["In Defense of Reason"] is a particularly good book to buy; one can put it between Empson's "Some Versions of Pastoral" and Eliot's "Selected Essays," and feel for them the mixture of awe, affection and disagreement that one always feels for a first-rate critical book. But the proportion of disagreement, often of incredulous and despairing disagreement, is extraordinarily high as one reads Winters: there is no critic of comparable eminence who has made so many fantastic judgments.

Winters is what Kierkegaard said he was—a corrective; and Winters' case for the rational, extensive, prosaic virtues that the age disliked, his case against the modernist, intensive, essentially romantic vices that it swallowed whole, have in his later criticism become a case for any academic rationalistic vices, a case against any complicated dramatic virtues. Winters' tone has long ago become that of the leader of a small religious cult, that of the one sane man in a universe of lunatics; his habitual driven-to-distraction rages against the reprobates who have evidenced their lunacy by disagreeing with him go side by side with a startled, giant admiration for the elect who in a rational moment have become his followers.

His arguments often remind one of Tolstoy's: he takes a few facts, disregards the existence of the rest, and reasons simply, clearly, and convincingly to a partial and extravagant conclusion. All his vices are cumulative: in a book like Winters' last one, "Edwin Arlington Robinson," one walks among the ruins of criticism.

But these are the ruins—temporary, one hopes—of an extraordinary critical talent, of someone who, at his best, is one of the finest of all critics of poetry. A note like this cannot be much more than a hand pointing dumbly to Winters' virtues; but it is a pleasure to testify to all the pleasure and insight one has gained from them, to acknowledge what a genuinely educational influence he has been to everybody except his disciples (to them he has been mesmeric).

Essentially he is an evaluative, analytical critic, concerned first of all with the intrinsic, objective methods of the work of art, with the quality and qualities of a particular work of art; his criticism is only secondarily interested in how these were arrived at, in the biographical, political and economic, genetic aspects of works of art. But these are the regular interests of our critical life; consequently, many critics dismiss Winters, a few join him, as they would join the Party or the Church, and a few more accept him as something different, partially wrong, and valuable….

When Winters' taste is at its best one feels that he is an immediate contact with the reality of the poem, that his criticism has reached a level at which praise and objection are alike superfluous; but much of the time, in whole desolate areas, his taste can be depended upon to be valueless, since in them it is purely dogmatic and theoretical, proceeding not from his experience but from his standards….

Winters' greatest theoretical mistake is this: he takes the act of criticism, assumes that the values involved are moral, that the act is an act of moral judgment, and then assumes that this process of judgment is itself the act of creation by which any work of art is produced. His practical misvaluations, at their most extraordinary, rival the Himalayas; perhaps their most forbidding peak is the judgment which pronounces Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" the "finest single flower of the Jamesian art," and finds its prose "certainly superior to the prose of James."

But Winters' clear, independent and serious talent has produced criticism that no cultivated person can afford to leave unread. His essential insights can be found in their purest form in "Primitivism and Decadence," but there are perceptions that match those scattered through his later essays on Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Dickinson, James and Henry Adams.