A Record of Revision:
The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren
by Randy Hendricks (State University of West Georgia)
Harold Bloom writes in the first
sentence of his Foreword that John Burt’s new edition of The Collected Poems
"should establish the permanent place of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry in
his nation’s literary achievement" (xiii). Many readers of course were
quite prepared to grant Warren that status already; however, those same readers
will likely value this text most of all. Coming as it does in the year after
the publication of Joseph Blotner’s biography, this book helps complete the
picture of Warren’s intellectual and artistic development. In fact, it may do
more to fill in that picture than the biography, for while Blotner tells the
story of a good man, John Burt’s skill in handling Warren’s fanatic revisions
and his most crucial editorial choices have produced a volume that makes
clearer the working mind and development of a great poet.
Any Collected Poems implies such a
story of development, however shadowy. In his Introduction to the Notes"
Burt says that the Collected Poems he sought to assemble is akin to the
poet’s diary, representing where he stood at given points in his career (625).
Toward this end Burt includes every poem Warren published, using as copy texts
the versions of the poems in their first appearance in the twelve volumes
Warren himself saw through the press. In addition the three poems that were
first collected in from the Selected Poems, 1923-1943, as well as the
two long poems Audubon: A Vision and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.
Framing all are two sections of published but previously uncollected poems from
the years 1922-1943 and 1943-1989. The only poem published by Warren not
included is the long masterpiece Brother to Dragons, which Burt has
reserved for separate treatment in the future.
The approach rejected by Burt would
have produced something akin to an author’s autobiography (again Burt’s
analogy), representing the career as the poet conceived of it in the end, an oeuvre.
Burt explains that he chose the diary over the autobiography chiefly because of
what the autobiography would have left out. While even this trimmed version
would have been a significant work, with the diary approach Burt has made a
nearly inestimable contribution to American literature.
Since Warren thought of the volumes
he prepared as records, or cycles, of poetic impulses, Burt’s approach makes
good sense. One problem that would have followed an attempt at an
"autobiographical" collection, for example, is the questionable
authority of certain volumes in consideration of emendations. Burt describes
one such problem with the alterations Warren made for an unfinished Collected
Poems that he himself had begun:
They
too, give only the haziest glimpse into what Warren’s final intentions for his
poetry would have been. For one thing, all of these alterations date from the
late spring of 1987, when Warren’s final illness was already far advanced. For
another thing, the revisions were clearly not made with the care Warren
exercised in 1966. For example Warren used a copy of the original English
edition of Promises for the Promises section of this project, but
he shows no signs of having collated it against his many revisions of the poems
from Promises in the Selected volumes of 1966, 1976, and 1985. Indeed,
many lines that Warren tinkers with are lines he had completely excised from
the Promises section of all the later revisions, and many other
revisions make no sense against the background of the complicated revision
history of those poems. (630)
Yet even the diary mode Burt opts
for entails serious problems and necessitates massive notes. Editorial
materials include Burt’s introduction to the notes, a list of emendations,
textual notes, explanatory notes, and an index of titles and first lines. The
marvelously detailed textual notes include information on publication history
and variations of each poem. Often whole stanzas or more are included to show
how typescripts differ from revised and final versions. Burt works through the
maze of variants with a patient and scrupulous attention to detail,
acknowledging along the way the frustrations of working with a poet who seemed
sometimes to forget earlier changes he had made to poems, or at least his
apparent reasons for making them. The result is a scholar’s volume, to be sure.
As Burt explains, "[I]f the Collected Poems is a record of the development
of the poet’s thought, so, too, is the history of the poet’s revisions
presented in the notes. Using these notes the reader can reconstruct every
version of every poem Warren published" (628).
This is welcome news for those who
will gorge themselves on editorial apparatus as on so much Christmas cake to
experience every nuance and shade of meaning affected by the subtlest change.
