The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters.(Review)

R. L. Barth, editor The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 423 pages, $49.95.

No one aware of Yvor Winters's reputation for brawling literary criticism will be taken aback by his letters' ability to inflict a blow. Readers unfamiliar with his deadpan, gravel-voiced style, however, may be surprised to discover its wry and often generous good humor. Regularly salting his letters with levity as well as curt judgments, Winters maintained robust exchanges with Allen Tate, Lincoln Kirstein, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Harriet Monroe, R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, Louise Bogan, and Theodore Roethke, among others. Winters, who taught at Stanford for most of his career, might have sequestered himself in "Castle Adamant on the Pacific" (in Richard Howard's phrase), but, as his letters attest, in his influence and associations he remained very near the center of American poetry.

With Monroe, the founder of Poetry, he developed a precocious candor. Not yet twenty, Winters wrote that he feared her magazine was "sliding rather too rapidly, and [would] soon be, as the saying goes, among the dogs." Winters accused her of printing "things that are absolutely dull and without excuse and abominably done." Despite Winters's rebarbative tone, Monroe continued to correspond with him and kept his poems and essays appearing in her pages. "I have known the old woman for fourteen years," he later wrote to Linclon Kirstein, who made Winters western editor of his landmark journal, Hound & Horn, "and fought with her steadily and until fairly recently amicably." The extent to which Monroe responded in kind remains uncertain; Winters routinely destroyed the letters he received, and he even encouraged others such as Tate to do the same with those he wrote to them. This ample collection provides the measure of their noncompliance.

The greatest epistolary exchange of Winters's career--the one with Crane--constitutes the greatest irony as well: Winters sedulously preserved Crane's letters, while his, presumably in Crane's possession, were lost or destroyed. As a result there is no vestige of the correspondance in this collection. But that theirs was one of the essential dialogues in modern poetry is clear from Crane's letters, which appear in Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, by Thomas Parkinson (1978). Parkinson follows their initial friendship and eventual falling-out, while attempting to mortar up the hole left by Winters's lost letters. Relying on contemporaneous correspondence from Winters to Allen Tate, a common friend, Parkinson fills in what gaps he can, and the result is well worth reading.

Winters's dispatches are striking in ...