Whence come our problems, eh? Yvor Winters knows? Sentimental we. It's a crime? Barnabe Googe vs. Sir Philip Sidney. Forget Ralph Waldo. Narcissus.

The source of our problems: You've heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without "human interest" thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts.

The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the '30s and '40s, etc. with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today.

Winters' problem would be the primacy he gives reason -- in poetry but one suspects in all of life -- over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as "the brink of darkness," as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket in 1932.

Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? asked Winters about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century's William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason.

This idea was "to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously." One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints "of the wrong religion," as Winters identified Hart Crane.

The crime of sentimentalism: This association of ideas idea seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis -- lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don't hold water. They're yours, aren't they? And who am I to say you're wrong? Etc.

Romantic poets -- one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase "blithe spirit" -- looked in their hearts and wrote (as the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney was advised by his muse when worried what he would tell his girl friend). Winters favored "a logical, plain-spoken poetic," as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century poets, which is like preferring the plain-spoken Harry Truman to the oratorical FDR in political terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.

In his poem "Of Money," Googe says he'd rather have money than friends because with the first he'd always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration:

Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, fare well they must away.

The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric "to the minimum required by the subject," as opposed to "rhetoric for its own sake" as practiced by other Elizabethans.

Another of Winters' favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own "creeping genius" was "more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit" and thus wrote for "those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world." An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.

In Winters, discontent: Winters' own poetry was on the money in Greville terms. In his "A Grave," he has this: "Life it seems is this:/ To learn to shorten what has moved amiss;/ To temper motion till a mean is hit . . . "

And translating from the 17th-century French of Mme. des Houlieres: "Pathetic plaything of a witless chance,/ Victim of evils and of laws,/ Man . . . must suffer life's impertinence." Facing death, he is to "regard it with unhurried breath,/ And know this outrage for the last."

Or the stunning motto on the back of a bicycling youngster the other day in River Forest: "It's not the pace of life that bothers me, but the sudden stop at the end." Only in River Forest.

Winters held feeling in suspicion and wanted it served up with restraint. This is art, to tell the tale, describe the experience, emotion and all, trying to understand it and then presenting it with the feeling it deserves and not a gulp more.

It's the poet's duty to take a fix on the feeling and put it in its place. He is to control emotion, "releasing it through constraint," in Yezzi's words.

An excess of emotion "obscured the experience" to be communicated, which is why we call sentimentalism sloppy. Bad poems are "slipshod" in their rendering of experience. They are inaccurate.

Ralph Waldo who? Winters clearly thought there was something to be said about the world. Unlike those theorists engaged in "the killing of history" as Keith Windschuttle tells it in his book of that name, he thinks we can get at the truth, or at least get close.

He defended an "absolutist" theory of literature, by which literature "approximates a real apprehension and communication of . . . objective truth." This alone would get him laughed out of many a classroom today, if we are to believe higher education's critics.

Interestingly, one of his absolute bad guys in the literary realm was Ralph W. Emerson, who said things like "No man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations." Oh? This is somewhat like what current educationists say, "Every child can learn," without saying what it is he or she can learn. But theirs is a slogan.

Emerson saw art, Winters said, as resting "on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment," regardless (apparently) of what he is at that moment. Spit it out, and it's good, because it's you. Makes one wonder what did happen to the handsome Narcissus when he fell in love with his reflection in the pond. He pined away and died, that's what.