
In Defense of Reason

In Defense of Reason is a three-volume work of literary criticisms by the American poet and literary critic Yvor Winters. First published in 1947, the book is known for its meticulous study of metrical verse and for its examples of Winters' system of ethical criticism. 
The collection consists of three books of critical essays that Winters had written earlier. The first, "Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry", is Winters' revised doctoral dissertation on the classification and analysis of poetic structures. The second, "Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism", is a study of seven prominent American novelists and poets of the 19th century. The third, "The Anatomy of Nonsense", is a study of several prominent writers associated with modernism. The book also contains three general essays that are crucial to understanding Winters as a critic and poet: the Foreword to the whole collection, "Preliminary Problems," which is in effect the introduction to "The Anatomy of Nonsense", and "The Significance of 'The Bridge,' by Hart Crane, or 'What Are We to Do with Professor X?'".
Though he started his poetic career in the early 1920s as a free-verse imagist, by late in that decade Winters had become a modern classicist, of a sort. He argued that poets should use metrical verse more often in their compositions. He also argued that poems should have rational structures and favor discursive language rather than the loose, associationist structures and styles favored by the moderns, which emphasize the emotions and personal expression. As is explained in these essays, Winters considered the moderns the literary descendants of Romanticism.
Content.
The study of the structure of modern poetry in "Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry" is complex and challenging. Winters presents an elaborate and unique classification system of structures and methods, with an assessment of each kind of structure or approach to help readers understand how poets write in the modern age. In the course of his discussion, Winters also lays out his moral theory of literature, along with his close study of metrical verse and his unusual and difficult theory of free verse, in which he first composed his poetry.
"Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism" offers erudite short studies and appraisals of the writing careers, work by work, of James Fenimore Cooper (moderately favorable), Nathaniel Hawthorne (moderately favorable), Herman Melville (strongly favorable), Edgar Allan Poe (sharply unfavorable), Emily Dickinson (favorable, with qualifications), Henry James (favorable, with qualifications), and the little-known American poet Jones Very (favorable), who was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Winters' evaluations of these writers and their works are sometimes unusual, if not eccentric.
The third work in the collection, "The Anatomy of Nonsense", offers short, crisp, but detailed overviews and interpretations of the writings of Henry Adams (moderately unfavorable), T.S. Eliot (unfavorable), and Wallace Stevens (favorable, with qualifications). In addition, this section contains an essay on American critic and poet John Crowe Ransom that serves as Winters' defense of his own critical concepts, which Ransom had judged to be wrongheaded.
The collection is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize in summary. Winters was opposed to the ascendant Romantic theory of literature, as he understood it. He strove to foster a particular kind of classicism in literature, his own brand of stately, polished, rational, discursive poetry (as well as controlled, stately fiction) that emphasizes ideas and concepts. Across this collection he also reveals his growing penchant for rating individual works of literature and for the centrality of literary evaluation to criticism, as well as his nascent interest in revising the canon of literature to conform to his ideas of classical greatness, or near perfection in poetry. (Winters uses the term, "great", frequently in these writings, and elsewhere, to refer to artworks that he judges to be nearly perfect literary achievements of one kind or another.)
The three general essays in critical theory mentioned in the introduction are crucial to understanding Winters' general theory of literature and his misgivings about and opposition to Romanticism. In the "Foreword," Winters gives a lengthy and learned summation of his theory of poetry, which he calls the "moral" theory of literature. Winters contrasts this theory with his explications of the "didactic", "hedonistic", and "Romantic" theories, which he holds to be the three main critical strands of thought in western literary criticism. In the "Preliminary Problems" essay, found in "The Anatomy of Nonsense", he gives a trenchant, painstakingly logical, step-by-step summary of the criteria he uses in evaluating poems and assessing their greatness, particularly precise diction that subordinates emotion to conceptual content and rational structure.
In the concluding "Bridge" essay, also found in "The Anatomy of Nonsense", Winters examines the literary and psychological dangers facing poets who push Romantic ideas to what Winters believed to be their logical limits, one of whom was, in his judgment, Hart Crane. ("The Bridge" referred to is a famous poem by Hart Crane, with whom Winters briefly corresponded about poetry shortly before Crane's death in 1932.) The essay considers Crane as a disciple of Walt Whitman, whose romantic concepts of life and literature Winters discusses at some length.
Style.
Yvor Winters' memorable prose is highly polished, formal, and exacting. He was a fine stylist and a strikingly scrupulous interpreter of literary artworks. He was often and sometimes still is mistakenly considered one of the New Critics because of his many careful readings of individual works of poetry, fiction, and drama. But, unlike the New Critics, his close reading was performed in the service of his moral theory of literature.
"In Defense of Reason" also features Winters' acerbic comments in opposition to, and sometimes strongly disapproving of, various writers and critics usually held in high esteem in modern literary culture. For such comments he has been often called "brutal," which, however, appears to be an exaggeration. Winters wrote like most other hard-hitting critics who waged battle in the critical wars surrounding the New Criticism in the middle of the 20th century.