 20th century master of the form. Here, we can see how he uses subtle enjambment to avoid Popean pomp and glide the poem along, but always leaving the lines independent enough from one another that their rhymes retain a soft, satisfying chime. We should also note that lines 21 through 23 constitute a triplet, a subtle sonic marker that the poem is drawing to a close.

The most superficially startling thing about Winters’ poetry is how old school it sounds for its time, yet despite that, never coming across as archaic. There were other formalists in the mid-20th century of course, but none, not even Hecht, had the unabashed devotion to strict formal polish and the restrained, unfashionably dignified voice that Winters had. In terms of theme and diction however Winters is always modern enough, and thereby demonstrated that modern poets need not resort to avant garde radicalism or demotic populism to distinguish themselves from their predecessors. His meter is as immaculate as you would expect to find in the Renaissance— every potential anapest can be elided, and his only substitutions are first foot trochees. The one exception to this is in line 14: “all this to pass, not to return again,” which has a trochee in the third position to emphasize the finality of the negation. This slight variation in the music also marks the primary shift in this stichic poem, that from romance to consummation and death. 

Let’s now go back and read the first fourteen lines again. In a normal voice this time: 

Incarnate for our marriage you appeared,

Flesh living in the spirit and endeared

By minor graces and slow sensual change. 

Through every nerve we made our spirits range.

We fed our minds on every mortal thing:

The lacy fronds of carrots in the spring,

Their flesh sweet on the tongue, the salty wine

From bitter grapes, which gathered through the vine

The mineral drouth of autumn concentrate,

Wild spring in dream escaping, the debate

Of flesh and spirit on those vernal nights,

Its resolution in naïve delights,

The young kids bleating softly in the rain—

All this to pass, not to return again.

            Immediately, the use of the word “incarnate” adds a religious valence to the poem and tells us that he thinks of his wife not merely as a person but as an embodied spirit. This is confirmed in line two by the phrase “flesh living in the spirit,” but this phrase also suggests both a body that lives for spiritual things and living in sync with a larger spirit, the holy spirit. Winters could never bring himself to be a Christian, but he identified himself as a kind of secular Thomist and believed in a divine presence as the foundation of metaphysics and ethics, a transcendent holy spirit that he may or may not have identified with the great spirit of Native American religion. His beloved is endeared to him by minor graces, the small details of haecceity which make us love someone, and “slow sensual change,” the intimacy between two people that deepens over time. These small graces, as well as change itself, are virtues which are only possible to a spirit which is embodied.  While Winters is making clear the importance with which he views his beloved’s soul, he also embraces her physical presence as essential to his love for her. 

            Winters then describes the delightful phenomenon that when we are in love, our senses are not only heightened toward the one we love, but toward the whole world, and that this sensuousness is inseparable from a sense of spiritual elation. In every line, Winters is describing a marriage not only of two people, but of body and soul. “Through ever nerve we made our spirits range./ We fed our minds on every mortal thing.” The phrase “mortal thing” is not only touching because it suggests that joy is always tinged with sorrow, that appreciation of life goes hand in hand with a recognition of temporality, but also because we recall that Arthur and Janet’s relationship developed in a sanatorium, where thoughts of death were never far away. 

            Religious connotations heighten in the next line: “the lacy fronds of carrots in the spring.” The word “fronds” probably makes us think of palm fronds, and fronds in the spring suggest Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus paraded into Jerusalem, a parallel to love entering the heart or soul entering the body. As in a metaphysical poem, the next line mischievously blends the holy and the carnal: “their flesh sweet on the tongue, the salty wine.” While undoubtedly sexual, the reference of flesh and wine also strongly suggests communion, which Winters sees a secular proxy for in his communion with his beloved. The striking image of “salty wine” calls to mind not only blood but sweat and tears, evocative of the labor, sexual athleticism, suffering, and overwhelming feelings that go into making a relationship. The “bitter grapes,” a rather Aesopian image, receive their bitterness from an autumnal process, yet another reference to the bitterness of death-consciousness when in the throes of pleasure. Going back to Spring, he speaks of “the debate of flesh and spirit on those vernal nights.” Knowing Arthur and Janet, I could well believe they would diversify their lover’s talk with metaphysical debates, but I can also imagine the debate as occurring within Winters himself, before he resolves, or succumbs, to the “naïve delights” of the senses. Given the seasonal theme here, one wonders if Winters was tempted to play on his own name, but thought better of it. The poem is already rather John Donne-like, and Winters probably felt it was too well Donne to cook it further. 

