Yvor Winters Quotes & Sayings

The rain of matter upon sense
Destroys me momently. The score:
There comes what will come. — Yvor Winters

By practice and conviction formed, With ancient stubbornness ingrained, Although her body clung and swarmed, My own identity remained. — Yvor Winters

Reptilian green the wrinkled throat,
Green as a bough of yew the beard;
He bent his head, and so I smote — Yvor Winters

The land is numb. It stands beneath the feet, and one may come Walking securely, till the sea extends Its limber margin, and precision ends. — Yvor Winters

The poet's first job of work is to put bread on the table. — Yvor Winters

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage — Yvor Winters

And when I found your flesh did not resist,
It was the living spirit that I kissed. — Yvor Winters

Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education — Yvor Winters

And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray. — Yvor Winters

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 for 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 in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything. — Yvor Winters

The passion to condense from book to book
Unbroken wisdom in a single look,
Though we know well that when this fix the head,
The mind's immortal, but the man is dead. — Yvor Winters

Even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other ... which comes back to reading poetry aloud ... — Yvor Winters

Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity. — Yvor Winters

What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling A poem in the first place should offer us a new perception..bringing into being a new experience Verse is more valuable than prose for its rhythms are faster and more highly organised and lead to greater compexity. — Yvor Winters