When Robert Penn Warren began writing poetry again in 1954, after the ten-year interval in which he wrote none except for the long “play for verse and voices”, Brother to Dragons, there was a very noticeable change. His new verse was far more open in texture and more explicitly personal in reference than the earlier. The change was plainly a response to the same pressures that caused numerous other poets to begin at about the same time to write the kind of poetry that has since been called “open” or “confessional” or “naked”. On the other hand, it is equally plain that the change was the end product of an internal development, an accentuation of tendencies present from the beginning. Even in the Fugitive days, Warren's poetry was marked by a candor and directness of address to the reader in which these recent trends were clearly latent.

The plan of Selected Poems makes this continuity evident: Warren begins the volume with his latest work, and arranges all his poetry in reverse chronological order. The poems written 1954-1966 occupy 216 pages of the volume, as against only 75 pages for those published 1923-1943 (some 15 poems being dropped from those published in the original volumes during this period). Warren could hardly make his sense of the meaning of his own work clearer: the selection gives pride of place to the recent verse and suggests that it overshadows the earlier in quality as in bulk. Loyal admirers of the early verse may feel some initial outrage at this suggestion, but they must grant immediately that the arrangement gives the volume a special contemporary relevance.

The titles of the later volumes indicate their central themes. Promises: Poems 1954-1956 begins with a sequence dedicated to the poet's daughter, born in 1953, and finds its center in the title sequence, dedicated to his son, born in 1955. (Warren's father died in this same year, as a group of poems in the next volume tells us, and the conjunction in time of these two events was highly significant to him.) The title, Promises, suggests both the new hope that the children bring to their father and the commitment to the future that they represent. He sees them in various perspectives of time and place—“Infant Boy at Mid-Century”; “To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in a Ruined Fortress”—and through them he relives his own childhood. The title also designates the theme new to Warren's poetry: the promise of joy as a real possibility. This theme is intimately involved with the other one that underlies all the later poetry even when it is not explicit. Put abstractly, this may be called the necessity to accept Time in all its aspects. (The theme is new only in its urgency and elaboration.) To live fully in the present is to accept the world as real and to accept both past and future, for the present takes part of its reality from them. Hence the volume begins with the poet's vision of his dead parents repeating their promises to him, and reaches one of its high points in the ballad about the grandmother who must submit to being eaten by the hogs—this being the most powerful of the images of eating (a natural symbol for acceptance and communion) that abound in the volume. This concern with interdependence is reflected formally in Warren's increasing tendency, beginning with Promises, to conceive of his poems in terms of sequences in which the poems are not autonomous or self-sufficient but depend for part of their meaning on the context of surrounding poems, on their place in the sequence and in the volume.

Warren has always been fond of the second personal pronoun, his “you” being a way of declaring the common ground between reader and poet. This device is used in the title of You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960. The first poem begins, “Whoever you are, this poem is clearly about you”; the volume is also about the “Roman citizen, of no historical importance, under the Empire”, whose epitaph is quoted with this first poem, as well as about the Roman emperors who appear in other poems, together with the poet's dying father and an assortment of creatures including cockroaches, mice, and grasshoppers. The newest group—not previously published in book form—in Selected Poems is “Tale of Time: New Poems 1960-1966”. The title sequence deals with the death of the poet's mother almost forty years before; other obsessive images of guilt and fear range from the Kentucky of his childhood to Vermont in fall to recent scenes by the Mediterranean. The visionary note of joy is strong in many of the poems, not dissociated from the evil and confusion, but subsuming them. And not only joy is possible, but in some sense blessedness and redemption.

The latest volume, Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968, marks a change of direction—or perhaps plateau or wave-trough or consolidation would describe it more accurately—in tone and style. The almost obsessive theme of the preceding volumes—the poet's guilty and ambivalent relation to his parents and to the past which they represent—seems pretty well worked through. Hence the book seems less personal. It is also less optimistic, if so preposterous a word can be used in this context. The goal of joy and communion remains possible and real, but no closer; and the volume has, as we shall see, a somber ending. There is a greater detachment, an ironic treatment of themes that might seem grandiose or vulnerable, sometimes a definite touch of self-parody.

The book has two epigraphs, one from the ballad of John Henry—“A Man Ain't Nuthin but a Man”—and the other from the Bible: “Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren.” These make clear what kind of incarnation is in question: not a vertical one like that of Christianity, but a horizontal and purely human one. The flesh, in the second of the two principal sequences, is that of an old convict dying of cancer in a Southern penitentiary and a Negro maid dying in a meaningless traffic accident in New York. The communion celebrated is one of suffering.

