Yvor Winters
Who is Yvor Winters
Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 – January 25, 1968) was an American poet and literary critic.
Life
Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there until 1919 except for brief stays in Seattle and in Pasadena, where his grandparents lived. He attended the University of Chicago for four-quarters in 1917–18, where he was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and his future wife Janet Lewis. In the winter of 1918–19 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and underwent treatment for two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During his recuperation he wrote and published some of his early poems. On his release from the sanitarium he taught in high schools in nearby mining towns. In 1923 Winters published one of his ...
Read Full Biography
Yvor Winters Poems
- To Emily Dickinson
Dear Emily, my tears would burn your page,
But for the fire-dry line that makes them burnâ??
Burning my eyes, my fingers, while I turn
Singly the words that crease my heart with age.
...
- Alone
I, one who never speaks,
Listened days in summer trees,
Each day a rustling leaf.
...
- Sonnet To The Moon
Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.
...
- On A View Of Pasadena From The Hills
From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn.
No light appears, though dark has mostly gone,
Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills
Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills
...
- The Slow Pacific Swell
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
...
Read All Poems
Yvor Winters Quotes
Read All Quotes
Comments about Yvor Winters
- Theamscho: for this week’s read me a poem, amanda holmes brings us “sunday morning” by wallace stevens, which critic yvor winters called “the greatest american poem of the twentieth century.”
- Kulambq: 'peace to the heart that can accept this cold!'
~ yvor winters, 'the castle of thorns'
- Isidro_li: if i ever pleased the muse,
may she not one boon refuse;
may i ages hence rehearse
darkest evil in my verse;
may i state my grief and shame
at the scholar's empty name:
how great scholars failed to see
virtue in extremity.
— yvor winters
- Aliterarybot: we have to live
in a half-world, not ours nor history's
—thom gunn, 'to yvor winters, 1955'
- Heather_nanni: “the rats run on the roof,
these words come hard—-
sadder than cockcrow
in a dreamless, earthen sleep.
the christ, eternal
in the scented cold; my love,
her hand on the sill
white, as if out of earth;
and spring, the sleep of the dead.”
yvor winters
spring 1978 by andrew wyeth
Read All Comments