'These Remarks Are Heretical'

Like Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century,” published in the Summer 1955 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (Swallow Press, 1957): “At this point, I would like to interject one word of warning to the professors. Poets are not fools (I mean good poets); they are capable of perceiving in their early twenties facts which professors may or may not manage to perceive in their sixties or seventies. I am not trying to be insulting (the technical term, I think, is ‘arrogant’); I am trying rather to state an important truth which is overlooked for the greater part in the academic world. There is likely to be over long periods what one might call an underground or unpublicized, tradition of the best writing, which one can discover only if one has the perception to trace the tradition from poem to poem. I am fully aware that these…