Warren, Robert Penn 1905–: Critical Essay by Dave Smith

Warren has spoken often of Randall Jarrell's admonition that the true poet stays out in the rain and waits to be struck by the lightning. In poems that range from early iambic monotony to images of virulent, if disorderly power to a late and soaring architecture of the individual heart, Warren has submitted himself to that lightning. His character, his art, is the conduit of the violent and essential energy of the universe.

[Harold] Bloom, rightly, has said that Warren wants to be a hawk of life. As poet he is hawk-like, imperial and imperious, gliding over and holding in thrall everything that is. He rarely relaxes or clowns or indulges in the slighter uses of poetry. He has explored a continuous anatomy of ideas, a spectrum of recurrent images, with the doggedness of a prospector…. Warren has a vision: the unravelling tag ends of the world's body. We have no poet truer to a comprehensive, sustained evocation of the nature of existence; no one who grapples more with the nuances, the variations, the shadings of a core of thought…. In Audubon: A Vision (1969), that poem of few peers, Warren made everything he knew as clear as he could: the poems must define "the human filth, the human hope" and would be inextricable in filth and hope; must regard the human in his true humanity. The language became what it had been in fits and starts, a voice-instrument calibrated to final experience. Warren found what [John Crowe] Ransom had called for, a poetry of the right head, heart, and foot. Warren created a poetry which expressed and formed sacramental force as it flowed through events of Love and Knowledge. Man, Warren says, must understand love is knowledge if he is to understand his fate and, moreover, to accept his fate. Audubon, the killer of birds and beauty, the creator of beauty and a possible joy, is Warren's deep analogue. (pp. 4-5)

Read the rest of this Criticism with our Warren, Robert Penn 1905–: Critical Essay by Dave Smith Access Pass.