Arthur Yvor Winters (17 October 1900 – 25 January 1968) was an American poet and literary critic.
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Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American poetry and by Imagism. His essay, The Testament of a Stone, gives an account of his poetics during this early period.
Around 1930, he turned away from modernism and developed an Augustan style of writing, notable for its clarity of statement and its formality of rhyme and rhythm.
Winters's critical style was comparable to that of F. R. Leavis, and in the same way he created a school of students (of mixed loyalty). His affiliations and proposed canon, however, were quite different: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence above any one novel by Henry James, Robert Bridges above T. S. Eliot, Charles Churchill above Alexander Pope, Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne above Sidney and Spenser.
He attacked Romanticism, particularly in American manifestations, and set about Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow. (Ironically, his first book of poems, Diadems and Fagots, takes its title from one of Emerson's poems.) In this he was probably influenced by Irving Babbitt. Winters was sometimes and questionably associated with the New Criticism, largely because John Crowe Ransom devoted a chapter to him in his book by the same name. He bestowed the sobriquet "the cool master" on the American poet Wallace Stevens. (See the entries for Wallace Stevens, Harmonium, and Floral Decorations for Bananas.)
Winters is known for his argument attacking the "fallacy of imitative form:" "To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything." (Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry, 1937).
He was born in Chicago, Illinois and brought up in Eagle Rock, California. He attended the University of Chicago where he was a member of a literary circle including Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and his future wife Janet Lewis. He suffered from tuberculosis in his late teens, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he recuperated, wrote his early published verse, and taught. In 1925 he became an undergraduate at the University of Colorado.
In 1926, he married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, also from Chicago and a tuberculosis sufferer. After graduating he taught at the University of Idaho, and then started a doctorate at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford, living in Los Altos,[1] until two years before his death, from throat cancer. His students included the poets Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Jim McMichael, N. Scott Momaday, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, Moore Moran, Roger Dickinson-Brown and Robert Hass and the critic Gerald Graff. He was also a mentor to Donald Justice, J.V. Cunningham, and Bunichi Kagawa.[1]
He edited Gyroscope, a literary magazine, with his wife, from 1929 to 1931; and Hound & Horn from 1932 to 1934.
He was awarded the 1961 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems.
As editor