University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1990 The Braided Dream: Robert Penn Warren's Late Poetry Randolph Paul Runyon Miami University - Oxford Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Runyon, Randolph Paul, "The Braided Dream: Robert Penn Warren's Late Poetry" (1990). Literature in English, North America. 28. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/28 The Braided Dream This page intentionally left blank The Braided Dream Robert Penn Warren's Late Poetry Randolph Paul Runyon THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY I would like to express my gratitude to Leonard Simutis, Dean of the Graduate School of Miami University, and Stephen Day, Dean of the College of Arts and Science, for their generosity in making funds available to support the publication of this book. Warren's poems are reprinted from the following volumes, all copyright by Robert Penn Warren, by permission of Random House, Inc.: Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968, copy­ right 1968; Selected Poems: 1923-1975, copyright 1976; Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978, copyright 1978; Brother to Drag­ ons, copyright 1979; Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980, copy­ right 1980; Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980, copyright 1981; Chiefjoseph of the Nez Perce, copyright 1983; and New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, copyright 1985. The poems of Thomas Hardy are reprinted from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, and Macmillan Ltd., London. The poems of John Crowe Ransom are reprinted from Se­ lected Poems, Third Edition, Revised and Enlarged, by John Crowe Ransom, copyright 1962, 1963, 1969 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright renewed 1952, 1955 by John Crowe Ransom. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright© 1990 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, 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 40506-0336 Cataloging-in-Publication Data are on the last page. for ELIZABETH This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction. Buried Nanrative and the Parody of Time 1 ONE. Altitudes and Extensions "Some Logic Here to Trace" 19 TWO. Rumor Verified "Caverned Enchainment" 90 THREE. Being Here "Life's Long Sorites" 128 FOUR. Now and Then "In Its New Ectoplasmic Context" 174 Afterword 209 Notes 227 Appendix. The Order of Warren's Poems 235 Works Cited 241 Index of Warren's Works 245 General Index 251 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Buried Narrative and the Parody ofTirrLe Robert Penn Warren, until his death on 15 September 1989, had been generally acknowledged to be this country's greatest living poet. For Harold Bloom he was "our most eminent man of let­ ters"; Peter Stitt found him "the most important American poet of the second half of the twentieth century, and one of the five most important of the entire century" (review of New and Se­ lected Poems, 648). He twice received the Pulitzer Prize for po­ etry, for Promises and Now and Then, and the list of his other awards was extensive. The publication of New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985 on the occasion of his eightieth birthday was a liter­ ary event, and the announcement in early 1986 that Warren had been named the nation's first poet laureate was generally greeted with the feeling that the man dignified the office, not the other way around. One of the most remarkable qualities of Warren's poetry is its accessibility. Beyond its immersion in America's past, and the poetry's intrinsic greatness, the fact that it can be read by every­ man (and everywoman)-even People exhorted its readers to "check it out!" ( 17 March 1986, p. 66)-with no special prepara­ tion made the laureate announcement especially welcome. It is not particularly difficult poetry, at least not on the surface, though it richly rewards close rereading. There is no reason why anyone who enjoys poetry at all cannot find immense pleasure in reading the recent sequences that have so enhanced Warren's steadily rising reputation, and it is to such a reader that this book is addressed. It was perhaps not always so accessible. Warren began his po­ etic career under the influence ofT.S. Eliot and the seventeenth- 2 The Braided Dream century English Metaphysicals, and such early works as "Bearded Oaks" and "Terror"1 with their borrowed rhetoric and occasional archaic language, though in fashion at the time, would appear somewhat offputting to a present-day reader. Yet the kind of close reading championed by the New Critical move­ ment of which Warren was a prime mover owes something to these same influences, and certainly the close reading I will at­ tempt here is itself indebted to the way Warren and Cleanth Brooks taught a whole generation to read in Understanding Po­ etry. There have been three major phases in the poetic career of Robert Penn Warren. The first began in 1922, when he pub­ lished poems in the Fugitive while he was still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt, and concludes in 1944 with the appearance of Se­ lected Poems, 1923-1943. This was his third published volume of poetry, preceded in 1935 by Thirty-Six Poems and in 1943 by Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. The Selected Poems of 1944 in­ cluded all eleven of the preceding year and all but two of the 1935 collection. Three appeared for the first time in 1944, of which "The Ballad of Billie Potts," consistently reprinted in the three subsequent Selected Poems, announces the down-to-earth style that was to characterize so much of his successful poetry years later. Like Brother to Dragons (1953; revised 1979), it is a narrative based on a story from Kentucky's past, in particular from the western region of the state to which Warren would later return in much of the poetry considered here-though the lat­ ter would be based not on historical legend but on his childhood in Guthrie, a rural community just north of the Tennessee bor­ der, and in the surrounding fields and woods. At the same time, in the 1930s and early 1940s, Warren was developing as a novelist. Two unpublished novels and several published short stories preceded the astonishing (to my eyes) Night Rider (1939), a novel based on the Tobacco Wars in War­ ren's native region at about the time of his birth in 1905 and one whose tightly woven and haunting imagery could perhaps have been achieved only by a poet. The somewhat less compelling At Heaven's Gate (1943) followed, set in the present in a town very much like Nashville or Memphis. It could hardly have led a reader to expect the miracle of All the King's Men (1946), the combined popular and critical success for which Warren is still Introduction 3 remembered today by most Americans who know his name. World Enough and Time ( 1950), perhaps his second-best novel, was based on an incident in early nineteenth-century Kentucky history. It was followed by six more novels between 1955 and 1977, norie of which has-I think unjustly--enjoyed much criti­ cal or popular acclaim. Yet as the appreciation of his novels has declined since the mid-1950s, his reputation as a poet has undeniably soared. War­ ren stopped writing poetry entirely in 1944, so that his period of greatest glory as a writer of fiction was one in which he gave him­ self completely to that aspect of his talent. When he returned to poetry with the publication of the book-length Brother to Dragons in 1953 and then Promises: Poems 1954-1956, a second phase of his poetic career began; certainly his poetry acquired a new lease on life. Gone were the archaisms and "subterranean ledges" of Thirty-Six Poems and Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. There was now a directness, both of style and of connection to a personal, unborrowed, past, that was most appealing; these poems read as well today as they did thirty years ago, and as movingly. William S. Ward pinpoints the change thus: "It was in the summer of 1954 that he regained his talent for lyric verse and a 'new sense of poetry,' following his divorce from his first wife in 1951, his mar­ riage to Eleanor Clark in 1952, and the birth of his two children. The renewal came while he was living with his family in a ruined fortress on the Italian coast about one hundred miles north of Rome. From this renewal three years later was to come Promises: Poems 1954-1956, and the beginning of the most distinguished stage of Warren's career" (178). The first sequence within the volume, the five poems of "To a Little Girll, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress," is set on that Italian coast; at least as many are lullabies to his sleeping infant son; most of the rest are set in Guthrie or close by. James Justus still considered Promises "the greatest single volume of his career" in 1981 (49). Victor Strandberg has recently wondered whether his next collection, You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960 was not perhaps "Robert Penn Warren's Worst Book" (title of a paper given 16 October 1987 at "Robert Penn Warren: A Hometown Symposium," Austin Peay State University).