122
NORMAN MARTIEN
I HEAR AMERICA SINGING
AUDUBON: A VISION. By Robert Penn Warren. Random House. $4.00.
THE GEORGE WASHINGTON POEMS. By Diane Wakoski. East Sid.
Book Store. $2.00.
THE COMMON SHORE. By Robert Kelly. Black Sparrow Press. $4.50.
GUNSLINGER. BOOKS I & II. By Edward Dorn. Black Sparrow PreD.
$4.00 each volume.
The "vision" of Robert Penn Warren's
Audubon
is of two
kinds: one invokes that pictorial sense which allowed Audubon to ob–
serve and record the birds of America; the 'Other, that sense of the
dream which prompted his grand project in the wilderness. This double–
ness, along with his uncertainty as to his origins and identity, gives a
peculiarly American definition to the Audubon of Warren's poem. His
fascination in the wilderness and his business enterprises in Europe;
his
immersion
in
the texture of natural things and the abstraction necessary
to
his great and public design; the precision of his rifle, which was
the necessarily brutal instrument for getting the "material" for the pre–
cision of his art - this play of contradictory forces makes him seem a
type of the American artist. Indeed, some of this same doubleness char–
acterizes Warren's poetry: on the one hand, he sees events
as
part of
a great fabric of gothic American history, as in
Brother to Dragons,
while
on the other he offers modest
a~d
precise renderings of things seen and
felt, near yet hard to explain, as in "The Day Dr. Knox Did It." There
is
in his work an impulse toward final and epic conception, combined
with the instinct for exact perception in the tentative forms of lyric and
conversation. And it
is
perhaps for this reason that the figure of Audubon
appeals to him: as an example of how vision and fact can be brought
together. The achieved balance works to make this Robert Penn War–
ren,s finest poem.
For the most part we see Audubon "walking in the world," with–
out a definition of joy, without a name for the world, without the
recovery of what is lost:
We never know what we have lost, or what we have found.
We are only ourselves, and that promise.
Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!
In the poem this "love" means the act of seeing, the wonder at what is
present. It means that the other vision - the dream of distances–
comes to us through what
is
immediate, and is finally sustained by it:
