A fundamental coherence unifies Warren's whole body of poetry, as though it constituted a single poem drawn out in a fugal pattern…. Ultimately, in fugal fashion, his three master themes interlock, so that at any point in the poet's career we are likely to see simultaneous traces of all three themes—and in at least one instance, "The Ballad of Billie Potts," they fuse into perfect harmony. But for the most part each theme has in its turn a period of predominance over the other two. (pp. 33-4)

By virtue of their dialectical interaction, Warren's grand themes of passage, the undiscovered self, and mysticism imparted continuous tension and growth. (p. 35)

In Warren's first published volume, Thirty-six Poems (1935), [the] theme of passage from innocence into a fallen state is apparent in a number of poem titles—"Man Coming of Age," "Problems of Knowledge," "So Frost Astounds," "Aged Man Surveys the Past Time," "The Garden"—and it not only permeates all the poems in the collection but also spills over into the subsequent Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942) and the new poems in Selected Poems: 1923–1943. As a whole, this latter collection (representing some twenty years of poetry-writing) divides itself fairly evenly between the two emotional poles that are naturally implicit in the lapsarian material: nostalgia and regret concerning paradise remembered; guilt, dread, and despair prevailing after the Fall. Often the two emotional states occur in the same poem, locked in dialectical conflict; but sometimes a whole poem is given over to one perspective or the other. (pp. 46-7)

[Considered as a whole], Warren's early poems constitute a rendering of the lapsarian experience and a weeding out of false responses to it. Following this weeding out process, the rudimentary elements of Warren's own response begin to appear in fragmentary passages. This response centers upon the poet's decision to accept his passage into the fallen world and to search for a sacrament, preferably in greater knowledge, whereby that world might compensate for its loss of meaning. As even Satan proclaimed while prostrate in Hell, all is still not lost so long as the unconquerable will endures. While hardly ready to emulate Milton's heroic rebel, Warren's persona does insist upon that small measure of existential freedom that even a fallen world cannot extinguish, and in that freedom some few embers of hope and courage may yet be nourished. (p. 62)

Of all the volumes of poetry Warren has published to date, You, Emperors, and Others remains the least satisfactorily understood and appreciated. Called "seventy-nine pages of poems largely about nothing in the world" by one critic, and "an exercise in metrical high jinks,… an artistic vacation" by another, the volume is best understood, I think, in the light of Warren's earlier poetry, particularly with reference to our three grand themes…. [The] poems of passage in You, Emperors, and Others properly begin with "Mortmain," the sequence on the death of the poet's father, an experience harrowing enough to set Time's reel moving backwards to both the poet's and his father's prelapsarian boyhood. (pp. 73-4)

Far removed from this family setting, the next victim of passage into the world's stew in You, Emperors, and Others is Achilles in "Fatal Interview: Penthesilea and Achilles," where Warren continues his longstanding practice of reinterpreting myth and history to suit his private system. [It is written] in the Homeric grand style, with admirably graphic details and vivid metaphors…. (p. 76)

In the final three sections of You, Emperors, and Others we find Warren's psychology of passage somewhat departmentalized according to life's major phases. "Autumnal Equinox on Mediterranean Beach" is an older man's mood poem, wherein gusty blasts of autumn wind are welcomed as a correlative of the speaker's disillusion with summer's phony paradise…. [The mood turns sourer] at the poem's conclusion, which observes that in this fallen world neither nature nor its God cares who suffers or who benefits in the turn of its seasons. The poem's cacophonous noises seem to objectify the speaker's black mood…. In form, content, theme, and setting, this poem sufficiently resembles Shelley's famous "Ode to the West Wind" to suggest possible parody: oh, wind, if autumn comes, can winter be far behind? (pp. 81-2)

