SOURCE: Matthiessen, F. O. Review of Selected Poems: 1923-1943. The Kenyon Review 6, no. 4 (Autumn 1944): 683-96.

In the following excerpted review, Matthiessen observes the influence of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell evident in Warren's Selected Poems: 1923-1943, the dense suggestiveness of Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, and the dramatic tension of “The Ballad of Billie Potts.”

Warren has published two previous books of poems (in 1935 and 1942), but these had a very restricted circulation; and he has generally been placed as a minor figure in the school of Ransom and Tate, and is thus dismissed by [Yvor] Winters. His Selected Poems: 1923-1943, by separating his late work from his earlier, mark where he started and how far he has come. “The Return: An Elegy,” eloquent as is its expression of undisseverable attraction and repulsion of a son for his mother, uses too many of Eliot's contrasts to be quite...