An American Hardy? Not exactly. Though we have not had such a prolonged late flowering of a poet since Thomas Hardy's (which lasted until his eighty-eighth year), and though Warren's poetry resembles Hardy's in many ways—perhaps most in the religious attitude of yearning unbelief coupled with grim irony and the metrical virtuosity based on stretching traditional forms—Warren is obviously not merely an American version of Hardy. He is unique, original, and, for me at least, a far more profound, moving, and satisfying poet than Hardy. At the risk of being thought a precious paronomasiac, I have therefore shifted the word order in my title so as to stress Warren's hardiness and hardihood. He is strong and durable, a tough-minded survivor who never shirks a full look at the worst. And he is supremely American, immersed as he is in American history and feeling a personal responsibility for older American literature (reviving Melville's and Whittier's poetry, Dreiser's novels) and for the state of the Republic (a concern shown not only in his poetry but in his prose studies of the Civil War, of segregation, and of Jefferson Davis). That Warren's character embodies many of the qualities that we like to think peculiarly American is a statement that is nebulous but not, I think, meaningless: great energy and vigor, a willingness to take risks, a kind of omnicompetence that impels him to turn his hand to everything from biography and history to children's books, as well as criticism, plays, novels, and poems of all varieties; a deep understanding of and sympathy for the ordinary or, as he used to be called, “common” man. Generalizing even more recklessly, I might suggest that in the largest terms the essential theme of all his work is one which, while universal, is specially applicable to Americans and to our national foreign policy: the dangers of innocence, self-righteousness, moral isolation that allow us to believe that only we have escaped from history.

Rumor Verified, Warren's third collection since the Selected Poems of 1975, is not quite up to its predecessor, Being Here; yet this does not mean any decline, but merely the ebb and flow inevitable in the productions of so large and prodigal a talent. (His latest volume, Chief Joseph, is not the mixture as before but a new and quite different kind of poem.) As far as I can see, Rumor Verified lacks the clarity of theme and organization that helped to make Being Here so effective. The title poem makes the theme explicit enough—the verified rumor is “That you are simply a man, with a man's dead reckoning, nothing more”—and the sequences are given such titles as “Paradox of Time,” “If This Is the Way It Is,” “But Also,” and “Fear and Trembling.” A more dramatic and effective principle of organization is constituted by the ghostly figure of Thomas Hardy, which seems to me to hover in the background of many of these poems. Warren does not imitate or reply to Hardy directly, but he does deal with Hardyan themes in his own way; and he seems deliberately to evoke Hardy so that the reader will be conscious of the parallels and differences. An obvious example is “Convergences” (published in the Sewanee Review for summer 1981), in which the meter as well as the title recalls Hardy's “Convergence of the Twain”; but instead of Hardy's grim but impersonal irony of the Spinner of the Years humbling man's pride, Warren has the more disquieting image of the personal future as rails converging into a dark tunnel to embody the memory of human evil in the tramp who robbed him and of his own responsive hatred. The image of “God's palsied hand shaking / The dice-cup? Ah, blessèd accident!” can hardly fail to recall “Hap” and other Hardy poems, and “Immanence” Hardy's “Immanent Will,” and “Afterward” Hardy's beautiful poem of the same name—though Warren offers even less consolation than Hardy for mortality. But Warren is in general much less bleak and grim than Hardy, much less defensive. He is a purer agnostic because he is unsure that God doesn't exist and that Fate always is hostile or indifferent. He often sounds like someone who has escaped the Hardyan trap; he doesn't understand how or why, but he believes in the existence of joy and love because he has experienced them; and therefore he has hope. He has far more humor than Hardy, and he is capable of fear and trembling, which is foreign to Hardy's grim stoicism. He is more compassionate, a yearner after more than a denouncer of the absent God. He has his own belief in a kind of secular Eucharist, in which the parents and the dead past must be eaten and digested; and we too must be ready to be eaten. (An alternative metaphor, more prominent in the prose than in the poetry, is that of “osmosis of being,” a membranal interpenetration of being between self and others and man and nature.) The dionysiac or surreal aspect of Warren—as in the mystical Eucharist just mentioned, or the visions of the dead grandmother eaten perpetually by the hogs, or the ghost of the dead father dancing, or the experiences of pure joy, of feeling that “everything that lives is blest”—suggests Yeats; but it is a striking fact that one does not feel the presence of Yeats in Warren's later poetry.

