[In the following review of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Zawacki briefly encapsulates Warren's poetic accomplishments and his literary status at the end of the twentieth century.]

The problem of knowledge has defined the major poetries of the past century. While contemporary thought is witnessing so many catch-phrase exhaustions—the end of history, of ideology, of the aesthetic—Robert Penn Warren (1905-89) invigorated six decades with his investigations into the origins of knowledge and its erratic trajectory towards or away from a realization in truth. “What is love?” he asked in Audubon: A Vision (1969): “One name for it is knowledge.” Jean Jacques Audubon was Warren's most compelling avatar because of the legendary Dauphin's preoccupation with both self-knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world. Warren imagined Audubon cataloguing birds with precision even as he “did not know / What he was. Thought: ‘I do not know my own name’.” Warren continually explored this inability to name the self, its source and ultimate dissolution, articulating epistemological predicaments as early as “Problem of Knowledge” from Thirty-Six Poems (1935):

What years, what hours, has spider contemplation spun
Her film to snare the muscled fact?
What hours unbuild the done undone,
Or apprehend the actor in the act?
Loving, with Orphic smile, we yearn
Down the deep backward our feet, we think, have trod:
Or sombrely, under the solstice turn,
We sow where once our mattock cracked the clod.
The rodent tooth has etched the bone,
Beech bole is blackened by the fire:
Was it a sandal smote the troughèd stone?
We rest, lapped in the arrogant chastity of our desire.

The compressed formalism of Warren's early work, with its emphasis on rhyme and thematic enjambment (“fact”, “act”, “cracked”), reflected not only an aesthetic conservatism converging on New Criticism, but also a resistant social position. The Fugitive Movement to which he belonged, and which included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and other poet-critics, apologized for a Southern agrarian culture they hoped to preserve from industrial capitalism. Yet Warren became enamoured of modernist poetry, despite the city at its centre, and while his roots in Guthrie, Kentucky, remained strong, he flowered into cosmopolitanism. A Rhodes Scholarship enabled him to travel, to England and on to Paris to visit Pound, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and in “Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand?” (1975), the elder statesman admitted that although his imagery had been largely drawn from nature, “how acutely I remember the romantic shock which I encountered, even before I knew the great cities, of the urban poetry of modernity, from Baudelaire to T. S. Eliot”.

Warren's dialogue between the country mouse and city mouse engendered distinctions between mice and men. The title character of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé (1982) provided an opportunity to condemn injustices suffered by a Native American Indian tribe at the hands of an expansionist US government, though the poem is equally remarkable for its extended analysis of the individual's struggle with valour and vanity, courage and self-renunciation: “Straight standing, he thrusts out his rifle, / Muzzle-grounded, to [General] Howard. It is / The gesture, straight-flung, of one who casts the world away.” Having fought out of need, Joseph surrendered out of a greater necessity and died over reservation graves, but not before wanting “to know if he / Had proved a man, and being / A man, would make all those / Who now there slept know / Their own manhood.” Warren earnestly inquired into integrity in the verse novel Brother to Dragons (1953, revised 1979) about President Jefferson's notorious silence regarding the murder of a slave by his nephews. While Warren had a peculiar habit of cumbersome and Latinate moralizing—“to the pure heart, Truth speaks”—Harold Bloom's statement in the foreword to this Collected Poems that Warren was “probably the most severe secular moralist that I have ever known” is crucial to understanding the poet's eccentricities.

According to John Burt's introduction to the extensive notes (170 pages' worth), Warren had begun assembling a Collected Poems before his death. Rather than compile the most current versions of Warren's work, however, as Warren had done in the 1985 Selected Poems, Burt has wisely opted to reconstruct the original volumes, preferring the poet's unfolding development to retrospective summary. Warren was a tireless reviser: poems in journals were often extensively rewritten for collections, Chief Joseph went through eleven drafts prior to the typescript, and Being Here (1980) was emended at every stage. Burt's meticulous notes collate all the poems' myriad versions, forming a practically separate book of fascinating minutiae about a poet at once painstaking and inadvertent. Burt has made consistent the enumeration of the labyrinthine sections and subsections of Warren's longer poems, as well as addressing the poet's most surprising inattention:

The “line bends” are often marked on the typescript, and they are frequently not in the place where Warren bent the line when he was typing it. In most of these cases my assumption is that Warren did not think in detail about how to break the line on the printed page until he went over the typescript with [editor Albert] Erskine. … The typesetters pretty much ignored how the lines were bent in Incarnations, and neither Warren nor Erskine seems to have noticed.

This seems a specious claim to make about any poet, let alone one whose beginnings vigilantly insisted on formal rigour, yet it illuminates Warren's eventual transformation to a more lyrical and discursive mode. For all their philosophical and historical probing, his later poems could be sloppy. He exercised greatest control over Brother to Dragons, which, while regrettably absent here, is promised by Burt as a parallel volume.

The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren appears precisely when Warren is no longer being read seriously, at least not by younger poets. A distrust of narrative may be unfairly relegating him to the sidelines, since he is sometimes stereotyped as a narrative poet on the strength of “The Ballad of Billie Potts” and his book-length verse tales. He has been short-sightedly pigeonholed as a regional Southern writer by some, and others look no further than his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men (1948), although he also won two Pulitzers for poetry. His poems are often considered masculinist—a criticism not necessarily unfounded—and however convincingly he reformed his views on race, he used the word “nigger” frequently (though the problems of prejudice in Warren have not generated nearly the same heat as racism in Frost). Possibly his poems gesturing toward metaphysical unity are misconstrued as irrelevant when the primary strain of American poetry is morphing out of post-Language Poetry and postmodern fragmentation (though that has not penalized Stevens), and the New Critical tenets central to Warren's poetics have been vigorously displaced by criticism more sympathetic to experimentation. There is already an air of the period piece about Warren's oeuvre, but his mastery of the poetic sequence and of the long poem still recommends him. The cultural moment also permits a view of his “lettered” example not as retro but radical; he was a fine literary critic (having co-authored with Cleanth Brooks the still-circulating Understanding Poetry, 1938), cultural commentator (see especially Who Speaks for the Negro?, 1965), editor (he founded Southern Review in 1935), novelist, short-story writer, playwright and, as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, spokesman. While Warren's Collected Poems is too monolithic to negotiate conveniently, his persistent questioning of whether “the baroque ironies of Time” are informed by “logic” or “accident” solicits a return to the poems he offered as provisional answers:

Let the leaf, gold, of birch,
Of beech, forever hang, not vegetable matter mortal, but
In no whatsoever breath of
Air. No—embedded in
Perfection of crystal, purer
Than air. You, embedded too in
Crystal, stand, your being perfected
At last, in the instant itself which is unbreathing.
Can you feel breath brush your damp
Lips? How can you know?