The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren
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The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren The University Press of Kentucky To Anne and Susan, And with thanks to Penny for her encouragement and support Man lives by images. They Lean at us from the world's wall, and Time's. --"Reading Late at Night, Thermometer Falling" ISB~: 0-8131-1347-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card number: 76-9503 Copyright © 1977 by The University Press of Kentucky A statewide cooperative scholarly publishing agency serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506 Web site: www.kentuckypress.com 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 4 I. Introduction: The Critical Reckoning 6 II. The Themes of Robert Penn Warren 29 Passage 29 The Undiscovered Self 32 Mysticism 36 In Context: Warren's Criticism 43 III. Poems of Passage 58 IV. The Undiscovered Self 143 V. Mysticism 221 VI. Postscript: An Appreciation 296 Some Notes on Verse Texture 297 The Question of “Place” 310 Notes 320 NOTE: (January 2012) I thank the University Press of Kentucky for its permission to put this book online. For easier readability, I have converted the text to a Microsoft Word format. Because computers now have a search function, I have also removed the Index. 3 Preface I have written this book in pursuit of two purposes. First, I have tried to elucidate Warren's poetry through a close study of a great number of individual poems, because the fact is that, after over half a century of prolific creativity as a poet, Warren is not very well or very widely understood, though he is good enough that he ought to be. Second, I have organized this study around a thematic analysis that shows the development, from volume to volume, of three ground themes that span Warren's career as a poet: poems of passage, the undiscovered self, and mysticism. In passing these themes over his books like a magnet over iron filings, my study shows that the poems from all his volumes leap to the magnet in three large clusters that largely preempt everything there. If such a procedure looks dangerously reductive to some readers, I can only ask that they weigh my arguments and supporting evidence before resting in that judgment. I wish to acknowledge here my debt--both practical and inspirational--to two students in my Faulkner-Warren seminar, John Stevenson and Marsha Kuhn, whose presence in my classroom I must hereafter count among the luckiest things to have happened to me in Academe. I also owe such scholarly debts as are indicated in my "Introduction: The Critical Reckoning"--above all to Mary Nance Huff for her magnificent bibliography, as well as to scholars and critics whose contribution might be only passing phrases (e.g., J. Hillis Miller's "poets of reality") but who show thereby how their thoughts have entered the climate we all inhabit together. I also want to thank my three typists for their good work and good cheer: Betty Goodbar, Anne Durden, and Susan Williford; and to acknowledge the four magazines in which I have published material partly reused here: PMLA (September, 1964), Criticism (Winter, 1968), Shenandoah (Summer, 1969), and Four Quarters (May, 1972). Lastly, I am most grateful, of course, to Robert Penn Warren, whose poetry from first to last is a treasury of riches that seems larger and more rewarding upon my every return to it. In following an essentially thematic approach, I have found it necessary to dismember those volumes that treat disparate themes, so as to re-gather their several fragments under the appropriate thematic canopy. Other volumes, like 4 Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, Brother to Dragons, and Audubon: A Vision, cohere around an inherent thematic unity that renders the dismemberment process needless and hence inadvisable. To clarify the development of Warren's poetic canon, the following list of his published volumes of poetry, with original publication dates, may be useful: 1. Thirty-six Poems (1935) 2. Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942) 3. Selected Poems: 1923-1943 (1944) 4. Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (1953) 5. Promises: Poems 1954-1956 (1957) 6. You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960 (1960) 7. Selected Poems, New and Old: 1923-1966 (1966) with Tale of Time: New Poems 1960-1966. 8. Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968 (1968) 9. Audubon: A Vision (1969) 10. Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1974 (1974) 11. Selected Poems, 1923-1975 (1977) In republication, a number of Warren's poems have undergone cuts and revisions. In general, I have used the later, revised versions of poems in this study, partly out of respect for the author's sense of self-improvement but also for the practical reason that the later, revised versions of these poems are what Warren's audience of the future will most likely be reading. I am grateful to Mr. Robert Penn Warren and Random House, Inc., for permission to quote from his published books; to Esquire magazine for permission to cite passages from "Bicentennial" (December, 1976); to the New Yorker for permission to quote from "American Portrait: Old Style" (August 23,1976); to the New York Review of Books and NYREV, Inc., for permission to reprint parts of "Youth Stares at Minoan Sunset" (September 30, 1976) and "Sister Water" (October 24, 1976); and to the Atlantic Monthly for permission to cite passages from "Waiting" (© 1976) and "Three Poems in Time" (to be published in 1977). 