During the six years between You, Emperors, and Others and the publication of Tale of Time: New Poems, 1960–66, several changes in the materials of the poet's art occur: a shift in geography with Vermont replacing Italy as a favored setting; and interest in biblical characters supplanting Achilles and the Roman emperors of classical antiquity; and the development of his children's minds providing a foil to his own melancholy meditations. In other respects, however, Tale of Time fastens upon the recurrently familiar, most importantly in the poems of passage situation. Of the six major poem sequences [in] the collection, five treat the Fall from a more innocent view of life as the predominant issue; the two poems that lie outside the sequence format also treat the theme of bitter knowledge. (One of these, "Shoes in the Rain Jungle," is an early protest poem that sees the Vietnam war as evidence of an ominous national innocence; and the other, "Fall Comes in Back-Country Vermont," exploits symbolically the poet's favorite seasonal setting.) (pp. 84-5)

[In Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Poems 1975] we find the themes of his earlier volumes extended, modified, or otherwise "made new" through strikingly novel achievements in imagery, tone, and form. Concerning the theme of passage, the main event of these poems is a return to his motif of the bifurcated self—the unified prelapsarian psyche having been split, after the trauma of passage, between the fallen self in a ruined world and an alter ego or anima disappearing toward a higher realm of being. It was some forty years ago, in Thirty-six Poems (1935) and the first few of the Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, when Warren last addressed this subject so intensively. In these recent poems he extends the motif to what one must suppose is an ultimate level of intensity. There is also increasing use of the pronoun "you" to refer to the fallen self. (This "you" is sharply distinguished from the "you" of Warren's middle period, the 1940s and 1950s, when it referred to an idealized self-image.) (pp. 109-10)

[Through] what we have called Warren's poetry of passage, the configuration of his thought has assumed a pattern similar to that of poets like Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas in their regret over the loss of a prelapsarian self and in their poetic attempts to eulogize the lost self. Warren departs sharply from such companion spirits, however, in his next stage of development, wherein the psyche in its fallen state is at last compelled to cope with its new and terrible sense of reality. This new sense of reality, reaching both outward into the immensity of time and space and inward toward an innate depravity that Warren calls "Original Sin," typically imposes upon the Warren personae identities that they find unacceptable and seek to evade at all costs. Yet it is this mode of identity alone that can remedy the effects of passage on the Warren persona by reconciling the warring parts of the psyche and making possible redemptive mystic perceptions. Extending through Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942), "The Ballad of Billie Potts" (1943), and Brother to Dragons (1953), this psychological metamorphosis occupies the crucial center of Warren's poetic career, producing major changes in form and carrying his theme into that zone of the psyche which C. G. Jung denoted as "The Undiscovered Self." (p. 121)

As we proceed toward the center of Warren's poetic vision, we find that [the] vanishing of the prelapsarian self is prologue to a grander obsession in Warren's total canon—namely, the effort to find or construct some sense of identity that may fill what "The Ballad of Billie Potts" calls "the old shell of self," left behind in the fallen world like the cicada's cast-off casing, "thin, ghostly, translucent, light as air." This effort may never reach a satisfactory conclusion, for the experience of the Fall renders such genuine innocence and total wholeness of self irrecoverable. But the craving to recreate that original felicity is one of mankind's deepest obsessions, in Warren's judgment—it motivates the Happy Valley episode in At Heaven's Gate and Jack Burden's Great Sleep, Going West, and Back-to-the-Foetus psychology in All the King's Men, to mention two rather grotesque fictional examples.

Since the 1940s, when Warren's poetry first began to manifest such characteristics of short fiction as plot and character, this psychological dilemma has evoked narrative and dramatic elements to add to his already well-developed lyric mode of earlier decades. It is particularly through dramatic characterization—monologues, debates, parts of the self in conflict, dialectical confrontations—that Warren has developed his identity-psychology. At the same time he has relied on extended narratives or sequence-arrangements to effect dramatic development in a large number of shorter poems, several medium length ones ("The Ballad of Billie Potts" and Audubon), and one book-length masterpiece, Brother to Dragons. Among the diverse characters depicted—biblical, classical, legendary, or historical; and those drawn from personal reminiscence or imagination—the two types most important to Warren's identity-psychology are what we may call the Clean and the Dirty.

