SOURCE: Zawacki, Andrew. “Retro Values, Radical Voice.” The Times Literary Supplement 350, no. 5011 (April 16, 1999): 30.

In the following review of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Zawacki briefly encapsulates Warren's poetic accomplishments and his literary status at the end of the twentieth century.

The problem of knowledge has defined the major poetries of the past century. While contemporary thought is witnessing so many catch-phrase exhaustions—the end of history, of ideology, of the aesthetic—Robert Penn Warren (1905-89) invigorated six decades with his investigations into the origins of knowledge and its erratic trajectory towards or away from a realization in truth. “What is love?” he asked in Audubon: A Vision (1969): “One name for it is knowledge.” Jean Jacques Audubon was Warren's most compelling avatar because of the legendary Dauphin's preoccupation with both self-knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world. Warren imagined Audubon cataloguing birds with precision even as...