With [Selected Poems 1923–1975] and his … novel A Place to Come to Robert Penn Warren continues to run both poetry and fiction toward the ring of Truth (often his ostensible, even ostentatious, subject). The race in unequal. His fiction is lame and always has been. And for a long time the poetry too was but fair-to-middling down the stretch. But as if more and more goaded by the cheers of death, it has gained speed, mass, power, grandeur. (p. 71)
The novels are dispiriting in every way—personally, morally, aesthetically. They are given over to a somewhat thin, raspy consciousness. The self-loathing of the male narrators glances up against things gracelessly. Something rotten in the South … some compensating "fine woman" worship. Throughout, the novels display what fiction can hardly tolerate, social awkwardness. They lack urbanity: the dialogue is a solopsist's rough copy, the tone is one long discomfort … the reader feels rather bound in. Then the arraignment of human failure before the "awful responsibility of Time" sits in the middle and palls. A little more virtue … the message dies of inanition. A regenerative vision must be radical after all, or it won't fire. Nor, finally, is there any poetry of approach or conception. A Faulkner pitches you toward his "subject" over and over with a tricky imaginative arm and the meaning, the poetry, is the alarmed getting-there. A Welty, even a Flannery O'Connor, transports. But on much the same country road Warren parks his battered Dodge and gossips a long piece about the mostly sordid ways of Man. There is no passage, only a foot-on-the-bumper presentation.
This is a free excerpt of 268 words. There are 2,367 words (approx.
8 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Warren, Robert Penn 1905–: Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient Access Pass.
