Typically, the voice in Robert Penn Warren's Selected Poems, 1923–75 is situated in a moment, a boundary or threshold, where the meaning of time must be hazarded: "the future is always unpredictable. / But so is the past, therefore / At Wood's edge I stand and, / Over the black horizon, heat lightning / Ripples the black sky" ("Tale of Time," IV). In this threshold moment (and it is usually a narrative one for Warren, not a lyric one as for Eberhart and Ammons), the speaker historicizes himself by extending the moment in time, by creating time. The "Tale of Time," for example, is based upon the expansion of an "interim" of consciousness that the speaker feels at his mother's death: "the time / Between the clod's clunk and / The full realization" (I). In the expanded moment that is the poem the speaker defines his historical relation to the world through the heritage he...