Typically, the voice in Robert Penn Warren's Selected Poems, 1923–75 is situated in a moment, a boundary or threshold, where the meaning of time must be hazarded: "the future is always unpredictable. / But so is the past, therefore / At Wood's edge I stand and, / Over the black horizon, heat lightning / Ripples the black sky" ("Tale of Time," IV). In this threshold moment (and it is usually a narrative one for Warren, not a lyric one as for Eberhart and Ammons), the speaker historicizes himself by extending the moment in time, by creating time. The "Tale of Time," for example, is based upon the expansion of an "interim" of consciousness that the speaker feels at his mother's death: "the time / Between the clod's clunk and / The full realization" (I). In the expanded moment that is the poem the speaker defines his historical relation to the world through the heritage he creates from his mother's life. In expanding or creating time the poet not only attempts to presence the past but to anticipate the future…. In manipulating time, the poet manipulates, creates his world. Warren's speakers are usually able to find a philosophical category, time, in which to order particulars, and this is perhaps his greatest advantage over a poet like Ammons. What the speaker of a Warren poem inevitably learns, like Saul, is that the difference between world and self is ambiguous. Like Audubon, the speaker discovers, "how thin is the membrane between himself and the world."
At the knife's edge, the poet anticipates a world he is in the process of creating through language: "Out of the silence, the saying. Into / The silence, the said. Thus / Silence, in timelessness, gives forth / Time." The process of language itself becomes history, and thus becomes the essence of the historical self: we are, says Heidegger, a "conversation," a progressive dialogue between subject and object, presence and absence. And yet language itself is simply one arbitrary system among systems for clarifying what we hope is "real." In moving from the isolated to the historical self, from interim to all of time, the principal tool is a language notorious for its ability to deceive. This problem is examined in several of the new poems in a section entitled "Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand?" For example, in "Brotherhood in Pain" Warren exhorts the reader to focus "on any chance object" until it can be seen "in the obscene moment of birth." At this point, the object, the world really, so anthropomorphized by man's meditation on it, ironically turns to pity us who can "exist only in the delirious illusion of language." Our language fails us when we forget its essential temporality, when we forget it marks absence, not presence. When language fails us we become like the bodiless head of Mary of Scots rolling from our linguistic scaffolds: "The lips, / They were trying to say something very important" ("A Way To Love God.")
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