Robert Penn Warren

One point critics do agree on, however, is the extraordinary nature of Warren’s contribution to literature. In his critical study of the author, Bohner declares that “no other American literary figure of the twentieth century has exhibited greater versatility than Robert Penn Warren. ... While arguments about his preeminence in any one field would be ultimately inconclusive, his total accomplishment ... surpasses that of any other living writer.” Marshall Walker has similar words of praise for Warren in the London Magazine, calling him “America’s most distinguished man of letters in the European sense of a writer involved with books and human kind and at ease in a variety of genres. ... The range of his achievement testifies to the scope and commitment of Warren’s human sympathies. Each intellectual act, whether formally poem, novel, or one of the interviews with black leaders in Who Speaks for the Negro? is of the nature of a poem, according to his own definition of the poem as ‘a way of getting your reality shaped a little better’. 

Underlying the energy, even the violence that is part of Warren’s metaphor of the world as well as of the world itself, is a concern to visualize the meaning of common experience and, without artistic concessions, to make this meaning available in a body of work which, with astonishing success, unites metaphysical and social themes in a single vision.”

Underlying the energy, even the violence that is part of Warren’s metaphor of the world as well as of the world itself, is a concern to visualize the meaning of common experience and, without artistic concessions, to make this meaning available in a body of work which, with astonishing success, unites metaphysical and social themes in a single vision.”

Writing in the Saturday Review, Dickey suggests Warren’s depth rather than his range should be celebrated. “[Warren] is direct, scathingly honest, and totally serious about what he feels,” Dickey begins. “He plunges as though compulsively into the largest of subjects: those that seem to cry out for capitalization and afflatus and, more often than not in the work of many poets, achieve only the former. ... He is a poet of enormous courage, with a highly individual intelligence.” But above all, concludes Dickey, Robert Penn Warren “looks, and refuses to look away. ... [He] wounds deeply; he strikes in at blood-level and gut-level, with all the force and authority of time, darkness, and distance themselves, and of the Nothingness beyond nothingness, which may even be God.”