Reviews for Yvor Winters: Selected Poems

The average rating for Yvor Winters: Selected Poems based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-23 00:00:00 Greg Risch It is a surprise to read Winters' "juvenilia" and how it was so influenced by the writers he spent so much of his career as a critic despising ( Eliot, Stevens, Sandburg, and Crane); Surprising in how it remains more alive and interesting than the bulk of his verse; those five-but-really-two finger line exercises in which he dedicated himself to being form poetry's man of propriety. I could care less that he was mean( and to be honest, his bouts of rational liberalism align him with my politics more than most poets). So there are a lot bigger assholes in my library. However, those assholes knew about dissonance assonance, breath, sprung rhyme. Those assholes knew about slant rhyme, off rhyme, blank verse or any of techniques that could have kept the bulk of Winters' verse from being so stentorian and painful to read.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-02 00:00:00 John Bennet Edited and introduced by his student Thom Gunn. The earlier pseudo-imagist poems are almost universally terrible... hopefully only intended as biographical intrigue lol. Of course, so the story goes with Winters, he finds Form later in life and writes a lot of nice stuff. Maybe I'll finish that essay collection of his I have lying around now...