Can a poetic rebel be an intellectual reactionary? Can a modernist poet be a traditionalist critic? Leaving aside the permanent puzzle that is Ezra Pound, and the work of T.S. Eliot, the poet Yvor Winters (1900–1968) seems to give us the answer yes.A native of Chicago, he attended the University of Chicago — where he formed a literary circle that included his future wife, Janet Loxley Lewis (whose “Austerity” appeared as the Sun’s Poem of the Day this past August). Tuberculosis drove him to Santa Fe, where he began to write his first publications, notably for a trendy literary journal called Secession. Winters, after taking his doctorate, settled in as professor at Stanford — where, in the theme of his life, he formed a literary circle. Among his students were the likes of Edgar Bowers, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, and Gerald Graff, while his literary friendships reached to Donald Justice and, especially, J.V. Cunningham. Through the years his fame as poet would grow, but even more powerful was his reputation as a fierce critic. Winters began with the modernist generation’s rejection of the sappy (he thought) late romanticism of 19th-century American poetry. And he aimed to use this rejection to help define a new canon, resurrecting underappreciated authors through the centuries.Today’s Poem of the Day, “The Moonlight,” was written during his convalescence in New Mexico and appeared in Secession in 1924. It’s pure modernism, typical of its time, with all the advantages and disadvantages that come from diving headfirst into the subschool known as Imagism. It’s a little self-congratulatory — See how rebellious I am! — the way young poets’ work often is. And it’s more than a little opaque, the ending left beyond clear meaning. Yet there is something in the poem that refuses to let us dismiss it as merely an artifact of its 1924 modernist moment. The inversion of clauses in the first stanza (the moonlight interrupting “I waited on . . . a train”) deepens our sense of the scene rather than obscuring it. The poet humming to sleeping children unites the poet and the image of the train. The something that lurks here makes the difficulty of the poem worth the effort to read it with sympathy and intention.The Moonlightby Yvor WintersI waited onIn the late autumn moonlight,A train droning out of thought —The mind on moonlightAnd on trains.Blind as a thread of waterStirring through a cold like dust,Lonely beyond all silenceAnd humming this to children,The nostalgic listeners in sleep,Because no guardianStrides through distance upon distance,His eyes a web of sleep.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
