Dogmatism Without Authority

Extract

This is the study of an anomaly, an inquiry into a paradox. It is an examination of how and why the apparently unexceptionable tenets and standards of one very distinguished literary critic can so often lead him to the most erroneous conclusions.

Yvor Winters is an American, a man who has had a formative influence on a number of young poets in the United States but who, until very recently, was almost unknown in this country save for a few of his stylish and fastidious poems which had appeared in anthologies of American verse. He is a great teacher, a teacher who has been honoured in a fine poem by Thom Gunn who has studied with him; he is also a self-appointed arbiter of taste who is spoken of by his devotees with an almost hushed reverence and awe.

Let us first examine Winters’s credentials, his beliefs. In one very real sense, he is a Schoolman, a scholastic who rates human reason higher than every other faculty or function; but he is a Schoolman who pays homage to no Church, a man who gives allegiance to no established system but who creates his own fearlessly and sometimes defiandy. Winters is not afraid to be either didactic or dogmatic. Indeed, what first strikes the reader of his essays is, above all, the enormous assurance of the writer; there is no timidity, no demurring. The judgments are never tentative, the appraisals never ambiguous. And Winters is as confident and precise in his generalities as when he applies those generalities to particular poems or poets.