The Poetry of Warren by Robert Penn Warren

First published:Thirty-six Poems, 1935; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, 1942; Selected Poems, 1923-1943, 1944; Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, 1953; Promises: Poems 1954-1956, 1957; You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957-1960, 1960; Selected Poems New and Old, 1923-1966, 1966

Critical Evaluation:

Robert Penn Warren’s reputation as a novelist and critic has tended to overshadow his achievements and distinction as a poet. Like many of our best fiction writers, he was published as a poet before he gained recognition as a novelist; but, unlike most, he has continued to write poetry throughout his career. This fact would make him stand out even among the poets of his generation, most of whom, after achieving some measure of recognition, a niche in the pantheon of the establishment, have at best settled for the care and preservation of the “image” rather than the risky and perhaps unrewarding business of writing more poems. Both factors may help to explain the undeniable fact that Warren’s poetry is not as well known as it might be and ought to be. The divorce between the audience for poetry and the audience for fiction has not been settled. The poetry-reading public remains inconsequentially small compared to the larger public for fiction. And within the poetic establishment there remains a lingering suspicion of the poet who also writes fiction.

In Warren’s case this suspicion has without doubt been compounded by the fact that his novels have been extremely well received. Part of this suspicion can be written off as professional pride at best and, at worst, simple envy; but in a larger sense it is also the result of the specialization so characteristic of our culture as to be inevitably reflected by its artists and, indeed, strongly protected by them. Warren does not fit neatly and nicely. He is clearly, from the present point of view, not only out of date as a man of letters in the grand style, but a threat by his existence and creativity to the status quo.

Not that he has been ignored or unrecognized as a poet in the usual way. He has generally received excellent reviews and notices for his poetry and he has won many honors and awards. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and he has served as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Some of his poems, particularly the earlier ones, are widely anthologized. But ironically, in spite of his honors, his influence by criticism and example, in spite of his innovation and, above all, his sustained and genuine productivity, he is not often considered critically as a poet.

There is a kind of double irony at work here, for had he continued to write in the manner of his earliest and best-known poems, the manner of THIRTY-SIX POEMS and ELEVEN POEMS ON THE SAME THEME, he might have been more acceptable. The early poems, chiefly distinguished by an elegant combination of form and deliberate artifice, deeply influenced by the rules and guidelines of the first generation, the elders, of “The Fugitives,” are quite sharply distinct from his prose. At least at that state his prose and poetry seem to be separate concerns. But through the years of his own change and growth he has managed to bring the two into a closer kinship, to integrate his concerns and manners in prose and verse so that they are clearly part of the same body of work, clearly the voice of one man. Though most modern poets pay brief lip service to Ezra Pound’s fiat, that poetry should be as well written as prose, major energy has been spent in cultivating what is special and singular about poetry as if to segregate forever the prosaic from the lyric precincts. It is in this sense that Warren’s development as poet has gone against the grain.

In some of his early poems Warren showed that he could turn the modern “metaphysical” lyric to perfection. The final, familiar quatrain of “Bearded Oaks” is a marvelous example, the manner of Andrew Marvell gracefully translated into twentieth century English. And in the frequently anthologized “Love’s Parable” we see the influence of John Donne, its origins proudly shown in the syntax, in the archaisms and inversions, and even in the imagery.

Warren might have continued in that vein, and not without distinction; but he was at once a gifted storyteller and deeply involved in the living Southern tradition. Scattered among the early poems which were brought together in SELECTED POEMS, 1923-1943, there are various examples of poems which break the pattern and have a very different kind of grace, life, and vigor. “The Ballad of Billie Potts” is a real story, a sustained narrative poem which is at once particular and concrete, precisely local in color and allusion, and laced with homely imagery, some of it directly out of the folk tradition and some contrived to be a close approximation of the original and source. And in a small group of poems set in Mexico he demonstrated an ease and ability to handle concrete scene and action in verse which could rival his abilities in prose.

The effects are the effects available in verse lines, strengthened by the surplus power of verbs and the rugged texture, a texture like some Mexican painting, but above all it is an achievement in presented action. Few of our poets could create a wild gallop like that one.

