Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters 1900-1968, American poet and critic, b. Chicago, educated at the Univ. of Chicago, Univ. of Colorado (M.A., 1925), and Stanford (Ph.D., 1934). From 1928 until his death he was a member of the English department of Stanford. His controversial criticism was based on the thesis that a work of art should be "an act of moral judgment." In Defense of Reason (1947), his major critical work, is a collection of three earlier studies— Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Maule's Curse (1938), and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943). His poetry, ranging in mood from the austere to the lyrical, appears in Collected Poems (1952) and The Early Poems of Yvor Winters (1966).

Bibliography: See his Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (1967) and The Uncollected Essays and Reviews of Yvor Winters (1973).

Winters, (Arthur) Yvor (1900–68), American poet and critic, whose own poems exemplify his critical doctrine of classicism, restraint, moral judgement, and ‘cold certitude’. (See New Criticism.) His In Defense of Reason (1947) contains three earlier works, Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Maule's Curse (1938), and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), all of which attack obscurantism and Romanticism.

Winters, [Arthur] Yvor (1900–1968), born in Chicago, was a member of the Department of English, Stanford University, from 1928. There he edited The Gyroscope (1929–31), and was the Western editor of Hound and Horn (1932–34). His poetry, published in The Immobile Wind (1921), The Magpie's Shadow (1922), and The Bare Hills (1927)—all collected in The Early Poems (1966)—The Proof (1930), The Journey (1931), Before Disaster (1934), Poems (1940), and The Giant Weapon (1943), is marked by those qualities he asks for as a critic: classical order, dignity, restraint, and moral judgment. His Collected Poems (1952) was revised and enlarged (1960) and at that time was awarded a Bollingen Prize. His critical works are Primitivism and Decadence (1937), showing the obscurity of modern American poetry as the result of romanticism qualified by certain aspects of American history, Maule's Curse (1938), on obscurantism in 19th‐century American authors, and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), on 20th‐century poets and critics—all three books collected in In Defense of Reason (1947); Edwin Arlington Robinson (1946); The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (1957); Forms of Discovery (1967); and Uncollected Essays (1973). He was married to Janet Lewis.