BOOKS
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changes: literature focuses on or narrows into poetry, which unfolds into
the writer's friendships in relation to her work and life, considerations
which, falling away, reveal a landscape (or an inscape) of bleak solitude - a
landscape which Steiner, in the last of these books, sees as a darkening
plain, dim in the twilight of the gods.
Moving chronologically from Warren's genial considerations ofwriters
and their work, of what a poem actually means to its readers, to Steiner's
grim evocations of our age as an afterword, a mere epilogue, it's hard not to
trace a plot whose downward curve droops like a distressed mouth. Refer–
ring to the celebrated sled ride ("Marie, Marie, hold on tight") in "The Waste
Land," Northrop Frye has called such a plot the "down we went" vision of
history.
Since Robert Penn Warren died (in September 1989) not long after the
publication of his
New and Selected Essays,
the collection has the elegiac feel
of a posthumous volume (and the note of elegy is sounded again by each of
the other authors in turn). Yet although some of the essays date back to the
1940s and 50s, readers expecting a consistently New Critical mode of dis–
course will be disappointed. Any reader ofWarren's own fiction and poetry
knows that here was a writer entranced by the personages and place names
of a particular locale - that any aseptic notion of the poem as unencumbered
artifact is alien to Warren's distinctive style. He doesn't find it necessary to
divest himself of his own personality when writing criticism; he doesn't don
the white robes of the specialist or conceal himselfbehind a priestly jargon.
A repeated theme of this rich and varied book is Warren's refusal of
reductive reasonings, of severely schematizing systems which in order to
reduce poems to some ideal silhouette would force the poet to follow a recipe.
In "Pure and Impure Poetry," an essay first delivered as a lecture in 1942,
Warren makes a useful list of some of the elements critics have at one time
or another demanded be purged from poems. He names a few and writes in
an equable tone, but the self-defeating draconian ferocity of the list is a
testament - as eloquent as it was nearly half a century ago - to the arbitrary
and restrictive flailings of theory. I can't resist quoting the list in full:
1.
ideas, truths, generalizations, "meaning"
2. precise, complicated, "intellectual" images
3. unbeautiful, disagreeable, or neutral materials
4. situation, narrative, logical transition
5. realistic details, exact descriptions, realism in general
6. shifts in tone or mood
7. irony
8. metrical variation, dramatic adaptations of rhythm, cacophony, etc.
9. meter itself
10. subjective and personal elements.
