When Yvor Winters's publisher and friend Alan Swallow hailed him in 1940 as the "sage of Palo Alto," he accurately touched on the paradox of Winters's career: the isolation in which he became admired as a poet, a teacher, and critic of poetry. For...

R. L. Barth, editor The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 423 pages, $49.95. No one aware of Yvor Winters's reputation for brawling literary criticism will be taken aback by his letters' ability to inflict a blow. Readers unfamiliar...

"A critic may even be specifically wrong yet theoretically right. Paul Elmer More, for instance, damns all modern literature with one irritated and uncomprehending gesture; he is academic and insensitive. The tragedy of it is, that most modern writers could learn a great...

The American Classics: A Personal Essay, by Denis Donoghue. Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27.Rapping the knuckles of the American classics is good fun-especially if it's done with a light, sharp touch. And nobody gets hurt, certainly not the great dead white males themselves, who...

"Yvor Winters: poet, professor, critic …" This original sequence still holds when one turns from critical theory to actual practice in the development of Winters' double career. One need always remember that he developed his particular theories of criticism as a result of certain necessary practices in the creation of his poetry. His first published works were all poems, and his later critical canon is the direct result of his practical poetic experiments…. It is ironic th...

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published in The Southern Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1938.] Mr. Yvor Winters has written [Primitivism and Decadence,] a book which every serious American writer, and indeed every-one with the least pretense to serious interest in literature, ought to buy and ought to study. This is said by way of qualifying radically many of the difficulties which I wish to point out in his notions about the nature of poetry. And one ought also to say at the start that ...

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The Southern Review, Summer 1940.] The critic who is best at pouncing upon the structure of a poem is Mr. Yvor Winters. There may be guardians of the honor of poetry who are grimmer; that would be because they are more literal, less imaginative, than he is…. Winters is not hostile to the modern poets as such, and in fact he works with them chiefly, and as lovingly as his conscience allows. He is not their most severe critic, yet he is...