608
PARTISAN REVIEW
CL:
Is there a contradiction, in this country, particularly compared
to England, between the notion of a tribal voice, and the incredibly
multifarious nature of American voices and culture and regions?
Does it make sense in a country of this scope to speak of
a
poet as
the
poet laureate?
DW:
I think of Warren emblematically now because he himself has
written poems that deal a lot with the image of the hawk: the circling
hawk, the hawk over a barren or rich landscape. And in a sense he's
like an old hawk. You meet him and he has what you see as a sort of
fierceness, but he's a beautifully gentle man. In terms of trying to
take in the whole image of America with the sort of three hundred–
sixty-degree vision that a hawk might have, it's not far, the regions
that he deals with are the regions that he knows by heart. And that
is, in a sense, epic, deliberately epic-he's from the South, he knows
the South, his perimeters are not really vast, he takes on huge sub–
jects. But in a sense he has kept within his own circle always. And in
the rootedness of that, in terms of the circling, the distance that he
made himself travel, in that emblematic manner he has been trying
to see as far as he can see. What is the meaning of the ground that he
is above? The validity of that is wonderful in his old age. And it's not
a conceited image of "I am a hawk"; it is an image of trying to get
above everything, and trying to see what is the range of my vision,
and what joy do I feel. In terms of the gift that he has, it's a tribute to
his gift when he calls himself a hawk. One thinks of him in that man–
ner. So it's not as though he is the heavy voice of America, the cons–
cience of America, the emblematic America, he's just now a great
poet who has kept within really fairly modest limits of personal ex–
perience. What Seamus is saying is that you can have these personal
limits. I think that's what a great poet has. You have the personal
limits of your own experience, but somehow you are capable of mak–
ing the horizon, the perimeter of that, be part of your experience. So
it isn't that you have a huge vision, a beginning epic vision. Instead
your vision is out of what you know, out of knowing where you are,
where you
come
from. And that has been the strongest thing in War–
ren : I am from the South, I am part of the conscience of the South, I
am part of the guilt of the South. I don't feel any hostility
myself- I'm not a Black American - but I don't feel any hostility
about reading Warren because I think he's as honest a conscience as
you can get about the agrarian situation in the South.
CL: Could you take a crack just at the notion of a tribal poet in a
country of this range and contradiction and diversity?
