SOURCE: Forgotson, E. S. “The Poetic Method of Robert Penn Warren.” American Prefaces VI (Winter 1941): 130-46.

In the following essay, Forgotson evaluates Warren's poetic technique, concentrating on the poet's use of symbolism and compression in an extended explication of “Eidolon,” and in partial analyses of “Aubade for Hope” and “The Garden.”

The body of poetry to be examined in this essay is “modern,” yet its modernity may be viewed, I think, as being more of the second generation than of the first. Though the early part of Warren's career was marked by some precocity—he assisted in editing The Fugitive while he was still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt in 1923—most of the poems appearing in his single published volume (Thirty-Six Poems, 1935) were probably written after 1925; that is to say, in the period from his twentieth to his thirtieth year. Thus, at the time when he was attempting to...