Though it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize, the poetry of Robert Penn Warren still is not widely or well understood. In this study, Victor H. Strandberg redresses this imbalance by providing a comprehensive survey of the poetic canon of this gifted, complex, and much-neglected poet.

Warren writes in the tradition of Western poets concerned with the painful experience of a forced, one-way passage from innocence into "the world's stew" of time and loss. This passage, Strandberg explains, results for Warren in bifurcation of the self into...