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Primitivism And Decadence (Winters)

 

To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent.
-- Yvor Winters. From the section "The Heroic Couplet And Its Recent Revival" of the essay "Poetic Convention" from Primitivism And Decadence (1937), republished in In Defense Of Reason.
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