BOOKS
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guage that is replete with romantic "yearning," a grand style
flecked with regional flavor and theatrical abstractions.
In
an
unusual prose "Afterthought" to this volume, Warren speaks of
writing a "shadowy autobiography." This is his eighth book of po–
etry in the last fifteen years, and the fourth to bear a pair of dates as
its subtitle. But instead of the daily "journal" poem that we might
have expected (hearing echoes of Lowell's
Notebooks
and their subti–
tles, perhaps), we are given narrative poems that suggest a kind of
highly psychologized, theological
exempla.
But Warren's religious
aura does not depend on an explicit theology or a personalized
theodicy-quite the contrary. Warren's yearning arises from and
towards a preternatural cosmic order, a deep sense of a universe
filled with meaning that can never fully announce itself. The poems
ask "what did I see?" and "Can it be that the vision has
... already
come-land
you just didn't recognize it?" Warren's
subject is less the origin of the self than its destiny, and his focus,
though it often yields only a virtual image, is the intersection of that
self and a cosmic meaning.
Since this intersection is highly theatrical, and since the mean–
ing is often vague, Warren resorts to such words as Truth , Time,
History, Being, and Nature. But "resorts to" suggests a reluctance
or at least a pressured reaction, whereas the tone of these poems
indicates that Warren is positively eager
to
invoke these grand, capi–
talized abstractions, usually considered
verboten
by one of the funda–
mental tenets of modernism . Warren is, almost casually, without any
sense of strain or willfulness , taking poetry back to its primordial
entanglement with religion and philosophy. Lyric poetry has often
drawn strength from such large, universal orders, as well as from the
more fickle drives of the individual ego. But for Warren, the individ–
ual ego will function as well as any institutionalized discourse or
belief system when it comes to a primal scene of conflict and discov–
ery.
In
fact, one of these poems covertly addresses the primal scene,
and others seem to present dramatic moments that are analogous to
that Freudian
topos.
Time and again, the speaker of these poems is a
young boy seeing things-a tramp being killed by a train , an old
man's face, a dog attacking a doe, a drowned monkey-that are
emblems of death and love and change; and the poet, speaking often
as an old man facing his death , questions these immensities. The
theme of memory is thus intertwined with the other great abstrac–
tions to lend an even more sacralized aura to the language.
