[In the following review of Selected Poems: 1923-1975, McClatchy surveys Warren's poetic career and lauds his poetry of the 1970s.]

Robert Penn Warren last made selection of his poetry just over a decade ago. Thirteen small poems have been further trimmed from that previous collection; the three books he has written since then, plus ten additional poems, have been added. Such a gathering would be valuable in any case, as a comprehensive survey of Warren's character and achievement as a poet. Certainly it is his poetry on which rests his claim to greatness, though a decade ago few would have predicted that with real confidence. After all, so much else about this artist was distracting. During the half-century of his career, his contributions to nearly every aspect of the literary art have been recognized, but his novels now seem more sturdy than significant, and his essays more feisty than definitive. But the poetry he has produced in the past ten years has altered our sense of his career and its consequence, so that this Selected Poems is not merely a useful book but a truly important one. Given Warren's odd habit of arranging his work in reverse chronological order, his new work allows us to see his earlier verse as both an anticipation and an echo, the effect of which is to throw his recent poetry into an even higher relief and so to dramatize a remarkable event in the literature of our time by suddenly revealing to us a poet of unexpected and extraordinary power. Instances are rare of poets discovering such absolute strength so late in life, but a phrase from John Ashbery's Three Poems almost describes the phenomenon: “The great careers are like that: a slow burst that narrows to a final release.” That is not exactly the right term for Warren, since his grand late release is not a narrowing but an expansion—of language into a heightened virtuosity and intensity, and of theme into his special version of the visionary mode. Still, one is eager to say, the great careers are like that. In fact, Warren's most recent and distinctive advocate, Harold Bloom, is now arguing in print that alone among living writers Warren deserves to be counted with the best American poets of our century. The risks of both hyperbole and prophecy are well known, and I am less interested here in ranking Warren than in responding to the obvious excellence of his work.

There are three conspicuous phases to Warren's poetic career, and I often ask myself why I cannot read the first of those phases—the poems written before 1954—with much excitement or pleasure. Clearly “Bearded Oaks” or “Picnic Remembered” have long ago earned a place on the short-list of permanent poems. But I suspect that is less because they are worthy in themselves than because they are good poems of a certain kind. The kind of poem, that is, written by the group of Fugitives who were Warren's first peers and in whose company his work has since been discussed, compared, equated. John Crowe Ransom's wry (and overrated) elegies, and Allen Tate's severe odes and indictments are the products of true neo-classical sensibilities. But the rough-hewn narratives and abstracted metaphysics of Warren's work from this period seem awkwardly restrained by the stiffness of their dry formalism and uncertain diction, as if to check the indulgence of his essentially American-Romantic imagination. The effect is like a bust carved in burl oak. Like so many other poets of that era, he was under the spell of Eliot, though less the lure of Eliot's techniques (which were superior) than of his tastes and attitudes. And so, in doctrine disguised as paradox, Warren lamented over “the inherited defect”, and brooded on unredeemed human nature, on the violence and despair of a time “born to no adequate definition of terror.” I am left unconvinced by such poses.

Once he abandoned cultural mythologies and confronted history more immediately, his verse strengthens measurably, and the volumes from Promises (1957) through Incarnations (1968) give ample evidence of that. There are four long central poems that anchor this second period of his career, two celebrations and two elegies: “To a Little Girl, One Year Old, In a Ruined Fortress,” for his daughter; “Promises,” for his son; “Mortmain,” for his father; and “Tale of Time,” for his mother. Each of these moving familial poems is a part of Warren's effort during this time to explore “how cause flows backward from effect”—effects of either gain or loss, birth or death. His emphasis shifts now from guilt to grace; and even as grace, the reverse of guilt which gives form to experience, gives freedom, so too Warren's verse grows more supple and expressive, favoring sprawling forms whose dimensions and dynamics were determined by the life they record. It was during this period, too, that several characteristics of his work emerged more distinctly—among them his juxtaposition or conflation of the narrative and the meditational, modes that most nearly parallel his instincts and notions. As a Southerner raised in a tradition of tale-telling and as a gifted novelist, narratives seem a natural choice for Warren's poems, but behind the method is his deeper conviction that experience transpires in time and that an historical imagination is a prerequisite for an authentic poetry. This idea extends even to Warren's obsession with book-titles that include the dates of composition, and with arranging his poems into sequences that stress dramatic interplay and cumulative force. And on the other hand, there is his penchant for discursive meditation, always inflected by his personal accent. As if experience and history were not finally self-sufficient, Warren often epitomizes them into conceptual dialectics. “To have truth”, he says in one poem, “Something must be believed, / And repetition and congruence, / To say the least, are necessary.” Truth, then, lies somewhere between the instance and eternity, the fact and the form. Poem by poem, Warren explores both sides of that border.

