"In Poetic Creation, John Van Dyke explores the turn in Robert Penn Warren's poetry toward the problematic nature of language and argues that such an attention to language discloses a shift away from a modernist critical paradigm (that conceives of language as tool) and toward a more postmodern conception of language as an endless play of difference. Such difference is found in Warren in the unresolvable tension between the "sayable" and the "unsayable." Warren's struggle within this tension of language is not articulated within the context of a clearly defined philosophy or theory; rather, it is conceived through the poet's own unrelenting attention to poiesis-the act of poetic creation itself"--