[The essay from which the following excerpt is taken was originally published in a slightly different form as "Two Essays: 'Quantity and the Meters of Yvor Winters' and 'Being, Poetry, and Yvor Winters' Criticism'," in The Denver Quarterly, Autumn 1975.]

It is easy to ridicule a man who, like Yvor Winters, argues that poetry is a moral evaluation of experience and that poetry should use the full resources of the language. It is particularly easy in this century, since romantics seem, by and large, to have forgotten the religious origins of their position….

Winters' crucial stance, despite all of its apparent unfashionableness and antiromanticism, was actually the romantic position that a poem is the result of a religious act, that it is an organic whole, and that reading it is a fusion of one's consciousness with the universe of the poem. The difference between Winters and virtually everyone else...