Robert Penn Warren: On the Dark Side of Creation

By Mark Daniel Miller

My general subject is the conflict between art and life, between the artistin this case, the writerand his or her world; and my specific subject is this conflict in the life and work of the twentieth -century American author, Robert Penn Warren. Since not everyone is an artist, I begin with a definition of the problem, a description of the life/art conflict. Besides, even if you are an artist and are, thus, a sort of walking casualty of this conflict, you may not understand what hit you, and you may be wondering what to do next. I am not offering any solutions here, nor does Warren. As he has said any number of times, each individual has to work out his or her own salvation. But I am offering, first, a definition of the problem and, second, the example of Warrenhow he understood and tried to cope with the life/art conflictand this you may find salutary in some small way.

Why Robert Penn Warren? His accomplishments as an artist and as a critic are formidable: seventeen volumes of poetry, ten novels (plus two unpublished), a collection of short fiction, several plays, a biography, two studies of race relations in America, two children's books, several books combining history and cultural criticism, and a massive body of work on other writers, including shared authorship of several textbooks which revolutionized the teaching of literature in America. Our first poet laureate, Warren was also clearly a true man

of letters the only American, for instance, to have won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry, for which he won it twice. But Warren was not only an artist; he also commented at length on being an artist, on the place of the artist in the modern world, particularly in America; and he did so not only in his own works, but also in dozens of interviews granted over the years. Thus, Warren seems a particularly promising specific subject on which to focus our attention (and besides, he's the writer whose work I know best).

To begin defining the life/art conflict, consider a pair of statements by Warren from a 1969 interview with Richard B. Sale, statements which I also use as a handout in my Creative Writing: Poetry class. Here, Warren identifies two requirements for writing poetry which are almost guaranteed to put the poet at odds with his or her world: first, the achievement of a state of being which Warren calls "passivity" or "prayerful . . . 'waitingness'"; and, second, "time": time for achieving the passive state; time to write. Here are Warren's statements:

Warren: But to poetry. You haveto be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.

Sale: Then you had the kind of life in recent years where you could do this, when you chose. Is that correct? Or is there always limited time?

Warren: Well, if you can't do it that way, you'd better not try. If something seems to be there to rob, always rob Peter to pay Paul. If anybody's going to be a writer, he's got to be

able to say, "This has got to come first, to write has to come first." That is, if you have a job, you have to scant your job a little bit. You can't be an industrious apprentice if you're going to be a poet. You've got to pretend to be an industrious apprentice but really steal time from the boss. Or from your wife, or somebody, you see. The time's got to come from somewhere. And also this passivity, this "waitingness," has to be achieved some way. It can't be treated as a job. It's got to be treated as a non-job or an anti-job. (Talking 121)

Lest we think that Warren is alone in his description of the life versus art conflict, here is a poetic version of the same thing, from the poem "Adam's Curse" by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. I also use this as a handout in my poetry writing class:

. . . 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.' . . .

(Yeats 78)

Implied here is also a general scorn on the part of the world for the end-product of the poet's efforts: the poem.

We could multiply such examples: Walt Whitman defiantly rejecting the prevailing values of his timeand of oursby beginning Song of Myself, "I loafe and invite my soul"; William Saroyan asserting, "My real work is being"; T. S. Eliot, in part 3 of "Burnt Norton," describing faces "Distracted from distraction by distraction." But the

point is clear: the writer, particularly the poet and particularly in the modern era, feels alienated from society, at odds with the worlda victim of the conflict between life and art. Warren was no different, and I would argue that this fact is a large part of what darkened his artistic vision even long after its apparent brightening in the early fifties.

In an interview with Warren published in 1977, Peter Stitt poses the following question:

Since the fifties your poetry has been mostly optimistic and affirmative, emphasizing the glory of the world and its promises. And yet you also have poems on ugliness, death, racial violence, and so on. How do these poems fit into your vision?

