Yvor Winters

Arthur Yvor Winters (17 October 1900 – 25 January 1968) was an American poet and literary critic.

Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there until 1919 except for brief stays in Seattle and in Pasadena, where his grandparents lived. He attended the University of Chicago for four quarters in 1917-18, where he was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and his future wife Janet Lewis. In the winter of 1918-19 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and underwent treatment for two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During his recuperation he wrote and published some of his early poems. On his release from the sanitarium he taught in high schools in nearby mining towns. In 1923 Winters published one of his first critical essays, "Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image," in the expatriate literary journal Secession. That same year he enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he achieved his BA and MA degrees in 1925.

In 1926, Winters married the poet and novelist Janet Lewis, also from Chicago and a fellow tuberculosis sufferer. After leaving Colorado he taught at the University of Idaho and then began the doctoral program at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford after receiving his PhD in 1934, becoming a member of the English faculty and living in Los Altos for the rest of his life. He retired from his Stanford position in 1966, two years before his death from throat cancer. His students included the poets Edgar Bowers, Turner Cassity, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Jim McMichael, N. Scott Momaday, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, Moore Moran, Roger Dickinson-Brown and Robert Hass, the critic Gerald Graff, and the theater director and writer Herbert Blau. He was also a mentor to Donald Justice, J.V. Cunningham, and Bunichi Kagawa.

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