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PARTISAN REVIEW
The paradoxes-the anguish and the glory of time, along with memory,
its mediator, and identity, both its product and its victim-are issues
relentlessly, compulsively probed in Warren's poems. Psychologists say
memory develops in the child through three stages-what they term
eidetic, anecdotal, and autobiographical memory. Without insisting on
strict correlation, one might say that Warren's poetry avails itself of all
these stages of memory, from the flashbulb image of the "earliest thing you
remember, the dapple / Of sunlight on the bathroom floor while your
mother / Bathed you" ("Loss, of Perhaps Love, in Our World of Contin–
gency"), through the anecdotal recall of "Little Boy and Lost Shoe," to the
fully autobiographical interchange between
was
and
is
of "Rattlesnake
Country" or "Covered Bridge"-and then the memorial recovery, playing
forward and back, of a single volume or of the entire
Collected Poems.
Rereading Warren's poetry at large one is reminded of no one so
much as W. B. Yeats. I don't mean in local detail, though there is the
occasional echo of a phrase or two, but in the careful structuring of
individual volumes, in the interplay between volumes and the progres–
sion traceable through them, finally in the unitary vision of a career
embracing every sort of antinomy, dichotomy, and complexity. Warren
is like Yeats, too, and only Yeats (unless we would go a bit further back,
to Sophocles), in that he went on into old age from strength to greater
strength, improving, deepening, and becoming richer, stranger, yet
more familiar, so that some of his last poems-I think of "Mortal
Limit," "Old Dog Dead," "After the Dinner Party," "Old-Time Child–
hood in Kentucky," "Covered Bridge," "Reinterment: Recollections of
a Grandfather," "Last Meeting," "Old Photograph of the Future," and
more-too many to name-are also among his best.
It
is not irrele–
vant to observe that, like
Being Here,
this final volume,
Altitudes and
Extensions,
bears an epigraph from Augustine's
Confessions:
"Will ye
not after that life is descended down to you, will not you ascend up to
it and live?" I am strangely reminded of Montaigne by this choice of
epigraph-strangely, because St. Augustine and Montaigne do not
always mingle in one's thoughts-in his last and greatest essay, "Of
Experience" :
"It
is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know
how to enjoy our being rightfully." St. Augustine and Montaigne may
not be frequent bedmates, but they are well and truly joined in these
late poems in which Warren draws his shadowy autobiography to a
climax and close and seems, with his life and work, to confirm Yeats's
final insight: "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."
James Olney