The incarnation celebrated and explored in the first sequence, fifteen poems called “Island of Summer”, is relatively personal, in that the poet comes to fuller acceptance of the ties of the flesh—of his parents, his ancestors, and his own past life. Accepting his own fatherhood and his own father, he accepts the human condition, including the mystical relation between fathers and children. As Warren sees it, this relation goes backward as well as forward in time: not only are the children's teeth set on edge because the fathers have eaten grapes, but vice versa. Images of fruit are prominent in this sequence—fruit that is very literal, fleshy, and sensuous, but also on occasion symbolic both of the original forbidden fruit and of the condition of fruitfulness. It is often contained within the larger image of the garden, which similarly fluctuates in the degree and nature of its symbolic meaning. In the last poem of the sequence, the themes associated with both images are recapitulated:

The world is fruitful. In this heat
The plum, black yet bough-bound, bursts, and the gold ooze is,
Of bees, joy, the gold ooze has striven
Outward, it wants again to be of
The goldness of air and—oh—innocent. The grape
Weakens at the juncture of the stem. The world
Is fruitful, and I, too,
In that I am the father
Of my father's father's father. I,
Of my father, have set the teeth on edge. But
By what grape? I have cried out in the night.
From a further garden, from the shade of another tree,
My father's voice, in the moment when the cicada ceases, has called to me.
The voice blesses me for the only
Gift I have given: teeth set on edge. …

Some of the most effective poems deal with the sexual aspect of carnality. For many people now, the only Word is sex, and its incarnation would have to be Aphrodite. “Myth on Mediterranean Beach: Aphrodite as Logos” is a description of a hunchbacked old woman in a bikini who parodies Aphrodite rising from the sea, and as she walks along the beach exposes all the illusions over which Aphrodite presides. In form and rhythm, the verse appears to parody that of Marvell's “The Garden”—a poem that has always haunted Warren's imagination and that lies behind his fine early poem “Bearded Oaks”—in order to puncture the prime illusion of innocence and escape from time. The woman, a “contraption of angles and bulges, an old / Robot with pince-nez and hair dyed gold”, steps into the “first frail lace of foam / That is the threshold of her lost home”, in a dreadful parody of Botticelli. While in the sea she “may not know, somnambulist / In that realm where no Time may subsist”, but eventually re-emerges into the human world of time and pursues her demythologizing way down the beach: “She passes the lovers, one by one, / And passing, draws their dreams away, / And leaves them naked to the day.”

Warren's images of the natural world—and especially of fruit—in this sequence are throughout anti-Marvellian: concerned, that is, not with the contrast between the innocence of animals and plants and the guilt of human beings, but with the community between them, both moral and physical. Thus the fig, in “Where the Slow Fig's Purple Sloth”, takes on its traditional connotations of human sensuality and obesity, “Motionless in that imperial and blunt / Languor of glut …”. “Natural History” describes the relics of human destructiveness (from the Crusades to World War II and the nearby rocket research center preparing for future wars) and the processes of nature on a Mediterranean island; neither nature nor history is merciful except by accident, and the poem dwells on the physical interchange between them. From the bodies of dead soldiers “the root / Of the laurel has profited, the leaf / Of the live oak achieves a new luster, the mouth / Of the mullet is agape. …” (This is, of course, a projection of human qualities into the biological world, corresponding to the reverse kind of projection in Warren's notion of “osmosis” as a form of human communion.) “Riddle in the Garden” is the fullest development of the fruit image. This garden contains no apple but a peach which, falling, “makes full confession, its pudeur / has departed like peach-fuzz wiped off”, and it becomes very fully human and fleshly:

We now know how the hot sweet-
ness of flesh and the juice-dark hug
the rough peach-pit, we know its most
suicidal yearnings, it wants
to suffer extremely, it
Loves God. …

“Where Purples Now the Fig” justifies the flesh as shelter for the bones: “Yes, keep /Them covered, O flesh, O sweet / Integument, O frail, depart not / And leave me thus exposed, like truth.” Encounter with the sun in this poem is counterbalanced by a confrontation in the depths in “The Red Mullet”:

… 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.

The flesh of the mullet, like that of the fig (“like flame, purer / Than blood. / It fills / The darkening room with light”), illuminates as human flesh does not. Such encounters and other perhaps mystical experiences are generalized upon in the next poem, “A Place Where Nothing Is”. Because of the horror of dark nothingness, contemplation of the sea (bright collective nothingness) is authorized:

I retract my words, for
the brightness of that nothing-
ness which is the sea is
not nothingness, but is
like the inestimable sea of
Nothingness Plotinus dreamed.

