Yvor Winters and His Circle - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters

Fri, 22 Dec 2000

The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000)

Edited by R. L. Barth

Poet, teacher, and critic, Yvor Winters was a man of letters in more ways than one. This selection of his personal correspondence spans half a century of literary history and a lifetime of intellectual development and growth. As a record of a serious artist and thinker's grappling with important issues and, sometimes, with his notable friends, the letters offer new and often unexpected insight into the creative mind at work.

The reader who comes to these letters with the standard-issue caricature of Yvor Winters- cantankerous, dogmatic, Calvinistic- will not be disappointed. Like all caricatures, this one contains partial truth, but partial truth is ultimately more destructive than an outright lie. What these letters portray clearly is a complex individual: he can be cantankerous and dogmatic (he was never Calvinistic) but he is also generous in the extreme, egalitarian, sensitive, noble, and downright funny.

Rich with Winters's personal impressions and honest appraisals and addressed to a panoply of poets, writers, and editors, including Marianne Moore, Allen Tate, Lincoln Kirstein, Louise Bogan, and Katherine Anne Porter among many others, The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters offers that unique glimpse of a writer of stature in private conversation with his peers.

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In Defense of Reason

Sun, 01 Mar 1970

In Defense of Reason (1970)
Three Classics of Contemporary Criticism

By Yvor Winters

Introduction by Kenneth Fields

Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works—Primitivism and Decadence, Maule’s Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense—of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing.

The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer—as it is of very man—to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example—the technique of the “whole critic” who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.

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The Function of Criticism

Thu, 01 Jan 1970

The Function of Criticism (1970)
Problems and Exercises

By Yvor Winters

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