Yvor Winter, American poetry, and the imagination
 

Yvor Winters, in letters with Hart Crane, argued that "starting with Whitman and Emerson, American poetry and poetics had put too much stress on the unconscious, by critically privileging the rhapson, the dithyrambic, the delirious currents in language"
 
"Winters came to the conclusion that Crane--like Pound and Eliot--was only using his intelligence as a smoke screen to allow himself to indulge these undisciplined forces from the unconscious" (Delany's summary, 177)
 
also Delany: "I think Winters was wrong in his basic assumption that intention, reason, and logic are the compelling source of language. I think the corollary that goes along with it is also wrong: That language 'communicates' these in some direct manner"

> from Conversations with Samuel R. Delany (2009), Carl Freedman, ed.

> tagged with #communication, #imagination, #language, #poetry

> created May 21, 2025 at 11:15:09 AM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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