In 1953, Warren presented BROTHER TO DRAGONS: A TALE IN VERSE AND VOICES, a book-length narrative poem which seems to combine in one work all his interests. It has the story line of a novel; much of it is dramatic in form; and by introducing himself as a character and commentator in the action Warren is, in effect, a critic as well. But the form is verse; and thus it is in Warren’s poetry that we find the unity of his various interests, techniques, and concerns. On the immediate and dramatic level he tells the story of a particularly brutal and gruesome crime, the literal butchering of a Negro slave by Lilburn Lewis, the nephew of Thomas Jefferson. The background and psychological complexity of the crime is as thoroughly explored as in any novel. Then by adding Thomas Jefferson, whose brave new world did not seem to take account of the potential for evil even in his family blood lines, Warren creates a dimension of dramatic conflict, in this case the conflict of ideas, on another level than the presented action. Finally there is Warren himself, literally visiting the site of the crime and imaginatively summoning up the ghosts, conversing with Jefferson, arguing too; thus modern man, in the form of the author, is brought directly into the drama as well. In a work of this size and scope all the demonstrated ability of Warren to use verse for scene, action, and psychological and metaphysical speculation had to be employed. What was needed as well, required by the length if nothing else, was a rhetorical line which could contain with simplicity and dignity the burden of thought without calling attention to itself and breaking the spell of the whole poem and without being so complex as to lose the meaning. This was for Warren a new kind of simplicity and power. To achieve it he returned to the roots of poetry, to the clear and sustained and unsurprising metaphor, to cadence, to repetition, to menomic power.

In one sense BROTHER TO DRAGONS was a peak, a culmination of all Warren’s work to date. Where he might go from there, in what direction, would have been difficult to imagine. PROMISES: POEMS 1954-1956 offered an answer. It was evident that BROTHER TO DRAGONS had been a liberating experience for the poet, had, even as the new title implies, opened up new possibilities for him. On the surface the book is technically different from anything he had done before. There is a newly devised long line, based often on stress rhythms and speech cadences. There are new variations on stanzaic form. The language itself, though clearly in his recognizable voice, seems different too. Its singularity is the simultaneous ability to join both the “poetic” and the prosaic to create a total effect of poetry. Something of the virtuoso’s mastery of the modes of apparent simplicity, so evident in BROTHER TO DRAGONS, is now focused on the genre of the contemporary lyric. And there is now, by implication, a declaration of independence. No subject, no word, no notion is to be segregated by definition from the realm of poetry.

The real breakthrough in PROMISES is in language. For a very long time, and still to a degree, the Southern literary tradition of which Warren’s work is an important modern example had been founded upon a very clear and present distinction between poetry and prose. Though Southern poets and critics in this century have exercised great influence, it has been the Southern prose writers, the novelists and short story writers, who exploited most fully the richness and variety of the regional vernacular and public rhetorical language. Other poets—William Carlos Williams, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, each in a different way—worried with extending the limits of the language of poetry. But Warren, growing and developing as a novelist, had clearly seen the possibilities largely unexplored by other Southern poets. With PROMISES, after a brief period of silence, he returned with new forms, wider and richer language and subject matter, and a bold assault on the limits of poetry at a time when poetry seemed to have dwindled to two not completely dissimilar voices—the “academic” and the “beat.” PROMISES won all the prizes for 1957.

Yet it is in his 1960 collection called YOU, EMPERORS, AND OTHERS: POEMS 1957-1960 that the new territory claimed and won in PROMISES is consolidated and settled. Bookjackets are not celebrated for their veracity, but the jacket of this book is quite simply accurate when it states: “YOU, EMPERORS, AND OTHERS is an extension of the lyric voice which made PROMISES such an important literary event.” There is consolidation as well as extension. There are examples of poems which could easily have been a part of PROMISES, but there is more variety in form and, if anything, more ease in the range and kinds of language the poet can employ. Perhaps the earlier poet would not have added the ironic dimension of mocking his own technique with the bravado of rhyming “supper” and “tup her,” but the means and concerns are not essentially different from Warren’s first poems. His dramatic ability and use of the folk vernacular are eloquently demonstrated. Remarkably, with his new freedom, his new toughness, even wisdom, the poet has not lost the thing that young poets are said to lose to time and experience, the purely lyric note. In truth, he is more at ease with the lyric voice than he has ever been before.

Warren’s achievement over many years is an important part of the American literary scene. With a very few exceptions, there have been almost no examples in this century of the continued development and growth of an American poet from youth to age, to an age characterized by wisdom without loss of impulse, by technical ease without rigidity and habitual gestures. Yeats was such an example in our language. Warren is another. His “late” poems can bear the analogy. And he is still young enough to continue, to prove by and through his work that it is possible to be a poet here and now and for a lifetime. The promise of the future is implied clearly in one of the final poems of YOU, EMPERORS, AND OTHERS, one of a virtuoso sequence of “nursery rhymes.” The subject is “history,” in all the rich complexity that Warren’s use of the word in his works suggests; but, in one sense, it may be conceived of as personal history, the history of the working poet, as well.