SOURCE: Smith, Dave. “He Prayeth Best Who Loveth Best.” The American Poetry Review 8, no. 1 (January 1979): 4-8.

In the following review, Smith centers on the moral vision of Warren's Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978 and of his earlier poetic collections.

I

Robert Penn Warren is seventy-three. He has published his eleventh volume of poetry, this thirty-second book, and he has never written better. His first book, a biography of John Brown, appeared when he was twenty-four, in the year Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury and Hemingway A Farewell To Arms. With others he is known as the architect of New Criticism; his textbook, Understanding Poetry is one of the first stones in the foundation of contemporary American poetry. There is no genre in which his fierce and craggy and formidably human talent has not manifested itself. There are no awards in American letters which he has not...