I fear that I have been tempted into too many generalizations, and so I will conclude with a few more words about Rumor Verified. Though it is full of images of sleeplessness and nightmare, of the terror of meaninglessness in life and death, it is a hopeful volume. The epigraph, fittingly, is the passage from Dante about emerging from Hell to see the stars again. The first poem, “Chthonian Revelation: A Myth,” describes a sexual communion in the nave of a hidden sea-cave, a hermetic revelation which is wordless; and as the lovers are swimming home, each drop of water falling from a fingertip is “a perfect universe defined / By its single, minuscule, radiant, enshrinèd star.” So the transient waterdrop and the eternal star are equated in the mystery of time. The quest for meaning is often equated with the writing of poetry, as in the beginning of “Minneapolis Story”:

Whatever pops into your head, and whitely
Breaks surface on the dark stream that is you,
May do to make a poem—for every accident
Yearns to be more than itself, yearns,
In the way you dumbly do, to participate
In the world's blind, groping rage toward meaning. …

Again, “The Corner of the Eye” images the poem as alternatively a small fugitive animal or a Jamesian “Beast in the Jungle”:

The poem is just beyond the corner of the eye.
You cannot see it—not yet—but sense the faint gleam,
Or stir. It may be like a poor little shivering fieldmouse,
One tiny paw lifted from snow while, far off, the owl
Utters. Or like breakers, far off, almost as soundless as dream.
Or the rhythmic rasp of your father's last breath. …
It has stalked you all day, or years, breath rarely heard, fangs dripping.
And now, any moment, great hindquarters may hunch, ready—
Or is it merely a poem, after all?

The final poem, “Fear and Trembling,” in a section called “Coda,” seems again to identify poetry and the discovery of meaning: only at the death of ambition “does the deep / Energy crack crust, spurt forth, and leap / From grottoes, dark—and from the caverned enchainment?” But the volume is full of splendid and varied poems that I wish I had space to comment on. “Redwing Blackbirds” is an American equivalent of Yeats's “Wild Swans at Coole,” and “If” (“If this is the way it is, we must live through it”)—surely consciously?—of Kipling's dreadful inspirational poem.

Warren's latest poem (published last summer in the Georgia Review and now in a considerably revised version) is a new departure in several ways. Whereas Brother to Dragons is a “play for verse and voices” and Audubon “a vision” (described by Warren in an interview as a series of snapshots or fragments), Chief Joseph is simply called “a poem,” and is Warren's closest approach to a traditional narrative poem. Most of it is spoken by Chief Joseph himself, after a brief introduction; Warren does not enter in his own person until the last section, when he describes his visit to the burial site. In a collage technique Warren intersperses prose excerpts throughout the poem; these are extracted from contemporary and later documents of many kinds, from records and reports to letters, biographies, and newspapers. Since the prose constitutes a running commentary on and counterpoint to the old chief's words in the poem, the technique is very effective.

Chief Joseph is an American epic. In many ways it is the third point on a line of development that begins with Brother to Dragons, and in which Audubon is the middle work. In Brother to Dragons the action is in every sense tragic: the ghost of Jefferson and the persona R. P. W. recognize their own complicity in evil and are changed by the reenactment. Audubon is, in contrast, not dramatic: the Audubon of the poem is made far more serene than the historical Audubon ever was (as James Justus notes), a hero-saint, a mythic rather than a tragic protagonist. Chief Joseph is faultless—the only Warren protagonist who is wholly good. (The only things he can find to reproach himself with are pride in his position and possible minor errors of judgment.) Hence there is no psychological conflict in the poem and no irony. Joseph is not passive: he fights; but since the fight is hopeless, his main function is to suffer. His only alienation is physical: deprived of his homeland, he remains true to the eyes of the fathers who watch from darkness.