These two types, whose dialectical opposition provided much of the structure in All the King's Men, carry their warfare to the deepest psychological levels in Warren's poetry. Warren's Clean people—those who refuse passage into a polluted and compromised adult environment—range from mild and harmless eremites, victims perhaps of the fundamentalist Protestantism of the poet's native region, to murderous psychopaths like the prophet Elijah in A Tale of Time who "screams" in ecstasy at the spectacle of the Dirty people (the prophets of Baal) being butchered. As a poet of reality, Warren naturally tends to side with the Dirty people, partly because their apprehension of the world correlates more largely with the actual state of things, but most importantly because those who accept passage into the world's stew are empowered thereby to proceed to the subsequent stages of spiritual development represented in this discussion by the phrases "The Undiscovered Self" and "Mysticism."

If the poems of passage constitute, collectively, Warren's "Songs of Experience," we might call his small but fine group of poems on the Clean people his "Songs of Innocence"—with the concept of innocence, as we might expect in Warren's work, heavily drenched in irony. For in the "One Life" perspective there is no such thing as innocence, but only the delusion of one's separateness from the filth of the world or, even worse, the delusion that one must rise up and cleanse the fallen world of its putrid corruption. Warren's career as a prose writer began with his portrait of one such world-cleanser, the redoubtable John Brown, whose truth is lyrically still marching on but whose little known cleansing operations before Harper's Ferry included the deliberate slaughter of several whole families in the Kansas-Nebraska territory. Following the John Brown model, the Clean figure rising up in the holy purity of his ideal to rid the world of its putrefaction has been one of Warren's most recurrent fictional types…. Both the world-cleansers and those who merely retire from the world's stew into their private righteousness are making a cardinal error that precludes their glimpsing the one life or osmosis of being vision that is Warren's final answer to the quest for identity. After all, anyone might love the world after it has been purified and trasformed by the New Creation of religious prophecy or by its modern secular counterpart of political millennialism. But in Warren's opinion such love fails the first requirement of a realistic religious imagination, which is to love the world and its denizens just as they are, brimming with pain, injustice, and corruption.

Both of Warren's Clean types make their appearance at about the beginning of the middle phase of his poetic career in Eleven Poems on the Same Theme and the Mexico Is a Foreign Country sequence (in Selected Poems: 1923–1943); and both types have continued to figure in all of the subsequent volumes…. [In portraying the world-cleansers] what Warren objects to is the tendency of every ideology to interpret the world symbolically. When applied to human affairs this tendency has proved exceptionally catastrophic in our age, leading to terrorism, genocide, and military slaughter of unimaginable proportions. (pp. 122-24)

A willingness to shed other people's blood for the sake of an idea marks off these world-cleansers from Warren's other Clean people, whom he treats with a gentler irony that sometimes dissolves into empathy. (p. 126)

Warren's preference for the Dirty is not purely ironic or perverse. Like Hawthorne, Warren feels that in a fallen world some merit attaches even to sin, vice, and guilt. Whereas righteousness separates, guilt unifies the human community. To feel guilty towards someone is to have a genuine, if unhappy, relationship with the injured party; and to commit sin is to share a humiliation—an erosion of the ideal self-image—that exempts very few. Unbeknownst to the Clean in their aloofness, a sense of complicity is finally the true cement of the human bond, ultimately binding all creatures into Warren's "mystic Osmosis of Being." (p. 128)

So we come to the central subject of Warren's poetry and the most dramatic and original thing in it, to which the poems of passage form but an elaborate prelude. Culminating the motif of the Clean and the Dirty, Warren's long and crucial series of you poems forms the arena wherein guilt and innocence stage their epic battle for possession of the psyche—bringing us squarely into [Jungian territory]…. Beginning with Eleven Poems on the Same Theme and "The Ballad of Billie Potts" (1942, 1943), and continuing through Brother to Dragons (you being Thomas Jefferson), Promises (especially "Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace"), and You, Emperors, and Others (notably the "Garland for You" sequence), the you poems have been Warren's most obscure and for that reason least appreciated body of verse. But they are certainly his most distinctive and probably his most important poetic works.

