SOURCE: Spears, Monroe K. “Robert Penn Warren: A Hardy American.” The Sewanee Review 91, no. 4 (Fall 1983): 655-64.

In the following essay, Spears remarks on Warren's poetry and critical accounts of Warren's work published in the early 1980s.

An American Hardy? Not exactly. Though we have not had such a prolonged late flowering of a poet since Thomas Hardy's (which lasted until his eighty-eighth year), and though Warren's poetry resembles Hardy's in many ways—perhaps most in the religious attitude of yearning unbelief coupled with grim irony and the metrical virtuosity based on stretching traditional forms—Warren is obviously not merely an American version of Hardy. He is unique, original, and, for me at least, a far more profound, moving, and satisfying poet than Hardy. At the risk of being thought a precious paronomasiac, I have therefore shifted the word order in my title so as to stress Warren's hardiness...