[John James] Audubon's art is muscular and avid: his birds and his rats alike inhabit a world of beak and claw and fang, of ripped-open bellies and planted talons. Violence caught in act, at the heart of Audubon's work, is at the heart too of [Audubon: A Vision] where Robert Penn Warren retells with his peculiar narrative Ancient-Mariner talent, a raw incident of craftiness, torture, and death, purportedly witnessed by Audubon.

The incident seems considerably milder as it appears in Audubon's recollections of the prairie; Warren's version has more sex, more murder, and more poetry. Warren's narrative, like the two stories of wretched death in his Incarnations (1968), is horribly memorable in plot, while the language tends very often to efface itself in pure transparency. Warren can make a climax out of five unremarkable words (as Audubon lies transfixed in a cabin, threatened with murder)—"He hears the jug slosh." But there occur, here and there, clotted descriptions on which the plot depends. (pp. 87-8)

Warren's elegy for Audubon succeeds in all but one respect: we believe the life (even so intensified and interpreted), we believe the death, one of the silences of the frontier, but the immortality … is perhaps unearned. Nevertheless, two of Warren's great questions—the nature of love and the meaning of life in time—are incarnate here in his fitting parable of the chosen hunter-artist-hero. Of love: "One name for it is knowledge." Of life: time is the necessary condition for the living-out of Audubon's "story of deep delight." (pp. 88-9)

[The] inside of America is Robert Penn Warren's territory, and these striking vignettes of a man questionlessly happy in his environment and his birds map out for us a possible happiness, incorporating the gory and the ethereal at once.

Like some previous sequences in Warren's Collected Poems (1966) and later work, these poems tell us that one spurt of feeling is inadequate to any detailed subject, and yet that a single long poem, in its composure, is false to the discontinuous feelings that an event, or a person, or a vision can provoke. So Warren gives us these linked poems, so many tangential observations around the self-contained sphere of the actual and its complex of man, event, and scene. (p. 89)