In Warren's poems of passage, the trauma of passage typically involves recognition of the fallen world "out there," after a knowledge of naturalistic reality has cast the childself out of his original worldly paradise and forced him irremediably into the realm of time and death and losses. But unlike such other poets of passage as Wordsworth, Housman, and Dylan Thomas, Warren proceeds beyond the self-consoling stance that normally obtains at this point … to deal with a trauma even greater than that of naturalistic loss and oblivion—namely, the humiliating sense of inward pollution that we might call the psyche's fall from the Clean to the Dirty. Beginning as a peripheral subject in Thirty-six Poems, this motif swelled to central importance in Warren's second volume, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, and continued to dominate the poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. (pp. 130-31)

[Eleven Poems on the Same Theme] presents a psychological drama that defines the issues and equips us for understanding Warren's whole body of subsequent poetry. Its antagonists are the conscious against the unconscious self; its setting moves from the fallen naturalistic world of the poems of passage through the interior darkness in the house of the psyche (attic to cellar); and the issue at stake is the possible redemption of man, "the groping God-ward, though blind," through the uniting of self, of all selves, in the attainment of identity.

Above all, the development toward a Jamesian "Conversion" through the ministrations of a Jungian undiscovered self gives Eleven Poems a crucial place in the Warren canon, for its metaphor of a repressed shadow self that was slain and buried in the dank cellar of the house of the psyche (only to rise again) became a protean master metaphor in the later poems…. Although its central drama awaits resolution in Warren's later verse, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme may be considered a masterful achievement in its own right: original in its conception, significant in its import, and striking in its presentation. The emergence of a major new vision and voice in American poetry dates from this work.

In "The Ballad of Billie Potts" Warren's three ground themes of passage, the undiscovered self, and mysticism fuse for the first time into his single paramount theme of identity. (pp. 148-49)

[The] basic structure of "Billie Potts" follows the principle, common since Whitman's time, of patterning a poem after a musical composition…. Warren's "Ballad" unfolds in a fugue-like arrangement, its three ground themes interweaving throughout the poem until they converge to form a most extraordinary terminal crescendo. The theme of passage, to begin, renders both setting and characters in such a way as to underscore appropriate mythical allusions. Although Warren sets his story in the frontier country of America, he evokes the image of a very ancient time through his setting "in the land between the rivers." Mesopotamia, which translated means "the land between the rivers," has long been regarded in Semitic myth, including the Garden of Eden story, as the birthplace of mankind. So Warren subtly implies as early as line 2 of this poem the origin and outcome of the myth he is recreating in the context of New World innocence and its Fall. The importance of this phrase ("the land between the rivers") is indicated by the fact that it becomes the recurrent refrain throughout the ballad, and it ties in with the water imagery that later emerges to predominant significance in the poem.

The characters also suggest Edenic analogies. In the first stanza Warren depicts Big Billie Potts as an American Adam—already fallen but not yet aware of the literal death his sin will entail for his posterity…. The resemblance between Big Billie's wife and Eve is seen [clearly]…. And Little Billie, if lacking Edenic dimensions, is at least a prime candidate for Warren's psychology of passage because of his rather vulnerable adolescent innocence…. (pp. 149-50)

