[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-(Arthur) Yvor Winters 1900–1968 Courtesy of Janet Lewis Wintersone 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 there are many remarkable insights in this book: Winters seems, for example, to have predicted, indirectly, Crane's death; he has managed, apparently by a deliberate effort, to extend his taste from such writing as Joyce's to such an opposite extreme as Churchill and Gay, and in doing so he has provided us...