Over the years Warren has, I believe, tended to refine a particularly "classical" vision. That is to say, he has eschewed most hasty views of contemporary culture, views that seem to depend on shibboleths like "dissociation," "dissolution," or "disorder," and has tended instead to see the directions of modern life based not so much on hysterical sociology as upon the unavoidable accidents of the human plot, the ironies of covert circumstances, the unravelings of cosmic drama. Hence, his earlier work insisted upon a dimension that has often enough been called "historical," but which might more accurately be thought of as the documentary-past that envelops the mysterious present. In Warren's work, whether fiction or poetry, we understand the reasons for a phenomenon much better than the phenomenon itself…. (pp. 136-37)

The poems in Warren's latest collection, Now and Then, while not exempt from Warren's preoccupation with obscure fatalities, nevertheless...