SOURCE: Stitt, Peter. “Tradition and the Innovative Godzilla.” The Georgia Review 39 (Fall 1985): 635-48.

In the following excerpted review, Stitt responds to Harold Bloom's assessment of Warren and his New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Stitt goes on to call Warren “the most important American poet of the second half of the twentieth century,” while lamenting the exclusions from his latest poetic collection.

Robert Penn Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, especially when considered along with Harold Bloom's review of it in The New York Review of Books, raises a couple of important issues. The one of these that concerns the book specifically as a selection of a lifetime's work I will reserve until the end of my discussion. For now I would like to consider a fundamental issue about Warren's thinking and, in the process, air my disagreement with Professor Bloom, who insists upon divorcing Warren from the great...