Poetry Criticism | Warren, Robert Penn - James H. Justus (essay date 1984)

James H. Justus (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: Justus, James H. “Warren's Later Poetry: Unverified Rumors of Wisdom.” Mississippi Quarterly 37, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 161-72.

[In the following essay, Justus details the searching and questioning quality of Warren's nostalgic poems in Being Here, Now and Then, and Rumor Verified.]

Our customary expectation when we read the work of an older poet is that it will be declarative—in effect a summing up, a smoothing out, a papering over, if you will, of the characteristic concerns that have compulsively and ambivalently engaged him for so many years. What is wanted, in the genial conspiracy of poet and reader, is a rounded-off final vision, affirmative if possible, that will justify the long labor of a high and passionate calling. What we expect, in short, is wisdom literature. This is the phenomenon of Wordsworth and, in our own more difficult century when such attempts go mostly...

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