“Edited with scrupulous attention not only to detail but also to the overall impression left by the volume. The Selected Letters is a virtual autobiography of Yvor Winters.”
The Providence Sunday Journal
“Thank you for your very pleasant letter and for your admiration of my work. The postage stamp was quite unnecessary. Writing my admirers will never seriously affect my income.”
Yvor Winters
“With the current renewal of interest in formalist poetry, it may well be that Winters legacy will prove more congenial to the present century than to the one just past… [T]he clarity and balance that became dogma for this poet and text for his followers may ultimately be seen as less a detour from the main highway of literary history than as an inviting alternate route.”
Chronicles
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.
Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a poet, critic, and Stanford University professor of English literature. He won the Bollingen Prize in 1961. More info →
R. L. Barth is the author of A Soldier's Time, Abandon Hope, and, most recently, First Morning, Last Night. As Robert L. Barth he is a publisher of chapbooks. More info →
Retail price:
$49.95 ·
Save 20% ($39.96)
US and Canada only
Share 
To request instructor exam/desk copies, email Jeff Kallet at kallet@ohio.edu.
To request media review copies, email Laura Andre at andrel@ohio.edu.
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Hardcover
978-0-8040-1031-3
Retail price: $49.95,
S.
Release date: December 2000
490 pages
Rights: World
Toward the Winter Solstice
New Poems
By Timothy Steele
Since the appearance of Timothy Steele’s first collection of poems in 1979, growing numbers of readers and critics have recognized him as one of the best and most significant poets of his generation. Widely credited with anticipating and encouraging the revival of poetry in traditional form, Steele has produced a body of work praised for its technical accomplishment, its intellectual breadth, and its emotional energy.Toward
The Destructive Element
New and Selected Poems
By Turner Cassity
Turner Cassity is like a highly accomplished traditional composer—Camille Saint-Saëns, say, or Richard Strauss—who does not doubt that the music is the score and the score is the music. That is, poetry is verse and verse is poetry.Given that confidence, he is prepared to take on any subject. In the forty years he has been publishing, Mr. Cassity has never once written about nothing.
