[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 a severe critic. In citing him as the ablest logical critic, I do not mean necessarily, and it would not follow, that he is blind to what I have called the texture of poetry; but his conscious theory does not know how to take hold of texture; and his distinction is his skill in analyzing structure...