SOURCE: Watkins, Floyd C. “Following the Tramp in Warren's ‘Blackberry Winter.’” Studies in Short Fiction 22, no. 3 (summer 1985): 343-45.

In the following essay, Watkins argues that the final sentence in “Blackberry Winter” is an ineffective conclusion to the story.

Robert Penn Warren wrote his short stories in the late 1930's and the first half of the 1940's. He did not publish any poems from his Selected Poems (1943) until Brother to Dragons (1953) and then the poems collected into the Pulitzer Prize winning Promises (1957). Brevity and compactness (and perhaps the intensity of writing short fiction) interfered with Warren's composition of poetry. On the other hand, he has said that the emotional turbulence of the last stages of his marriage to Cinina Brescia also ran counter to the mood which produces poetry.

Preciseness of imagery, distinctness of characterization, and revelation of meaning give Warren's “Blackberry Winter” many traits of his poems. The...