Edgar Bowers Conference at UCLA > Peers of Tradition

			PEERS OF TRADITION			ON EXHIBIT

			owers could not have found a more congenial place to study poetry than postwar Stanford University, or a more able and sympathetic mentor than Yvor Winters. Although Bowers had tried his hand at verse when he was a teenager and continued to write poetry during the war, he had great difficulty finding the forms to contain his experiences. During and shortly after the war, Bowers tried to write ambitious, experimental, free-verse poems in the manner of T.S. Eliot or Hart Crane, but his style was awkward and he sensed that something was wrong. Reading Yvor Winters's In Defense of Reason led Bowers to believe that Winters might be able to help him. His first encounter with Winters, however, began inauspiciously—Bowers asked to be admitted to Winters's poetry class without a single poem in hand. Winters simply said, “You look intelligent,” and gave Bowers a chance. Thus began Bowers's career as one of the foremost poets of the so-called “Stanford School.” Bowers earned his master's degree at Stanford by writing poems, instead of a critical thesis, under Winters's tutelage; several of these would later appear in Bowers's first collection of poetry, The Form of Loss (1956). Bowers's Stanford poems were metrical and often rhymed. They sometimes exhibited a rational, plain, epigrammatic style similar to that of English Renaissance poets, such as Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson, whom Winters championed, but they also exhibited the influences of French poets, such as Leconte de Lisle, José María de Hérédia, and Paul Val?y. Modern poets such as Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and William Butler Yeats—whom Bowers had read on his own in high school—also could be heard haunting these elegant poems. After completing his master's degree, Bowers pursued his doctorate at Stanford, and again, Winters helped Bowers tremendously, tutoring Bowers so that he could pass his oral examinations. (Having majored in French and German as an undergraduate, Bowers had not studied English literature systematically.) Winters also advised Bowers on his dissertation about the English poet Thomas Sturge Moore, a friend of William Butler Yeats's. Through Winters and Winters's wife, the poet and historical novelist Janet Lewis, Bowers became part of a remarkable circle of Stanford poets, which included J.V. Cunningham and Thom Gunn. Later Stanford poets, such as Turner Cassity, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, and Timothy Steele, also would become Bowers's friends in the art. Among these peers of poetic tradition, Bowers flourished and excelled.			Edgar Bowers's Stanford dissertation Thomas Sturge Moore Yvor Winters Letter from Winters to Bowers, 1956 J.V. Cunningham Letter from Cunningham to Bowers, undated Typed MS of "Gods and Men" Thom Gunn and Edgar Bowers Letter from Gunn to Bowers Helen Pinkerton Trimpi Helen Pinkerton Trimpi's essay on the poetry of Edgar Bowers in The Southern Review (Winter, 1977) Timothy Steele Excerpt from Timothy Steele's letter to Edgar Bowers (December 18, 1999) Letter from Robert Lowell to Bowers, 1964 THE POEMS "Study in Reaction," an unpublished poem "Two Poems on the Catholic Bavarians: 2"