In the following interview, conducted in 1977, Warren discusses his formative influences, his association with the Fugitive group, the means and development of his poetic composition, and the nature of his perception of the world as a poet.

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

In the following essay, Bohner summarizes thematic and stylistic developments in Warren's poetry of 1923 to 1944.

In the following essay, Bloom probes Warren's place within, and development of, the American poetic tradition.

A fundamental coherence unifies Warren's whole body of poetry, as though it constituted a single poem drawn out in a fugal pattern…. Ultimately, in fugal fashion, his three master themes interlock, so that at any point in the poet's career we are likely to see simultaneous traces of all three themes—and in at least one instance, "The Ballad of Billie Potts," they fuse into perfect harmony. But for the most part each theme has in its turn a period of predominance ove...

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.

In the following essay, Forgotson evaluates Warren's poetic technique, concentrating on the poet's use of symbolism and compression in an extended explication of “Eidolon,” and in partial analyses of “Aubade for Hope” and “The Garden.”

In the following essay, Watkins evaluates Warren's vacillation between skepticism and a religious view of mortality in his last two collections of poetry, Rumor Verified and New and Selected Poems.

In the following review, Balla suggests that Warren's collection Rumor Verified is unfocused and overly “genteel,” but describes the dramatic poem Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce as possibly Warren's finest.

In the following essay, Strandberg studies the relationship between Warren's early poetic themes—“the fall from innocence, the search for the lost self, and the redeeming pantheistic insight”—and his use of natural imagery.

In the following review, Bloom surveys Warren's life and literary career, concentrating on later developments in his poetry as reflected in New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985.

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

In the following review, Smith centers on the moral vision of Warren's Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978 and of his earlier poetic collections.

In the following review, Spears notes the heightened personal reference of Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966 and explores the themes, imagery, and language of Incarnations.

In the following essay, Justus details the searching and questioning quality of Warren's nostalgic poems in Being Here, Now and Then, and Rumor Verified.

On the basis of his recent work, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Warren is the best that we now have, the dean of living American poets, occupying the place left vacant at Robert Frost's death. If this ranking is accurate, it is not generally recognized…. It may be that Warren's versatility has had a detrimental effect on his reputation as a poet. Perhaps we assume that a truly fine poet must give his all to poetry, or that a writer can show true excellence ...

In the following review, originally published in 1958, Wright calls Warren “unpredictable” as a poet and focuses on “distortions of language” in his collection Promises: Poems 1954-1956. The critic continues by analyzing “The Child Next Door,” viewing it as “a successful, though disturbing poem.”

In the following review of Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980, Lieberman analyzes Warren's poem “Globe of Gneiss,” commenting on its experimental prosody and thematic grandeur.

In the following excerpt, Brooks praises Warren's skilled manipulation of irony, contrast, and theme in his poetry.

In the following review of Selected Poems: 1923-1975, McClatchy surveys Warren's poetic career and lauds his poetry of the 1970s.

In the following review of Brother to Dragons, Lowell confers stylistically qualified praise on Warren's “brutal, perverse melodrama” in blank verse.

With [Selected Poems 1923–1975] and his … novel A Place to Come to Robert Penn Warren continues to run both poetry and fiction toward the ring of Truth (often his ostensible, even ostentatious, subject). The race in unequal. His fiction is lame and always has been. And for a long time the poetry too was but fair-to-middling down the stretch. But as if more and more goaded by the cheers of death, it has gained speed, mass, power, grandeur. (p. 71) The novels are dispiriting in every way—...

In the following review, Yenser considers the enigmatic language, gritty tone, and thematic sweep of Warren's collection Or Else.

In the following review of Selected Poems: 1923-1943, originally published in 1944, Ransom briefly appraises the poem “Aubade for Hope” and stresses Warren's theme of Original Sin, which the critic defines as “the betrayal of our original nature that we commit in the interest of our rational evolution and progress.”

