SOURCE: Dickey, James. “In the Presence of Anthologies.” The Sewanee Review LXVI, no. 2 (Spring 1958): 294-314.

In the following excerpted review, Dickey highlights the intensity of Warren's poetry—despite its occasional unevenness—and its themes of self-definition, self-discovery, and self-determination.

Opening a book of poems by Robert Penn Warren is like putting out the light of the sun, or like plunging into the labyrinth and feeling the thread break after the first corner is passed. One will never come out in the same Self as that in which one entered. When he is good, and often even when he is bad, you had as soon read Warren as live, a feeling you do not get from any of these others, expert as some of them are. Of all these poets, Warren is the only one to give you the sense of poetry as a thing of final importance to...