SOURCE: Strandberg, Victor. “Image and Persona in Warren's ‘Early’ Poetry.” Mississippi Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 135-48.

In the following essay, Strandberg studies the relationship between Warren's early poetic themes—“the fall from innocence, the search for the lost self, and the redeeming pantheistic insight”—and his use of natural imagery.

In looking at Warren's early poetry, including his manuscripts on deposit at Yale, one could easily become distracted by a (Harold) Bloomesque anxiety-of-influence perspective. T. S. Eliot's style, imagery, and structuring methods leave tell-tale traces throughout “Kentucky Mountain Farm” and “The Return: An Elegy,” for example, and Hart Crane's influence (possibly via Allen Tate) is implicit in a thirty-eight-line poem by Warren, never published, entitled “Farewell of Faustus to Helen.” And Warren's mentor John Crowe Ransom is of course a presence behind many poems of that formative period, making himself felt in the rhyming quatrain form, in the elegiac...