SOURCE: '"The Body of This Death' in Robert Penn Warren's Later Poems," in The Kenyan Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, Fall, 1988, pp. 31-41.

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.

Many varieties of religious experience are everywhere present in the characters, the meditations, and the fiction and poetry of Robert Penn Warren. No novel is more permeated by the subject, perhaps, than All the King's Men, Jack Burden alone ranges from an unalleviated determinism which views God Himself as the Great Twitch (derived from the image of a hitchhiker's uncontrollable tic in his face) to some kind of belief which accepts in its own way the Scholarly Attorney's statement about the glory of God. It would be impossible to determine for long whether Warren's meditations search...