Warren has published two previous books of poems (in 1935 and 1942), but these had a very restricted circulation; and he has generally been placed as a minor figure in the school of Ransom and Tate, and is thus dismissed by [Yvor] Winters. His Selected Poems: 1923-1943, by separating his late work from his earlier, mark where he started and how far he has come. “The Return: An Elegy,” eloquent as is its expression of undisseverable attraction and repulsion of a son for his mother, uses too many of Eliot's contrasts to be quite Warren's own. “Kentucky Mountain Farm” expresses the particular and local concern with history of the Southern agrarian group, and yet Warren's resolution, his renewed emphasis on the will, his declaration that “The act / Alone is pure” already carries his individual accent. The most striking poem in his first book, “The Garden,” shows what it meant to have begun writing poetry in the era when the 17th Century metaphysicals had just been reassimilated for contemporary use. This poem and the somewhat later “Love's Parable” are excellent instances of what Cleanth Brooks has called a structure of inclusion. They use an aristocratic and slightly archaic diction comparable to Ransom's, and they may have learned from him some of their suave irony. But, more essentially, they show how much a poet can still profit from Marvell. They are as different as possible from Cummings. Despite Cummings' distaste for abstraction, his lyrics hardly more than name the wonders of love and beauty, and thus, except for their eccentric syntax, are little thicker in texture than the songs of tin-pan alley. Warren, on the contrary, has devoted his whole attention to crowding his lines with the greatest specific gravity they will bear, so that they will not merely assert the uniqueness of an experience but will convey the actual burden of that experience, both as it has been felt and as it has been thought about. “Love's Parable” is as incapable of paraphrase as “To his Coy Mistress.” It could be reduced in prose to the statement that love is perishable; and yet the poem, as constructed, contains an impressive and absorbing range from sensuous delight to somber reflection.

The title of Warren's second book, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, emphasizes the persistence of his dominant thoughts. It also hints at the constricting limitations latent in such preoccupation. The theme detaches itself as one with which Tate also has been particularly concerned: a protest against the tendency of our scientific age to reduce knowledge to abstraction, and to rob experience of its religious tension by making sin meaningless. Warren has not stated this theme in as explicitly philosophical terms as Tate. His method, as in “Picnic Remembered,” is to present the apparently smooth surfaces of life in such an improved, amoral age, and then to suggest the violence and terror ever lurking just beneath the enlightened consciousness. He portrays this as a nightmare stumbling past, or as a dim memory of crime, or in quieter, but no less compelling terms, in “End of Season,” by an image which breaks through the effort to live in a holiday timeless present: “But the mail lurks in the box at the house where you live.”

His frontal attack on the theme is carried out most thoroughly in “Terror,” “Pursuit,” and “Original Sin,” poems which are so tightly organized through their successive images and which are permitted such a minimum of generalization that the reader may at first find them very obscure. Warren shares with Tate and with some of the French symbolists a fondness for images of violent disorder, and it sometimes becomes a question whether these images rise inherently from his concept, or whether they are manipulated too cerebrally upon it. His control is most decisive in his demonstration that we are “born to no adequate definition of terror”; for here he makes, both at the beginning and at the close of the poem, a functional repetition of the suggested figure of Macbeth, the conscience-stricken man who sees the ghost of his evil deed, whereas we simply crack nuts and “see an empty chair.” The consequences of our shallow lack of implication in any moral struggle are imaged with telling violence when Warren notes that under such circumstances even war itself is meaningless, since

Blood splashed on the terrorless intellect creates
Corrosive fizzle like the spattered lime,
And its enseamed stew but satiates
Itself, in that lewd and faceless pantomime.

Warren is probably unaware of how often he poses our problem as one of definition: in “Revelation,” “In separateness only does love learn definition”; in “Ransom,” “Our courage needs, perhaps, new definition”; and in “The Ballad of Billie Potts,” in a closer verbal echo than he probably intended, “Our innocence needs, perhaps, new definition.” Such repetition may betray a static tightness, and some critics have found the texture of Warren's poems too uniformly dense. He seems finally to have come to some such conclusion himself, for the most exciting feature of his most recent poems is their breaking away from the intellectualized modes that have often become the mannerism of our generation. In “Variation: Ode to Fear” he makes a far more loosely colloquial satiric statement of his theme. In “Mexico is a Foreign Country: Five Studies in Naturalism” he introduces a hearty and humorous coarseness. And finally, in his “Ballad,” he enters quite a new realm by accomplishing the fusion that Yeats urged between the poetry of the coteries and the poetry of the folk.

Warren's flair for drama was foreshadowed in his early “Pondy Woods”—as well as by many passages in his novels—but here he has given it free rein for the first time in his poetry. He has handled his “Ballad” on two levels. On one level he retells an old folk story of Western Kentucky about an outlaw innkeeper and his son. Little Billie, emulating his father's habit of practising highway robbery on his guests, is caught in an attempted murder, and has to leave for the West. When he comes home ten years later, rich, he is murdered by his parents before they recognize him. The other level consists of the poet's philosophical reflections on the story; and in such weaving back and forth Warren, like Spencer, reveals the almost inevitable influence of Eliot's Quartets. But only occasionally do Warren's meditations on time and the timeless seem borrowed, and for the most part he is speaking out of his own full mind. His verse has also learned something of Eliot's later dangerous freedom in its frequent descents into near prose, and some may find Warren's prosody too crude and casual. Yet it increases his conversational effect.

The dramatic point of the story is the parents' horrified discovery of what they have done; but the reflective passages make their contrast by concentrating on the rôle of the son. We cannot escape going back to where we came from, as the son returns to the father. But Warren's preoccupation, the preoccupation of our generation, can hardly be with the Father of grace. We have scarcely begun to understand even the grounds for salvation. We must first return to the old man, to an awareness of our roots in erring humanity, and our first discovery must be the blinding one of essential evil.