In The American Adam R.W.B. Lewis reminds us that during the nineteenth century many serious writers pictured America as a new Garden of Eden and saw the American as a new Adam, "a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history." The experience of the past century, however, has shattered the validity of such a myth. The serious American of today is more likely to see himself as a tainted anti-hero whose potentialities have been dissipated by imperialis...

Warren associated the acceptance of scientific determinism as a philosophy with the rise of totalitarianism—partly, one supposes, because that philosophy appears to be merely an expansion of the idea of cause and effect into a universal principle as applicable to human affairs as to the motion of billiard balls. Such a view seems scientific and therefore carries with it the implicit authority of science…. If, in an historical context, determinism tended to bolster non-ethical forms of authorit...

In the following review of Selected Poems: 1923-1943, Fitts comments on Marvellian traces in Warren's poetry, and on the near grotesque, tragicomic quality of “The Ballad of Billie Potts.”

In the following excerpted review, Stitt responds to Harold Bloom's assessment of Warren and his New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Stitt goes on to call Warren “the most important American poet of the second half of the twentieth century,” while lamenting the exclusions from his latest poetic collection.

Warren has spoken often of Randall Jarrell's admonition that the true poet stays out in the rain and waits to be struck by the lightning. In poems that range from early iambic monotony to images of virulent, if disorderly power to a late and soaring architecture of the individual heart, Warren has submitted himself to that lightning. His character, his art, is the conduit of the violent and essential energy of the universe. [Harold] Bloom, rightly, has said that Warren wants to be a hawk of life. As ...

In the following review of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Logan offers a derisive look at Warren, characterizing him as “a failed major poet.”

In the following review, Flint favorably assesses Warren's narrative poem Brother to Dragons.

In the following review of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Zawacki briefly encapsulates Warren's poetic accomplishments and his literary status at the end of the twentieth century.

In the following essay, Watkins summarizes Warren's poetry on American subjects and emphasizes Warren's depiction of the human capacity for evil in Brother to Dragons.

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.”

[In Now and Then] time is of the essence. One might think of these poems as a series of commentaries on two ideas that run through the book so steadily that they come to have thematic significance…. Time is running out; the world is a beautiful place. The two sections of Now and Then offer different ways of dealing with these related truths: Nostalgic delves into time past; Speculative moves mostly forward, touching on past, present, and an envisioned futuristic otherness. (Shouldn't the book&...

In the following review of Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, Smith focuses on the new poems in this collection, collectively called “Altitudes and Extensions,” which he says “oscillate between prosy speculation and lyrical exultation.”

In 1953 Robert Penn Warren published Brother to Dragons, a narrative poem based on the crimes [of Lilburne Lewis, Thomas Jefferson's nephew]. He organized it as a dialogue of disembodied voices conversing long after the event, in an unspecified place. Instead of making the incidents themselves the substance of his poem, Warren treated those as starting a debate on "the human condition," particularly the extent of men's innate virtue or depravity. To suit his plan, he not only alt...

In the following excerpted review, Martz acknowledges Warren's “subtle and firm command of his own idiom,” while surveying the poetic works of Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968.

In the following excerpted review, Pritchard describes the verses of Being Here as “poetry of emotions … high-pitched and poignant.”

In the following excerpted review, Dickey highlights the intensity of Warren's poetry—despite its occasional unevenness—and its themes of self-definition, self-discovery, and self-determination.

Warren's Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices was published in 1953. A quarter century later, he gives us a new version that is, as he says, "a new work."… Reading Brother to Dragons in this new version, side by side with the 1953 text, is an instructive experience, particularly in regard to the vexed problem of poetic revisionism. (p. 30) Reading Brother to Dragons in 1953, I was made uneasy, acknowledged the poem's vigor, disliked its ideological tendentiousnes...

The source of Warren's stunning power is angst, a kind of radiant metaphysical terror, projected outward into the natural world, particularly into its waiting waste expanses: open field, ocean, desert, mountain range, or the constellations as they feed into the eye a misshapen, baffling, and yearning mythology bred on nothingness. He is direct, scathingly honest, and totally serious about what he feels, and in approach is as far as can be imagined from, say, Mallarmé, who urged poets to ...

