It should be remembered … that Winters is a poet as well as a critic. His critical theories derive from his experience in writing poetry; his application of these theories to specific poems is marked by a perceptual sensitivity and understanding that can come only from a poet. Basic to all the essays in [The Function of Criticism] is his general theory of poetry—that a poem, the result of an act of contemplation, is a statement about human experience, that this statement should be rationally apprehensible and should communicate emotion appropriate to the rational apprehension of the subject. Closely linked with this theory is his analysis of the fallacy of imitative form—the "procedure by which the poet surrenders the form of his statement to the formlessness of his subject matter", and his distinction between prose and verse—"verse is metric or measured language", the rhythm of which...