With a half-dozen books of poetry published to date, Kenneth Fields distills some forty years of teaching and writing about poetry into Classic Rough News, a collection of fresh sonnets and sonnet-like lyrics that attests to both Fields's skills as a writer and the inexhaustible possibilities of the form.

Classic Rough News follows a skeptical, cosmopolitan, intelligent, poetic presence aware that its carefully constructed veneer could crumble at any moment. In poems that mine interior dialogue for the discovery of great truths, Fields conveys feelings of awkwardness, incompleteness, conflict, and insanity-all in finely crafted verse. Ironic and skeptical, the voice in these poems records the flux of the mind, ruefully acknowledging how easy it is to deceive oneself with mixed emotions. Fully mature and unconcerned about impressions, Classic Rough News is grounded in erudition and humor, revealing how tradition and talent can push one another in unexpected directions.

Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works—Primitivism and Decadence, Maule’s Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense—of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing.

The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer—as it is of very man—to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example—the technique of the “whole critic” who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.