Presents a book length study of Robert Penn Warren's poetry. In a communicable, jargon-free style that will appeal to the non-academic reader as well as the serious scholar, Randolph Paul Runyon provides a detailed and illuminating guide to a body of poetry that, despite its greatness, has until now seemed resistant to full understanding.

He shows how Warren's poems assume additional meanings by the poet's very arrangement of them, deepening his thesis by arguing that poems eat poemsas each reuses and reconceptualizes the imagery of its predecessor, frequently with ironic or parodic effect.