Volume 32, Number 9 · May 30, 1985
The Flight of the Hawk
By Harold Bloom
New and Selected Poems: 1923–1985
by Robert Penn Warren
Random House, 322 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Robert Penn Warren, born April 24, 1905, in Guthrie, Kentucky, is at the age of eighty our most eminent man of letters. His position is the more remarkable for the extraordinary persistence with which he has made himself into a superb poet. A reader thinks of the handful of poets who wrote great poetry late in life: Browning, Hardy, Yeats, Stevens, Warren. Indeed, 'Myth of Mountain Sunrise,' the final poem among the new work in this fifth Warren Selected Poems, will remind some readers of Browning's marvelous 'Prologue' to Asolando, written when the poet was seventy-seven. Thinking back fifty years to the first time he saw Asolo, a village near Venice, Browning burns through the sense of loss to a final transcendence:
Review, 4221 words
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