SOURCE: Balla, Philip. “‘A Dance on the High Wire over an Abyss’.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 12, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1984): 267-80.

Poets can't really take credit for too many of their own observations. They pick them up, somewhat the way the rest of us pedestrians pick up things on the bottom of our shoes. Robert Penn Warren in a 1957 Paris Review interview described poetry as “a dance on the high wire over an abyss.” A lovely image, but the dean of American poets probably just picked it up somewhere. The inspiration may have had some respectably genteel source because, as any of his numerous author's credits will testify, Robert Penn Warren by his prizes, awards, and honors very much belongs to America's literary establishment. His publisher lists all these accruing accomplishments from new book to new book, but in spite of all this Warren is still very much a country boy. He could just as easily have corralled his definition of poetry in some good redneck bar where, in the sauce a little, he found himself obliged to describe a bit of what he did to his flannel-shirted, whiskered, whiskeyed companions.

This particular country boy was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905, a time and place where dirt-farming, mules, and deep segregation conspired to alert Warren to the graphic images, contradictions, and layers of hurts of the surrounding continent. But his own local origins matter because Warren made them matter—going to Vanderbilt University in nearby Nashville, Tennessee, where the presence of The Fugitives allowed him to remain deliberately self-conscious of his southern origins, as his first published writings testify. Headed by the poet John Crowe Ransom, these self-styled Fugitives adopted as their mission in the 1920s to rid southern writing of the suffocating claptrap of wisteria, mint juleps, and over-refined sentiment which had been a tradition in the South at least since the earliest popularity and imitations of the Walter Scott novels a hundred years before. It was a tradition still going strong at the time of Ransom and his group, and the national success of Gone with the Wind in the 1930s indicates that the aesthetics of saccharine chivalry continued to prevail, but The Fugitives won some recognition. In Tennessee they published their own little magazine (The Fugitive), and some of them got published nationally elsewhere as well, so from New York Edmund Wilson could notice them and single out three for praise: Ransom, Warren, and Allen Tate. By 1929 this trio felt sufficiently established as writers to become social critics. They became Agrarians. And in 1930 Tate, Ransom, Warren, and nine others—Twelve Southerners—collectively published a manifesto collection of essays with the rebellious title of I'll Take My Stand.

This polemic against the industrial age proved later to be an embarrassment for most of its authors. Robert Penn Warren's contribution to the volume was an essay called “The Briar Patch.” Here Warren, at the age of 25, defended racial segregation in the South as a system humanly preferable to wage slavery in the wicked North. It was the old “Our niggers are happier than your niggers” refrain, one which Warren recanted by the time of Little Rock a generation later and that 1957 Paris Review interview with James Baldwin asking the questions.

Though Warren's “The Briar Patch” deserved repudiation on political grounds (Plato warned about trusting poets to set policy), as an essay it revealed one of the characteristic themes of his work, visible for the next half-century: a half-formulated sense of the dancing and the abyss, that web of complications, human sordidness, and entrapments—that “dirt” by which a young reporter got his education in All the King's Men, that web of genealogies Faulkner found a syntax to follow, that diseased membrane of life which impelled James Agee to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Warren is intimate with this abyss in its historical, factual, regional setting. I'll Take My Stand failed because it was a polemic; it set up a thesis and then went and found language to justify it—which is exactly opposite to the way good poetry works. Warren's best poems have always arisen out of words he has known in their grittiness: “Billie Potts,” “Homage to Dreiser,” “Rattlesnake Country,” “Founding Fathers, Nineteenth-Century Style, Southeast U.S.A.,” “Flaubert in Egypt,” “The Last Laugh,” and most of Audubon and Brother to Dragons. After I'll Take My Stand Warren may have become—as his immediate predecessor, Sam Clemens, did—a bona fide Easterner; but, also like Twain, Warren has thrived upon his regional roots. “There is a kind of extraordinary romance about American history,” he put it in that 1957 interview, adding, “I have a romantic kind of interest in the objects of American history: saddles, shoes, figures of speech, rifles, and so on. They're worth a lot. Helps you focus.”

Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980 is a book that would be improved by sharper focusing. True, in this, his next-to-most recent book, there is a consistent presence; the rumor he's verifying is death—that old abyss. But here Warren cozies up to it: death domesticated, old friend, who perhaps occasions shudders, though “You pull yourself together,” says the poet. “A drink helps. After all, it's the sort of thing that may happen to anybody. And does.”

Rumor Verified is Warren's most pale, or paleface, or genteel book. Daniel Halpern might have written it, or any number of those East Coast or writing-school poets whose roots are primarily literary, secondhand, removed from the land and nasty place, nasty circumstance. Rumor Verified is a clean book, gentle, almost pretty. In “Dead Horse in Field,” one poem typical of the others, flowers grow out from around the bones of a horse whose stinking flesh has long before been eaten away in the field where it lay to die. But that's all Warren has to say about death here: flowers. That means renewal, as any poet-in-residence can tell you. And if there's ebb, then there's flow; if yin, then yang. In another Warren poem, “What was the Thought,” he hears a little mouse at night. Next morning pussy cat deposits the mouse on poet's bed, “skull crushed, partly eviscerated.” So much for mouse. So much for the message that death pervades all, even in the dress of banal inevitabilities. Life is precious, fragile, and the poet hears it beating at night often throughout Rumor Verified, identified elsewhere in this collection by such figures as the dog at the foot of his bed, “Its tail now and then thumping the floor.”

Or life is puny. In “If,” the poet compares puniness to vastness and asks, being at the seashore this time, what can a drop of water on a stone “Tell us of the blind depth of groan out yonder?” The abyss beckons, tempts the poet's thoughts, and continues to yawn (no pun intended) throughout this book. In “Nameless Thing” the poet is awakened again in the night and goes out stalking his own fear with a poker in his hand. Vastness and nameless terror are everpresent. The poet can't touch them, surely not with a poker, though sometimes he touches sympathetically upon the plight of fellow creatures captured in their own (and therefore our own) mortality. In “English Cocker: Old and Blind” Warren evokes sympathy for the family dog who can barely survive the little of life left for him. As the dog attempts to negotiate the stairs down to waiting master, the poet commiserates with him, up there, “Suspended above the abyss at edge of the stair.”

Most of the poems in Rumor Verified are similarly tame. In “Redwing Blackbird” there's a little drama, however, in the contrast between the scarlet epaulets of a bird and the completely vaster grayness through which this bird momentarily flashes. It's debatable, perhaps, whether this flash of red, this flight (the dance) punctuates the more-pervading grayness (the abyss) or is overwhelmed and swallowed up by it. In the statement of these dilemmas, poetry verges on philosophy. In “Vermont Ballad: Change of Seasons” there's similar drama, similar contrast between flashing red and grayness all around, only here the images work more like poetry, less like philosophical examples. This may be the best poem in the book. Here the red is blood, portending suicide. Grayness dominates; but these latter images shift from a viscous grayness of the mind to a more somber grayness of rain beating against a window. If there's any dancing quality to “Vermont Ballad: Change of Seasons” it's a dance of endurance, like the one Warren narrated in an earlier poem from his 1976-1978 collection Now and Then, “A Confederate Veteran Tries to Explain the Event.” Here a little boy asks why, why, why did a certain person kill himself. With a repetition as good as Faulkner's in Absalom, Absalom, when Quentin Compson denied and denied and denied that he hates the South, Warren describes the old veteran, the grandfather, as if, before the vastness of the cosmos and the unreasonableness of life, only “a voice” could respond to such a question about suicide:

“For some folks the world gets too much,” it said.
In that dark, the tongue moved. “For some folks,” it said.

In “Vermont Ballad: Change of Seasons” endurance reaffirms itself. At the end Warren notes someone out walking on the road in dark night and cold rain:

“No sportsman—no!
Just a man in his doom
In rain or snow you pass, and he says
‘Kinda rough tonight!’”

