Yvor Winters: founder of New Formalism

• At the San Francisco Airport
• To my daughter, 1954
• This is the terminal: the light
• Gives perfect vision, false and hard;
• The metal glitters, deep and bright.
• Great planes are waiting in the yard—
• They are already in the night.

• And you are here beside me, small,
• Contained and fragile, and intent
• On things that I but half recall—
• Yet going whither you are bent.
• I am the past, and that is all.

• But you and I in part are one:
• The frightened brain, the nervous will,
• The knowledge of what must be done,
• The passion to acquire the skill
• To face that which you dare not shun.

• The rain of matter upon sense
• Destroys me momently. The score:
• There comes what will come. The expense
• Is what one thought, and something more—
• One’s being and intelligence.

• This is the terminal, the break.
• Beyond this point, on lines of air,
• You take the way that you must take;
• And I remain in light and stare—
• In light, and nothing else, awake.

• The Fable
• Beyond the steady rock the steady sea,
• In movement more immovable than station,
• Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes,
• A slow obscure metonymy of motion,
• Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain.
• But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes
• A steady quiet of the steady music,
• Massive with peace.
• And listen, now:
• The foam receding down the sand silvers
• Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words,
• Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.

• Much in Little
• Amid the iris and the rose,
• The honeysuckle and the bay,
• The wild earth for a moment goes
• In dust or weed another way.

• Small though its corner be, the weed
• Will yet intrude its creeping beard;
• The harsh blade and the hairy seed
• Recall the brutal earth we feared.

• And if no water touch the dust
• In some far corner, and one dare
• To breathe upon it, one may trust
• The spectre on the summer air:

• The risen dust alive with fire,
• The fire made visible, a blur
• Interrate, the pervasive ire
• Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was an American poet and critic who was perhaps better known for his criticism – which often took to task many of the accepted poets of the literary canon – than he was for his poetry. His own style began in the Modernist mode – heavily influenced by the Imagist style of presenting the image in a poem unadorned and directly to the reader, without either commentary or sentiment. In his later years, however, he developed a more staid and neo-classical style of poetry, which included a greater clarity of statement, and formal elements such as meter and rhyme. He is considered one of the founders of the New Formalism movement in poetry.