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The poetry, the fiction, and even the critical essays of Robert Penn Warren form a highly unified and consistent body of work. But it would be impossible to reduce it, without distorting simplifications, to some thesis about human life. The work is not tailored to fit a thesis. In the best sense, it is inductive: it explores the human situation and tests against the fullness of human experience our various abstract statements about it. But Warren has his characteristic themes. He is constantly concerned with the meaning of the past and the need for one to accept the past if he is to live meaningfully in the present. In this concern there are resemblances to Faulkner, though Warren\'s treatment is his own. Again, there are resemblances to W. B. Yeats in Warren\'s almost obsessive concern to grasp the truth so that \"all is redeemed / In knowledge.\"
-Cleanth Brooks, The Hidden God, 1963
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