SOURCE: Smith, Dave. Review of New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Poetry 147, no. 1 (October 1985): 46-48.

In the following review of Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, Smith focuses on the new poems in this collection, collectively called “Altitudes and Extensions,” which he says “oscillate between prosy speculation and lyrical exultation.”

Robert Penn Warren's fourth selected poems, New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, appears exactly a decade after the third selected, a period in which many have ceased to think of him as novelist, critic, or Southern man of letters. Now he is widely admired for the poetry of his last twenty years. These poems attract as tales of yearning for and searches after what he has called “the human scheme of values,” perhaps especially because life has often seemed pointless. He has labored to make felt the large, daily, always inscrutable forces of Time, Place, Community, Self, Family, Death, and...