Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then … is about the possibility of joy…. Warren shows … romantic credulity,… and he writes in a genuinely expansive, passionate style. Look at its prose ease and rapidity oddly qualified by log-piling compounds, alliteration, successive stresses, and an occasional inversion—something rough and serviceable as a horse-blanket yet fancy too—and you wonder how he ever came up with it. It is excitingly massive and moulded and full of momentum. Echoes of Yeats and Auden still persist, but it is wonderfully peculiar, homemade. (pp. 302-03)

Warren usually makes the big words—God, destiny, love—awkwardly climb the shale of near-prose. Perhaps sublimity has not been so homely since Whitman…. Typically the writing is off-balance yet energized…. At first nipped phrasing, congested with repetition, then the characteristic long lines that seem to expand in an effort to take in as much of wonder as possible. How disarming is the lineal emphasis on "lonely," which would hardly be acceptable in any but its potentially awkward and flagrant spot. Such is Warren's ambiguous mammoth grace.

Two faults: he is sometimes truly awkward and sometimes pseudo-profound…. Often he seems bitten by the Enormity of it all. He will have mystery. Yet his willingness to risk folly prepares him for the monstrous and miraculous. Consider the close of "Heart of Autumn."… Warren's topic is Strand's, Emerson's: the American theme, "the soul's identity." Dreams and messages and namelessness and Time's un-Timing and "the grandeur of certain utterances" and the possibility of "joy in the world's tangled and hieroglyphic beauty": together with Philip Levine and John Ashbery he is our current poet of these—and in a manner more head-on and go-for-broke than theirs. With his large bony gestures he breaks out of the cobwebs of self-reflexiveness…. In fact, as I have said, he is occasionally facile. But very few poets today have made so fine an adjustment between comfort and discomfort of manner or offer so satisfactory a balance between comfort and discomfort of vision. (pp. 303-04)