Yvor Winters facts for kids

Arthur Yvor Winters (born October 17, 1900, died January 25, 1968) was an American poet and a literary critic. This means he wrote poems and also wrote about other people's writing.

About Yvor Winters' Life

Yvor Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1900. He lived there until 1919, except for short visits to Seattle and Pasadena. He went to the University of Chicago for about a year. There, he met other writers like Glenway Wescott and Janet Lewis, who later became his wife.

In 1918, he became sick with tuberculosis, a lung illness. He spent two years getting better in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While he was recovering, he wrote and published some of his first poems. After leaving the hospital, he taught in high schools in mining towns nearby.

In 1923, Winters published one of his first essays about writing, called "Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image." He then went to the University of Colorado and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1925.

In 1926, Winters married Janet Lewis, who was also a poet and novelist. She was also from Chicago and had also been sick with tuberculosis. After leaving Colorado, he taught at the University of Idaho. Then, he started his PhD program at Stanford University. He stayed at Stanford after getting his PhD in 1934. He became a professor in the English department and lived in Los Altos for the rest of his life.

He stopped teaching at Stanford in 1966 and passed away two years later from throat cancer. Many famous poets were his students, including Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. He also helped guide other writers like Donald Justice.

Winters also helped edit literary magazines. He worked on Gyroscope with his wife from 1929 to 1931. He also edited Hound & Horn from 1932 to 1934. In 1961, he won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his book Collected Poems.

Winters and Modern Poetry

Winters's early poems appeared in new, experimental magazines. These magazines also featured writers like James Joyce. His early poems were written in a "modernist" style. This style was influenced by Native American poetry and a movement called Imagism. Imagism focused on clear, sharp images in poetry.

Winters wrote an essay called "The Testament of a Stone" about his ideas on poetry during this time. Even though he started by admiring Imagist poets, he later changed his mind. By the late 1920s, he developed a new style of poetry. Around 1930, he moved away from modernism. He started writing in a more traditional style, known for being clear and having formal rhyme and rhythm. Most of his later poems used a specific form called accentual-syllabic verse.

Winters as a Critic

Yvor Winters was a literary critic, meaning he wrote about and judged other people's literature. He had a strong opinion about what made good writing. He believed that a poem should give readers a "new perception." This meant it should help them see or understand something in a new way.

He often disagreed with Romanticism, especially in American writing. He strongly criticized Ralph Waldo Emerson, a famous American writer. Winters was sometimes linked to a group of critics called the New Criticism. He even gave the poet Wallace Stevens the nickname "the cool master."

Winters is well known for his idea against the "fallacy of imitative form." This means he believed that if a poem is about something messy or falling apart, the poem itself should not be messy or fall apart. He thought that good poetry should bring order to feelings, not just copy them. He said that letting a poem become formless just to express a feeling of chaos is not good poetry. Instead, poetic form helps to control and organize feelings.

See also

In Spanish: Yvor Winters para niños