SOURCE: Spears, Monroe K. “The Latest Poetry of Robert Penn Warren.” The Sewanee Review 78, no. 2 (April 1970): 348-57.

In the following review, Spears notes the heightened personal reference of Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966 and explores the themes, imagery, and language of Incarnations.

When Robert Penn Warren began writing poetry again in 1954, after the ten-year interval in which he wrote none except for the long “play for verse and voices”, Brother to Dragons, there was a very noticeable change. His new verse was far more open in texture and more explicitly personal in reference than the earlier. The change was plainly a response to the same pressures that caused numerous other poets to begin at about the same time to write the kind of poetry that has since been called “open” or “confessional” or “naked”. On the other hand, it is equally plain that the change was the end...