Incarnations was a transitional book, and an uneven one; indeed, all along Warren seems to have had trouble recognizing his own most successful work—a question of taste, not talent. But I remember being astonished by several poems when that volume first appeared. They are still superb: “Natural History,” “Myth on Mediterranean Beach: Aphrodite as Logos,” “Masts at Dawn.” The poet here begins to unfold the world's parable with the bold intellectual and sensuous command that has marked his poetry since that time. What might seem a surrender—“The world means only itself”, concludes “Riddle in the Garden”—is actually his more complex project to find beauty in “the fume-track of necessity.” “Masts at Dawn” offers the injunction another way: “We must try // To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God.” This necessity is urged in tones increasingly sharp, spare, eccentric, and often oracular. All of the work in this current phase of his career is spoken by this new voice. What before has struck the ear as stiff now sounds nearly scriptural. (In fact, I suspect that the Old Testament cadences are the strongest influence on Warren's new line.) The verse is now often free, the voice more formal. Some readers might consider it fustian or old-fashioned, but they would miss the strange, at times unsettling impact his use of inversion and stark enjambments produces. And there is always a marvelous lyrical counterpointing, such as this interlude from Audubon:

October: and the bear,
Daft in the honey-light, yawns.
The bear's tongue, pink as a baby's, out-crisps to the curled tip,
It bleeds the black blood of the blueberry.
The teeth are more importantly white
Than has ever been imagined.
The bear feels his own fat
Sweeten, like a drowse, deep to the bone.
Bemused, above the fume of ruined blueberries,
The last bee hums.
The wings, like mica, glint
In the sunlight.
He leans on his gun. Thinks
How thin is the membrane between himself and the world.

The quiet moment is one of the many superimposed images that make up Audubon and its cumulative definition of man, identified now with his passion, now with his fate. It is easy to see why the figure of Audubon—in his own words, “the Man Naked from his hand and yet free from acquired Sorrow”—must have been compelling to Warren, for he is at once artist and adventurer, always on the edge of things, wilderness or legend. The details Warren evokes from Audubon's history center on how “the world declares itself” to such a man, and portray how truth cannot be spoken or even embodied but “can only be enacted, and that in dream.” What cannot be understood can be known. “What is love? / One name for it is knowledge.” Poised between engagement and comprehension, between violence and awe, Audubon is Warren's most eloquent characterization, and his story has been shaped into one of the best long poems ever written by an American. One of the manifest advantages of this Selected Poems is that it makes Audubon easily available again.

Such a poem might have capped the career of any poet less unusual than Warren. Instead, he has gone on to extend and amplify his mastery in the collection titled Or Else (1974) and in the poems new to this volume. At first glance, Or Else seems a sort of anthology of Warren's tried and true: the down-home ballad, the political prayer, homages to dead writers, the rural narratives and metaphysical lyrics. He returns to all the familiar forms, but with a new emphasis and artistry. Throughout, he is driven by the “compulsion to try to convert what now is was / Back into what is.” The book's blunt title, which implies both ultimatum and alternatives, is echoed in the staccato delivery of these overlapping attempts to sift lost evidence—his father's death, himself as a boy, a remembered chair or saw—for some sense of the continuity of a life's experiences. It is the noble Wordsworthian ambition to recapture redemptive spots of time: to wake, as Warren says, from “that darkness of sleep which / Is the past, and is / The self,” with a question: “Have I learned how to live?” Warren often sounds such a moral note, but it can be deceptive since his concern is more existential—the necessarily defeated effort to restore the logic of the original dream, to resolve the innocence since fulfilled in “the realm of contingency.”

