Yvor Winters and the Antimimetic Prejudice

Winters, characteristically, was not content to leave it a simple matter of taste or a personal idiosyncrasy, but elaborated it strenuously into an article of dogma, and made it an integral part of his critical system. As with his other heterodox theses, he did not hesitate to push this one to its most bizarre extremes, so that what starts as a temperamental distaste for a certain strain in literature grows into the most sweeping attack on the mimetic principle since Plato, an attack more sweeping than Plato's since it admits of no contradictions or qualifications, and since it is never itself couched, as it is in Plato, in the quasi-mimetic form of dialogue, but advances like a military campaign, flanked and buttressed by argument and counterargument. Any such defiant act of iconoclasm, aiming to unseat an opinion nearly universally held for two thousand years, would be worth a glance, but when the attempt comes from a gifted critic whose most wrongheaded formulations have always had the power to fix attention on crucial issues, it deserves a nearer scrutiny. Winters sometimes couched his pronouncements as problems or exercises or invitations to debate. The present essay would like to take him at his word in this regard, unhappily aware that he can no longer speak for himself in rebuttal. The authority of his name, and the challenging mixture of brillance and perversity in his analysis of the issue in question make it desirable to initiate, at least, a reasoned reply.'

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