Poetry Criticism | Warren, Robert Penn - William Logan (review date 2000)

William Logan (review date 2000)

SOURCE: Logan, William. “Robert Penn Warren Collected.” Salmagundi, Nos. 126-27 (Spring-Summer 2000): 298-305.

[In the following review of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Logan offers a derisive look at Warren, characterizing him as “a failed major poet.”]

The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren preserves in fossilized form some of the poetic movements and anti-movements that flourished in the wake of the moderns. When Warren died ten years ago, heavy with half a century of honors, including three Pulitzer Prizes, he was less a man of letters than an institution of drawling Southern manners and professional gentility. As a young man he had been welcomed into the Fugitives, though membership was often an excuse for writing frowsy, mint-julepy lines like “Who saw, in darkness, how fled / The white eidolon from the fangèd commotion rude?” or stanzas no parodist of...

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