The aesthetic problem is how to avoid making this situation overly simple and sentimental: when the Indians are all good and most of the whites bad, and the good suffer wholly undeserved evil, the result is likely to be pathos. This result is avoided in two ways. The first is the characterization of Joseph. Throughout his long speeches he exhibits no trace of self-pity or vindictiveness: he is the noble Indian of legend realized in life. The second is the characterization of the whites, who range from noble spirits like Jefferson through many soldiers and statesmen of mixed character to real villains like Sherman. Who was responsible for the final betrayal? “General Sherman, it was, and the name he bore, / That of the greatest Indian chief— / Tecumseh. William Tecumseh Sherman, of course.” The whites even offered bounties for Indian scalps: “One hundred dollars per buck, fifty / Per woman, only twenty-five for a child's.” In the “predictably obscene” procession to dedicate Grant's tomb

Joseph, whose people had never taken
A scalp, rode beside Buffalo Bill—
Who had once sent his wife a yet-warm scalp,
He himself had sliced from the pate
Of a red man who'd missed him. Joseph rode
Beside Buffalo Bill, who broke clay pigeons—
One-two-three-four-five—just like that.
Joseph rode by the clown, the magician who could transform
For howling patriots, or royalty,
The blood of history into red ketchup,
A favorite American condiment.

In the final section Warren describes his own visit to the battlefield, his vision of Joseph

While he, eyes fixed on what strange stars, knew
That eyes were fixed on him, eyes of
Those fathers that incessantly, with
The accuracy of that old Winchester, rifled
Through all, through darkness, distance, Time,
To know if he had proved a man. …

Reflecting that “There is only / Process, which is one name for history. Often / Pitiful. But, sometimes, under / The scrutinizing prism of Time, / Triumphant,” he imagines a future stranger, in a similar moment of decision while the mob rushes onward, who will “into / His own heart look while he asks / From what undefinable distance, years, and direction, / Eyes of fathers are suddenly fixed on him. To know.”

Turning now to the studies of Warren, let us begin with Then & Now by Floyd C. Watkins. This is a hard book to classify. The subtitle, “The Personal Past in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren,” is not much help, except that it indicates certain limits. Though Watkins disclaims any biographical intention, the book is more biographical than anything else; even the exhaustive analyses of poems are biographical in emphasis. The thesis is that Warren creates in his poetry an imaginary town, a “created village of the mind and art,” like Faulkner's Jefferson, Wolfe's Altamont, Anderson's Winesburg, or Robinson's Tilbury Town; and with the poet's help Watkins proceeds to explore the relation between the poetic town and the “reality” of Guthrie and Cerulean Springs, Kentucky, as represented in historical documents and in the memories of Warren's surviving contemporaries. There are various assumptions here that one might question, from the rationale of these limits—why exclude the novels?—to the notion that Warren has been much concerned with creating an imaginary town. But rather than quibble about such matters, let us rejoice that the study did produce some valuable results. With his customary generosity Warren cooperated very fully with Watkins, not only providing material and suggestions but discussing each chapter in detail and making elaborate suggestions for revision. The resulting book is perhaps most like an expanded interview, though for the most part Warren's words are absorbed into Watkins's commentary rather than given verbatim. Warren has said that he doesn't intend to write an autobiography and doesn't want a biography written; but on the other hand he has been more generous than any other poet known to me (except James Dickey in his Self-Interviews) in giving interviews that supply just about everything that a reader might find helpful. Watkins has published not only one of these interviews, but (with John T. Hiers) a collection of them, Robert Penn Warren Talking (1980). So this book grows naturally out of that kind of activity. Whether it adds much to the understanding of Warren's poetry is debatable; but, literary appreciation being always impure and not completely divorceable from curiosity, many of Warren's readers will be glad to have this book.

The second chapter, “The Penns, the Warrens, and the Boy,” is much the best part of the book. It contains the fullest account I have seen of Warren's family background and boyhood, with new material on such matters as Warren's accidental blinding in one eye. This injury was obviously of enormous importance psychologically, aside from its practical effect in disqualifying him for Annapolis; but Warren—a man who successfully protects his privacy—has refused to talk about it until recently. He told Watkins: “I felt sort of alienated rather than emasculated, but alienated. … Alienation and separation from other people, and I felt a kind of shame—shame is not the word—but disqualification for life, as if I had lost a leg, say, or an arm or something. … It made you feel unattractive, and it made you also express your anger quite a lot.” He worried about losing the other eye, and no doubt this was all related to his attempt at suicide. (He discusses these matters also in his latest interview, in the summer 1982 Georgia Review.)

