With the appearance of his "Selected Poems" in 1943, followed by the publication some two months age of his latest novel, "All The King's Men," Robert Penn Warren gives evidence that he has arrived at the height of his powers, both in fiction and poetry, and is one of the two or three most vigorous artists now working in American letters.

Born a generation after Eliot and Ransom, and the youngest member of the "Fugitive" group whose nucleus was Vanderbilt University, Warren has been profoundly influenced by the two older men, and through them, by the English metaphysicals. But there is another strain in Warren's experience as an artist, a strain which stems from his acute consciousness of his birth place, the South. In speaking of Warren's awareness of the land in which he grew up, Ransom has remarked that the South is a land where "The inhabitants are sensitively aware of the country in which they live, acknowledging more firmly than do most, the bonds of blood and native sense which individuate it." It is Warren's fusion of these two strands of metaphysical speculation and consciousness of place that marks him as a distinguished artist.

Nowhere in his work has this fusion been more fully realized than in "All The King's Men," It is a story told through the person of Jack Burden-- newspaper man, intellectual, and above all, cynic. A man of intelligence whose life has been largely wasted, symbol of the sterility and deracination of modern man who can find nothing on which to center his life and thereby lend it meaning. But although he tells it, the story is not Jack Burden's, it is Willie Stark's, the mock-heroic man of the people whose earnestness "to do good" is corrupted by lust for power. Critics of Warren have pointed out the close parallels between the careers of Willie Stark and Huey Long and have claimed that Warren has exalted Long by his treatment of Stark's character. This criticism is beside the point. The novel in no-wise constitutes an apologia for Long or for the South and to say that it does is to ignore the meta-physical side of Warren's thought. For despite the novel's immersion in a vast welter of detail about Southern life, "All The King's men" is fundamentally a parable of Evil.

Warren has taken the text for his lesson from Dante's "Purgatorio." Man is not lost "so long as hope retaineth aught of green." Warren's selection of this particular line to serve as epigraph for his novel furnishes the key to the evolvement of his thought across the past few years. All of Warren's work has been informed with an acute and very private sense of Doom. But in his maturer poems, and now in "All The King's Men," Warren has translated this vision of Evil into one of religious affirmation. Willie Stark is corrupted and dies, but through his death Jack Burden finds a love and happiness he had never known. In this does Willie Stark fulfill his own transposition of the Biblical story of the grain of wheat: "good must come out of bad." Surely a knowledge of Evil is the first step on the road to Grace.