5 CHAPTER I Introduction: The Critical Reckoning CRITICISM of the poetry of Robert Penn Warren falls into three chronological phases roughly corresponding to three periods of creativity in his career. Phase one covers the three volumes represented in Selected Poems, 1923-1943, which evoked a cacophony of critical voices that continued to echo into the late 1940s. Phase two embraces the three volumes written in the 1950s, after Warren had been publishing exclusively in prose for nearly ten years. The first two of these volumes, Brother to Dragons and Promises, engendered a sufficiently large and favorable response to represent the high-water mark of Warren's popularity as a poet, which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize for Promises; but the third volume, You, Emperors, and Others, raised more cacophonous critical voices, sharply divided between distaste and approval. Phase three, we may say, got under way at about this time and it continues to the present; in this period several large-scale studies of Warren's whole literary canon--fiction, criticism, and poetry--have gradually emerged to place their subject in the light of a well- informed and carefully considered judgment. Criticism during the early years, though scanty, was generally highly laudatory, though Warren's satisfaction in this fact must have been tempered by his knowledge that the criticism originated mostly among close friends and literary acquaintances. John Crowe Ransom, for example, called Warren "one of the really superlative poets of our time" in a 1939 Kenyon Review article, and Allen Tate designated his fellow Fugitive "the most gifted person I have ever known" in a reminiscence published in 1942--by which time Tate had come to know some very gifted people indeed, including T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and William Faulkner.1 At this time, moreover, judgment 6 of Warren's poetry rested upon only one published volume, Thirty-six Poems, brought out in 1935. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that generous comments were confined to the friendly inner sanctum. Morton Zabel, in Poetry--a Modernist magazine but certainly not a Fugitive house organ--concluded that Warren is "a writer who more and more shows himself . one of the most serious and gifted intelligences of his generation."2 With the publication of Eleven Poems on the Same Theme in 1942, Peter Monro Jack, writing in the New York Times, found reason to call Warren "very much a poet's poet" (an opinion substantiated by lavish praise from other poets in later years) who "is something of a Donne in the twentieth century."3 Another reviewer, Peter Rushton, agreed, adding that, "It is from a mind such as Warren's that we may expect the best and most lasting poetry of our own times."4 Real critical controversy about Warren's poetry surfaced for the first time with the publication, in Selected Poems, 1923-1943, of "The Ballad of Billie Potts," which has generated sharply discordant opinions. Since I consider this poem among Warren's best and most important, it may be well to let critics ventilate their views at greater length than would otherwise be appropriate. Dudley Fitts, in a review entitled "Of Tragic Stature," treats Selected Poems as a whole in a judiciously balanced manner, accrediting Warren's use of influences like Ransom, Eliot, and Marvell, while complaining about the "metaphysical fog" that renders poems like "Toward Rationality" and "Aged Man Surveys Past Time" unintelligible, even "after the most painful rereading." The tempered judgment disappears, however, when Fitts compares "Billie Potts" to At Heaven's Gate, Warren's recent novel: 7 "I find it hard to be temperate about Billie Potts, just as I find it hard to be measured in my praise of the unjustly neglected At Heaven's Gate, which it resembles. The poem is . composed of two streams--the narrative itself, and a parenthesized commentary--which converge at the end. (This technique resembles the double-thread method--narrative and Wyndham statement--of At Heaven's Gate.)" Contrary to many other critics, Fitts judges that "the concluding lines of the poem, narrative and commentary, meet in a perfect resolution."5 For John Crowe Ransom, however, "Billie Potts" represented a regrettable break with Warren's Fugitive past, the poem's "great skill" in the narrative section being outweighed in the philosophical stanzas by "a gloss far more implausible than that which Coleridge wrote upon his margins" in The Ancient Mariner.