SOURCE: A review of Dear Judas, in Poetry, Vol. 35, No. V, February, 1930, pp. 279-86.

Winters was a prominent American poet and critic who maintained that all good literature must serve a conscious moral purpose. In the negative review of Dear Judas below, he examines the themes and narrative structures in the volume, concluding that Jeffers's "aims are badly thoughtful and are essentially trivial."

It is difficult to write of Mr. Jeffers' latest book [Dear Judas] without discussing his former volumes; after his first collection he deals chiefly with one theme in all of his poems; and all of his works illustrate a single problem, a spiritual malady of considerable significance. Mr. Jeffers is theologically a kind of monist; he envisages, as did Wordsworth, Nature as Deity; but his Nature is the Nature of the physics textbook and not of the rambling botanist—Mr. Jeffers seems to have taken...