Yvor Winters Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

What calm catastrophe will yet assuage
This final drouth of penitential tears?

Yvor Winters
Reptilian green the wrinkled throat,
Green as a bough of yew the beard;
He bent his head, and so I smote

Yvor Winters
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage

Yvor Winters
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.

Yvor Winters
Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education

Yvor Winters
The passion to condense from book to book
Unbroken wisdom in a single look,
Though we know well that when this fix the head,
The mind's immortal, but the man is dead.

Yvor Winters
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.

Yvor Winters
What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling

Yvor Winters
And you are here beside me, small,
Contained and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall-

Yvor Winters
Verse is more valuable than prose for its rhythms are faster and more highly organised and lead to greater compexity.

Yvor Winters
The young are quick of speech.
Grown middle-aged, I teach
Corrosion and distrust,
Exacting what I must.

Yvor Winters
Metal, intrinsic value, deep and dense,
Preanimate, inimitable, still,
Real, but an evil with no human sense,
Dispersed the mind to concentrate the will.

Yvor Winters
A poem in the first place should offer us a new perception.. bringing into being a new experience

Yvor Winters
By practice and conviction formed,
With ancient stubbornness ingrained,
Although her body clung and swarmed,
My own identity remained.

Yvor Winters
The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.

Yvor Winters
The rain of matter upon sense
Destroys me momently. The score:
There comes what will come.

Yvor Winters
... even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other … which comes back to reading poetry aloud...

Yvor Winters