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 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, and Robert Hass and the critic Gerald Graff. He was also a mentor to Donald Justice and J.V. Cunningham.

He edited Gyroscope, a literary magazine, with his wife, from 1929 to 1931; and Hound & Horn from 1932 to 1934.

He was awarded the 1960 Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems.

As critic and teacher, Yvor Winters was one of the most controversial and influential figures of his time. He criticized the likes of Eliot and Henry James, was called by the chair of his English department "a disgrace," and taught such major poets as Robert Pinsky and Philip Levine. As a poet, he created a moving body of work featuring natural and personal subjects and dramatic formal experiments. The American Poets Project presents the largest collection of his work ever published. Selected by celebrated poet Thom Gunn, a friend and former student of Winters, this volume begins with early free verse and culminates in late meditative neoclassical masterpieces.