Collected Poems

What began with no expectations ended up a benchmark experience in reading poetry. Opening the book, I'd never heard of Winters: the book was a gift. In what I now think of as my "first reading" (not all poems, perhaps half the collection), my overall impression was that Winters tried too hard -- not with every poem, only in specific places, though the impression of those specific places was pronounced. Other poems or lines seemed to work very well at evoking an image or a feeling, even as I failed to apprehend an overarching purpose. At the end of this reading session, I realised I could not state what I thought Winters was like, could not characterise his poetry in any specific way, and thought I should read more and try to develop a show more clearer sense of what I thought.

In my "second reading" (again not of all poems in the collection, but re-reading many from the first reading) I warmed to Winters and the sense of the book overall, as opposed to individual poems. I still had no firm sense of purpose, but I began to pick up on an abiding interest in stillness: in nature, in relationship. In this reading, I remarked specifically the poem "The Vision", it was odd in its subject matter (a dream of encountering a decapitated head), but wasn't a novelty or a jarring departure from other poems in the collection.

Thereafter, I dipped in multiple times: new poems, re-reads of poems from the first two readings. Usually I found Winters uneven, within the same poem identifying really strong and then really awkward portions. I spent some time reading about Winters and his place in contemporary American poetry, both at the Poetry Foundation and a New Yorker essay. After a prolonged read of perhaps the final quarter or third of the collection, I reflected I had a a strong impression I "got" what Winters was after in the poems collected here. That reading somehow suggested the classic concern of Spirit and Matter, or actual life along with the importance of abstract principles, and that Winters in his verse was grappling with what abstractions are, putting into as clear terms as possible what these meant for living, how they inform 'immortality' or a legacy left after one's death via culture, learning, and values passed on.

Much remains obscure to me, I still do not feel as confident or clear in reading verse compared to reading fiction or essays or non-fiction. But reading Winters' Collected Poems feels like a milepost in my efforts at understanding verse and the poetic tradition.

I had grown away from youth,
Shedding error where I could;
I was now essential wood,
Concentrating into truth;
What I did was small but good.

-- A Dream Vision show less