Here a scholar might also make a slight quibble over the organization of the
book. If this is primarily a scholarly edition, Burt’s crucial Introduction is
buried far too deep, displaced, perhaps, by Bloom’s high-powered, celebrity
Foreword. For many readers, however, and perhaps for most, the poems as
presented will be the draw, and with the exception of Bloom’s Foreword the
first 624 pages of the volume are given over to the poems in a format
mercifully unencumbered by textual apparatus except for the welcome addition of
line numbers. Editorial materials are reserved for the final two hundred pages,
so the format might be the ideal one to appeal to a wide range of readers.
And Burt’s decision in favor of the
diary approach will make it possible for any type of reader to understand much
about Warren’s development as a poet, and even to see why that development is
itself an important story in American literature. For the poems provide a
substantial record of this intense revisionist’s carrying the major concerns of
his personal life, his regional consciousness, and his status as a citizen of
America and the world back into the poetic fire for testing and retesting. In
the process he moved from the High Modernist formalism of his early period into
ever more idiosyncratic forms (never formlessness).
Dominating the Fugitive-era and
other early poems, which most readers will be seeing for the first time here,
is the theme of country or small-town death. These early poems reflect the
influence and flavor of some of Warren’s teachers, particularly Ransom, and are
ripe with Eliotic cadences, images and even names (Dodd). The verse also
reflects the formal, schooled, yet often playful verse of a Ransom, especially
in the interplay of stateliness and unaccented rhymes, as in the final stanza
of "Mr. Dodd’s Son":
Before he died
unto the sea he came:
He could not
speak—as one who suddenly
Hears in the
night beyond the coasts of time
Faintly the
surges of eternity. (13-16)
At other times the rhyme is more conventional, as in the
first poem in the sequence "Images on the Tomb," "Dawn: The
Gorgon’s Head":
Too late
returns the measured sun and slow
To mute the
night articulate in dream,
For voices
like paling stars did go
Coldly before
the dawn whose rigid beam
Now stirs the
tangled body to arise.
"Get up, get
up. Wash the face, comb the hair,
Put shoes on
the feet and take the coat that lies
Crumpled like
a brain upon the chair. (1-8)
The fusion of playful notes with a tone of urgency is
illustrated in one of Warren’s best poems, "Bearded Oaks," one of the
Eleven Poems on the Same Theme published in 1942: "We live in time
so little time / And we learn all so painfully, / That we may spare this hour's
term / To practice for eternity" (37-40).
The later verse is markedly
different, as in the first part of the poem Bloom singles out for comment,
"The Leaf":
Here the fig
lets down the leaf, the leaf
Of the fig
five fingers has, the fingers
Are broad,
spatulate, stupid,
Ill-formed,
and innocent—but of a hand, and the hand,
To hide me from
the blaze of the wide world, drops,
Shamefast,
down. ([A] 1-6)
This is vintage early-late Warren. He emerges with a
"new style [that] was hard, riddling, substantive," writes Bloom
(xxv), citing later lines in the poem: "My tongue / Was like a dry leaf in
my mouth" and "I, / Of my father, have set the teeth on edge."
Also in evidence here is Warren’s growing inventiveness with lines. The echoing
repetitions of "the leaf, the leaf," "fingers . . .
fingers," "a hand . . . the hand" and the inverted word order
and alliteration of "the leaf/ Of the fig five fingers has" are
techniques that lend the verse fluidity, but these line flow up to a line that
has the effect of a wall, or rather the multiple walls of a maze: "the
fingers / Are broad, spatulate, stupid." A reader’s eyes, and ears, moving
through the lines suddenly bounce off each word in turn before half-way through
the next line the lyrical fluidity returns. We seem to be flushed out of the
complexities of "broad, spatulate, stupid," but we are somewhat wary
of the lyricism now that carries us out of the verbal maze. There is hardly
another way to put it: Warren was a master of the ugly, halting line and harsh
diction strategically placed. What he valued in Melville’s poetry, a hard,
masculine, inclusive style, is true of much of his own. What happens in these
first few lines of "The Leaf" is the equivalent of the earlier
experiment of mixing ballad and metaphysical styles in "The Ballad of
Billie Potts" (1943), or, if we turn to Warren’s criticism, the effect is
like that produced when the "pure" poetry spoken by the lovers in the
garden is juxtaposed with the bawdy jokes of Mercutio outside the garden wall.