In “Masts at Dawn”, however, the notion of mystic union is presented in a tone verging on parody: “When there is a strong swell, you may, if you surrender to it, experience / A sense, in the act, of mystic unity with that rhythm. Your peace is the sea's will.” But this ominous departure from “in His will is our peace” is tempered by the image of the masts which “go white slow, as light, like dew, from darkness / Condenses on them, on oiled wood, on metal. Dew whitens in darkness.” And the poem concludes, “… We must try / To love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God.” As we have seen, the final poem in the sequence is a recapitulation of all these themes, with stress on the idea of fruitfulness and continuity in time.

The second kind of incarnation with which the volume is concerned differs from the first in two respects: it begins with observation of events having no relation to the poet, and the flesh in question is exclusively human. This kind is explored in the second section of the book, called “Internal Injuries”. The flesh is that of other human beings suffering at present, and the incarnation is effected, the communion achieved, by the poet's sharing in that suffering. In the seven-poem sequence called “Penological Study: Southern Exposure”, the flesh is that of a convict dying of cancer in a Southern penitentiary; and in the eight-poem “Internal Injuries” it is that of a Negro maid killed in a New York traffic accident. Perhaps the best poem in the first sequence is “Night Is Personal”, which begins:

Night is personal. Day is public. Day
Is like a pair of pants you can buy anywhere, and do.
When you are through with day you hang it up like pants on
The back of a chair, and it glows all night in the motel room, but not
Enough to keep you awake. Jake is awake. Oh, Warden,
Keep that morphine moving, for we are all
One flesh, and back in your office, in the dark, the telephone
Is thinking up something to say, it is going to say
It does not love you, for night is each man's legend, and there is no joy
Without some pain. Jake is meditating his joy. He sweats. …

The second sequence has a remarkably effective beginning, capturing the full horror of a traffic accident which abruptly dehumanizes the victim who was deprived and defenseless to start with:

Nigger: as if it were not
Enough to be old, and a woman, to be
Poor, having a sizeable hole (as
I can plainly see, you being flat on the ground) in
The sole of a shoe. …

Toward the end of the sequence the poet finds the whole thing no longer bearable and escape imperative: “I must hurry. I must go somewhere / Where you are not, where you / Will never be. I / Must go somewhere where / Nothing is real, for only / Nothingness is real and is / A sea of light. …” And in the final poem he asks, after seeing the victim's flesh thus exposed and desecrated, “Driver, do you truly, truly, / Know what flesh is, and if it is, as some people say, really sacred?”

The third and final section of the book, “Enclaves”, is much shorter than the two earlier ones. It consists of two sequences of two poems each, called respectively “The True Nature of Time” and “In the Mountains”. These deal with enclaves in time, moments of ecstasy or dream preserved in its hostile territory. The dominant image in the first sequence is that of gold and yellow; like all Warren's recurrent images, it is a development of the most basic natural symbolism: gold for preciousness, joy, for moments preserved against the darkness of time. “The Faring” deals with the ecstatic union of the poet with his beloved after crossing the Channel. The poem celebrates brightness of her hair as he first saw her on the pier, and then yellow roses against a gray stone wall: “That last light / Gilding the track across the gray water westward. / It came leveling in to finger the roses. One / Petal, yellow, fell, slow.” The companion poem deals with the moment of cockcrow, when the cock's cry “like gold blood flung, is scattered”. The poet wonders how he may “know the true nature of Time, if Deep now in darkness that glittering enclave / I dream, hangs? It shines. …” And the poem concludes with a return to the first scene: “Wind / Lifts the brightening of hair.”

The second sequence embodies similar themes in different images, but with equal explicitness. Skiers, seen at a distance in “gold mist”, look like birds or angels, but when they emerge onto “the flat, where the whiteness is / Trodden and mud-streaked, not birds now, / nor angels even, they stand”. They are awkward in the world, now strange to them, “of Time and / Contingency”, but the “human / Face has its own beauty.” As if to guard against any suggestion of facile resolutions, however, the final poem, “Fog”, describes the experience of dissolution of the body and the world in luminous blindness, silence, and nothingness, so that the poet can pray only for the crow's call again: “that much, at least, in this whiteness.” The whiteness suggests first of all the terror of death that Warren has always rendered with great power; in this context, it represents also the particular horror of leaving the body and the flesh—of disincarnation. This enclave out of time, as a foretaste of the ultimate farewell to it, of the “substance of body dissolving”, provides an experience that is anything but ecstatic. The experience is like that of Decoud in Conrad's Nostromo, in the great scene that Warren has interpreted so eloquently in his essay on that novel: a sceptic without faith, Decoud shoots himself after ten days of solitude on an island, confronting the “immense indifference” of the cosmos, and the whiteness of this poem produces a similar disorientation through loss of context in which the mind is as utterly lacking in beliefs to which to attach itself as the body is without physical reference points. Thus the book closes on a moment of cold terror.

