Criticism > Poetry > Warren, Robert Penn - William H. Pritchard (review date 1981)

Warren, Robert Penn - William H. Pritchard (review date 1981)

William H. Pritchard (review date 1981)

SOURCE: Pritchard, William H. “Weighing the Verse.” Poetry 138, no. 2 (May 1981): 107-16.

[In the following excerpted review, Pritchard describes the verses of Being Here as “poetry of emotions … high-pitched and poignant.”]

In his introduction to the recent New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, Kingsley Amis refers at one point to the opposite of such verse and instead of opting for the demeaning “heavy” (Who would want to be known as a writer of heavy verse?) chooses the adjective “high.” Whatever one calls it, a prime contemporary example of unlight verse is the work of Robert Penn Warren. As was the case with respect to his last volume (Now and Then, 1978) nobody goes on about Mr. Warren for very long without reaching for the word “powerful.” Harold Bloom, who has been touting Warren's later poetry as America's central contemporary instance of the...

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