[In the "Ballad"] the psychology of passage leads to Warren's second ground theme, the undiscovered self. Not the sought after innocence but a terrible knowledge has ended the quest for identity. Not the child-self but the Old Man has answered, in Mephistophelean perversity, the heart's deep summons, its yearning to complete its own definition. Allegorically, then, for Billie as for his Edenic prototypes, passage into the fallen world brings death and the Jungian shadow and subjects the seeker of identity mainly to knowledge of identity's limitations: naturalistic annihilation and inward depravity, twin gifts of the father, "the patrimony of your crime." With the hatchet's fall the theme of passage culminates; having fused sin and death in one sublime stroke, it can go no farther. The narrative part of the "Ballad" therefore unravels to its denouement quickly, with the conniving parents finding to their grief and horror just who was this stranger they have killed for his money.

With the narrative ballad finished and Little Billie dead, Warren is free to move his true subject and his true main character to center stage—namely, the you of the poem's parenthetical passages. For it is not Billie Potts, but you that he has been talking about all along, you being as always the Clean part of one's identity that William James called the ideal self and Freud called the superego. In fact, one of the subtlest and finest things in the poem is the shifting identity of you. Like Billie, you began the poem as a Clean fellow with primal innocence safely intact, as befits the conscious ego that is unaware of its connection to the Jungian shadow. To further bait the trap, Warren's narrator initially aligns his identity with you, both personae being mere innocent observers who scrutinize the scene of this crime of time past from the safely sanitized shelter of time present…. (p. 153)

[In] the seventh parenthetical passage, Little Billie vanishes from the text and leaves you fully to assume his quest and his identity, and so to carry them into the eighth and final parenthetical passage which concludes the poem. This passage—surely both one of the finest things Warren has written and one of the landmarks of modern poetry—resolves the theme of identity by dovetailing the undiscovered self with a pantheistic mysticism. So far as the undiscovered self is concerned, you now at last head back to the father figure whose fallen condition … represents the missing element of your identity: "And the father waits for the son." Bowing in humility to that loathsome figure and acknowledging consanguinity with him, you will thereby complete your knowledge of who you are. In Eleven Poems and later in Brother to Dragons, the theme of the undiscovered self is likewise resolved only when the Jamesian ideal self or Freudian superego submits in this fashion to acknowledge its id or animus or shadow. But it is doubtful whether Warren ever again captured that moment of fearsome though necessary psychic integration with such perfect clarity, economy, and power as he did at the end of "Billie Potts":

        And you, wanderer, back,
        After the striving and the wind's word,
        To kneel
        Here in the evening empty of wind or bird,
        To kneel in the sacramental silence of evening
        At the feet of the old man
        Who is evil and ignorant and old….

This passage thus serves as the culmination for Warren's theme of the undiscovered self and also provides a convenient bridge to the poem's third ground theme of mysticism through religious diction and imagery. The devoutness of tone and setting ("in the sacramental silence of evening"), the hushed imminence of eternity ("evening empty of wind or bird"), the son's humble posture of genuflexion, the archetypal connotations of the father and son motif—echoes and allusions like these strike deeply into the Western religious consciousness. Above all in the tableau of Son bowing his head to the hatchet in the silence of evening we have overtones of Christ in Gethsemane. (pp. 156-57)

In "Billie Potts" [a wish for cosmic unity is] turned into reality, as Warren's earliest and perhaps most powerful version of his "osmosis of being" vision blooms suddenly vast as Dante's celestial rose. This irruption of what James and Freud called "cosmic consciousness" provides the poem's final resolution for Warren's ground theme of identity, a resolution that endures as the "One Flesh" idea—akin to Coleridge's "One Life" theme in The Ancient Mariner—throughout Warren's subsequent poetry. What binds the "One Life" into unity is precisely the intuition that, as Warren has said elsewhere, all life lifts towards its own definition. Ultimate identity comes from participation in that great quest shared alike by all creation….

