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But of course many other readers would say such lines need no
defense. Combined as they are with homespun narratives, beautiful
passages of natural description, and a full range of individual
expression, the lines are an integral part of Warren ' s universe. That
is indeed the proper defense, even if it fails to convince everyone.
Warren has built his own world, and it is constituted in part by a
language that virtually flaunts the great adjective , the sort of phrase
that gave "poetic epithet" a bad name:
Platonic drowse, Joamjrayed
sea, laggard cunning, darkling susurration, bloody-armed augurs.
The
phrases almost italicize themselves, as if drawn from a modernist's
copybook to illustrate excessively poeticized language. In part , such
language is an act of concealment, guilty of Pound's charge of
"emotional slither," but again it can't be otherwise for Warren, who
aims for the "guessed-at glory," the "imagined star glint" of a
grand and single insight into cosmic order. No such unitary or uni–
versal insight is actually recorded by the poems, either individually
or collectively. There's none of Yeats's occult or Eliot's Christianity
behind the yearning; Warren is perhaps the last romantic in the
almost-Symbolist sense of one who simultaneously yearns for and
invokes an absolute while at the same time insisting that its chief
characteristic is its unknowability, its random penetration into the
human order, and its ultimate separation from it. The settings for
these poems are the mountains, the shore, the forest, any snow-filled
landscape, and Warren shares with Strand an almost overbearing
sense of the felt presence of some terrifying, absent power. Like the
Frost of "Once by the Pacific" and "The Most of It," but without
Frost's corrosive and subversive irony, Warren dreams of an Ameri–
can sublime that is and is not locatable in natural forces and
emblematic moments. Because of its fitful appearance, its essentially
Protestant sense of righteousness and guilt, such a sublime is easy to
confuse with, even to identify as, the entangled ego . And in Warren,
the ego has little or no society or history to give it shape , turning
instead to family (hence the primal scene) and regional culture
(hence the mixing of folksy tones with the grand style) for its traces
of the "other" in order to define and reveal the psychological
drama.
For me the most moving poem here is dramatically titled "The
Only Poem." In it, Warren tells how he and his mother visited a
newborn infant some "friends stashed with Grandma while they
went East for careers." He admires and plays with the infant briefly,
