In 1983 Donald E. Stanford, the justly esteemed editor of Edward Taylor's poems, published Revolution and Convention in Modern Poetry. Subtitled ‘Studies in Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Yvor Winters’, Stanford's book rates the five poets in this sequence on a rising scale of merit from first to last. The book went largely unnoticed, as was customary with critics of Stanford's persuasion: the judgements that he arrived at were so far from those commonly accepted, that the majority seemingly could not find any common ground that would make dispute profitable. Yet Stanford reached those judgements out of a coherent understanding of the poetic tradition in English over the centuries. As he declared in the Southern Review in 1987:

Winters would have named Ben Jonson along with Herbert, and would have reversed the rankings of Pound and Eliot in Stanford's hierarchy. Yet we hear in these comments Yvor Winters still speaking twenty years after his death. Before dismissing such views as merely crotchety, it must be noticed that they come to terms with certain figures that the current consensus is uncertain about. One such is Edwin Arlington Robinson. Another is J. V. Cunningham. And a third is Paul Valéry. More generally the consensus is uneasy with the assumption that poetry is an instrument for evaluating experience; and it is reluctant to legislate for the future, as Stanford does with his concern for ‘better role models’.