In using the word incarnations, Warren must have intended a wry contrast to the meaning of the term in Christian theology. Nothing in this book suggests the doctrine of the Word made Flesh, the divine united with the human; there is only the vision of all human flesh united in communion and accepted by poet and reader. But the ground of acceptance, the basis of communion, lacks any such doctrinal explanation or sanction as was given it by Eliot and Auden, the two poets who have dealt most memorably with Incarnation—especially in the Four Quartets and in For the Time Being—in recent years. Like Eliot, Warren is concerned with the relation of timeless moments to time; and like Auden, he rejoices in the frailties of the flesh that keep man from being even worse than he is. But he does not, like Auden, contrast human guilt and imperfection to the innocence of other forms of life, but rather uses non-human flesh as emblematic of human qualities. His incarnations remain strictly horizontal, with no possibility of the vertical; as to what lies beyond the body, there are only questions. “The body's brags are put / To sleep—all, all. What / Is the locus of the soul? / What, in such absoluteness, can be prayed for? Oh, crow, / Come back, I will hear your voice, / That much, at least, in this whiteness.” We remain in the world of Wallace Stevens with his snow man and blackbird, or of Moby Dick, or most of all of Conrad, whose limited, empirical, and always tentative affirmation is as far as we get.

As I suggested early in this review, there is a certain large resemblance between Warren's later poetry and the open or naked or confessional poetry of which Robert Lowell is chief luminary and exemplar. There are, however, two important differences that the present volumes make clear. In the first place, Warren's poetry is never really confessional: there is no self-exposure, no revelation of disintegration or breakdown into madness, or of marital battles and separations, or of any other exceptional misfortune. Hence there is in Warren's attitude no touch of the poète maudit, suffering exceptionally for us all, as there is sometimes in Snodgrass or Sylvia Plath or Lowell. Instead, Warren offers himself rather as Auden does in his later verse, as a representative man, accepting himself as part of accepting the flesh of common humanity: “A man ain't nuthin but a man.” Secondly, Warren never goes as far as Lowell, for example, has gone in his latest volume, Notebook 1967-1968, toward the abandonment of form. Warren seems, indeed, to be moving now in the opposite direction: Incarnations might be said to signal a kind of backlash movement against excessive openness, for it shows an intense interest in form and a reflorescence of such safeguards against sentimentality and sensationalism (the pitfalls of openness) as detachment, irony, self-parody, and allusion. Many of the poems employ regular meter and rime; there is much use of repetition and refrain and of various approximations to ballad effects. Some of them use long, intricate sentences with different kinds of rhetorical suspension; others display extreme variations in tempo from poem to poem or within the same poem. These multifarious formal elements, together with the linking up and interplay of themes and images within each sequence, as we have observed, counterbalance the plainness and simplicity of most of the language—though parody, allusion, and irony are more frequently present in the diction than would appear on the surface.

These two volumes—the selection of poems from Warren's whole long career, pruned and revised carefully, and arranged so as to give primary emphasis to the later work; and the new book which, while continuing in the same general direction, differs in so many respects from its predecessors—make evident the magnitude of Warren's achievement as a poet. His limitations are hard for me to specify; I find his attitudes and themes—moral, psychological, and religious—so congenial that it is difficult for me to regard the poetry with proper detachment. Sometimes the themes are perhaps a little too explicit, not very fully dramatized; and there is a danger in the fact that they are basically few, though combined and varied in many ways. But Warren's later poetry seems to me to embody most of the special virtues of “open” poetry—accessibility, immediate emotional involvement, wide appeal—and to resist the temptations to formlessness and to moral exhibitionism, self-absorption, and sentimentality that are the chief liabilities of that school. The new long poem about Audubon from which excerpts have been appearing in the magazines seems to indicate a return to the historical mode of Brother to Dragons, though not to its form; it is far less personal than Incarnations, and strikingly different from it in most respects. Happily, then, Warren continues to grow and to change with undiminished vigor; the two volumes with which I have been concerned provide ample evidence of his stature without suggesting that it is time for any summing up.