ABSTRACT
There are more good poets than really competent critics, and Austin Warren, being one of the latter, is rare. Austin's place among practitioners of what Blackmur called the critic's job of work is just below the top tier. Part of that interlocking directorate of high-toned men of letters between the two World Wars and after—they found houseroom in quarterlies like the Kenyan, Sewanee, and Southern reviews—he helped make criticism an art form. More than generals, CEOs, and captains of erudition, he put intellectual coin in the pockets. No man more conservative. Preserving his ties to church, university, and political state, he stayed in partly from "a steady faith in the importance of continuity". Skepticism fuelled this faith, a perception that the evils of institutions, part and parcel of the nature of the beast, were not "to be abolished by substituting a new set of institutions".
