SOURCE: Strandberg, Victor. “Poet of Youth: Robert Penn Warren at Eighty.” In Time's Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren, edited by James A. Grimshaw, Jr., pp. 91-106. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Strandberg traces enduring themes and images from Warren's poetic career illustrated in the “Altitudes and Extensions” pieces of his New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985.

The publication of “Altitudes and Extensions” on Robert Penn Warren's eightieth birthday—April 24, 1985—invites the “Poet of Youth” designation on three grounds.¹ First, as though to prove his contention that a man has all the images he will ever need by age twenty, Warren continues to write extensively about his boyhood throughout the poetry of his septuagenarian years. Second, he continues in this latest volume to explore and develop the themes he first adumbrated fifty to sixty years ago, as though these last poems were designed...