[In the following excerpted review, Martz acknowledges Warren's “subtle and firm command of his own idiom,” while surveying the poetic works of Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968.]

It has now been fifteen years since Robert Penn Warren returned to lyric poetry in the writings of his volume Promises: Poems 1954-1956. His new volume, Incarnations, fulfills those promises. Warren has moved now into subtle and firm command of his own idiom, with an effect well-described by his chosen title. These poems incarnate, by movement of spoken words, by images of fruit and sea and city, a sense of spirit flowing through all existence, or as he puts it in one poem, a sense of “the furious energies of nature.” These are sequences with many settings: first, a Mediterranean island off the coast of France; next, the dismal setting of a Southern prison; then, in New York City, the scene of a pedestrian accident near old Penn Station; and lastly, a few poems set in the mysterious “Enclaves” of memory. What is most remarkable about these poems is their quiet deftness in weaving together a universe of sights and sounds within the mind of this sensitive speaker. In the opening sequence, memories of Phoenicians merge with a Nazi helmet found in the “island dump,” while from “the next island,” a rocket rises from “Le centre de recherche d'engins spéciaux,” preparing for another war. Yet still the “mind is intact,” receiving and absorbing these varied images, holding them all together in a tender apprehension, sensing and interpreting the meaning of “the slow fig's purple sloth,” or of an old woman in a bikini on the beach, or of the mistral and the “Masts at Dawn.” In his poem “The Red Mullet,” the presence of the fish is associated with that of the fig, while both together suggest a realization of an inner life in the things of nature, including the depths of the speaker's own mind. I quote this superb poem complete, for it represents the best of Warren's art in this volume, and illustrates the way in which the terror and the attraction of nature's forces may be held within the mind and action of a human figure:

The fig flames inward on the bough, and I,
Deep where the great mullet, red, lounges in
Black shadow of the shoal, have come.          Where no light may
Come, he the great one, like flame, burns, and I
Have met him, eye to eye, the lower jaw horn,
Outthrust, arched down at the corners, merciless as
Genghis, motionless and mogul, and the eye of
The mullet is round, bulging, ringed like a target
In gold, vision is armor, he sees and does not
Forgive.          The mullet has looked me in the eye, and forgiven
Nothing.          At night I fear suffocation, is there
Enough air in the world for us all, therefore I
Swim much, dive deep to develop my lung-case, I am
Familiar with the agony of will in the deep place. Blood
Thickens as oxygen fails.          Oh, mullet, thy flame
Burns in the shadow of the black shoal.

This poem, as I read it, speaks of the mystery and the fear of human understanding: the mind's eagerness to know, along with the shock of knowledge, the grasp of forces that lie, perhaps hostile, beyond the rim of the mind.

In different settings we can find the same deep sympathy at work, with the sick murderer Jake in the pen, crying out,

“Jest keep that morphine moving, Cap,
And me, I'll tough it through,”

or, in a better sequence, we have the gradual inclusion of the demolition of Penn Station, a prowling jet above, a black woman hit “by a 1957 yellow Cadillac,” and the poet himself watching from his taxi. All this is brought together under the image of the woman's scream, a sound that comprehends, within the sharply aroused mind of the onlooker, the “tat-tat-tat” of the “pneumatic hammers” as they wreck an edifice of classic form and beauty, while “the orange-colored helmets of the construction workers bloom brilliant as zinnias”—those very zinnias that the black woman knew back in Georgia as a child when “a lard-can of zinnias bloomed by the little cabin door.” The jet is too high to be heard, and yet the poet can feel its ominous presence:

The jet is so far off there is no sound, not even the sizzle
                                        it makes as it sears the utmost edges of air.
It prowls the edge of distance like the raw edge of experience.

And lastly, in the final section of this book, we have the apparition of human beings that transcend and yet incarnate the earthly in their guise as “Skiers”:

With the color of birds or of angels,
They swoop, sway, descend, and descending,
Cry their bright bird-cries, pure
In the sweet desolation of distance.
They slowly enlarge to our eyes.          Now
On the flat where the whiteness is
Trodden and mud-streaked, not birds now,
Nor angels even, they stand.          They
Are awkward, not yet well adjusted
To this world, new and strange, of Time and
Contingency, who now are only
Human.          They smile.          The human
Face has its own beauty.

This volume has a total integrity of great power, as it moves through the varied images of human experience, attractive and repulsive, and yet in the end concludes with the emphasis upon the incarnate beauty of the human. …