The first, Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry, is Winters' revised doctoral dissertation on the classification and analysis of poetic structures.

The book also contains three general essays that are crucial to understanding Winters as a critic and poet: the Foreword to the whole collection, "Preliminary Problems," which is in effect the introduction to The Anatomy of Nonsense, and "The Significance of 'The Bridge,' by Hart Crane, or 'What Are We to Do with Professor X?'".

Though he started his poetic career in the early 1920s as a free-verse imagist, by late in that decade Winters had become a modern classicist, of a sort.

[4] The third work in the collection, The Anatomy of Nonsense, offers short, crisp, but detailed overviews and interpretations of the writings of Henry Adams (moderately unfavorable), T.S.

[6] In the "Preliminary Problems" essay, found in The Anatomy of Nonsense, he gives a trenchant, painstakingly logical, step-by-step summary of the criteria he uses in evaluating poems and assessing their greatness, particularly precise diction that subordinates emotion to conceptual content and rational structure.

The essay considers Crane as a disciple of Walt Whitman, whose romantic concepts of life and literature Winters discusses at some length.

[9] In Defense of Reason also features Winters' acerbic comments in opposition to, and sometimes strongly disapproving of, various writers and critics usually held in high esteem in modern literary culture.