[In the following review of Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, Smith focuses on the new poems in this collection, collectively called “Altitudes and Extensions,” which he says “oscillate between prosy speculation and lyrical exultation.”]

Robert Penn Warren's fourth selected poems, New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, appears exactly a decade after the third selected, a period in which many have ceased to think of him as novelist, critic, or Southern man of letters. Now he is widely admired for the poetry of his last twenty years. These poems attract as tales of yearning for and searches after what he has called “the human scheme of values,” perhaps especially because life has often seemed pointless. He has labored to make felt the large, daily, always inscrutable forces of Time, Place, Community, Self, Family, Death, and History, believing the individual might know and express the grand design. A speculator, then, his outlook has been consistently grim, his opinion of man suspicious, and his course unequivocally ethical. But he has rarely become a poetic preacher. He distrusts one-answer systems, whether religion, politics, or aesthetics. His effort has been to portray the responsible man. In Audubon: A Vision, his finest poem, he dramatizes such a man and then becomes the bearer of that man's voice as both yearn for virtue. Watching the naturalistic flight of geese, Warren pleads “Tell me a story of deep delight.” Perhaps he has not heard that story of meaning, but he has heard many and learned patience. Watching geese fly again in “Heart of Autumn,” he writes:

Path of logic, path of folly, all
The same—and I stand, my face lifted now skyward,
Hearing the high beat, my arms outstretched in the tingling
Process of transformation, and soon tough legs,
With folded feet, trail in the sounding vacuum of passage,
And my heart is impacted with fierce impulse
To unwordable utterance—
Toward sunset, at a great height.

So much of the subject, attitude, and even expression is standard operating equipment for contemporary poets that we forget Warren is among the originators of our dominant style. He wrote his first poems while Thomas Hardy lived. Warren's personal narratives of ordinary experience raised to an archetypal or mythical shape are ancestral, though broken, ballads that connect the Anglo-Saxon tradition to the contemporary shift into confessional experience. Robert Penn Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985 is more than his greatest hits; it is the cry for a life of consciousness, and that is twentieth-century poetry.

Warren has no doubt about how to present his sixty-two years of poetry. Half of his book is given to poems of the last decade, and he has ruthlessly winnowed there, keeping only 41 of 126 poems from four widely praised collections: Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978, Being There: Poetry 1977-1980, Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980, and Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand?: Poems 1975. To make room for this new poet in a book actually three pages shorter than its predecessor, he has cut many old favorites, for example “Homage to Emerson,” most of “Mortmain,” and the bulk of Incarnations. If his decisions seem, arguably, the right ones, we can conclude he has given up on the idea of sequencing poems into a single unit. Now we see what he has always been at his best, what Stanley Plumly called a prose lyricist.

The forty-nine new poems collected as “Altitudes and Extensions: 1980-1984” oscillate between prosy speculation and lyrical exultation. At eighty, Warren is acutely aware of Death as subject and threshold. The obsessive metaphor of these poems, mountain climbing, takes him to edges of extinction and danger where his old brooding historical consciousness seems replaced by a turn toward western landscapes and the animal life that has not been domesticated. When he narrates the climb to freedom and discovers what he calls “that divine osmosis” of all life, as in “Caribou” and “The First Time” he is unsentimentally and splendidly Wordsworthian. In the face of death he manages passion and serenity, so that in “Last Walk of Season” he says, “Our wish is to think of nothing but happiness. Of only / The world's great emptiness. How bright, / Rain-washed, the pebbles shine!” Yet if exultation is a joy he has long sought, long anticipated, he is too much the Puritan to have it without cost.

The cost, in fact, is mind, intelligence, speech—the knowing that resists even simple praise of natural beauty. When he describes himself poised for a dive into the sea in “Question at Cliff-Thrust,” it is Audubon's choice—how to live—he faces:

But there is the beckoning downwardness
That you must fight before you turn, and in the turn
Begin the long climb toward lighter green, and light,
Until you lie in lassitude and strengthlessness
On the green bulge of ocean under the sight
Of one gull that screams from east to west and is
Demanding what?

That debunking gull is the signature of Robert Penn Warren as much as any of his assertions of unity. The gull says what Warren says in “Little Girl Wakes Early”—that “you've learned that when loneliness takes you / There's nobody ever to explain to—though you try again and again.” This insinuant conviction of dis-unity, the gull-squawk of anarchic separation, has always underlain Warren's portraits of the good life. He believes life isn't fair, virtue isn't easily had, goodness rare but possible. His task has been to prove God wouldn't let “A man's honest sweat just go for nothing.” There is a deep sadness in Warren's best poems that seems now to arise from not only the impending loss of a world in which the struggle has meant so much to man's dignity but also from the loss of memory. The wonderful paradox at the heart of “Altitudes and Extensions” is that the more the remembered world falls away from Warren, the more he climbs into the world of elements, creatures, things. He offers no easy answers to human problems, in spite of having collected some of his most rhetorically bullying poems. The poems of “Altitudes and Extensions” are sometimes ponderous, repetitive, even unsteady, but many are the cries of an Eagle of poetry. And many are the American poets glad for the Robert Penn Warren who writes:

Yes, stretch forth your arms like wings, and from your high stance,
Hawk-eyed, ride forth upon the emptiness of air, survey
Each regal contortion
And tortuous imagination of rock, wind, water, and know
Your own the power creating all.
Delusion?—No!