Yvor Winters, "Before Disaster"

Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1932 - 1933

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem

Resources

“Before Disaster” is one of Yvor Winters’s most frequently quoted poems. Donald Davie foregrounded it in his introduction to the Collected Poems of Yvor Winters. The poem is dated “Winter 1932- 3” and is about the rise of Fascism in Europe (“Fool and scoundrel guide the State”). It compares international politics with cars speeding down the California freeway, still a relatively new and terrifying sight in the early 1930s. The trochaic tetrameter leads inexorably towards “large, sweeping moral statements” (Pinsky 2007) about the “ranks of nations”:

Evening traffic homeward burns
Swift and even on the turns,
Drifting weight in triple rows,
Fixed relation and repose.…

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629 words

Citation: Forsyth, Neil. ""Before Disaster"". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 March 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35619, accessed 24 April 2024.]

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