Rumor Verified may be an acknowledgment of the abyss, even touching at times, but it's a far cry from the raunchy, bawdy, sex- and passion-filled lines Warren has written on Dreiser, Flaubert, Twain, the Jefferson nephews, and Audubon. Maybe it's all right for a good old boy to be nice and genteel sometimes, to show he, too, can write in a nice, East Coast, academic, paleface, writing-school minimalist style. That's one way to win prizes. But there's no defense for such rhetoric as runs too often through Rumor Verified: “Joy of its being,” “In timeless light the world swims,” “the paradox of time,” “The Self flows away,” “that blind yearning lifeward,” “the agony of time,” “the light of her inner being,” “the darkling drag of the nameless depth below,” “the tales and contortions of time,” “straining … to offer its inwardness,” and “what is the past but delusion?”

Southerners are notorious, infamous, for over-writing, over-publishing. It's probably from growing up in a place where preachers set precedents by all the frothing, phrase-jumbling, and Bible-pumping they've done in both canebrake and calico settings. Robert Penn Warren could easily have not published two-thirds of his stuff over his career and had a more distinguished career for it—a shortened list of author's credits notwithstanding. Some things, some books—some rumors—one oughtn't to verify. Warren did choose to publish this volume, however. While its chief fault may not be garrulousness, its chief interest may be as evidence for what happens when a poet who believes in the clarifying value of history departs for a while from his history and from his place.

After the Twelve Southerners had stood up in 1930 to crow on behalf of their region, they had a lot of explaining to do. Warren, Ransom, Tate, Stark Young, and Andrew Lytle must have gotten tired of explaining all the time there in the early 1930s just how their writing in any genre related to and exemplified that regional stand they had taken. In the 1930s social perspectives on works of art, social and polemical uses for art, were almost obligatory. These particular Southerners soon demurred, recanting their stand. Ironically, they became instrumental in devising an aesthetic by which art should have no relationship to any history, politics, economics, or psychology. This was the New Criticism—happy time for nearly forty years of academic palefaces who could ignore connections to the social world and concentrate instead on the pure joy, integrity, and technique of the text at hand. Warren played his part in this, too, writing with René Wellek one of the seminal texts of the New Criticism, Understanding Poetry.

They published this Bible of New Criticism in 1938, and revised it several times since, so there, simply enough, are the grounds to see justification for a man who loves history as much as Warren to deviate so far into paleface never-never land as he did with Rumor Verified. Only it's not so simple—this Robert Penn Warren is a contradictory man—and just as he moved beyond his youthful enthusiasms for segregation, so did he in another interview published in 1965 leave behind his association with the New Criticism. He'd decided that the New Criticism mattered only to “aging conservative professors, scared of losing prestige, or young instructors afraid of not getting promoted.” This fear, this cowardice was for others. It was “they,” said Warren, who “all have a communal nightmare called the New Criticism.”

Someone else later on will have to straighten out these contradictions in the life of Robert Penn Warren. For himself Warren acknowledges the contrary impulses in American life and letters. Some writers, he said in that famous Paris Review interview, just get “bogged down in history.” The whole South, he said, got bogged down that way “—in time—and the North got bogged down in nonhistory—non-time.”

“That split,” he went on saying, was “the tragic fact of American life.”

To lack a sense of time means, specifically, that in a writer, Hemingway, for instance, there are “no parents, grandchildren, or children.” In Hemingway, concluded Warren, there was “no time.” The writer Edward Dahlberg complained about the same point, too, in Hemingway and in most other American writers. Take Fitzgerald, Dahlberg said, for instance:

What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is a peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscled suits; dresses, hats, and sleeves. … Everybody in a Fitzgerald book is denatured, without parents or family.

Leslie Fiedler complained similarly in Love and Death in the American Novel: too many American heroes were just men who shirked family ties—and especially shirked ties to women. Calling this “icy nihilism,” “anti-life,” and “the dread of human touch and being involved with people,” Dahlberg disregarded the possible significance of the people in William Carlos Williams' Paterson and counted the number of times Williams used the word “rock” in that poem. Even for a work giving the geological history of a river, concluded Dahlberg, eighty-seven times using the word “rock” was too much:

One cannot feed too long on the bogs of Thoreau or on the ravished gravel and grubby river Paterson. … who wants to read these American anchorites on bleak ravines and desolate scrub-pines just to be more inhuman than one already is by nature?