"That's all part of the picture," Warren responds,

just the other side of it. You have people like Dreiser, who are monsters humanly but who make great things. There is Flaubert, whose main goal in going to Egypt was to get the clap, and yet he had this inspiration for Madame Bovary, and he thanks God to be alive, approaching the curve of the wave. It is the complication of lifenothing more complicated than that. (Talking 244-245)

Now, in one sense, this is the response we would expect from Warren, a man who spent his entire life trying to show both sides of "the picture." In his response to Stitt, he clearly says that his poetic vision includes the pessimistic and negative because an entirely optimistic and affirmative vision would over-simplify the true complication of life and would therefore be false.

However, in the lives of the two men he cites as examplesthe authors Theodore Dreiser and Gustave Flaubertwe have, despite Warren's words to the contrary, something a bit more complicated than the complication of life; we have the complication of life versus art. Warren is concerned here with a sort of corollary of the life/art conflict as we have defined it thus far: the fact that people who are "monsters humanly" can nevertheless "make great things," but it is telling, I think, that he cites these literary artists in response to a question about the dark side of his own poetic vision. By all accounts, Warren was anything but a "monster" in his own, personal life, but he was always fascinated with the writer such as Dreiser whose career, as

Warren says in his book about him, "raises in a peculiarly poignant form the question of the relation of life and art" (Homage 9). In particular, Warren seems to have experienced in his own life the truth of an irony best expressed by yet another such writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his great poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: the fact that though the writerin Coleridge's poem, the Mariner"brings the word which is salvation, he cannot quite save himself and taste the full joy of the fellowship [of all things] he advertises. Society looks askance at him" ("Pure Imagination" 257). He is, as Warren says in his essay on The Ancient Mariner, the "poéte maudit"the cursed poet. Some causes of the poet's estrangement from society we have already seen. But the matter, predictably, is even more complicated than I have suggested thus far. We shall explore it shortly. However, the basic paradox is this: the very qualities and behaviors which enable the writer to "see into the life of things" are also the qualities and behaviors which cut him or her off from that life, even to the point of a kind of suicide. And this predicament, the predicament of the "poéte maudit," would continue to haunt Warren apparently till the end of his life.

Two points before I proceed. First, if I myself am presenting here only one side of the picture, the dark side, that is because I have already presented the other side, in an essay published in The Mississippi Quarterly in the Winter of 1994-95 and entitled, "Faith in Good Works: The Salvation of Robert Penn Warren." In that essay, I argue that the decade-long "drought" of short poems Warren underwent from 1944 to 1954 was a symptom of his own sick soul, an index of his own need for salvation, and that in the long, experimental works he turned to in these years, we have, as Warren says of Coleridge and The Ancient Mariner, "the case of a man who saves his own soul by composing a poem"or, in the case of Warren, by composing a novel that began as poetry, All the King's Men; A Tale in Verse and Voices, the book-length poem, Brother to Dragons; and a second, highly experimental novel, World Enough and Time ("Pure Imagination" 254). However, at the end of my essay, I indicate that the salvation was not final or complete, in part because the complication of life ensures that "the victory is never won, the redemption must be continually re-earned" ("Pure and Impure Poetry" 54), but also because Warren continued to be haunted by the just-described predicament of the writer. The writing which was his salvation was also a curse.

Second, in the argument to follow, I will be careful, as Warren

himself always is, to distinguish between those things which he claims are true for writers and writing in general, and those things which he says are true only for himself. Of course, there is some overlap between these things, and it is with such an overlap that I wish to begin.

In his 1997 biography of Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Blotner relates a description of Warren at work which in many ways sums up the whole conflict of life versus art, the tension between writing and living. In the Summer of 1971, James Glickman, a former student of Warren's, was employed by the family at their home in Stratton, Vermont, as a sort of general helper, and he was able to observe Warren at work on poems. "`When he was in the midst of one,'" recalls Glickman,

"his face took on an extraordinarily meditative quality cheeks sunken, eyes downcast--and he would be completely absent from whatever was going on around him. [His wife] Eleanor would sometimes remind him to be polite if someone were talking to him or had asked him something. He would summon himself out of whatever reverie he was in, looking like someone who was swimming to light from a deep watery element, at last breaking the surface, then saying he was sorry, smiling and `being polite.' A few minutes later, he would be back where he had begun." (Blotner 394)

