The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters — (1999)

By Yvor Winters
Edited by R. L. Barth

With an introduction by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi

“Winters’s poems have compassion and are made of iron ... Dimwits have called him a conservative. He is the kind of conservative who was so original and radical that ... neither the avant-garde nor the vulgar had an eye for him.”

Robert Lowell

“Yvor Winters is a master obscured by history.”

Donald Justice

“Yvor Winters… conducted a poetic revolution all his own. His writing has clarity, elegance, and power.”

Allen Tate

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. His impact on mid- to late-twentieth-century poetry is profound. This stems in large part from his own poetry, which was a reflection of his critical thinking about poetry, and which underwent substantive changes over his career as a poet. His collected poems won the Bollingen Prize in 1960.

This retrospective of one hundred poems, edited by the poet and publisher R. L. Barth, is compiled from Winters's published and unpublished work and features an introductory overview of his life and career by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, a former student of Winters's and a distinguished scholar of American literature.