Criticism > Poetry > Warren, Robert Penn - Peter Stitt (review date 1985)

Warren, Robert Penn - Peter Stitt (review date 1985)

Peter Stitt (review date 1985)

SOURCE: Stitt, Peter. “Tradition and the Innovative Godzilla.” The Georgia Review 39 (Fall 1985): 635-48.

[In the following excerpted review, Stitt responds to Harold Bloom's assessment of Warren and his New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Stitt goes on to call Warren “the most important American poet of the second half of the twentieth century,” while lamenting the exclusions from his latest poetic collection.]

Robert Penn Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, especially when considered along with Harold Bloom's review of it in The New York Review of Books, raises a couple of important issues. The one of these that concerns the book specifically as a selection of a lifetime's work I will reserve until the end of my discussion. For now I would like to consider a fundamental issue about Warren's thinking and, in the process, air my disagreement with Professor Bloom, who...

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