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:
“The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy’s whimper or our daddy’s growl.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“‘Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“And whether life had been before that sleep
The Heaven which I imagine, or a Hell
‘Like this harsh world in which I wake to weep,
I know not.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)