Overintensity

And, curiously enough, one of the earliest of them was brought about, not by overintensity of rivalry between competing fishermen, leading to acts of hostility, but by undue familiarity based on mistaken notions of friendship and resulting in abuses of a social and moral nature which called for interference.

If Dos Passos' argument fails to be entirely convincing the reason is probably to be found in the overintensity with which he pleads his cause. There are too many disagreeable officers, the food smells too often like garbage, and hypocrites are too hypocrital for the book to be a fair portrayal of life.

Both Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) and New Poems (1918), in whose Preface Lawrence described his style in both books as the Whitman type of free verse, were accused by the reviewers of unselectiveness, wordiness, unpoetic style, overintensity, and a strained manner.