Of course, this would be at lunchtime, an hour preceded by a long period of physical exercise before breakfastbar weights and swimmingand about four hours of solitary work in the cabin perched on the hillside overlooking the stream that runs through the property. "`After having one sherry and an hour's break to eat,'" Glickman says of Warren, "`he would head back to his cabin and come back about five o'clock or so. He then would grab a stick, call for [the dogs] Joey and Frodo, and go for a five-mile walk up Mountain Road.' Then there would be drinks on the porch at sun set, dinner at eight, reading, and bed." (Blotner 394).

Now what is most notable about Glickman's descriptionaside from the fact that Warren was in a position to devote such long hours to writingis, first, the fact that Warren spent so many hours alone, and second, the fact that, even when he was with people, he would, if he was hot on a poem, "be completely absent from whatever was

going on around him." In various interviews over the years, Warren repeatedly said that writing was, for him, "a way of life" (Talking 132, 228, 370), but as Glickman's description shows, it was a way of life that was, in one sense, at odds with life. Indeed, to be "completely absent" from what is going on around you is, in one sense, to be dead, and yet this very powerthe power of the imaginationis what enables the writer to write.

Early on in his career, Warren pondered this distinguishing characteristic of the writer via his work on the English Romantics, particularly Coleridge. In his 1945 essay on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, "A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading," Warren quotes that portion of William Wordsworth's "Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads" in which Wordsworth, according to Warren, "says, first, that the poet has a `more comprehensive soul' than other men, and second, that he is set off from them by a certain special endowment. The first notion," explains Warren, "refers to a difference in degree, but the second refers to a difference in kind. In developing this second notion," Warren observes, "Wordsworth, like other Romantic critics, comments on the special nature of the aesthetic experience:"

the poet has, [Wordsworth] says in the Preface, an "ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet . . . do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events than anything which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves. . . ." ("Pure Imagination" 260; emphases Warren's)

Warren might also have quoted the phrase just prior to the one he does quote, the phrase where Wordsworth says that the poet has "a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present" (Wordsworth 453). Had he done so, then I would have been able to make this clever observation: it is this "disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present" which at times causes the writer to be "completely absent" from present things.

And what are these "absent things" that so occupy the writer's attention? Well, the main thing would be whatever the writer is working on, for until he or she creates it, the poem, story, play, or whatever can be said to be absent, or to be present only in the

writer's mind. However, this absent thing consists in turn of any number of other absent things: words, images, rhythms, scenes, characters, ideasin short, any and all of the things that will eventually go to make up the finished work. And these things may in turn consist of any number of absent things from the writer's own experiencetimes, places, people, events, dreamsall different from the particular things which are currently present. The absent things which occupy the writer's attention may also be wholly imaginary, or may be complex amalgams of the known or remembered and the imagined: what was and what might have been; what is (but is absent) and what may be.

Indeed, once some present thing summons the writer from his or her creative reverie and its welter of absent thingsas I write this sentence, I am summoned from my own creative reverie by the laughter of my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who wants me to see the sprinkles and chocolate she has gotten on her nose from eating a doughnutthere is no reason that the writer can't incorporate that present thing, if it fits, into the developing pattern of the work of art which is the main object of his or her attention. This is, in fact, precisely what Warren did when he began writing poems again after the ten-year drought. In the interview with Stitt, Warren describes the poems in Promises, the first volume after the drought, as combinations of "memories and natural events" in the present. When the drought broke, the Warrens were living in Italy with their children, in a ruined sixteenth-century fortress on the Mediterranean, and according to Warren, the poems he wrote at that time

wander back and forth from my boyhood to my children. Seeing a little golden-headed girl on that bloody spot of history is an event. With the bay beyond, the sea beyond that, the white butterflies, that's all a natural event. (Talking 239)

Combining the history suggested by the fortress, Warren's memories of his own personal history, and the experiences of the present, including those of the children, the poems become "one package," Warren says in a 1978 interview, "contrast and identity in one packagechange and continuitythe human story" (Talking 332).