In the following excerpted review, Deutsch admires Brother to Dragons “as a whole and in its parts.”

Typically, the voice in Robert Penn Warren's Selected Poems, 1923–75 is situated in a moment, a boundary or threshold, where the meaning of time must be hazarded: "the future is always unpredictable. / But so is the past, therefore / At Wood's edge I stand and, / Over the black horizon, heat lightning / Ripples the black sky" ("Tale of Time," IV). In this threshold moment (and it is usually a narrative one for Warren, not a lyric one as for Eberhart and Ammon...

Through the three [long, personal digressions in Brother to Dragons], Warren gives us the spiritual history of RPW, a spiritual history which parallels in many respects the spiritual history of Jefferson, the central concern of the poem, and which justifies the superior wisdom of RPW the commentator. (p. 19) His cousin's butchering of [a slave was] a traumatic experience for Jefferson. Prior to this event, Jefferson saw man as standing between beast and God and aspiring to the divine. Evil was merely...

Over the years Warren has, I believe, tended to refine a particularly "classical" vision. That is to say, he has eschewed most hasty views of contemporary culture, views that seem to depend on shibboleths like "dissociation," "dissolution," or "disorder," and has tended instead to see the directions of modern life based not so much on hysterical sociology as upon the unavoidable accidents of the human plot, the ironies of covert circumstances, the unra...

As the title [to Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then] indicates, his priority in this … volume of verse lies with the present. The poems in the first and shorter section, though they fall under the heading of "Nostalgic," are no mere sentimental journey home. With humor and affection, he recounts early observations of nature, discerning as always metaphysical suggestions in the realm of birds, sky, and stars. Revisiting scenes of childhood, the poet finds messages of lasting import...

[John James] Audubon's art is muscular and avid: his birds and his rats alike inhabit a world of beak and claw and fang, of ripped-open bellies and planted talons. Violence caught in act, at the heart of Audubon's work, is at the heart too of [Audubon: A Vision] where Robert Penn Warren retells with his peculiar narrative Ancient-Mariner talent, a raw incident of craftiness, torture, and death, purportedly witnessed by Audubon. The incident seems considerably milder as it appears in Audubon&#x...

Mr. Warren's poetry has made itself felt, for some five decades, as a moral presence and a moral pressure of an unusual kind, and he is read by people who are genuinely interested in poetry. Since Promises (1956) the poems have grown steadily more impressive. He is not among the great originals of American poetry, yet, in their power to astonish, his poems resemble Melville's: there is the same tested and life-weary appeal to experience, with the sense of a fierce self-command maintained again...

Robert Penn Warren's poems [in Selected Poems: 1923–1975] are perhaps … best described as those of a man of letters, novelist and critic as well as poet. His collections tend to follow poetic styles rather than to invent them, but within those inherited styles he can work consummately well…. Even [in early poems such as "Pursuit"] Warren had his storyteller's eye, his easy rhythm, and his feel for the horrible and the hopeful. The earlier poems are, like the ...

Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then … is about the possibility of joy…. Warren shows … romantic credulity,… and he writes in a genuinely expansive, passionate style. Look at its prose ease and rapidity oddly qualified by log-piling compounds, alliteration, successive stresses, and an occasional inversion—something rough and serviceable as a horse-blanket yet fancy too—and you wonder how he ever came up with it. It is excitingly massive and moulded and full of m...

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 Voi...

Lionel Trilling once wrote of E. M. Forster that he refused to be great—by contrast, presumably, with D. H. Lawrence, who insisted upon greatness. I am saying that those American poets who, under different circumstances, might make a leap toward greatness seem to have decided not to leap. It is not that present circumstances are in themselves desperately unpropitious. Who knows anything, in any case, about the circumstances that favor major work? It is that grandeur, especially of the bardic kind, is...