Over the years Warren has, I believe, tended to refine a particularly "classical" vision. That is to say, he has eschewed most hasty views of contemporary culture, views that seem to depend on shibboleths like "dissociation," "dissolution," or "disorder," and has tended instead to see the directions of modern life based not so much on hysterical sociology as upon the unavoidable accidents of the human plot, the ironies of covert circumstances, the unravelings of cosmic drama. Hence, his earlier work insisted upon a dimension that has often enough been called "historical," but which might more accurately be thought of as the documentary-past that envelops the mysterious present. In Warren's work, whether fiction or poetry, we understand the reasons for a phenomenon much better than the phenomenon itself…. (pp. 136-37)

The poems in Warren's latest collection, Now and Then, while not exempt from Warren's preoccupation with obscure fatalities, nevertheless seem to stand less in a relationship of dependency upon these fatalities and more in their private space, very beautiful and very clear. They are limited on purpose in the way that only a grand master knows how to effect. It may be, however, that at times the poems seem to look around for support, to sue at the end for approbation, for acknowledgment of their lyrical wisdom. Or so it seems in such poems as "Amazing Grace in the Back Country" whose last line loiters all too obviously: "But that was long years ago. I was twelve years old then."… Or in the assertion, reminiscent of some of Randall Jarrell's farewells, at the end of "Unless": "This is happiness." Do these insistent endings emerge from an uncertainty whether personal nostalgia can assume the directive force of the great impersonal past? Maybe, and if so, they lead us toward a vision wherein the past is obscured by the prominent mysteries of momentary consciousness.

And so, hurrah, in Now and Then we do have a new departure, at least if I correctly read his poem "The Mission."… I hope "The Mission" will make its way into the ultimate Warren canon. I hope the same for "Little Black Heart of the Telephone" which with eerie indiscretion contemplates a telephone's ringing and ringing in a dusty, long deserted room. I do not think I have to worry about the permanence of his poem "Heart of the Backlog," which surely is one of Robert Penn Warren's best poems. Too full of the pulse and nerve of life to be vain about what it is wearing, the poem is marvelously relaxed within the taut balance of its counterweights. (pp. 137-38)