SOURCE: Brooks, Cleanth. “The Modern Poet and the Tradition.” In Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 77-87. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939, 253p.

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

In Robert Penn Warren's sequence of poems, “Kentucky Mountain Farm,” the reader might expect to find an exploitation of Southern rural life, and there is enough accurate description to validate the poet's localizing of his scene. Consider for instance, the third poem of the sequence, “History among the Rocks.” The poet recounts the various ways of dying in the country of the rocks—freezing, drowning, the bite of the copperhead in the wheat:

By flat limestone, will coil the copperhead, Fanged as the sunlight, hearing the reaper's feet. 

But the items of local color are absorbed in the poem as adjuncts of the larger theme. These ways...