That characteristically emphatic and contentious statement opens Yvor Winters' essay “The Experimental School in American Poetry,” which became a chapter in his book-length “study of American experimental poetry,” Primitivism and Decadence, which in turn became part of his monumental attack on the regrettable and dangerous consequences of Romanticism and Modernism, In Defense of Reason. Deploying offense as the best defense, Winters launched the forays which made him during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s a deadly antagonist of Romanticism and Modernism.

The mature Winters would have liked us to pass over or forget his poetic origins, for he began his career as an experimentalist under the spell of Rimbaud and Williams. However, his intellectual, moral, and aesthetic position shifted in the year or so after he came to Stanford University as a graduate student in 1927. And after he began teaching there the next year, he waged the good fight against both Romanticism and Modernism – in the literary journals and in his correspondence with friends and enemies – from his western fastness far from the bustle of New York and Boston and Chicago, not to mention London and Paris.