Little of what Watkins reveals is surprising, though he gratifies curiosity and provides interesting details. The Guthrie that Warren remembers is not the town other people remember; nor does it always correspond to what facts are now discoverable. Being precocious and gifted, Warren as a boy was not popular: he was regarded with a good deal of envy and malice. Guthrie is now totally unaware of its most famous citizen.

Neil Nakadate's collection of essays, Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives, is the first general collection about Warren since John Longley's of 1965. It is a useful and engaging selection, and illustrates the high level of most criticism of Warren. (That Warren is well treated by critics is not merely good luck. He has always avoided literary politics, and has spoken well of fellow writers or remained silent; even his commercial success has provoked remarkably little envy. Furthermore his work offers many fruitful challenges to critics.) Unfortunately Nakadate's book is done in photo-offset and is cheap-looking though not cheap.

The other collection of essays, James A. Grimshaw's on Brother to Dragons, is a handsome book and a good complement to Nakadate's, since all these pieces deal with the same work. (There is little duplication: only three essays appear in both volumes.) Grimshaw's collection has two important sources of interest. First, Brother to Dragons occupies a unique place in Warren's career. He wrote it after a ten-year dry spell when he was unable to finish poems, and it was his writing of this work in 1953, his including his father and his own persona as R. P. W., that heralded and made possible his entire later poetic career that began with Promises (1956). Second, he published a dramatic version of Brother to Dragons in 1976 and a drastically revised version of the original “play for verse and voices” in 1979. In the meantime a historical study had appeared—Jefferson's Nephews: A Frontier Tragedy by Boynton Merrill, Jr. (1976)—that demonstrated the lack of correspondence to historical fact in many details of the first version, and questioned the whole matter of its relation to history. Brother to Dragons is thus Warren's most controversial work, both with regard to the comparative merits of the two versions and with regard to the matter of historicity. Most critics, whatever positions they have taken on these controversies, have also thought it (or one version of it) to be among Warren's finest works: many would rank it with All the King's Men as one of his two supreme achievements.

Grimshaw's volume, then, has every attraction to appeal to a very wide audience, since it deals on a high level with controversial matters of the widest range and the greatest importance. The first section consists of essays about the 1953 version, ranging from Frederick P. W. McDowell's 1955 essay “Psychology and Theme” (the only essay to be reprinted in all three collections, Longley's, Nakadate's, and Grimshaw's—and well worth it) to Dennis Dooley's study of the “Persona R. P. W.” and Richard G. Law's on “The Fact of Violence vs the Possibility of Love.” Space does not permit even the listing of all these, but they are uniformly good. The second section consists of reviews, the first five of the 1953 edition and the remaining two of the 1979. Jarrell and Lowell (who curiously seems to be trying to imitate Jarrell's style) are marvelous on the earlier version; Harold Bloom, a late convert to Warren's poetry on the basis of Incarnations and Audubon, doesn't really like either version (too anti-Jefferson and -Emerson) but finds the new one improved. Irvin Ehrenpreis doesn't like either version and does a rousing academic hatchet-job which is, at least, a comprehensive statement of everything that can be said against them. The third section is a group of interpretations of the 1979 edition. The late Hugh Holman faults Warren for not making it clearer that he is not a practitioner of historical fiction, for Brother does not, as the Merrill book shows, correspond even to the “general outline” of the facts, as Warren claims it does. But Holman performs this service for the poet, and does it well. Brother, he points out, began with folk tales and garbled legends; and Warren's change of the victim's name from the historical George to John “is a quiet but emphatic declaration to Clio, in the guise of Boynton Merrill, of ‘non serviam.’” Warren, Holman makes very clear, “embraces a purpose and a method older by far than that of historical fiction as it was practiced by Sir Walter Scott”; while historical fiction is realistic, seeking to displace myth with fact, myth exists “when what is unique about periods is dissolved away, when time becomes meaningless and space replaces time as the dominant ingredient in fiction.” When Warren locates Brother in “no place” and at “no time,” he is indicating that he is concerned with myth rather than history, or rather with the permanent meaning of history. His Jefferson, with his faith in human goodness and perfectibility shattered by the depravity of his nephews, is totally unhistorical; Warren is obviously not trying to describe a historical Jefferson but to criticize the view of man which Jefferson is generally considered to embody. Holman suggests that Brother might be aptly subtitled “Original Sin on the Dark and Bloody Ground”; and he remarks that this use of history is very old, going back to Shakespeare and Homer. (I hope Warren reads this essay; the only times I have heard him complain about critics have been when they have labeled him a “historical” novelist in the wrong sense.) Richard N. Chrisman makes a better case against the revision than did Ehrenpreis. He argues that, though Warren insists that the new version is not a play, it was in fact strongly influenced by the dramatic version published in 1976, and that these changes, while improving the poem as drama, disrupt its former coherence as poem. But Warren's “fundamental poetic task in Brother to Dragons of framing a ‘new definition of joy’ in the light of new definitions of humanity has nevertheless survived the editing.” There are several other fine essays, among which must be mentioned Richard G. Law's analysis of the figure of R. P. W.'s father as polar opposite to Lilburn. Finally there is an appendix containing the historical documents in the case: Merrill's account of the murder, a genealogical chart of the Jefferson family, and Warren's foreword to the dramatic version of 1976. The whole book resembles a glorified version of the casebooks that used to be popular for use as texts; but it would take celestial freshmen, or infernal and professional critics only, to make proper use of this one. The controversy is fascinating and most instructive.