            Winters juxtaposes indulgence in naïve delights with one of the tenderest images in his work: “the young kids bleating softly in the rain.” This may refer to literal baby goats, but of course it also refers to the lovers themselves, love-struck kids in wonder at life. It may also hint at the children they would later make together. Winters ends this section with the wistful: “all this to pass, not to return again.” Even if our marriages are successful, as Winters’ certainly was, there is always something irrecoverable about the feeling of first love, especially in youth. Love may only deepen and grow with time, but it is a different love, and one may fondly miss the original love just as one misses the babies one’s children once were. 

            Let’s now go back and read the poem again, this time all the way through:

Incarnate for our marriage you appeared,

Flesh living in the spirit and endeared

By minor graces and slow sensual change. 

Through every nerve we made our spirits range.

We fed our minds on every mortal thing:

The lacy fronds of carrots in the spring,

Their flesh sweet on the tongue, the salty wine

From bitter grapes, which gathered through the vine

The mineral drouth of autumn concentrate,

Wild spring in dream escaping, the debate

Of flesh and spirit on those vernal nights,

Its resolution in naïve delights,

The young kids bleating softly in the rain—

All this to pass, not to return again.

And when I found your flesh did not resist,

It was the living spirit that I kissed,

It was the spirit’s change in which I lay:

Yea, mind in mind we waited for the day.

When flesh shall fall away, and, falling, stand

Wrinkling with shadow over face and hand,

Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust

And know you as a faithful vestige must.

And in commemoration of our lust,

May our heirs seal us in a single urn,

A single spirit never to return.

Lines 15 and 16 are as beautifully tender as what came before. By saying that his beloved’s flesh “did not resist,” Winters evokes the gentle meekness of his beloved, as well as his own punctilious awareness of consent. Her flesh does not only not resist his advances, it also does not resist the advance of touch itself, permeable to the point where he is able to pass through her flesh, and “it was the living spirit that I kissed.” Having previously spoken of the changes of the flesh, Winters now recognizes “it was the spirit’s change in which I lay.” A communion of souls has been achieved, and both have been spiritually transformed. They are almost telepathically “mind in mind,” as the simultaneously consider spending their lives together, and, by extension, waiting for their deaths together. 

            Having spent the entire poem contrasting flesh and spirit, Winters now contemplates the time “when flesh shall fall away,” not so much in a mystical as in a literal aging sense, “wrinkling with shadow over face and hand.” These lines gain an additional poignancy if we know that Winters, in his last days, did indeed exchange a portly figure for an emaciated one as he struggled with cancer. In the face of this decrepitude, he says a line which I am tempted to put in my own wedding vows: “Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust.” He then rhymes this with an intriguing line: “and in commemoration of our lust.” Having spent the whole poem outlining a relationship both of the flesh and spirit, it is mildly shocking to encounter this word so associated with objectified sexuality. I suspect that Winters uses “lust” rather than “love” in order to emphasize the sheer force of desire and bonding which he is attempting to describe, lust as a cosmic, Empedoclean force, like magnetism. Love can mean many things, but lust is a more powerful, unambiguous signifier of attraction, which in this case is both physical and spiritual. 

            Winters ends the poem with a couplet which needs no explanation: “May our heirs seal us in a single urn/a single spirit never to return.” Here, not only the end rhyme but the anaphora on “single” create a satisfyingly symmetrical ending. Having spent so much time weaving flesh and spirit together in this quasi-religious poem, Winters leaves no doubt at the end that he still believes not only flesh but spirit is mortal. Finally, we might, if we choose, detect a pun in the word “heirs.” If we read it as a-i-r-s, which can be an old fashioned term for songs, we could read this line as: “May our poems seal us in a single urn.” Both Winters and his wife were poets of course, and this line suggests: “May the poems which we write for each other sanctify and memorialize our love, and may they outlast the mortality of both flesh and spirit.” If this podcast is any indication, they certainly have. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

The Marriage

Incarnate for our marriage you appeared,

Flesh living in the spirit and endeared

By minor graces and slow sensual change. 

Through every nerve we made our spirits range.

We fed our minds on every mortal thing:

The lacy fronds of carrots in the spring,

Their flesh sweet on the tongue, the salty wine

From bitter grapes, which gathered through the vine

The mineral drouth of autumn concentrate,

Wild spring in dream escaping, the debate

Of flesh and spirit on those vernal nights,

Its resolution in naïve delights,

The young kids bleating softly in the rain—

All this to pass, not to return again.

And when I found your flesh did not resist,

It was the living spirit that I kissed,

It was the spirit’s change in which I lay:

Yea, mind in mind we waited for the day.

When flesh shall fall away, and, falling, stand

Wrinkling with shadow over face and hand,

Still I shall meet you on the verge of dust

And know you as a faithful vestige must.

And in commemoration of our lust,

May our heirs seal us in a single urn,

A single spirit never to return.