By including that which would undermine its impulse, the poetry becomes
stronger poetry, Warren’s version of the mithridatic theory of poetry that
Housman implies in "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff."
We are beginning to understand,
through the work of critics such as Ernest Suarez primarily, how much this body
of work has influenced a burgeoning school of new Southern poets, toward whom
Warren bears a relation strikingly similar to Faulkner’s relation to a later
generation of Southern novelists. The Collected Poems might also lead to
some revision of earlier instructive but somewhat reductive assessments of
Warren’s accomplishment. Calvin Bedient, for example, argues that the power of
Warren’s late poetry stems from his exertion of will over unbendable evidence
to the contrary to assert a positive interpretation of experience (4). Bloom,
rejecting Warren’s philosophy, nevertheless finds power in the late Warren who
shrugged off Eliot for a version of the American Sublime in which "the
ontological self is identified with , and as, the flight of wild birds"
("Sunset Hawk," 78).
A second level of revision in
Warren’s work, perhaps even more important than the one so thoroughly recorded
in Burt’s notes and emendations, is the revision of mind or development
recorded as the poet revisits and reshapes old themes. Bloom finds a sudden
breaking of the Eliotic spell with Incarnations. The fact that Warren
admired Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and testified to recognizing
his own agonistic relationship to Eliot (the strong poet) in Bloom’s argument
makes this hard to gainsay. But there is a finer revision of mind recorded in
Warren’s poetry that is just as important and traceable over much more of his
career. We can see this by examining poems from different stages of his career.
For the sake of continuity I’ll look at two poems that reveal something of
Warren’s significant contribution to American romantic nature poetry.
The power in Warren’s late work
lies not in a transcendence of the ambiguity-actuality dialectic that
"troubled" Melville’s poetry but in its superior development of that
dialectical method. Flight, most often the flight of hawks and other birds,
does emerge from the late poetry as an important symbol for Warren’s vision,
and flight in these poems does represent a moment of transcendence, often
combining the terror and exhilaration associated with the Sublime. Yet the
movement toward identification with the wild birds is accomplished only after
an opposite experience has been, in a sense, ingested. The approach is
decidedly Melvillian, a movement toward a mystic identification with the hawk
that does not cancel the hawk’s Otherness.
In the 1975 poem "Evening
Hawk," for example, the sight of the hawk in flight leads to a state of
acute attunement with the world. "If there were no wind we might, we
think, hear / The earth grind on its axis, or history / Drip in darkness like a
leaking pipe in the cellar" (19-21). But it is important to note the
qualifiers and negatives in the verse: "If there were no wind,"
"we might," "we think." Even the two activities, the grinding
of the earth and the dripping of history, create a problem in exact
interpretation because the first is placed solidly in the realm of nature and
the second has been defined by Warren as the myth man lives (Brother to
Dragons, Foreword, xiii). Moreover, the image of history is troubling and
quotidian rather than sublime. Though human beings may be moved by sights in
nature to vision, pattern, or design, Warren keeps that vision grounded, so to
speak, by emphasizing inherent human limitations.
Bloom is certainly correct in
seeing Warren’s hawk as a distinct achievement in the Romantic tradition.
Warren’s hawk is not Bryant’s waterfowl, or Whitman’s untranslatable hawk, or
even Stevens’ ambiguous, undulating pigeons. He does, however, bear a strong
resemblance to Melville’s Man-of-War Hawk, whose flight is a "placid
supreme" that neither thought nor arrow can attain, an image and a comment
which suggest man’s painful and destructive eschatological search. Warren’s
hawk is similarly beyond "Time and error" and is also "unforgiving."
