'I Have Known His Voice Quaver'

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I would have been more impressionable, or later, when I would have been less ready to learn. So he came at just the right time for me.” Good teachers are exceedingly rare, which we’re not supposed to admit, but the same goes for students. It’s a matter of temperament and, as Thom Gunn suggests above, timing. By my count I had five excellent teachers in the formal sense, and dozens of lousy or indifferent ones. The good ones made it clear they had expectations of me. Since then, I’ve known several people I’ve informally adopted as teachers, beginning with Guy Davenport. Gunn’s portrait of Winters is taken from a lecture he gave in 1977 at Lake Forest College in Illinois. The recovered transcript, titled “An Apprenticeship,” was first published in Winter issue of The Threepenny Review in 2022. In 1954, Gunn had graduated from Cambridge, published his…