Yvor Winters Quotes

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

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

I. IN WINTER

Myself
Pale mornings, and
I rise.

Still Morning
Snow air--my fingers curl.

Awakening
New snow, O pine of dawn!

Winter Echo
Thin air! My mind is gone.

The Hunter
Run! In the magpie's shadow.

No Being
I, bent. Thin nights receding.


II. IN SPRING

Spring
I walk out the world's door.

May
Oh, evening in my hair!

Spring Rain
My doorframe smells of leaves.

Song
Why should I stop
for spring?


III. IN SUMMER AND AUTUMN

Sunrise
Pale bees! O whither now?

Fields
I did not pick
a flower.

At Evening
Like leaves my feet passed by.

Cool Nights
At night bare feet on flowers!

Sleep
Like winds my eyelids close.

The Aspen's Song
The summer holds me here.

The Walker
In dream my feet are still.

Blue Mountains
A deer walks that mountain.

God of Roads
I, peregrine of noon.

September
Faint gold! O think not here.

A Lady
She's sun on autumn leaves.

Alone
I saw day's shadow strike.

A Deer
The trees rose in the dawn.

Man in Desert
His feet run as eyes blink.

Desert
The tented autumn, gone!

The End

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

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

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.

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

At the San Francisco Airport"

To my daughter, 1954

This is the terminal: the light
Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
The metal glitters, deep and bright.
Great planes are waiting in the yard -
They are already in the night.

And you are here beside me, small,
Contained and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall -
Yet going whither you are bent.
I am the past, and that is all.

But you and I in part are one:
The frightened brain, the nervous will,
The knowledge of what must be done,
The passion to acquire the skill
To face that which you dare not shun.

The rain of matter upon sense
Destroys me momently. The score:
There comes what will come. The expense
Is what one thought, and something more -
One's being and intelligence.

This is the terminal, the break.
Beyond this point, on lines of air,
You take the way that you must take;
And I remain in light and stare -
In light, and nothing else, awake.

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.