I’m not sure what students think of what professors think of class discussions. I would imagine that it varies with the professor: you can likely tell when professors are bored or excited by such discussions. I think that it takes a certain kind of professor to enjoy them. For instance, when I was in graduate school, I knew professors who no longer taught introductory courses precisely because they (believed they) could learn nothing from them and so found them deadly as a result. I sympathize with the need to learn from one’s teaching: if teaching is just the rote transfer of information, it becomes deadly. Luckily, I find that I still learn a lot while teaching introductory courses.
In particular, I find that I always learn new things about the poems, stories, and plays that I teach. And teaching literary theory and research is always a challenge, and so I am always learning how to do that better. I believe that theory and research are important – they build up your critical thinking skills and your information literacy (your instinct to look things up and to be able to do something with the information once you find it). But I find that the poems in particular reward being looked at again and again each semester. It’s hard to read poetry on one’s own, and poetry is so dense. When I teach poems, I like to teach just one or two per class, and this enable the class to slow down and really focus. Of course, what we usually find is that forty or fifty minutes is hardly enough time for coming to a full understanding of a good poem. Such poetic density continues to amaze me.
Were I to write an essay on a poem right now, I would write on Winters’ “At the San Francisco Airport.” I find this poem to be very challenging (which is part of the reason I let it slide in class when we didn’t have time to get to it). I think that the question that I would put to this poem would be something like this: How does this poem reveal more fully what it is like to let one’s child go? The significance of this question might seem obvious – well of course that’s tough! – but I believe that Winters realizes that most parents never really do this and/or never come to grips with what it entails.
I think a simple answer would be that it is tough to let a child go but that it has to be done – that’s just the way the world is. I would challenge such a reading because I believe that Winters is saying something deeper. I think he is interested in looking at the way in which letting a child go can, if one is not careful about it, destroy one’s own ability to think clearly and well, and insofar as Winters believed that thinking clearly and well is vital to living a good moral life, he would be concerned about something that threatens that ability.
Winters really did have a daughter. I’ve not been able to learn much about her, but it appears that she went to Stanford (where Winters taught) and graduated in 1952. The poem is written two years after that. It also appears that she became a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, and so she clearly had to leave Northern California at some point in order to attend graduate school and earn her doctorate. So: This poem is likely a reflection upon that experience – or at least it likely originates in that experience, although the actual experience may just be a pretext for investigating something deeper about the relationship of clear thinking to loving another.
Winters was himself aligned with the New Criticism that was dominant during his time, although he did not adhere strictly to their doctrine. However, the poem lends itself to a New Critical reading: it is composed with a strict attention to form, insofar as it has a careful meter and rhyme scheme and insofar as the words all connect to each other and generate multiple, often ambiguous, meanings. What is especially interesting is the way that the terminal – an actual place – is associated with both “the light” and “the break.” What is it about this place such that it is both a place of light and a break of sorts, a place where things break or break off, such that they cease in the sense that one thing breaks off where another begins or in the sense that they are broken and so cannot continue as they once did? Both meanings of ‘break’ seem to be the case in this poem. The first sense is more obvious: his daughter is going away, and so this marks a break in life as he’s always known it. But the second sense is trickier.
The second sense becomes most evident in the fifth stanza: the light of this moment is too perfect and so is “false and hard” (as he says in the first stanza), and we learn in the fifth that what it reveals – “the rain of matter upon sense” – is destructive. It “destroys me momently.” The last word – ‘momently’ – can mean three things: it can mean ‘from moment to moment,’ as in ‘continually,’ or it can mean ‘for a moment,’ as in ‘briefly,’ or it can mean ‘at any moment,’ as in ‘imminently.’ These are three very different meanings, and they need to be parsed out. I would argue that the destruction is one that could indeed happen at any moment but is in fact happening now and is happening only for a moment, but for a moment that seems to continue endlessly. This is because he has lost his “being and intelligence” and so is at the mercy of his sensations – of the trivial information that he is picking up about his immediate surroundings. He cannot make sense of those sensations, and he is locked in this moment. As such, he cannot make sense of or come to grips with the departure of his daughter. He is “awake” and so aware of her departure and the need for it, but beyond that he cannot at present go.
The deeper questions that emerge at this point are many. Is he to be admired for facing this moment as he is and not backing away? Or is he to be chastised for having such trouble in accepting the departure – and autonomy – of his daughter? I believe that the New Critic would admire him; I believe that the Feminist Critic would chastise him. And I honestly had no idea that I would end up with these thoughts when I started writing this blog entry!
