[In Now and Then] time is of the essence. One might think of these poems as a series of commentaries on two ideas that run through the book so steadily that they come to have thematic significance…. Time is running out; the world is a beautiful place. The two sections of Now and Then offer different ways of dealing with these related truths: Nostalgic delves into time past; Speculative moves mostly forward, touching on past, present, and an envisioned futuristic otherness. (Shouldn't the book's title be Then and Now?)

The tactic of Nostalgic, not surprisingly, is to dip into memory. The ten poems in this section, which range in tone from the backwoodsy to the lofty, mostly succeed to the degree that Warren manages to trim his rhetorical sails. The poet uses rhetoric to impressive effect (instead of its using him) in "Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth," a commanding poem that moves memories in an arc through time and space…. The ceremonial tone … is appropriate, for the poem records a series of rituals, not mere snatches of memory. Its generous scale of time and space allows room and confidence for wonderfully sharp glimpses of detail…. [The] poem is deeply moving.

But Warren can run into trouble with these memory poems. His appetite for sublimity damages the first poem in the book, "American Portrait: Old Style." This account of a double reunion—with a childhood friend in a childhood landscape—begins well…. By the time the poem is being written, the splendid Southern past is even more remote. But as the poem proceeds it is vitiated by Warren's determination to extract a lesson from past grandeurs and childhood memories. The language expands to vagueness…. (pp. 203-05)

Warren's habit of building up to sublimity, mottoes, morals, what have you, makes the ends of his poems particularly vulnerable. Surely it's no coincidence that "Red-Tail Hawk" begins with the strange exaltation of the kill and works on down through the sadness and disorder of various kinds of decay. The opposite progression—a poem whose thrust is toward sublimity, a detail that unlocks the door to infinity—becomes painfully predictable in the three last pieces in Nostalgic. In each of these poems ("Mountain Plateau," "Star-Fall," and "Youth Stares at Minoan Sunset"), people and places lose the specificity that presumably made them memorable in the first place. The physical and rhetorical elevations towards which these poems struggle seem to exhaust them…. [The] figures in the poems, the very language, strain for loftiness at the price of humanity and individuality. The "piglike trotters" of the lady in "Old Flame" (another poem in this section) would never climb to such austere heights as these; but after having read Nostalgic many times, I find that those plump legs, not these stars and sunsets, are what I remember.

Speculative, three times the length of Nostalgic, is a prolonged meditation which, no matter how one tries to snip it into bite-sized poems, remains pretty much a homogeneous mass. Certain words recur in poem after poem, virtually capitalizing themselves after a while: Love, Truth, Dream, Time. These abstractions are the modest subject of the poet's speculations.

Many of the poems take place at midnight or dawn … and almost all of them have a dreamy tendency to float away from the specific event. (pp. 205-07)

But to speak of [the works] as separate, autonomous poems isn't to describe them accurately. Reading Speculative, the impression soon becomes overwhelming that the destination of each of these poems (or of this one long poem) is set from the start. We have to get to some important insight about Time, Truth, History, or Love, or we might as well not have started out at all. It follows that although (as in Nostalgic) the beginnings of the poems usually display more ingenuity and variety than the endings, it hardly seems to matter where the speculations start from…. Since the poems seem programmed to spiral speculatively out of the regions of the mundane, dramatic and narrative excitement is completely lacking. What's left is language.

In contrast to the long, exclamatory measures of a poem like "Red-Tail Hawk," many of these speculations are couched in a spare idiom, often in slender couplets. Spaciousness is systematically abandoned here, and so is the backwoods pungency of some of the pieces in Nostalgic.

The poems in Speculative approach the themes of Now and Then—the flow of time, the beauty and mystery of life—differently from those in Nostalgic, so it seems reasonable for Warren to use a different kind of language for these poems…. What Warren has (apparently willingly) scrapped in much of Now and Then is no less than his gift for language.

You have to go fairly far back in Warren's work to measure the extent of the loss. "Pondy Woods" (from Selected Poems 1923–1943) is a delectable example of Warren's natural way with words…. So much in the language [works] exactly right. The leisurely rhythm keeps pace with the hovering buzzards; the muffled assonances that end the first two couplets seem to hover too. As always when a poem is firing on all its cylinders, sound and sense are inextricably close; together they manage to wed humor and menace, beauty and filth. As have many English-speaking poets, Warren avails himself here of the musicality inherent in the disparate sources of the English language…. The linguistic drama is especially energetic when pairs of words from opposite camps curtsey to one another in rhyme: woods, altitudes. And try reading the lines aloud suppressing the consonants: you get vowel tones ranging from the prolonged clarities of blue and gold to the short, muffled grunts (sinking deeper into the swamp) of mud, muck, and gum.

In place of this gumbo-juicy world of slurpy sounds and memorable images and lazy humor, Speculative offers us several kinds of landscape, none of them luxuriant. All, indeed, have a disembodied air that suggests earth is to be transcended, not savored. (pp. 207-10)

Non-worlds, dream-worlds. Speculative avoids touching earth … by writing about unearthliness. It also makes lavish use of the second person in its gestures toward universality. Thirteen of the twenty-seven poems in this section are wholly or partly addressed to an unspecified "you."… (p. 210)

In all this exchange of gold for bronze, there's nothing as simple as a lack of talent. Part of the problem seems to be an inordinate ambition for grandeur; part is what feels to me like haste. If Warren were in less of a hurry to chronicle each dawn dream, birdsong, and memory as it occurred, a process of distillation just might be allowed to take place. Mostly, though, it's a matter of the poet's judgment of his own work. (p. 211)

Surely much of the trouble with Now and Then results from the poet's inability or unwillingness to recognize and settle for the nature of his particular genius. What that "genius" is, after all, is not negligible. Warren has an imagination of generous proportions. It embraces history, human drama, perhaps above all the beauty of the natural world; it is capable at times of both beauty of form and splendor of color,… or of something like music and meaning, in our lamer critical idiom. But Warren cannot do everything well. He is not an original thinker or a visionary poet; in his handling of condensed lyric, as well as of abstraction, he can be embarrassingly inept. Speculative is glaring proof that he is unaware of these limitations. (p. 212)