For its power of imagery, its remarkable richness of sound texture, and its profundity of theme, these closing stanzas of "Billie Potts" must rank as Warren's very finest achievement in verse. (p. 160)

"Billie Potts" is probably Warren's best poem, and almost certainly his most important. Its brilliant imagery, its wide-ranging command of sound texture, and its novel synthesis of Warren's three master themes—passage, the undiscovered self, and mysticism—render the "Ballad" analogous to Tintern Abbey as the crucial poem in its author's maturation as a poet. From this point on Warren would be a "finished" artist, capable of very substantial technical innovations in later decades, but having essentially completed his formation of a fully developed point of view. Perhaps it was this sense of poetic self-completion that lay behind the ten year lapse between the "Ballad" and Warren's next publication in verse, Brother to Dragons. (p. 163)

[The] matter of communication between the conscious self and the unconscious is the crucial issue in Brother to Dragons, as it is in much of Warren's earlier verse. Here also, and with particular reference to Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, the initial overtures are made by the deeper self, the serpent-self which the conscious mind tries so hard to repudiate. In contrast to the aloof and prideful surface self, the deeper self appears not so monstrous after all. Instead, it comes forward in shy, sad humility, begging and giving forgiveness simultaneously, asking only to be reunited with its brother self, the conscious identity. (p. 180)

Warren's central themes and preoccupations have remained largely consistent. Questions of man's place in the total scheme of time and nature, of his relationship to the other beings with whom he shares existence, and of his guilt and complicity in the evils that surround him—those questions, in short, that make up the problem of the search for identity—recur from Warren's earliest work to his latest. Because the search for identity becomes, necessarily, an attempt to define reality, and because reality presents itself to us ambiguously—in men's heroism and depravity, in nature's beauty and horror—Warren's work most often assumes a dialectical configuration: the Clean versus the Dirty, the One versus the Many, Solipsism versus Synthesis of Being, Time versus no-Time, Consciousness versus Dream and Intuition. Given this dualistic perception of things, Warren's poetry must try to reconcile opposites…. (p. 191)

[His essay "Knowledge and the Image of Man"] advances two propositions: first, that the end or purpose of man's existence is knowledge, particularly self-knowledge; and second, that this knowledge—of one's ultimate identity, as it turns out—comes through a vision or experience of interrelationships that Warren calls "the osmosis of being": "[Man is] in the world with continual and intimate interpenetration, an inevitable osmosis of being, which in the end does not deny, but affirms, his identity."

In all his writings Warren's most negative characters are those who reject the osmosis of being, while his spiritual guides are those who accept it…. An awakening to this truth typically provides the structure for Warren's fiction and poetry alike. Osmosis of being affords the central vision of Audubon: A Vision; requires Jack Burden in All the King's Men to accept responsibility for history; causes Thomas Jefferson in Brother to Dragons to acknowledge complicity in murder; leads a long series of Warren characters in all his novels towards acceptance of a father figure, however shabby or tainted; and draws forth the theme of a reconciliation between conscious and unconscious zones of the psyche in Warren's poetry about the undiscovered self. And ultimately osmosis of being imparts whatever meaning the self may have within eternity, absorbing the self into the totality of time and nature with the consoling promise, often repeated in Warren's work, that "nothing is ever lost."

Hence, Warren's osmosis has moral, metaphysical, and psychological ramifications; it is his contribution to modern religious thought, having an ethical and a mystical dimension. Looking back over Warren's career, moreover, we may find that osmosis was there all the time,… implicit in the early works and explicit later on. (pp. 191-92)

