At its most self-indulgent Robert Penn Warren's sensibility may be mournfully flowery, rhetorically compassionate, windily speculative; but it's a big human thing, and it's good to have it on our side. Warren's arrows fly off in every direction, toward the good and bad, the sublime and turpid, and he thus overshadows [Donald] Justice and even [Anthony] Hecht, poets limited to the boomerang of their own pain. The new sharpened version of Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices outdoes even Hecht in finding "vanity, greed, and blood-lust" in our natures, but it is "R.P.W." who pipes up with the sweetly willed thought that a certain killer's "heart-deep need / To name his evil good is the final evidence / For the existence of good." (p. 477)

Reading Brother to Dragons is a startling experience in complexity: the bear's claws drip both honey and blood.

First published in...