It's curious that though Warren and other New Criticism apologists shirked the social world in their aesthetic, they were the ones who kept a high sense of belonging to symmetry, hierarchy, and subordination—Old World qualitities all—in their approach to literature. It was their opposite camp in the twentieth century which chafed at being overwhelmed by layers of old devices; it was the modernists Pound and Williams, followed by the Black Mountain and San Francisco poets (redskins) who wanted to throw away outmoded hierarchies of rhyme, classical form, and such. So it is no coincidence that the same writers who had a content generally free of generational entanglements—little sense of history and its thickets—also had prose and verse styles, forms, generally free of syntactical entanglements. So William Carlos Williams could write Paterson and inspire two generations of poets to follow to write similarly freed of Old World form. So Hemingway could write his prose, usually about men being men, toughing it out, and inspire prose writers also to treat syntax as so many simple manly spurts. Those writers with a highly pitched sense of belonging to history and to time, generational, sexual time (Warren and Lowell in verse, Agee and Faulkner in prose) stayed with those more complicated forms whose subordinations, parallels, and syntactical series echoed their captivities, enchainments, and byzantine-southern (or New England) inter-relationships emerging through time and line.

If Rumor Verified in its pale innocence deviates from Warren's usual robust self, his next and most recent book may be the finest poem of his career, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.

Here Warren returns to familiar ground: the saddles, rifles, horses, and other things from the American frontier that he'd said allowed his vision best to work. Here is the story of America's last great Indian uprising, a case of classic and obvious wrong being done to one of the most cultivated, peaceable, and rightfully proud peoples on the continent. Basically, in order to protect the greed of whites (James Watts' ancestors) the Federal Government orders its cavalry to remove the Nez Perce tribe from its ancestral lands in Washington State. The time is 1877—one year after Custer's defeat out on the Plains even more legitimized, in the popular mind, the use of force against all Indians. General O. O. Howard—Old One Arm—leads the cavalry against Chief Joseph and his tribe when, refusing the reservation life destined for them, they move out, seeking to join Sitting Bull fifteen hundred miles to the east. Howard knows Joseph has been wronged—Warren quotes a letter from Old One Arm to his superiors saying clearly the treatment of the Indians is a “great mistake.” But he's a soldier and he does a soldier's job. Chief Joseph, for all his tribe's peacefulness since the days they befriended Lewis and Clark, turns out to be a better soldier himself than any whites expected. (Sherman afterwards called him one of the best in all military history). Against odds of ten to one Joseph fights a retreat action, protecting his women and children, his old and sick, as he moves his tribe. And so does Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce move.

All the relationships emerge from the drama that ensues. First and most clearly there is the respect Joseph and his people feel for their land and for the graves of the fathers on this land. These ancestors live in the consciousness of their descendants who measure self-respect, integrity, and decency by traditional, coherent standards and memories. Even in white culture there is precedent—in the language—for having and respecting such an ethic. The English word for truth, for instance, derives from the Anglo-Saxon for tree, “treow,” indicating how originally and deeply a sense of roots, branches, and continuities mattered to English-speaking people. By the nineteenth century whites had apparently forgotten such lessons of the language; in Joseph's time the white man's ethics are inferior to the Indians'. Gold, for instance, is inert, and when the Indians compare it to things that live, pulse, and are real, they cannot understand the white lust for this substance that can never have progeny, memory, or seed. Warren's own sentiments are clear. In the end, when the battles are over, and the technical winners and losers have all passed away with only their story or poetry left, Warren refers to the technical winners—the “Frontiersmen, land-grabbers, gold-panners”—as all “skull-grinned in darkness.”

A more soft-handed ilk now swayed the West. They founded
Dynasties, universities, libraries, shuffled
Stocks, and occasionally milked
The Treasury of the United States,
Not to mention each other. They slick-fucked a land.