Given the potency, indeed the vitality of these "absent things" which are the objects of the writer's creative reverieWarren himself was wont to call them his "vital images" (Talking 14, 331)perhaps

writing as a way of life is not so at odds with life after all. In fact, far from being a kind of death, perhaps the writer's estranging reverie is as satisfactory a way of life as life itself. After all, ". . . the satisfaction of living," according to Warren, "is feeling you're living significantly," and writing is, as he says, "a way of existing meaningfully as much of your time as possible" (Talking 212, 370). This is because it is, like philosophy, "a way of thinking about your life as you live," "a way of making your own life make sense to you" (Talking 187, 212), though it is not, like philosophy, abstract. Rather, it is "an imaginative involvement in experience," an imaginative "enactment" in which ". . . the imagination takes the place of literal living . . . by moving toward values and modifying, testing, and exfoliating older values" (Talking 82, 305, 171-172). According to Warren, the process of composing a work of literature is the process of "knowing what kind of person you can be, getting your reality shaped a little bit better" (Talking 16). It is the "process of trying to find your way into your own life and life in general," of "trying to give shape to experience" and "to know the self" (Talking 132-133, 212, 228). It is a way "of exploring the self and the world" (Talking 294). In this sense, writing is not at all an act which cuts the writer off from the world but, rather, is "a way of being open to the world, a way of being open to experience" (Talking 370). And the finished work itself is "an image of the possibility of meaning in life" or "a metaphor for meaning," "an image of the possibility of meaning growing from experiencean image, that is, of our continuous effort to make sense of our lives" (Talking 82-83). As Warren says at the end of the essay "Knowledge and the Image of Man," the form of the finished work "is not a thing detached from the world but a thing springing from the deep engagement of spirit with the world," and its very rhythm "is, as it were, a myth of order, or fulfillment, an affirmation that our being may move in its totality toward meaning" ("Knowledge" 245-246).

In these latter quotations from "Knowledge and the Image of Man" and, just prior to these, in the pastiche of quotations drawn from various interviews with Warren conducted over the years, we can see that Warren feels there is a vital connection between writing and life. As he said in 1956 during the Fugitives' Reunion at Vanderbilt University, the process of writing a work of literature "is clearly something that refers to all of your living in indirect and complicated ways" (16).

However, it is also clearly something separate from living and something that clashes with living, if we are to judge by still other comments by Warren. For instance, in the interview with David Farrell in which he says that poetry is "a way of existing meaningfully as much of your time as possible," Warren adds, as a sort of sarcastic punchline, "And that's never much" (Talking 370). It is never much because, as Warren says at the end of the Mariner essay, ". . . we conduct most of our living . . . [on] the superficial level" (Pure Imagination" 272)on the level of bills, dishes, household trash, laundry, housecleaning, sleep, and the like; on the level, that is, of practical and, even, animal necessity. (This is a list, by the way, of all the things I ignored while I was writing this paper.) Obviously, the idea of entirely eschewing this sort of life and of letting the imagination entirely take the place of literal living is absurd. However, even the tendency to do thatwhich is the tendency of the writercould obviously cause conflicts in, say, a marriage in which the spouse of the writer is content to live at a more superficial level. But even if the spouse wishes to live significantly in some other wayWarren is always careful to say that writing is a way of living significantly, with the clear implication that there are, indeed, other waysthen there may be conflict. Suppose the spouse's idea of living significantly is to be active in some large community, for instance; this need may clash with the writer's need to be alone. Even if the spouse is generally tolerant of the writer's estranging reveries, there may be timesduring a given lunch hour, for instancewhen he or she grows weary of a spouse "completely absent from whatever is going on" around them.

