SOURCE: Martz, Louis L. “Recent Poetry.” The Yale Review 58, no. 4 (June 1969): 592-605.

In the following excerpted review, Martz acknowledges Warren's “subtle and firm command of his own idiom,” while surveying the poetic works of Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968.

It has now been fifteen years since Robert Penn Warren returned to lyric poetry in the writings of his volume Promises: Poems 1954-1956. His new volume, Incarnations, fulfills those promises. Warren has moved now into subtle and firm command of his own idiom, with an effect well-described by his chosen title. These poems incarnate, by movement of spoken words, by images of fruit and sea and city, a sense of spirit flowing through all existence, or as he puts it in one poem, a sense of “the furious energies of nature.” These are sequences with many settings: first, a Mediterranean island off the coast of France; next, the dismal setting of...