Since “Time / Is the mirror into which you stare,” the discovery of its history is always a self-definition—mirrored in a few controlling images: “Man lives by images. They / Lean at us from the world's wall, and Time's.” Like the conjuring process of staring, there are certain images that are obsessive for Warren, that recur continually in his work and are at once its source and surface. The poem “Rattlesnake Country,” for instance, ends among the dark roots of his “Indecipherable passion and compulsion”:

                                                                                                              I remember
The need to enter the night-lake and swim out toward
The distant moonset. Remember
The blue-tattered flick of white flame at the rock-hole
In the instant before I lifted up
My eyes to the high sky that shivered in its hot whiteness.
And sometimes—usually at dawn—I remember the cry on the mountain.
All I can do is to offer my testimony.

That mountain cry is sometimes a bird hung high in the sky, or a star, as in “Birth of Love,” one of the very best poems Warren has ever written. On another of these night-swims, a man watches a woman climb ashore ahead of him to dry herself off with what light remains. It is a moment “nonsequential and absolute”, a spot between times,

                    … and in his heart he cries out that, if only
He had such strength, he would put his hand forth
And maintain it over her to guard, in all
Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever
Inclemency of sky or slur of the world's weather
Might ever be. In his heart
He cries out. Above
Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he sees
The first star pulse into being. It gleams there.
I do not know what promise it makes to him.

An example of how obsessive these images are for the poet is the fact that this poem flashes back to a scene from a book now over thirty years old, All The King's Men. Jack Burden is remembering a storm-struck picnic with Anne and Adam Stanton when the three of them were teenagers. Jack and Anne are swimming under a dark sky: a gull crosses high over them. He watches her floating profile sharpened against “the far-off black trees.”

That was a picnic I never forgot.

I suppose that that day I first saw Anne and Adam as separate, individual people, whose ways of acting were special, mysterious, and important. And perhaps, too, that day I first saw myself as a person. But that is not what I am talking about. What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind which become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.

The image I got in my head that day was the image of her face lying in the water, very smooth, with the eyes closed, under the dark greenish-purple sky, with the white gull passing over.

That is a crucial gloss on the method and meaning of Warren's poetry. The brightening image which he has been unveiling for as long as his career is the deliberate mystery of identity, of the legends that alone define and sustain identity. His primary scene's most impressive aspect is the bird above—which in his poetry can be a hawk or star or sun, the symbol of power with which Warren has identified his ambitions from the very beginning, in a high Romantic gesture. One of the new poems here, the glorious “Evening Hawk,” is its fullest testament:

                                                                      His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
                                                            Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

The rather anti-climactic mention of history at the end of this poem is meant to inhibit Warren's total giving of himself over to his ecstatic vision. But that is a measure of this poet's wisdom: to be able to encounter the sublime directly, and yet to temper his visionary impulse with a self-consciousness that includes both conscience and an eye for the incongruent detail. That hawk is, of course, the transcendental poet, but also a terrible divine presence, not unlike the “God” of Warren's late poetry who is an indifferent, unknowable, immanent principle of reality both feared and desired. Among the new poems, I would single out “A Way to Love God,” “Loss, of Perhaps Love, in Our World of Contingency,” and “Brotherhood in Pain” as especially powerful wrestlings with these themes of his “perfected pain of conscience.”

In his Democracy in America, de Tocqueville predicted that the poetry of the future here would have as its subject not the senses but the inner soul and destinies of mankind, “man himself, taken aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities, and inconceivable wretchedness.” I can think of no better description of Robert Penn Warren. Among his contemporaries he is our most truly American poet, working in a large-scale imaginative tradition that continues to be vital source for poetry.