Now and Then

Now and Then: Poems 1976 to 1978 collects Robert Penn Warren's late poems, work written in his seventies that circles back repeatedly to memory, the Kentucky and Tennessee landscape of his own boyhood, and the long reach of Southern and national history into a single aging speaker's present.

Warren writes in a rugged, oratorical voice built up over five decades as a poet, novelist, and critic, willing to interrogate his own earlier certainties even as he states them, moving between narrative anecdote drawn from a long remembered life and more abstract, almost sermon like meditation on what that life has meant. The poems return often to the physical detail of a specific rural Southern landscape, the kind of concrete, sensory ground Warren had used since his earliest fiction and criticism, but turn it here toward an old man's reckoning rather than a young writer's discovery, weighing what has lasted against what has not. That doubled perspective, a lifelong Southern regionalist looking back across his own long public argument with the region's history, including his own early defense and later renunciation of segregation, gives the book a gravity that a purely nostalgic late collection would lack.

Reading the book means following a senior writer still willing to press hard questions at himself rather than settle into easy reminiscence, in language that stays plainspoken even when its ambitions are large. It suits a reader who already knows Warren's fiction and criticism and wants to see the same restless, self questioning mind working in verse at the end of a long career.