In the interview with Sale conducted in 1969, Warren offers the following anecdote to illustrate the fact that, if you want to be a writer and a partner, you must face, as Warren puts it, "the problem of what kind of life you can subject other people to":

I know a young manhe's not young any longerwho shall be nameless. An extraordinary, talented writer, he married the wrong girl. Well, he's had a great success at life. But I know him well, and he sat there and told me, "I just can't do it. It's killing her. She's gonna leave me. I know it. It's gonna happen. She can't take it." She married a man when he was in a military uniform and was a heroic young man. And suddenly he put on those old clothes and locked

the door to write. It was different, and she couldn't take it. So he quit writing and has made a great success of another kind of life. (Talking 123)

In his second wife, author Eleanor Clark, Warren himself found a woman who not only understood his passion but also nurtured it. He was not so fortunate in his first wife.

Having introduced the subject, I now want to look more closely at the particulars of Warren's life, at the origin of his desire to be a writer and at his early experience of the life/art conflict. However, I should point out that, though we have Warren's work and, to some degree, the observations of others to use as evidence, our conclusions will in part be speculations. For we are looking here at the secret wellsprings of action, at obscure trains of psychic cause and effect: things that remained mysterious even to Warren himself. What seems generally to be true, however, is that Warren remained troubled by certain aspects of being a writer well into his late years and that this fact accounts for some of the darkness in his work.

In a New York Times Book Review article published four years before his death and entitled "'Poetry is a Kind of Unconscious Autobiography,'" Warren describes a practice he learned as a boy, before he began to write poetry, which later "became important to me," he says, "as a gateway to poetry." His best childhood friend, Kent Greenfield, was "a natural born woodsman" who, in the woods, "had the strange habit of suddenly stopping stock still, one foot almost poised, as he seemed to listen for every sound or stared at some objectsome tree or whatever. He seemed to sink for a moment into the world around him. I so admired his skills," Warren confesses, "that I unconsciously began to imitate him." Warren could practice these skills during, as he puts it, "my country summers at my bookish old grandfather's remote farm." And when he began writing poetry during college, he found some of it "coming out of" these summers ("`Unconscious Autobiography'" 9).

But the art of stillness he had learned from Kent Greenfield went deeper than that. Later in the New York Times Book Review article, Warren describes again the "new way of seeing things" that ended the ten-year drought of short poems during the late forties and early fifties. The language of his description will sound familiar to us. The poems, he says, were

a different kind, of the glittering present and of, often, vivid

moments of the past newly discovered. . . . [I]n poem after poem an action or event seemed at the core, as having happened, or being about to happen. Or a scene that demanded an action, or a recollection that stirred something vital. There was no pattern in the way in which such things happened, but always with a sense of new expectation, of significance about to be revealed. ("`Unconscious Autobiography'" 10)

"Significance about to be revealed." This, as we have seen, is the lure and promise of the writer's creative reverie, and it is also what reminded Warren, when he first began trying to write poetry in college, of the art of stillness he had learned from Kent and of the solitude of his grandfather's farm. ". . . I sensed," he says,

some continuity between the need to be alone, with what was in your heador wasn't there yetand the aloneness of woods and canebrakes of my grandfather's farm years before, when diving deep, or standing in breathless silence to stare at somethingas my old friend had done in the woods. What you stared at now was, however, the empty space on a sheet of paper which the right word would not come to fill. ("`Unconscious Autobiography'" 9)

Later, after discovering the new way to write poetry which ended the drought, Warren noted that

. . . the process, more than once, suggested some connection with the old woodland and canebrake wanderings of childhood or youth, or later years in foreign places, and the sudden instinctive motionlessness that might come as I idiotically stared at whatever it happened to be, tree or stone or bird rising. Whatever it was, it, for a moment anyway, would seem a strange event, blindly significant. ("`Unconscious Autobiography'" 10)

". . . I feel an immanence of meaning in things," Warren says in the interview with Stitt (Talking 243), the a in immanence clearly interchangeable with an i; and whether these things are the "absent things" of the writer's reverie or the "glittering present" things of the writer's here and now, Warren stops before them and stands stock still, poised for the apocalypse of meaning.

