[In the following excerpted review, Pritchard describes the verses of Being Here as “poetry of emotions … high-pitched and poignant.”]

In his introduction to the recent New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, Kingsley Amis refers at one point to the opposite of such verse and instead of opting for the demeaning “heavy” (Who would want to be known as a writer of heavy verse?) chooses the adjective “high.” Whatever one calls it, a prime contemporary example of unlight verse is the work of Robert Penn Warren. As was the case with respect to his last volume (Now and Then, 1978) nobody goes on about Mr. Warren for very long without reaching for the word “powerful.” Harold Bloom, who has been touting Warren's later poetry as America's central contemporary instance of the High Romantic Sublime (Bloom touts the Sublime generally) finds it “deeply moving.” But what is there to be said about an ordinary reader's experience of this powerful, sublime, deeply moving voice, varying little from poem to poem, speaking always as if propelled by some elemental force which throws up memories and scenes from the past and is never at a loss for words to describe them?

Since it is an excellent idea to be on the alert whenever one is placed in the neighborhood of something deeply moving (especially if it's the Sublime) we may remark first on the extreme ease with which Warren summons up the language in poem after poem. Wyndham Lewis once accused Faulkner of possessing a “whippoorwill tank” to which he had frequent recourse when his prose threatened to flag. Mr. Warren owns something like a Time and History tank. The book's three epigraphs all refer to Time, and the tank is repaired to on numerous occasions in the poems themselves:

So dressed now, I wandered the sands, drifting on
Toward lights, now new, of the city afar, and pondered
The vague name of Time,
That trickles like sand through fingers,
And is life
Time crouched, like a great cat, motionless
Time stops, like it's no Time.
Who needs the undertaker's sick lie
Flung thus in the teeth of Time …
All history resounds with such
Utterance—and stench of meat burned
Dark humus of history or our
Own fate, which blindly blooms, like a flower.
While out of Time, Timelessness brims
Like oil in black water …

There are many more, and a similarly large selection could be made of his employment of “Truth.” I do not mean to be perverse in saying that when I come to these patches in Warren's writing—

Time died in my heart.
So I stood on that knife-edge frontier
Of Timelessness,

—I am not at all deeply moved, but depressed rather at the mechanical cranking-out (or bucket gone to the well once more) of an old tune. It's not so much High as it is Heavy verse.

Surely the co-author of Understanding Poetry knows more about prosody than I, and there may be richly interesting prosodic feats in these poems I'm not hearing. What I do hear is a voice that has decided to rear back and let go as if, having attained the age of seventy-five, Mr. Warren feels he's earned the right to behave as he likes. He is certainly no searcher for the mot juste; the ease with which “like a” this or that comes to his pen suggests something other than Flaubertian fastidiousness. I think rather that his appeal—and many of these poems are indeed appealing—stems from the universality of the situation: an old man looks back, encourages his childhood to cry out to him, asks unanswerable questions about why (the favorite first word in these poems), and then wrestles with the big, impossible questions which have none, or only one, answer. His is not a poetry of ideas, although concepts are always popping up; it is the poetry of emotions rather, high-pitched and poignant. The self these poems speak to is one which given a chance will eagerly indulge in thoughts that lie too deep for tears. A single and compelling instance will have to suffice, from “Boyhood in Tobacco Country,” where the man dreams back to his young self, walking a dusky lane in the country. The poem concludes:

I move in its timelessness. From the deep and premature midnight
Of woodland, I hear the first whip-o-will's
Precious grief, and my young heart,
As darkling I stand, yearns for a grief
To be worthy of that sound. Ah, fool! Meanwhile,
Arrogant, eastward, lifts the slow dawn of the harvest moon.
Enormous, smoky, smoldering, it stirs.
First visibly, then paling in retardation, it begins
The long climb zenithward to preside
There whitely on what the year has wrought.
What have the years wrought? I walk the house.
Oh, grief! Oh, joy! Tonight
The same season's moon holds sky-height.
The dark roof hides the sky.

It is a voice once more out of the cradle, endlessly rocking and—for stretches in this new volume I'll admit it—powerfully. …