[Yvor Winters: Uncollected Essays and Reviews] contains about forty essays and reviews by Yvor Winters which he did not republish in book form…. I found the collection disappointing. For one thing, Winters's forte seems to have been the full-dress discussion of an author (such as his treatment of Henry James in Maule's Curse). He did not have T. S. Eliot's gift for making a memorable essay out of an occasional review. The good formulations in this book are all to be found, better stated, elsewhere in his writings. Nor did he have Eliot's extraordinary power of quotation. But above all his particular judgments are again and again quite unconvincing…. Distinguished critics have, of course, sometimes made very odd judgments…. But aberrations simply abound in Winters's pages. (p. 169)

The main thrust of [Winters's] polemic is directed against the romantic theory, which he sees as still the dominant one in...