Teeth Set on Edge

The publication of Robert Penn Warren’s collected poems in an extraordinary volume, magnificently edited by John Burt, should establish the permanent place of Warren’s poetry in America’s literary achievement. From 1966 to 1986, Warren wrote much of the best poetry composed during those two decades in the United States. During the three years before he died on Sept. 15, 1989, Warren was too ill to continue his high quest for poetic sublimity. Yet between the ages of 61 and 81, he had enjoyed a poetic renascence fully comparable to the great final phases of Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens. John Burt’s devoted edition gives us the definitive text of all of Warren’s poetry and thus restores an American masterwork, one that will be read, studied and absorbed so long as the love for, and understanding of, great poetry survives among us.

The late William K. Wimsatt, formidable scholarly critic and friend of Warren at Yale University, once remarked to me that he found my passion for Warren’s later poetry rather surprising because he thought of Warren as a “dramatic poet” rather than a lyrical one. As my former teacher, Wimsatt frequently had observed that in his judgment, I tended to undervalue the dramatic elements in modern American poetry. I replied that I recognized in Warren’s poetry, from “Incarnations: Poems, 1966-1968” on, the agonistic spirit that always had marked the sublime ode from Pindar through the Romantics to Yeats. From the start, Warren’s characteristic mode had been the dramatic lyric, but after the poet turned 60, he internalized drama in a great contest with time, with cultural and family history and, above all, with himself. In his long major phase, Warren wrestled with the angel of the poetic sublime and carried away the victory of a new name. “Robert Penn Warren” had meant primarily the novelist of “All the King’s Men” (1946) and “World Enough and Time” (1950). Those major fictions endure, but I believe that Warren’s name will be more associated with his “Collected Poems” because scores of them transcend even his finest narratives. This book is Warren’s center and his lasting glory.

Warren had many precursors in American poetry: He paid particular homage to John Greenleaf Whittier and Herman Melville. Among modern British poets, Hardy meant most to him. But the dominant influence upon Warren’s own poetry, from 1922 through 1966, was T.S. Eliot; the spell of “The Waste Land” was not broken before “Incarnations” began to be composed. Until I purchased and read “Incarnations” in 1968, I had thought of Warren’s poetry as admirable but essentially derivative: Eliotic in mode, manner and argument. Hart Crane, though also strongly affected by Eliot’s poetry, fought against it from the start, but Warren needed more than 40 years to get beyond Eliot.

Eliot’s example both inspired and inhibited Warren. I remember my own surprise when, in January 1973, I received first a postcard and then an exuberant letter from Warren, reacting to a little book I had just published, “The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry.” I scarcely expected Warren to like it, but I was mistaken, and the book, which cost me some old friends, gave me a new one. At our first lunch together, Warren emphasized his uncanny recognition of his own relation to his precursor, Eliot, in my descriptions of the agonistic relationship between strong poets and their inheritors. In the 15 years that followed, as our friendship developed, we rarely could discuss Eliot--or Ralph Waldo Emerson--without fierce (though amiable) lunchtime disagreements. Eliot and Emerson are profoundly antithetical to one another, and Warren’s distaste for Emerson was lifelong and passionate. Strongly not a Christian believer, Warren nevertheless had Augustinian convictions as to sin, error, guilt and history. Himself a man of great humor, ironic tolerance and considerable wisdom, Warren was probably the most severe secular moralist I have ever known.

Though he stemmed from Eliot, as poet and as critic, Warren’s temperament had little in common with Eliot’s. The savage bite of Warren’s best novels--”Night Rider” (1939), “At Heaven’s Gate” (1943), “All the King’s Men,” and “World Enough and Time”--sometimes echoes Eliot’s Jacobean diction. Nevertheless, Warren was a great storyteller whose narrative art had been schooled by Conrad and Faulkner, sensibilities more baroque than Eliotic. The full elaboration of Warren’s poetic rhetoric does not enter his poetry until “Incarnations” and the subsequent “Audubon: A Vision” (1969).

While he was teaching his final semester at Yale, Warren was at work on what became “Or Else: Poem/Poems, 1968-1974,” which still seems to me his finest single volume. A generation younger than the poet and awed by him (always kind, he nevertheless intimated a force kept in reserve), I listened raptly to his ongoing meditations upon his poetic career. His poetry had ceased in 1943 and was not fully resumed until the late summer of 1954, though the first version of “Brother to Dragons” was published in 1953. Warren remarked that the years from 1943 to 1953 were mostly devoted to the composition of “At Heaven’s Gate,” “All the King’s Men,” and “World Enough and Time,” but a kind of undersong intimated personal unhappiness as being an element in his poetic silence. The transitional volumes--”Promises: Poems, 1954-1956” (1957), “You, Emperors, and Others: Poems, 1957-1960” (1960), and the “Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966” (1966)--though admired by many, still seemed much under Eliot’s influence. Some of my own gathering thoughts on the nature of poetic influence were greatly stimulated by “Incarnations” (1968), where a new Warren emerged with astonishing intensity.

Warren’s new style was hard, riddling, substantive: “My tongue / Was like a dry leaf in my mouth,” the poet observes in the particularly good exemplar of this new style, “The Leaf.” Blinded in one eye at 15, Warren eventually had one glass eye as well as some perpetual uneasiness should he ever lose the other. I think Warren became aware that this anxiety had some relation to what became his most characteristic metaphor, which is the association of poetic vision with a hawk’s sunset flight and with a hawk’s own vision. “The Leaf” records a moment of shamanistic identity between the hawk and the reincarnation of the poetic character in Warren: “I saw / The hawk shudder in the high sky.” Warren’s father had wanted above all to be a poet but had given up this ambition in order to support his family. Warren’s awareness of that renunciation in part explains the piercing outcry: “I, / Of my father, have set the teeth on edge.” But this agonistic experience is offset by the blessing that frames the cry:

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.

Warren’s father calls to him and blesses him “in the moment when the cicada ceases.” “Not the cicada,” Eliot had written, and, with conscious artistry, Warren achieves his full, post-Eliotic voice, his new style: teeth set on edge.

The two great decades of Warren’s poetry were very demanding, of the poet and reader alike, and many have not been comfortable with his prophetic style, resonating like a new Isaiah. Yet the power and originality of Warren’s finest poems seem to me indisputable. Every lover of Warren’s work will have his or her own list of favorites; my ideal anthology of American poetry would begin Warren selections with “The Leaf” and then include, at a minimum: “Birth of Love,” “Evening Hawk,” “Heart of Autumn,” “Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth,” “Myth of Mountain Sunrise,” “Mortal Limit” and, of the earlier poems, “Mortmain,” “Revelation” and “Bearded Oaks.” My choices, though necessarily personal, at least reflect 30 years of rereading and teaching Warren’s poetry. Readers new to Warren’s work might want to begin with them, though I would invite them also to range freely through this vast and splendid book.

A critic cannot be a prophet, yet my own conception of criticism includes the enterprise of canon-making, now a very unpopular labor indeed. Nevertheless, there seems broad agreement these days upon at least some of the modern American poets who will be permanent in our literature: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Eliot, Crane, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons and others. Robert Penn Warren is clearly of that company. Doubtless there are other extraordinary candidates: I myself would add May Swenson, and the African American poets Jay Wright and Thylias Moss. Such listings can appear idiosyncratic yet may prove suggestive. The choice of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry to help constitute the canon of modern American poetry is, however, neither arbitrary nor idiosyncratic. At their strongest, Warren’s poems win their contest with the American Sublime and find a place with Melville’s best poems, formidable exiles from our dominant, Emersonian tradition.