Robert Penn Warren has contempt for the slick-fuckers of American history. He describes how the Nez Perce saw these instruments of the white greed that was out to subdue them:

All the blue coats, the buttons of gold, the black
Coats buttoned up tight
Over bellies that bulged—
White and sweaty, you knew, under that cloth—
And softer than dough …

The bluecoats in Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce fight as American soldiers all too often have fought in our history: by virtue of sheer mass. Robert E. Lee knew that intelligence and guttiness frequently prevailed in union blue, but he concluded finally, at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, that his own gray-coated men had been beaten by “overwhelming numbers and resources.” Paradoxically, their sophisticated equipment hampered the U.S. Cavalry in their battles with the Nez Perce, according to Warren's picture of the troopers:

… like children …
With all their fool tangle of cables and ferries,
… all that aimless tackle and gear.

They fought but with dramatic difference between the sides. If the white armies were reduced in their military potency by their Persian-like mass, Warren is like Herodotus who scorned and pitied such weight when other qualities measured for far more. And like the old Greek, and with similarly austere style as in The Histories, Warren shows how the chief victims of power are those who wield it, how their biggest loss is their own integrity and decency. When the troopers can catch up with the Indians, Warren describes it from the Indian vantage:

Near dawn they struck us, new horse-soldiers. Shot
Into tepees. Women, children, old died.
Some mothers might stand in the river's cold coil
And hold up the infant and weep, and cry mercy.
What heart beneath blue coat has fruited in mercy?
When the slug plugged her bosom, unfooting her
To the current's swirl and last darkness, what last
Did she hear? It was laughter.

If the intensity of his deadpan, non-poetic tone isn't enough, Warren adds to it with quotes from newspaper headlines of the time which show the banality by which whites accepted their own atrocities: paying for fresh Indian scalps, for instance, as if from males, mothers, or children they were only so many fox or varmint hides. His matter-of-fact tone, his severe style, magnifies the horrors unquestioned then. And by contrast he quotes General Sherman who, speaking of the Nez Perce after all the action is over, says simply enough:

The Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise; they abstained from scalping; let captive women go free; and did not commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families … they fought with almost scientific skill.

When the war is over—it was Chief Joseph who said “I will fight no more forever,” and Warren quotes all his surrender words verbatim—when it's all over it's not over. Joseph becomes emissary for his people, going to Washington, among other things—and going to New York, too. In New York he rides in the procession dedicating Grant's tomb. Irony of irony he rides “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.

Here Warren adds the line about Buffalo Bill that he was the one “who broke clay pigeons—One-two-three-four-five—just like that.”

This last reference to the famous Indian fighter works nicely within Warren's narrative—because it's not a line of Warren's. It's from e. e. cummings, and by not acknowledging it as someone else's, by treating it as Americana, folklore in the public domain—a reference anyone should know and accept without thinking—Warren adds another dimension to his own poem: the dimension of our own popularized innocence in regard to peoples this innocence let us and lets us go on stupidly brutalizing.

The e. e. cummings reference is, however, a literary technique as well, and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce abounds with techniques that work. For one, it's a multi-faceted story, with Warren relying on quotations from official documents, newspapers of the time, and historic memorabilia interspersed throughout—much like Dos Passos' U.S.A. There are Homeric (or Whitmanesque) litanies of names, enabling Warren to pay more literary obeisance and to name, touch on, the richnesses of mountains, ranges, rivers, and things he loves. There are references to cavalry going two by two and four by four: not factual description alone but again acknowledgement of the power and presence of form—as in the Frost poem, “The Woodpile,” where the wood is stacked “four by four by eight.” There are the seasons swirling about these men's lives and deaths: sense of processional. And sometimes there is obvious poetic language, Warren not able to help himself as he enjoys the sound in his mouth of

Flanges, shelves, rim-rocks, ledges, sage clumps.

And animals. They are always present. (Edward Dahlberg wouldn't have to worry about counting rocks in this hymn to life.) The poet's drama takes place in a world of nature, where an Indian's attentiveness is described as a “wolf's ear pricks forward,” where bait is set, where men catch lead balls humming into them like a hornet's song.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce is, in short, told so straightforwardly as a moving story that its devices seem unnoticeable. It doesn't rhyme. Lines don't measure against each other in evened feet and meter. It's a poem, nevertheless, one whose structure, strength of form, and momentum all largely proceed from the relationships of these males who are initial adversaries of each other.

