He crammed into his poem forty obscure euphonious words, more than fifty terms invoking “purple” and “red,” twenty-nine mythological creatures, and five astronomical bodies.

He envisions a winged woman named Fancy flying to beautiful places and horrifying sites, all imagined as red from seeing them in the dark wine and the sunset-reflecting wineglass.

Fancy leaves for a "Syrian treasure-house," then follows "the seaward flight of homing dragons" “To some red city of the Djinns" where silent palaces with "a porphyry crypt" make her flee South.

Outside, cypress trees reflect the sun's ghostly red, a flying bat sees "the twilight witch," and the king of "silent ghouls" excavates black relics.

… In 'The Testimony of the Suns' Mr. Sterling strikes and holds as high a note as has been heard in a century of English song, and I have a manuscript poem by him which would add to the glory of Coleridge or Keats.

James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, and British ambassador to the United States, in a widely quoted interview recently implied that this country lacked poets.

However, most of the controversy was caused by Bierce's opinionated and (for many readers) infuriating afterword, plus the efforts of William Randolph Hearst's media empire to rouse an uproar to sell newspapers and magazines.

"[25] Arthur Brisbane persuaded George Brinton McClellan Harvey, the editor of prestigious publications Harper's Weekly and North American Review, to give his opinion of "A Wine of Wizardry."

It begins nowhere, follows no path and ends where it began—a mere congeries of gobs, as far removed from the play of true poetic fancy as the odor of hyoscyamus from the fragrance of a rose.”[26] On September 8, Hearst's San Francisco Examiner ran an entire page about "A Wine of Wizardry," headlined "Will This Poem Be the Great American Classic?"

[27] The Washington Post stated: “Other poems dealing with creeping and crawling things have had their value—if they have lived—in something more than the recapitulation of repulsive objects in various colors.”[28] Sterling complained to his best friend Jack London, "Of course I realize that Hearst is doing all this merely to sell his damned Cosmopolitan, but it doesn’t make the whole row any the less absurd and offensive to me.

They must be burned or hung.”[30] In the New York Evening Journal, Arthur Brisbane reported that the issue of Cosmopolitan containing “A Wine of Wizardry” had sold out and the newspaper had received “many hundreds of letters” arguing over the poem.

[31] The San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser approved the poem but not Bierce’s heavy-handed endorsement: “‘A Wine of Wizardry’ is a great poem, one of the greatest produced in recent years, perhaps, and most of us would have made that discovery without having the fact bludgeoned into us by Mr. Bierce.”[32] Sterling described his own point of view in news magazine Town Talk: “I think there is room in the garden of poetry for all kinds of flowers, and we shouldn’t allow narrow minds to cast from it everything that’s not a rose, a lily or a violet.

I once knew a man who had ’em for fair, and wandered three days in the desert, chasing green-haired ballet girls in pink tights and combing snakes out of his whiskers, but he never saw anything to compare with the circus procession that passed before Mr. Sterling.

"[34] In the October 1907 issue of Humanity, Edwin C. Ranck covered the entire controversy in a caustic article beginning: The most amusing thing in recent literary annals is Ambrose Bierce’s grandiloquent praise of George Sterling’s new poem, “A Wine of Wizardry,” and the jealous, bitter reply made to it by that empress of scullery maid’s poetry—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

[35]The October Current Literature covered the controversy by reprinting "A Wine of Wizardry" and an introduction indicating its editor's displeasure: “The poem is a series of lurid pictures which Fancy, wine-inspired, is represented as conjuring up.

He named three from the Examiner’s September full page about "A Wine of Wizardry": Gertrude Atherton, Joaquin Miller, and Ina Coolbrith—who all knew Sterling personally.

Bierce gave nicknames to his other seven targets: the “Baseball Reporter” (William F. Kirk), the “Sweet Slinger of Slang” (possibly William J. Lampton, called "the Slang Poet" in Bierce's poem "A Poet's Hope"), the “Simian Lexicographer of Misinformation” (Wex Jones), the “Queen of Platitudinaria” (Ella Wheeler Wilcox), “Deacon Harvey” (George Harvey), “A person of light and leading in their bright band” (Arthur Brisbane), and “the critic, who, naturally, is a book-reviewer” (Hector Fuller).

… Moreover, he has a notable knack at mastery of the English language, which he handles with no small part of the ease and grace that may have distinguished the impenitent thief carrying his cross up the slope of Calvary.”[38] Near the end of December, sportswriter Grantland Rice used baseball jargon to sum up Bierce's quarrels with Sterling detractors: “The highest batting average among the ranks of the litterateruri, or words to that effect, belongs to Ambrose Bierce, of the Cosmopolitan.