Charles H. Bohner's Robert Penn Warren is a revision of a volume that first appeared in 1964. Bohner's is much superior to most volumes in the Twayne series. He writes with clarity, concision, and vigor, and he gets the facts straight and complete. For an account of Warren's background and early life, and for a brief survey of his whole career, this book is a good one to start with. Bohner thinks A Place to Come To Warren's best novel since All the King's Men; Or Else his best volume of poetry since Promises. He doesn't like the new version of Brother to Dragons as well as the original, but makes sensible comments on the questions of historicity and dramatic quality. This is an intelligent and useful book.

I have saved the best of all these books on Warren until last. James H. Justus's The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren is the best single volume covering all of Warren's work yet to appear. Justus makes full use of earlier critics—his preface begins disarmingly: “I would like to think that my views of Robert Penn Warren are fully original, but of course they are not”—but writes freshly, intelligently, and imaginatively. His book is continuously interesting: there is hardly a dull paragraph in it. It is so good, in fact, that it inspires even this weary reviewer at the end of this long review with the impulse to discuss various points at length, not to disagree but to refine and develop. I will confine myself to nothing a few of these points. First, I wish he had been able to think of a better word than Achievement, which Matthiessen preempted for Eliot. Second, to say that Warren's career “compares favorably with that of … Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate” seems both vague and invidious (it is repeated on the dustjacket): Warren is long past the stage when he needs to be bolstered by such comparisons. Third, I wish he had given more time to the poetry as compared to the novels. Fourth, I wish he did not insist on fitting Warren into an Emerson-Hawthorne dialectic so frequently, though he is certainly right in stressing Warren's continuity with earlier American literature.

These quibbles are nothing compared to the qualities that deserve unquestioning praise. First, readability: Justus grinds no axes, is unfailingly intelligent and perceptive. He is good on the question of historicity in the novels, on Warren's “border” quality, on Warren's scholarship and his deep respect for learning and for history. Though he avoids generalization, Justus is capable of such fine statements as this: “All of Warren's fiction, as well as much of his other work, seems intended, as it were, to counter Thomas Jefferson's extravagant vision of America as a people ‘not chosen to fulfill history but a people freed from history.’” When he encounters the unquestionably great works—All the King's Men, Brother to Dragons, Being Here—he never fails to rise to meet the occasion. Justus is, in short, a fine critic, perceptive, learned, passionately involved with his subject yet still judicious, and capable of writing like an angel.