Winters Wields his Cudgel

Romantic poets beware

Art by Elliot Skow

In our age of affirmation, “The Sentimental-Romantic Decadence of the 18th & 19th Centuries,” a 1967 essay by the poet and critic Yvor Winters, is a delightful punch in the face. His barbs leave, at his feet, every sacred cow drowning in its own vomit. Indeed he would have derided that very metaphor as mixed-up nonsense. About Samuel Johnson Winters writes, “poetry appears to have been an acquired language in which he was never entirely at home”; Johnson’s was “a style which consists of a kind of coagulation of clichés.” Harsh? That’s just a warm-up.

William Wordsworth “has a reputation far in excess of his desserts.” He “is a very bad poet who nevertheless wrote a few good lines.” A few good lines—in this essay, that’s about the highest praise a romantic poet can hope for. Wordsworth’s “style is bad in almost every detail.” Wordsworth’s poem Mutability “exhibits his general illiteracy.” His writing is often “insufferably pretentious.” And,

Wordsworth is said to be the poet of nature, but his description of nature is almost invariably pompous and stereotyped; he sees almost nothing.

It’s worth pausing here briefly for a fact-check.