The stance or attitude assumed by the speaker in any number of

Warren's poems, this attentive stillness may be said to betoken an openness to experience, the sort of openness which Warren says is a quality of writing. However, because it is a stillness, a stoppage, it is also a sort of death. This duality is apparent in the term Warren himself used to describe this attitude: "blankness" (Talking 122, 176). The editors of Talking with Robert Penn Warren suggest that this blankness is like John Keats's "negative capability": a selfless receptivity to experience (Talking 176; 402, n. 23). However, "blankness" may also be emptiness or, as Warren puts it in the New York Times Book Review article, a "deprivation" and a "void." In that piece, Warren says the following about his earlier efforts at becoming a writer, shortly after his matriculation at Vanderbilt University:

There were, of course, a number of students of similar tastes and ambitions, and all the arguments were exciting. But sometimes I found it a lonely life, trying to write. It seemed to set one apart from life, to be, as it were, a sort of mystic deprivation, to create what can only be described as a psychic void that needed to be filled. Sometimes, paradoxically, it was as though the only way to be not lonely was to be alone. ("`Unconscious Autobiography'" 9)

Why did Warren feel this way about trying to write? We must turn to biography for help, but the evidence is contradictory, as we might expect.

In the Spring of 1921, when he was just sixteen, Warren certainly did not dream of being a poet some day. Rather, he dreamed of being "admiral of the Pacific Fleet," as he would put it in a 1982 interview (Talking 378), and to that end, he had managed to obtain an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Then, one "balmy afternoon" as he lay on the grass on the other side of a high hedge near his house, his dream of being a naval officer was shattered: his younger brother, Thomas, was throwing pieces of coal from the driveway over the high hedge, and one of them "landed directly on his brother's left eye, knocking him unconscious." Warren would eventually lose that eye, and he immediately lost his appointment to Annapolis. In the Fall, he enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, "to become, he thought, a chemical engineer" (Blotner 30). There, his composition teacher, John Crowe Ransom, recognized his talent and encouraged it. Soon, Warren was a member of the Fugitive group and had taken up poetry in earnest.

Writing poetry, then he had not yet taken up fictionwas in one sense Warren's attempt to fill the "psychic void" left when his dreams of a naval career were shattered. It was a compensation of sorts for that "deprivation" and for the other deprivationthe blindness of the left eyewhich had led to it.

But it was also, particularly in these early years, an "`escape,'" as Warren would put it in a letter of this time to Allen Tate (Blotner 45). It was a "refuge." Here is how Warren explains it in an interview with Farrell published in 1982. I quote at length:

. . . [T]hat first period of poetry . . . was so different from what I had set my life up to be; I mean, being a naval officer and all of that. But the poetry became so extraordinarily important to me. The reading of it and the trying to write it became simply matters of life and death to me. . . . This real sort of passion I got for poetry may have been due in large part to my fear of going blind at that time. I had been told that the injury to the first eye somehow would affect the other eye, you see . . . you could get sympathetic blindness. So I was watching for this and for a while using glasses on the other eye to protect it. And I got fits of depression during that period. I felt myself going blind. I was sort of, you know, watching, watching, watching . . . always aware of it. And my refuge became in a way the study of poetry and the writing of poetry. (Talking 363)

It was apparently not enough of a refuge, however, for it was during this time that Warren attempted suicide.

Suicide, of course, is the ultimate blankness, and the means by which Warren attempted hislying on his back in bed with a chloroform-soaked towel over his faceseems to connect it with that effacement of self which is a part of the creative reverie. In "Warren Lying Down," a paper presented on April 21, 1995, at the Fifth Annual Meeting of The Robert Penn Warren Circle in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Fred Waage pointed out that there are not only many instances of the standing reverie in Warren's poetry, there are also a number of instances of what Waage called the "recumbent reverie." He also observed that the accident which took Warren's left eye was an instance of such a "recumbent reverie interrupted by gratuitous violence." The lesson of that life-altering incident must have been abundantly clear to Warren: we are all, at all times, thus open or

vulnerable to the world of contingency or accident.

