Yvor Winters - Life

Life

He was born in Chicago, Illinois and brought up in Eagle Rock, California. He attended the University of Chicago where he was a member of a literary circle including Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and his future wife Janet Lewis. He suffered from tuberculosis in his late teens, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he recuperated, wrote his early published verse, and taught. In 1925 he became an undergraduate at the University of Colorado.

In 1926, he married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, also from Chicago and a tuberculosis sufferer. After graduating he taught at the University of Idaho, and then started a doctorate at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford, living in Los Altos, until two years before his death, from throat cancer. His students included the poets Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Jim McMichael, N. Scott Momaday, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, Moore Moran, Roger Dickinson-Brown and Robert Hass and the critic Gerald Graff. He was also a mentor to Donald Justice, J.V. Cunningham, and Bunichi Kagawa.

He edited Gyroscope, a literary magazine, with his wife, from 1929 to 1931; and Hound & Horn from 1932 to 1934.

He was awarded the 1961 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems.

He died in 1968 in Palo Alto, California.

Read more about this topic:  Yvor Winters

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
    Henry Miller (1891–1980)

    With only one life to live we can’t afford to live it only for itself. Somehow we must each for himself, find the way in which we can make our individual lives fit into the pattern of all the lives which surround it. We must establish our own relationships to the whole. And each must do it in his own way, using his own talents, relying on his own integrity and strength, climbing his own road to his own summit.
    Hortense Odlum (1892–?)

    Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)