BOOKS
333
of Warren's poems there is, at least after a certain point that I will spec–
ify in a moment, what might be termed a summative quality, a taking
stock, as it were, of the life at this moment in it; the summation is, how–
ever, of necessity in constant change and development from one volume
to the next. The German historiographer Wilhelm Dilthey once
remarked that we are all of us, all the time, composing our autobiogra–
phies though we may never write one; thus any volume of Warren's
poetry may be thought of as an autobiography composed at this stage
in his life's progress. Many of his poems are narrative in impulse, and
the same is true of a book-length sequence like
Audubon: A Vision.
But
beyond these individual and collective narratives lies a metanarrative
that recounts the story of the life of the poet. In readings and various
other venues, Warren made it clear that for him this "shadowy narra–
tive" began to emerge only with the volume
Promises: Poems
I954-56,
and it concluded with the long view back of
New and Selected Poems
I923-I985.
Here a vexed question arises for the editor of Warren's col–
lected poems, one that Burt addresses in the introduction to his explana–
tory and textual notes. Shall an editor include all poems published at
whatever time, in whatever place, by the poet, or shall he allow the
poet's final vision of the shadowy narrative to determine the contents of
his ultimate autobiography? Burt's choice is the former, meaning that his
Collected Poems
consists of some sixteen discrete volumes bound
together as one. I suspect Warren would have chosen the latter, which
would mean that had he been granted authority over his "shadowy
autobiography," it would probably look not very different from
New
and Selected Poems
I923-I985'
"I thirst to know the power and nature of Time," says St. Augustine
in an epigraph Warren chose for
Being Here-and
could have chosen for
any volume from
Promises
on. Indeed, the Augustinian trinity of Time
(to continue with Warren's habit of upper-casing the word), memory, and
identity, developed so powerfully in Books
10
and
I I
of the
Confessions,
are the deep subject matter throughout the poems of Warren's maturity,
the dominants of his life and work. "I can't remember the names of the
others who came there," Warren writes in "Rattlesnake Country,"
The casual weekend-ers. But remember
What I remember, but do not
Know what it all means, unless the meaning inheres in
The compulsion to try to convert what now is
was
Back into what
was is.
