early period. Although beginning his career as an admirer and imitator of the Imagist poets, Winters by the end of the 1920s had formulated a neo-classic poetics. Around 1930, he turned away from modernism and developed an Augustan style of writing, notable for its clarity of statement and its formality of rhyme and rhythm, with most of his poetry thereafter being in the accentual-syllabic form. As critic Winters's critical style was comparable to that of F. R. Leavis, and in the same way he created a school of students (of mixed loyalty). His affiliations and proposed canon, however, were quite different: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence above any one novel by Henry James, Robert Bridges above T. S. Eliot, Charles Churchill above Alexander Pope, Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne above Sidney and Spenser. In his view, "a poem in the first place should offer us a new perception . . . bringing into being a new experience." He attacked Romanticism, particularly in its American manifestations, and assailed Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow. His first book of poems, Diadems and Fagots, takes its title from one of Emerson's poems. In this he was probably influenced by Irving Babbitt. Winters was associated with the New Criticism. Winters is best known for his argument attacking the "fallacy of imitative form": "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. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything." Bibliography Diadems and Fagots (1921) poems The Immobile Wind (1921) poems The Magpie's Shadow (1922) poems Secession certain Notes on the Mechanics of the Image (1923) a magazine The Bare Hills (1927) poems The Proof (1930) poems The Journey and Other Poems (1931) poems Before Disaster (1934) poems Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry Arrow Editions, New York, 1937 Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938) Poems (1940) The Giant