Poetic Creation: Language and the Unsayable in the Late Poetry of Robert Penn Warren

Though perhaps best known for his 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s final phase of poetry from the 1960s through the 1980s demonstrates a maturity of thought not previously seen in his work. By wrestling with the fundamental questions of language and articulation throughout his work in this period, Warren seeks to understand how the poet can “say the unsayable.”

Poetic Creation is John C. Van Dyke’s plunge into this liminal moment in Warren’s career, ...