Yvor Winters citations (12 citations)

Yvor Winters: 12 citations0 J'aime

Yvor Winters: Citations en anglais

“Metal, intrinsic value, deep and dense,
Preanimate, inimitable, still,
Real, but an evil with no human sense,
Dispersed the mind to concentrate the will.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

"John Sutter"
The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1960)

“Now verse is more valuable than prose … for the simple reasons that its rhythms are faster and more highly organized than are those of prose, and so lend themselves to a greater complexity and compression of relationship, and that the intensity of this convention renders possible a greater intensity of other desirable conventions, such as poetic language and devices of rhetoric.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention, Section V : The Heroic Couplet and its Recent Rivals
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

“What end impersonal, what breathless age,
Incontinent of quiet and of years,
What calm catastrophe will yet assuage
This final drouth of penitential tears?”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

"John Sutter"
The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1960)

“It will be seen that what I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling; the justice of the evaluation persisting even into the sound of the least important syllable. Such a poem is a perfect and complete act of the spirit; it calls upon the full life of the spirit; it is difficult of attainment, but I am aware of no good reason to be contented with less.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention : Section III : The Scansion of Free Verse
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

“I mean to indicate the reading of poetry not merely for the sensual ear, but for the mind's ear as well; yet the mind's ear can be trained only by the other, and the matter, practically considered, comes inescapably back to the reading of poetry aloud.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

The Audible Reading of Poetry (1951)

“Poetry, as nearly as I can understand it, is a statement in words about a human experience, whether the experience be real or hypothetical, major or minor; but it is a statement of a particular kind. Words are symbols for concepts, and the philosopher or scientist endeavors as far as may be to use them with reference to nothing save their conceptual content. Most words, however, connote feelings and perceptions, and the poet, like the writer of imaginative prose, endeavors to use them with reference not only to their denotations but to their connotations as well. Such writers endeavor to communicate not only concepts, arranged, presumably, either in rational order or in an order of apprehensible by the rational mind, but the feeling or emotion which the rational content ought properly to arouse.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

The Audible Reading of Poetry (1951)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Yvor Winters

"At the San Francisco Airport" (1954)
The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters (1960)