Yet the hawk alone does not stand for Warren’s vision in the poem. The bat
replaces the hawk at night and "cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics"
(16), a term that suggests both that man can "read" nature to learn
something about himself and that this reading is difficult because it requires
interpretation of what might be called the pictorial language of perfect
adjustment. And in the reading, the hawk with its omniscient God’s eye and the
bat whose "wisdom / Is ancient, too, and immense" (16-17) are apparently
to be taken equally. The vision which is possible in this unresolved and
irresolvable tension is suggested by the lines which follow the description of
the bat: "The star / Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain"
(17-18). The comparison between the star and the philosopher narrows the breach
between man and nature; however, it is not platonism which is
"steady" here, but Plato himself, perhaps because of the coherence of
his illusion, or more likely Plato is steady only from a historical perspective
because of the steadiness he represents in the history of philosophy. Or
perhaps the simile is an acknowledgement that the star is not really steady
after all, is steady only in the coherence of the speaker’s awareness that in
an open universe the star is steady only as any man, or any system of thought,
is steady, temporarily.
In one of his most acclaimed late
poems, Warren thus employs the principle of inner resistance within the poem
that he valued so highly in Melville and provides the key clue to his need to
revisit old issues poetically, but the principle may also be understood to work
intertextually. For its relation to Warren’s own body of poetry and to the
tradition of American Romanticism which searches nature for moral instruction,
"Caribou" is one of Warren’s most interesting late poems. In
"Caribou," as in "Immortality over the Dakotas," the poem
which immediately precedes it in the volume Altitudes and Extensions,
Warren again uses flight but reverses the perspective by placing his persona in
a plane and in that rarified atmosphere Warren induces from planes to associate
with cold idealism in poems like "Homage to Emerson" or with relief
from social or familial responsibility in the profound study of race relations Segregation
and the novel The Cave. In this case the poet flies in the company of
scientists on an arctic expedition. The landscape over which they fly is
mystical:
Far, far
southward, the forest is white, not merely
As snow of no
blemish, but whiter than ice yet sharing
The mystic and
blue-tinged, tangential moonlight,
Which in
unshadowed vastness breathes northward. (1-4)
Yet the animals which come lumbering into this otherworldly
whiteness seem, like the bat, a complement to Warren’s birds, and perhaps a
commentary on all the poetic birds of the Romantic spirit from Shelly through
Stevens as they afford an opportunity to consider natural phenomena in relation
to human identity and destiny. Moreover, though they do not inspire terror,
they bear more than a little resemblance to Melville’s phlegmatic Maldive
shark:
The heads
heave and sway. It must be with spittle
The jaws are
ice-bearded. The shoulders
Lumber on
forward, as though only the bones could, inwardly,
Guess
destination. The antlers,
Blunted and
awkward, are carved by some primitive craftsman. (18-22)
What beasts could make the meditation more awkward and
preposterous than these which don’t seem natural at all, or which suggest that
nature contains its own Gothic imagery carved by primitive craftsmen? They
break upon and mar the clean landscape: "each shadow appears, each /
Slowly detached from the white anonymity / Of forest, each hulk / Lurching,
each lifted leg leaving a blackness as though / Of a broken snowshoe partly
withdrawn" (11-15). In their very individuation they break upon the poet’s
mystic dream of a seamless nature without conflict. Warren’s explication and
application of the "text" these caribou write on the landscape
affirms the meaning of destiny revealed in the natural world and yet affirms
simultaneously that it is unavailable to man.
We do no know
on what errand they are bent, to
What mission
committed. It is a world that
They live in,
and it is their life.
They move
through the world and breath destiny.
Their destiny
is as bright as crystal, as pure
As a dream of
zero. Their destiny
Must resemble
happiness even though
They do not
know that name. (23-30)
It is their world, as the poet says, and in them we
may find even more than an image of that happiness we most long for, but
through imperfect correspondence, for they exist outside language, even outside
image, while we are trapped in a world totally dependent on both. The
unavailability is further figured in the contrast between the instinctual and
mysterious path and destination of the caribou and the mechanical and social
dependencies of the passengers in the plane:
I lay the
binoculars on the lap of the biologist. He
Studies
distance. The co-pilot studies a map. He glances at
A compass. At
mysterious dials. I drink coffee. Courteously,
The binoculars
come back to me.
I have lost
the spot. I find only blankness.
