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:
“There is a right according to which we may deprive a human being of his life but none according to which we may deprive him of his death: to do so is mere cruelty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“When I was in high school I thought a vocation was a particular calling. Here’s a voice: “Come, follow me.” My idea of a calling now is not: “Come.” It’s like what I’m doing right now, not what I’m going to be. Life is a calling.”
—Rebecca Sweeney (b. 1938)
“Coming to terms with the rhythms of women’s lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)