In the following excerpt, the critic offers her interpretation of Anderson's use of lyric and epic elements in "Sophistication."

At this date, not much remains to be done by way of appointing Sherwood Anderson a place among American writers; in fact he himself succinctly indicated his own position when he remarked in the Memoirs that "For all my egotism, I know I am but a minor figure." There is little disagreement, either, about the work on which Anderson's reputation rests— Winesburg, "Death in the Woods," a few stories from The Triumph of the Egg. When we come to estimate the accomplishment represented by Winesburg, however, things are not quite so clear. There are those who wish, still, to view the collection as a frame-story, but they then must reckon with the difficulty of seeming to reduce all the stories to the dead level of equivalent exhibits...