But
They must have
been going somewhere. (31-37)
The trappings with which the poet and his fellow travelers
must negotiate their way through the world—the plane, binoculars, map, compass,
"mysterious dials," even courtesy—seem intended to emphasize human
distinction from creatures who "breathe destiny" as easily as they
find their way by instinct. Once these have obtruded on the poet’s own dream of
zero—the unblemished snow at the beginning of the poem—he finds only blankness.
None of this is to say, of course,
that Warren’s vision does not concern itself with spiritual realities. His
eschatological appetite is, in fact, as large as the one that so fascinated him
in Melville, and the poems I have considered here are evidence of the depth of
his spiritual quest. And that depth and appetite for final things also makes
Warren’s work comparable to Faulkner’s, yet one does not get the impression
from "Caribou" that the explorers would come closer to nature by
setting aside their binoculars or compasses, as Ike McCaslin does in "The
Bear." And the poet would surely echo Ishmael’s protest against making
Moby-Dick "a hideous and intolerable allegory" (205). He might also
agree with Emily Dickinson’s more caustic moment of questioning: "‘Faith’
is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see-- / But Microscopes
are prudent / In an Emergency" (134). In what many consider Warren’s
greatest poem, Audubon: A Vision, the naturalist "Thinks / How thin
is the membrane between himself and the world," but he does so even as he
leans on his gun—even he is dependent on instruments, gun and brush, to know
the world (13-14).
With the last integument always
creating the dividing line, what cause can there be for the final affirmation
in "Caribou" that the animals "must have been going
somewhere"? At least I read it as an affirmation, although I realize that
literally the line states no more than what is naturally obvious. The affirmation
comes, not despite the evidence of loss and blankness, but with that evidence
poised against the evidence already presented in the poem—the mystic landscape,
the tracks of the caribou, the mechanical gadgetry, a hint of human communion,
and even the narrative intrusion that asserts the resemblance between the
destiny of caribou and human happiness, the word the poet does know.
Going outside the terms Warren used in discussing Melville, we may find a
useful term for clarifying if not adopting for Warren’s irony is literary parataxis,
as defined by Brooks Landon, a juxtaposition of "seemingly incongruous
sentences, narrative codes, and other forms or concepts within the text"
(115-16). Warren’s irony seems very like this, a parataxis extended to the
larger elements of the poem. The result is an irony that is itself submitted to
irony, that does not simply undercut the precedent vision but recuts it. It is
the irony of the hero poet who sees through the illusion without necessarily
devaluing the illusion. He continues to act, to affirm. Warren’s faith is
finally in his own instrument, in art, in language; and this new book by
offering in one place the workings and reworkings of the poet’s mind on nature,
family, race, region, nation and the relation of identity to all of these, is
the most significant record to date of that fact.
Works Cited
Bedient,
Calvin. In the Heart’s Last Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
Bloom,
Harold. Foreword. The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. John
Burt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998. xxiii-xxvi.
---.
"Sunset Hawk: Warren’s Poetry and Tradition." A Southern Renasence
Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. Walter B. Edgar. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1984. 59-79.
Dickinson,
Emily. ["Faith" is a fine invention]. The Poems of Emily
Dickinson. v. 1. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap, 1955. 134.
Landon,
Brooks. Thomas Berger. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Melville,
Herman. "The Man-of-War Hawk." Collected Poems of Herman Melville.
Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Chicago: Packard, 1947. 197.
---.
Moby-Dick. The Writings of Herman Melville. Vol. 6. Ed. Harrison
Hayford, et al. Evanston: Northwestern UP/Newberry, 1988.
Warren,
Robert Penn. Foreword. Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (A
New Version). New York: Random, 1979.
---.
The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. John Burt. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1998.
Randy Hendricks is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of West Georgia, where he teaches courses in American and Southern literature. He is the author of Lonelier than God: Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Exile, just out from the University of Georgia Press, and coeditor (with James Perkins) of a forthcoming book from Mercer University Press, For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader. He lives in Carrollton with his children Amanda and Derek, his fiancee Cher Chester, and several dogs.