SOURCE: Suarez, Ernest. “Toward a New Southern Poetry: Southern Poetry in Contemporary American Literary History.” Southern Review 33, no. 1 (winter 1997): 181-96.

In the following essay, Suarez examines the poetry of James Dickey and Robert Penn Warren as representative of the modern South, pointing out that their poetry is both regional and highly individual.

Robert Penn Warren's and James Dickey's verse published since the mid-1950s provides a basis for reevaluating the history not only of southern poetry but of contemporary American poetry. During the '50s, Warren and Dickey developed approaches that neither historical field has been able fully to accommodate; their work indicates how two categories that should overlap have instead formed distinct, and fragmentary, narratives. Considering the tensions between romantic and naturalistic tendencies in Warren's later poetry and Dickey's verse can suggest how these two men altered assumptions about the Southern Renascence, creating a foundation for a...