Robert Penn Warren After Audubon

Book excerpt: Robert Penn Warren after Audubon embraces research on developmental psychology, gerontology, and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings of Warren's later poems, seeing in them an autobiographical epic focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of transcendence. Among the autobiographical elements the author identifies are Warren's loneliness during his later years; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and, at times, the impotence of memory. The author concludes that the finest of all of Warren's literary efforts can be found in his later works, after Audubon: A Vision.