Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works--Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense--of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With "The Function of Criticism," a subsequent collection, "In Defense of Reason" provides an incomparable body of critical writing.
The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer--as it is of very man--to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example--the technique of the "whole critic" who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.

The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises brings together five essays by Yvor Winters: “Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature,” “The Audible Reading of Poetry,” “The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” “Robert Frost, Or the Spiritual Drifter as Poet,” and “English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.”

With Forms of Discover, Yvor Winters completes his critical canon. The distinguished poet-critic defines by analysis and example the development of the method that he has called "post-Symbolist." Starting with the styles of the English Renaissance, Winters discusses at length the felicities and shortcomings of these traditions, the main defect being that sensory imagery was little more than ornament. This sets the problem: to discover a style wherein both the conceptual and the perceptual are given their fullest expression In the work of Charles Churchill, Winters explores the development of a complexly controlled associational procedure. Here is a richly varied conceptual method, though the sensory is still almost totally absent. Churchill's methods and those of the Renaissance masters are then contrasted with the work of the Romantics, who wrote a great deal about nature without bothering to look at it, and whose most lasting contribution would appear to be pathetically sentimental fallacies. The turn of the century, in France, Britain, and America, sees the beginning of the post-Symbolist methods, while Yeats continues the retrograde movement of the Romantics. It is in the work of poets like Tuckerman, Hardy, Bridges, Stevens, T. Sturge Moore, and Paul Valery that rational discourse combines richly with the perceptual universe in which we live: the particular perception is enhance by reference to general concepts, the general given substance by the particular exemplifying it. The post-Symbolist methods result in a poetry that unifies the diverse fields of human experience and employs all aspects of language. Style in Winters' sense is not simply a way of gracefully combining words. It is the way a man lives, the method or art wherein he discovers to the best of his ability the real nature of the world in which he lives. It is in this sense that Forms of Discovery is a philosophical work, not a miscellaneous collection of essays; this book is, as Winters remarks, "an act of piety, not an act of destruction."

As part of the ongoing effort of the Ohio University Press/Swallow Press to reintroduce the work of a number of significant twentieth-century poets to a new generation of readers, we are especially enthusiastic about publishing the selected poems of Yvor Winters, whose work and influence was so central to the development of the poetry list at Swallow Press.

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. His impact on mid-to-late twentieth-century poetry is profound. This stems in large part from his poetry, which was a reflection of his critical thinking about poetry, and which underwent substantive changes over his career as a poet. His collected poems won the Bollingen Prize in 1960.