Since he enunciated in Promises his central concept that "Time is a dream and we're all one Flesh, at last," Warren's subsequent volumes of poetry have been deeply affected by it. This concept has given coherence and direction to his work; it constitutes the "figure in the carpet" that Henry James talked about, "the primal plan" that "stretches from book to book." In Tale of Time (1966) and Incarnations (1968), Warren pursues the meanings of time and flesh somewhat separately, or at least with the stronger emphasis each title implies, although ultimately these meanings are inseparable. In these books, and in those that come before and after (You, Emperors, and Others; Audubon: A Vision; and Or Else), Warren's basic premise has been that the meaning of one's flesh is best perceived in the incarnation of other beings. Of paramount importance in this study is the recurrence in book after book of flesh which is dying or knows itself doomed to extinction. For the moment of extinction is when the dream of Time is about to end and the one Flesh concept is to become manifest. In Promises the snake propped high on a pitchfork tine and the men being hanged project this image, which the later books underscore increasingly. Some of the most moving poems in You, Emperors, and Others fall into this category. (p. 205)

[For] Warren, in Nature's grand eucharist, nothing is innocent and all are cannibals…. The meaning of one's flesh, therefore, can be understood, if at all, only in the light of an osmotic relationship that binds everything into unity and complicity together. (p. 209)

[For Warren himself], as for his various personae, a life as a conscious being is a tool to be used up in the service of the larger being that goes on eternally. But if the price of osmosis is high, meaning death for the conscious ego, its rewards are also high, meaning a kind of immortality through the ministrations of that shadow self so often shunned and loathed and locked out of the house of the psyche. For the shadow self, as made known in dream or animal intuition, is perfectly at ease in that infinitude of time and space which smites the conscious mind with the anxiety that man and his earth are bubbles in a cosmic ocean. The indestructibility of this deeper self was implied in its survival through Eleven Poems, despite murder and burial in the house of the psyche's cellar, and this immortality seems even clearer in Brother to Dragons, with particular reference to the serpent and catfish metaphors. In having "the face of the last torturer," the catfish is clearly associated with the "original sin" aspect of Warren's thought, but it also has redemptive possibilities not given to the conscious ego. Using ice to denote the separation between the world of light and time and consciousness above, and the timeless, totally dark world of unconsciousness below, Warren enviously describes the catfish as having "perfect adjustment" (or we might say osmosis) with its environment and thereby being "at one with God."

In its oneness with the total darkness under ice, the catfish need not fear, as the conscious ego must, the awesome infinitude of time and cosmos above the ice…. (pp. 214-15)

"Perfect adjustment," being "at one with God," and knowing at last who you are—such are the final rewards of Warren's osmosis, though its final price is the death of the conscious ego. "And the death of the self is the beginning of selfhood," R.P.W. had stated in Brother to Dragons. But the collective selfhood under the aegis of one flesh appears clearly superior to the separate ego, not only because of its gift of immortality but also because of its access to redeeming knowledge. (p. 216)

[This is] the apex of Warren's mysticism: given the inability of even the most brilliant scientists, philosophers, and religious thinkers to encompass this most mysterious dimension of reality, Warren has permitted his intuitive powers to work freely in their stead, evolving thereby his conception of time as a dream.

The motif of the dream—a perception of reality arising from the unconscious, as the word dream implies—has probably been Warren's most important new theme in poetry since Brother to Dragons. Promises is full of this motif, relating its highest promise—"All Time is a dream and we're all one Flesh, at last"—to the whole of Nature. (pp. 217-18)

[In Or Else] the counterpoint between Warren's naturalistic poetry of passage and his mysticism gives the book's title its meaning. The mysticism, as always in Warren, implies fusion with this world rather than escape from it. (p. 224)

[The] longest and most ambitious entry in Or Else, is called "I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision." The dream-vision of the title expands through the poem's dozen sections into one of Warren's grandest osmotic conceptions, rendering the oneness of time and flesh on a scale that binds together the living with the dead, family members with total strangers, densely compacted city-scape with vastly vacant countryside, summer heat and winter snow, past and present converging upon "the future tense / Of joy." (p. 225)

By implying a love of the world, joy is the surest mark of grace for the Warren persona; it is his sign of a religious redemption—redemption not in the sense of immortality, but in the sense that the world has come to seem permanently meaningful. This feeling of joy is the point at which Warren's two forms of mysticism converge—his osmosis of being and his epiphanies. And, repeatedly, joy affords the "moment of possibility" wherein the fallen persona may recapture his lost anima and dwell again, like the prelapsarian child-self, at least temporarily in paradise.

