A Place in the Country

Dickey, William; Sexton, Anne; Root, William Pitt; Talbot, Norman; Lieberman, Laurence; Enright, D. J.; Woods, John E.; Wright, James; Elliott, George P.; Warren, Robert Penn; Thompson, John F.; Berryman, John; Berry, Wendell; Wilbur, Richard; Bogan, Louise

doi:10.2307/3849418

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“…This tendency, Dickey said, threatens to "dissipate the singleness of his [Warren's] personal authority." 45 But Louis Martz--in the Winter, 1967 Yale Review--held that "This volume has a total integrity of great power," and G. S. Fraser found its metrics and imagery "exemplary for skill." (He cited an excerpt, "Wind / Lifts the brightening of hair," as constituting "a small one-line imagist poem in itself.")…”

Section: Chapter I Introduction: the Critical Reckoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren.

Pearce¹,

Strandberg²

1979

American Literature

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This groundswell crested in 1965 with three books dealing largely with Warren's poetry: John L. Stewart's complex and ambitious The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians, which devotes much of its last 115 pages to a close study of Warren's verse; John L. Longley, Jr.'s Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays; and my own study of Warren's verse, A Colder Fire. Stewart's chapter on "The Long Apprenticeship" of Warren is an excellent discussion of the poet's development prior to Thirtysix Poems (which is essentially where my study begins). Stewart also does some fine work with subsequent poems by tracing developments in theme and technique and such influences as Dante and Shakespeare. A judicious critic, Stewart freely exposes his subject's failings: speaking of Brother to Dragons, he says that "when Meriwether enters with his bullet-torn head and Jefferson greets him with 'Well, Crack-head, who are you?' one is tempted to lay the poem aside with disgust." Stewart is all the more convincing, then, when he bestows encomiums: "In scope, tragic sense, mastered substance, inventiveness, and plain power Promises surpasses all other volumes of verse published in this country since the Second World War." This volume, like Warren's other best work, is set in "that landscape lost in the heart's homely deep," Stewart says, citing the remembered world of boyhood about which Stewart, like Warren himself, writes beautifully. 54 Although John L. Longley, Jr.'s collection focuses mainly on Warren's fiction, it does reprint some material relating to Warren's poetry, such as Warren's own Paris Review interview and his seminal essay "Knowledge and the Image of Man" and Frederick P. W. McDowell's essay on Brother to Dragons that originally appeared in the Winter, 1955 PMLA. "Now thatFaulkner and Hemingway are gone, Robert Penn Warren is clearly America's most distinguished man of letters," Longley writes in his Introduction. 55 That opinion evidently belongs as well to George P. Garrett, whose essay "The Recent Poetry of Robert Penn Warren" was written expressly for the Longley collection. One of the "very small number of outstanding and genuinely productive poets of our time," Warren displayed in Promises "a new sense of freedom and expansion" that "can only be compared to that last astounding harvest of W. B. Yeats," Garrett writes.And with Warren's extension of "the full power and energy of his hardearned liberation" into You, Emperors, and Others, Garrett feels "no hesitation in suggesting that Warren's later poems . . . are more important to us than the late poems of Yeats." For a proper analogue to this later poetry Garrett looks to the worlds of art and music, where Warren's "steady growth and blooming" as a poet evoke comparison to Picasso and Stravinsky. 56 Other collections of criticism appear in the Autumn, 1963 South Atlantic Quarterly and the May, 1972 Four Quarters, which is a special Robert Penn Warren issue. Here Curtis Whittington, Jr., in "The Earned Vision: Robert Penn Warren's 'The Ballad of Bill...

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Section: Chapter I Introduction: the Critical Reckoningmentioning

confidence: 99%