SOURCE: Bohner, Charles. “The Texture of the World.” In Robert Penn Warren, pp. 28-45. Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

In the following essay, Bohner summarizes thematic and stylistic developments in Warren's poetry of 1923 to 1944.

In the spring of 1943 Robert Penn Warren published in the Kenyon Review an essay entitled “Pure and Impure Poetry” which has since taken its place among the major texts of modern criticism. Warren himself evidently believed the essay constituted an important personal statement, for he subsequently placed it first in his Selected Essays (1958). Since the essay appeared while he was preparing his Selected Poems, 1923-1943 for the press, he was perhaps prompted to speculate on the nature of poetry by looking back on two decades of his own practice of the art.

I Poetic Beginnings

“Poetry,” Warren begins, “wants to be pure but poems do not.” The poet writing the pure poem is, like...