The turn to the animal kingdom or even to inanimate nature for osmotic wisdom appears to be culminating in Warren's latest poetry, which abounds with voices of nature striving to give utterance. As though reversing Freud's thesis about the inorganic hiding out within the organic, Warren in his "Arcturus" poems shows mountains, trees, and even the severed head of Mary, Queen of Scots, trying to say something. What they say, on one side, is that they share the human agony of limitations; and, on the other, that the human may share their perfect fullness of being. (p. 226)

Complementing his osmosis of being, [his] "unity with nature" that resembles "the unity of the lover with the beloved" is best seen in Warren's epiphanies, which carry his own love of the world to its ultimate expression. "We must try / To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God," the speaker commented in "Masts at Dawn" (Incarnations). By providing "Joy," "Delight," and insight into "The True Nature of Time"—to quote Warren's designations—Warren's epiphanies convey a power that enables men, even after their trauma of passage into a fallen world, to "love the world" and so to love God, the world's otherwise unknowable sustainer. (p. 235)

Like his osmosis of being, Warren's epiphanies seem to have come into play only after his "conversion" experience made them possible, and they have become a predominant note only in his recent volumes—flooding in as the undiscovered self theme was tailing off in the late 1950s. The early poems contain almost nothing of the epiphany experience…. [The] function of the epiphany as a final source of meaning in Promises constituted something new in Warren's poetry, an incursion of Pateresque thought set off in counterpoint against the long travail to wrest meaning from history in Warren's earlier writing. Jack Burden's venture into "history and the awful responsibility of Time" at the end of All the King's Men now yields to the ecstatic intensity of the moment…. (p. 236)

In the Rosanna sequence [of Promises] "The Flower" marks the major turning point in Warren's epiphanies. Through the earlier three poems the girl, in her prelapsarian state, had enjoyed a continuous paradisical condition, while the speaker slumped into postlapsarian despair…. In "The Flower," however, the absorption of the speaker into the girl's perspective permits not only a remembrance but a partial possession of paradise, and a way of transcending time's ruins after the Fall…. The essence of the epiphany is an intuition of Time's oneness that corresponds to the "One Flesh" doctrine developing elsewhere in Warren's poetry…. (p. 237)

If, over the half-century span of Warren's verse, there is one quality that most unmistakably lifts him to the first rank of American poets, then that quality would have to be the remarkable power, clarity, and originality of his imagery, flowing copiously into every part of his poetic canon from the first part of his career to the last. By imagery we refer to that verbal construct which, beginning with simple pictorial power, may ascend to metaphorical, symbolic, and even mythic significance as it implies larger dimensions of meaning…. [The] cumulative power of Warren's imagery in his eleven volumes is incalculable. (p. 273)

[As] prophet Warren has spoken movingly and meaningfully about some central issues of our time. But it is as art that his poetry must hope to survive…. How much of his poetry will ascend into the immortality of "poetry as art" remains to be seen. But his themes are likely to remain significant; and through a career that reaches back over a half century, encompassing schools of pre-Modern, Modern, and post-Modern aesthetics, he has displayed both growth and consistency in technical resources. With respect to the ageless elements of poetic technique—command of metaphor, control of tone and diction, powers of organization, mastery of sound effects, and the like—each phase of Warren's career has evinced a "morality of style" that is true to the classic standard. (p. 274)

Both as "prophecy" and as "art" the poetic canon of Robert Penn Warren evinces such significance, versatility, and excellence as to rank him among the finest and most fertile talents of his age. (p. 275)

Victor H. Strandberg, in his The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren (copyright © 1977 by The University Press of Kentucky), University Press of Kentucky, 1977.