An Introduction To The Poetry Of Yvor Winters

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. His impact on mid- to late-twentieth-century poetry is profound. This stems in large part from his own poetry, which was a reflection of his critical thinking about poetry, and which underwent substantive changes over his career as a poet. His collected poems won the Bollingen Prize in 1960. This retrospective of one hundred poems, edited by the poet and publisher R. L. Barth, is compiled from Winters's published and unpublished work and features an introductory overview of his life and career by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, a former student of Winters's and a distinguished scholar of American literature.

The section of previously published letters and unpublished ones that were sealed by his will for 25 years after his death, are presented chronologically. The American poet Winters (1900-68) chronologically ensured his own voice posthumous dominance in any correspondence by burning all letters he received, including those from his wife. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR