Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then … is about the possibility of joy…. Warren shows … romantic credulity,… and he writes in a genuinely expansive, passionate style. Look at its prose ease and rapidity oddly qualified by log-piling compounds, alliteration, successive stresses, and an occasional inversion—something rough and serviceable as a horse-blanket yet fancy too—and you wonder how he ever came up with it. It is excitingly massive and moulded and full of momentum. Echoes of Yeats and Auden still persist, but it is wonderfully peculiar, homemade. (pp. 302-03)

Warren usually makes the big words—God, destiny, love—awkwardly climb the shale of near-prose. Perhaps sublimity has not been so homely since Whitman…. Typically the writing is off-balance yet energized…. At first nipped phrasing, congested with repetition, then the characteristic long lines that seem to expand in an effort to take in as much of wonder as possible...