Robert Penn Warren's poems [in Selected Poems: 1923–1975] are perhaps … best described as those of a man of letters, novelist and critic as well as poet. His collections tend to follow poetic styles rather than to invent them, but within those inherited styles he can work consummately well…. Even [in early poems such as "Pursuit"] Warren had his storyteller's eye, his easy rhythm, and his feel for the horrible and the hopeful. The earlier poems are, like the later ones, alternately folksy and philosophical, swinging like ballads or tautly analytic, embodying a strange cohabitation, it might seem, of Whitman and Marvell, "Who saw, in darkness, how fled / The white eidolon" crossed with "Ages to our construction went, / Dim architecture, hour by hour." Among these influences there appeared, early on, Warren's own individual slant:

       Because he had spoken harshly to his mother,
       The day became astonishingly bright.

The rest of that young poem doesn't live up to its beginning, but the second line has the true surprise of an interior state clarified in language. Warren's essential self, early and late, appears not in the skillfully rhymed or fastidiously analytical poems, but rather in his long rambles and his short lyrical songs. (pp. 81-2)

The short lyric "Blow, West Wind," on the other hand, remains unmarred and unselfconscious. For its fine simplicity, one would want to put it in school texts, except that the young are not old enough to understand its brief symbols and its cheated bleakness…. On the whole, though, Warren's best work lies in the poems much too long to quote. The recent elegy for himself and his parents—"I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas"—has the gripping realism of vision as Warren sees, in a dream, his father sitting in his usual Morris chair, but dead; and then his seated mother, dead too; and the cold hearth; and a long-dead Christmas tree; and three presents under the tree; and three chairs…. This kind of descriptiveness, like the song-rhythm of "Blow, West Wind," is a permanent resource of lyric. Warren continues, in these Selected Poems, some of the most firmly-based and solacing practices of poetry. (pp. 83-4)