Whereupon the enraged critic comes back with a statement, terming her ‘the poetess who has given up the sin-and-sugar of youth for the milk-and-morality of old age.’ If this isn’t hitting ’em out [of the ballpark], we miss an easy guess.

As you read his wizard pages, you feel as though you were voyaging up some tropic stream darkened with excess of foliage and bloom, where through the rifts in the leafy roofs you get glimpses of a blazing sky, or catch at times the iris flash of giant flowers or brilliant birds, the gleam of jeweled lizards or the coil of coruscating serpents.

Considered as a series of gorgeous dissolving views, “The [sic] Wine of Wizardry" is unequaled by anything else in our literature: it stands alone, a marvel of color and verbal beauty.”[55] Seventeen days before Sterling committed suicide, he revealed his feelings about the ongoing criticism in a Halloween 1926 letter to Clark Ashton Smith.

I regret that this should be so, for it implies that I’ve wasted a good deal of creative energy; but only cranks and mental hermits now take my ‘Wine’ seriously, and I feel futile when I use my imagination on ‘impossible’ stuff, the element where it is best fitted to function.

For the present, my ‘blue-eyed vampire’ is only an intellectual joke, and to call anyone a fool who smiles back at her is not to win the argument.”[56] After Sterling’s death, several summaries of his life mentioned his wine poem.

A gorgeous display, unbelievably rich in imagery and imaginative splendor, but … divorced of feeling, [and] sterile of rapture …"[58] Clark Ashton Smith, in a postmortem appreciation of his mentor Sterling, recalled how “touched with more than the glamour of childhood dreams, was my first reading, [at age 15], of “A Wine of Wizardry" in the pages of the old Cosmopolitan.

The poem, with its necromantic music, and splendors as of sunset on jewels and cathedral windows, was veritably all that its title implied; and—to pile marvel upon enchantment—there was the knowledge that it had been written in my own time, by someone who lived little more than a hundred miles away.

In the ruck of magazine verse it was a fire-opal of the Titans in a potato bin …"[59] In Oregon, one newspaper editor thought the best memorial to the deceased Sterling would be a reprint of his entire wine poem.

The editor explained Sterling “was, undoubtedly, a poetic genius of the first order, and in all English verse there is no more glowing example of the sheer beauty of phrase, of the glory and sorcery of language, than is discovered in ‘A Wine of Wizardry’ … it is desirable, apart from the testimony of news accounts, that there should be a more general comprehension of the literary worth of George Sterling, who in this poem reached his zenith.”[60] After 1926, “A Wine of Wizardry” went out of print for thirty-eight years, except for one 1948 appearance in the fanzine Fantasy Commentator with four full-page illustrations by Joseph Kruchner.

[64] Poet and critic Donald Sidney-Fryer described in 1977 how "A Wine of Wizardry" both reflected Ambrose Bierce's poetic preferences and influenced the works of Clark Ashton Smith: “Not only is Sterling’s imagery in “A Wine of Wizardry” admirably concentrated but the poem itself, in structural terms, is an uncompromising concentration of such imagery developed on the foundation of a simple narrative: this is a direct application of Bierce’s principal theory in the realm of poetics.

The odd detachment of the poem would suggest that this is a rather effete sort of experimentation; yet the highly mannered language seems like a fabric stretched over an abyss of despair, hidden from the reader’s view only by the gaudiness of that fabric.”[66] Professor Tony J. Stafford, in a carefully considered essay “George Sterling and the Wine of Fancy,” looked back at “A Wine of Wizardry” from a different perspective to explain the earlier critical confusion and describe what Sterling accomplished, as these two paragraphs show: “Contrary to contemporary opinion, including Bierce’s, the poem is not a mere verbal and imagistic orgy, but a carefully controlled work of art.

Yet throughout the wanderings of Sterling’s lines we can discern the Romantic and Decadent energies which in the following decades would form their own new, albeit less respectable, spaces in both the critical and popular imaginations.”[71] In his essay “On ‘A Wine of Wizardry’,” literary historian and critic S. T. Joshi pointed out the poem's significance for readers today: “The absence of a recognisable ‘plot,’ and even the relative dearth of philosophical ‘meaning’ beyond its prodigal wealth of vibrant imagery, are not drawbacks but virtues; for the single-minded ‘purpose’ of ‘A Wine of Wizardry’ is to suggest the inexhaustible scope of the human imagination—an imagination that has so frequently been drawn to the evocation of horror, terror, weirdness, and bizarrerie.