The Realism of Helen Pinkerton

The Coherence of the Stanford School In a poem to his former student, Achilles Holt, the poet-critic and longtime Stanford English professor, Yvor Winters, admonishes, "Write little; do it well" (The Poetry Of Yvor Winters 135). A remarkable number of Winters's students would take this advice. No other American university professor during the last century influenced so great a number of students who went on to become important poets as did Winters; and yet, the degree of Winters's influence on any one of these students has usually borne an inverse relationship to the size of their published output as poets. (1) Typical in this respect has been the career of Helen Pinkerton. First studying under Winters during the Second World War, Pinkerton's long career as a poet and scholar of Melville and the U. S. Civil War led only to the publication of a monograph on Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade and a handful of thin poetry chapbooks prior to the appearance of her full-length collection, Taken in Faith, in 2002. (2) Naturally, this slender record of publication has precipitated an even more sparse body of criticism on the poetry. (3) It may not surprise one to discover, then, that the most admiring comments on Pinkerton's work were those Winters himself published regarding her early lyrics. In a special issue of Sequoia--Stanford's literary magazine--celebrating Winters, he took the opportunity, in turn, to celebrate and comment on Pinkerton's first small book, Error Pursued (1959). This brief essay evaluates a handful of the poems and culminates in a discussion of the poem, "Eros," which Winters admires but finds obscure (Dickson 32). He has, therefore, solicited Pinkerton's own comments on the poem and reproduces them in his essay. Worthy of note, Pinkerton explains that the fourth stanza of the poem "is a reply to [J.V.] Cunningham's 'Haeceity' ... I contradict this view here because I think it is the perfect expression of Romantic dogma" (33). And she concludes (making a pair of references to which we shall return): The two strongest influences on the poem are [Etienne] Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers (for the concept of existence) and [Denis] de Rougemont's Love in the Western World (for its revelation of the myth of passion). Any similarity to [Robert] Bridges' "Eros" is purely coincidental; my title comes out of de Rougemont's analysis of Eros. The poem as it stands, good, bad, or indifferent, is as straight as I can get it out of my experience. (33) Pinkerton's poem, in other words, performs three distinct actions founded on a common purpose, each of which is typical of those works exemplary of what I would call (loosely) the Stanford school. It derives directly from her own experience and meets therefore the requisite definition of a poem, according to Winters's controversial but well-developed theory that "The poem is a statement in words about human experience" (In Defense of Reason 11). (4) The poem itself acts as a definition of experience, drawing closely on two authors whose moderate metaphysical realism (Gilson) and anti-Romanticism (Rougemont) were congenial to and even influential on Winters and his students. Thus the poem enters into an intellectual and moral conversation in the context of a life lived. And, finally, Pinkerton highlights that one stanza of her poem responds pointedly to the work of another Stanford poet, J. V. Cunningham, who was a graduate student and instructor there, and who is usually, though improperly, referred to as one of Winters's students. (5) These three acts highlight an often-remarked feature of Winters's Stanford school of poets. Winters tends to refer to his students directly in his criticism and to praise their poems as among the best of modern poetry, and this understandably reaped accusations of pedagogical "nepotism" from some critics. (6) Implications of critical dishonesty miss the mark, however; Winters admired a small number of poems by a fair number of his students because he had established a coherent theory of the function of poetry and attained a loose consensus about it. …