Yvor Winters

Quotes

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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.”
• “And you are here beside me, small,Contained and fragile, and intentOn things that I but half recall — Yet going whither you are bent. I am the past, and that is all.”
• “The rain of matter upon senseDestroys me momently. The score:There comes what will come.”
• “Metal, intrinsic value, deep and dense,Preanimate, inimitable, still,Real, but an evil with no human sense,Dispersed the mind to concentrate the will.”

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