SOURCE: Bedient, Calvin. “His Grand Last Phase.” In In the Heart's Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren's Major Poetry, pp. 1-21. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Bedient speaks of Warren's transition to poetic greatness with the publication of Audubon: A Vision.

Nothing in Robert Penn Warren's long career as a man of letters has so distinguished it as has the final act, which opened in the late sixties, when he himself had entered his sixties (he was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905). His greatness as a writer began with his determination to concentrate on poetry as the extreme resource of language-knowledge, language-being—began with Audubon: A Vision (1969), forty-six years after he started publishing poems as a student prodigy at Vanderbilt, under the tutelage of (among others) John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. What seized him then was a heroic effort to present himself as a...