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and, therefore, forever to be said. This is not quite the point that the
critics continue to make about Warren's works, observing that he re–
turns to the same themes of Justice and Guilt, to the same reflections
on the ambiguity of History, to the same exploitation of the dissonance
between the intent of an act in time and its infinitely echoing meaning,
to the same symbolisms of West and East, Wilderness and City, to the
same Faulkner-ridden milieu.
These are the excrescences of something deeper, and by themselves
suggest only an accidental entrapment, an obsession harmful to art. The
reader of Warren who sees just so far is tempted to suggest that it
might be well for him to find other concerns, to move on.... But his
major theme seems to me to be precisely the paucity of possible themes,
the terrible singleness of the truth under the multiplicity of our lies,
the ineffable oneness of Nightmare, or, as he preferred to call it in an
early poem (the term has no religious connotations), Original Sin.
Nodding, its great head rattling like a gourd,
And locks like seaweed strung on stinking stone,
The nightmare stumbles past, and you have heard
It fumble at your door before it whimpers and is gone .
..
Everyone is aware of the diversity of techniques with which Warren
attempts to formulate his single vision (his "aghast" vision, I am
tempted to say; for the adjective out of Faulkner inescapably offers it–
self), a profusion of means that ends finally in an almost indifference
to means. The same fable is worked as a poem, a play in verse, a play
in prose, a novel (as in
All the King's M en),
as if to demonstrate that
the inexpressibility is a part of the essential meaning. The title of an
early collection of verse can be extended to the whole corpus of his
writing simply by changing the number,
Eleven Poems on the Same
Theme.
. ..
There is no form to hold
Reality and its insufferable intransigence.
Br.other to Dragons
contains the relics of a ballad that was its first
formulation, and a confession of the inadequacy of that form .
. . .
I once intended
To make a ballad of them long ago.
And I remember how the thing began:
The two brothers sat by the sagging fire.
Lilburn and Isham sat by the fire,
For it was lonesome weather.