In another instance of "recumbent reverie," this one in the poem "The Leaf" from the "Island of Summer" sequence in the volume Incarnations, the speaker opens himself to the world only to find "exacerbation" and arid disappointment:

. . . On that

High place of stone I have lain down, the sun

Beat, the small exacerbation

Of dry bones was what my back, shirtless and bare,

knew. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . I

Have opened my mouth to the wind of the world like wine,

I wanted

To taste what the world is, wind dried up

The live saliva of my tongue, my tongue

Was like a dry leaf in my mouth. (25-26)

Here, blanknessor opennessis met with blankness: with dryness and death.

But the most disturbing instance of the "recumbent reverie" in Warren's work occurs in Audubon, in the scene where the protagonist is lying in the cabin of the frontier woman, knows she is about to murder him for his gold watch, and yet cannot bring himself to leap up and defend himself. He "knows," we are told, that "He has entered the dark hovel / In the forest where the trees have eyes," in "the tale / They told him when he was a child" and "the dream he had in childhood but never / Knew the end of, only / The scream" (11). He knows, too,

What he must do, do soon, and therefore

Does not understand why now a lassitude

Sweetens his limbs, or why, even in this moment

Of fearor is it fear?the saliva

In his mouth tastes sweet.

"Now, now!" the voice in his head cries out, but

Everything seems far away, and small.

He cannot think what guilt unmans him, or

Why he should find the punishment so precious. (12)

"I yearn for significance," Warren says in a 1976 interview with Bill Moyers (Talking 214), and here is either the ultimate significance or, possibly, the gateway to ultimate significance: deaththe end of the story, or at least the end of this story. When the travelers burst in and save Audubon, he is, at one level, disappointed. "He thinks / That now he will never know the dream's ending" and later asks, "`What has been denied me?'" (13, 17)

In one sense, this episode is just another dramatization of a familiar Warren theme: the terrible pull of "the dream," the idea, the ideal, the promise of fulfillment. The frontier woman has her dream, tooAudubon's gold watchand she is willing to commit murder to hold it in her hand. Audubon, for his part, wants to paint all the birds of North America and is willing to kill them to do that. But he is also an artist and, like Warren, a "yearner" (Talking 213, 243, 382), so he cherishes "the dream / Of a season past all seasons" (29). The stunning image of him which appears in the section entitled "Love and Knowledge" portrays him as scientist, artist, and priest all rolled into one: "Over a body held in his hand, his head was bowed low, / But not in grief" (30). The poem is thus about what the artistAudubon and Warrenand, indeed, what any person is willing to do or to sacrifice in order to pursue his or her passion; for, as the opening lines of the book ask, ". . . what / Is man but his passion?" (3) Audubon is willing to forego riches, to be alone a lot, to be much away from his beloved wife Lucy.

And Warren? Well, we know his attitude from yet another "recumbent reverie" poem, "American Portrait: Old Style," the first poem in 1978's Pulitzer-Prize-winning volume, Now and Then. In the penultimate section of that poem, the speakerWarrenlies down in the slight depression of an unmarked grave which he and "K"Kent Greenfieldhad used as a "trench" during their childhood games of warfare many years earlier. Lying in the trench, the speaker wonders "What it would be like to die, / . . . And know yourself dead lying under / The infinite motion of sky." Here is the concluding section:

But why should I lie here longer?

I am not dead yet, though in years,

And the world's way is yet long to go,

And I love the world even in my anger,

And love is a hard thing to outgrow. (7)

Then, as reported by Blotner, there are Warren's words to doctor and friend Tom Byrne, during one of their talks in the days just prior to Warren's death. "When Tom told Warren he was awed by what he had accomplished," according to Blotner, "[Warren] replied, `It's nothing. What counts are family and friends'" (Blotner 497).