First is the cavalry general, the old Civil War veteran whom Warren introduces with the spartan brevity of a colon: Howard.

Old One-Arm, dogged, devout, knowing
Himself snared in God's cleft stick of justice,
Stirs in the saddle. His heart is military.
Is inflamed with love of glory and
Vanity wounded. He is the butt
of every newspaper. Like foxfire,
At night in his dream, his quarry flickers, sardonic,
Before him.

With all that gadgetry American militarists dote on, Howard pursues Joseph. He is joined by colonels Miles and Sturgis who, with cavalry units from other directions, all try to cut off Joseph and his band of Nez Perce, to trap them in pincer movements. Miles—initially—seems simply to be “a glory-chaser, like Custer,” and Sturgis' blood, it is clear, still boils at the loss of his cavalry son who died with Custer the summer before at the Little Big Horn.

While the three officers and their units pursue Joseph for their various soldierly and personal reasons, Joseph keeps his eyes on them and his eyes, moreover, on his own fathers. He has a firm sense of the web of time, nature, and generations to which he belongs. Often in Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce he looks to the stars, to the fathers of his people who are there. He knows that they are looking back at him. He knows

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 himself a man, and being
A man, would make all those
Who now slept know
Their own manhood.

This reciprocity is infectious—the basic truths of life, like trees, like language, bearing seed, bearing reaching branches, bearing fruit. For while all the men here are clearly involved with war, and the white officers compete with each other, they are also involved in a more ennobling dance. It is because of Joseph's moral superiority, his human decencies and capacity to love, that others grow.

Miles especially. He's the glory-hound initially. His development is the most stirring aspect of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Warren shows this masterfully. By his own character Joseph teaches Miles how there is no price worth paying for the brigadier's star Miles has been coveting. Miles learns other qualities—modesty of proportion, respect for different-others, and the dignities of human loyalties—till by the end of the book the ambitious adversary is the one great friend among whites that Joseph has.

Others learn, too, or in relation to Joseph are enabled to see and to reveal in themselves the qualities Joseph and his people embodied—like the white man who eventually was settled on Joseph's own land after the removal of the Nez Perce. Joseph years later visited and saw, touched to tears, that this common farmer had respected the grave of Joseph's father on that land, had left it sacred and would not plow there, piling up stones to mark and preserve it instead. Joseph acknowledges “the purity of that poor man's heart.”

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce is a sacred book—as sacred as any American could write—ultimately about friendship and the longer-pervading dignity of relationships that redeem, ennoble, and outlast time. Although there are no women characters developed in it, no sexuality, and only one sexual metaphor having to do with a cavalry thrust, the work dances nonetheless.

In a typical John Ford movie, particularly his westerns, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and Fort Apache, the whole cast dances. Even John Wayne dances sometimes. Ford, the visionary of Monument Valley, had Willa Cather's love of detail in him, but he also had a sense of ceremony, life as a dance, people made larger by their relationships to each other in a community over time. So it's natural for his whole cast literally to dance, from a Grand March indoors to troopers jangling off two by two to the tune of “Gray Owen”—the tune by which Custer's men died. And so similarly does Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce dance.

There is loss in this book: loss of a people, loss of their land, and loss of life. Sometimes these losses occur as if the cosmos didn't really care. As men fight and die Warren describes their blood on the snow:

Snow red, then redder,
And reddening more, as snow falls
From the unperturbed gray purity of sky.

These lines recall those earlier Warren poems pitting throbbing, brief reds against neutral grays: the dance and the abyss. They recall, moreover, lines from earlier Warren work like “Grackles, Goodbye” (from his collection Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980), which teach that “in the name of Death” “We learn the true name of love.” They recall still earlier lines, like those of a decade earlier when Warren wrote, in “Fall Comes to Back Country, Vt.,” that

… in the act
of rendering irreparably the human fabric
Death affirms the fact of that fabric.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce itself demonstrates that, loss and losses notwithstanding, fabrics continue: our lives become moral fictions by grace of the language threading them through. So if Rumor Verified merely pirouettes a bit over vague void, Chief Joseph more truly measures up to Warren's own lovely definition of poetry.