But of course, writing did matter to Warren, and he did sometimes discount family and friends. We remember his statement in the interview with Richard B. Sale, the statement I always read to the students in my poetry-writing class:

If anybody's going to be a writer, he's got to be able to say, "This has got to come first, to write has to come first." . . . You've got to . . . steal time from your wife, or somebody, you see. The time's got to come from somewhere. (Talking 121)

In this same interview, Warren also says:

. . . I think that everybody who means to be a writer should go through a short period, anyway, where he does not have everything done for him, by a foundation or something else. Where he actually has to suffer a little bit, just a little bit, mind you, just enough to know what it's like to steal the time to give up something, in some way. And to offend wife or child or mother or father or best friend. Just to do what he wants to do. Just to know this: that he is able to make this reservation in life. To know how to achieve this inner privacy. (Talking 122)

Warren is not being entirely sarcastic here; and where he is not, he is clearly speaking from painful experience.

In light of comments such as these, one wonders about Warren's relationship with his first wife, Cinina. She was mentally ill and alcoholic, so even if Warren had not been a writer, it would not be too surprising to learn that he felt tremendous guilt over her. But as he stole time from her and therefore offended herwhich would have been inevitable since she was jealous and envious of his successhis guilt must have been compounded. His relationship with her must also have taught him something about salvation. During the drought period, he wrote the word which was salvation, and yet couldn't quite save himselfnot only because he was caught in the predicament of the writer as we have now been defining it for a

number of pages, but also because he was still married to Cinina. True, writing may have helped him make up his mind to divorce her, but he would have remained miserable had he not acted. And then, he was fortunate to meet Eleanor Clark. In the Mariner essay, Warren makes the following statement: "What A. E. Powell, in The Romantic Theory of Poetry, says of Wordsworth, that he lived his philosophy long before he phrased it, is equally true of Coleridge . . ." ("Pure Imagination" 226). What we could say of Warren is the opposite: he phrased his philosophy before he lived it. The philosophy appears in the two great masterpieces of the drought period, All the King's Men and Brother to Dragons. However, joy does not become an important part of Warren's works until he has divorced Cinina and married Eleanor. Then, he can say, as he says in Brother to Dragons, ". . . I have made new acquaintance with the nature of joy" (209). And it is not writing that brings about this joy; it is the same force that flung a piece of coal into Warren's left eye now steering Eleanor into his ken.

Yet another guilt Warren could not write his way out of was the guilt he felt for having stolen, in a sense, his own father's dream of being a poet. Mariner-wise, he told and re-told the story of how, as a boy, he found a vanity publication with some of his father's poems in it and how, when he confronted him with it, his father wordlessly took it from him and he never saw it again. As Blotner says, summarizing this aspect of Warren's obsession with the father, ". . . even near the end of his life he would record emphatically his strange sense of guilt, as a successful poet, for having somehow appropriated the vocation his father had vainly cherished . . ." (Blotner 207). Every success only compounded his guilt.

In the end, what Warren says in the Mariner essay of Wordsworth also applies to Warren himself: "The imagination was for him a healing power, . . . [but] he did know something of the `distress'" associated with its exercise. In fact, like the Ancient Mariner and his creator Coleridge, Warren knew the "`agony'" of creation and was much more the poéte maudit than Wordsworth ("Pure Imagination" 260). Consider the testimony of literary agent Helen Strauss, for instance, who says that, with Warren, ". . . `each work involved a protracted dredging of the soul and ruthless self-questioning'" which resulted in a "`chaotic agony' of creation" (Blotner 237). Or simply consider the works themselves. They are clearly the creations of an artist for whom writing, particularly poetry, was not just, as Warren says, "a parlor trick even in its most modest reaches." Rather, they

are the creations of an artist for whom the act of writing was "bread and meat" (Talking 16, 131).

Works Cited

Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997.

Strauss, Helen M. A Talent for Luck: An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1979. Quoted in Blotner.

Waage, Fred. "Warren Lying Down." Fifth Annual Meeting of the Robert Penn Warren Circle, Bowling Green, Kentucky, 21 April 1995.

Warren, Robert Penn. Audubon: A Vision. New York: Random House, 1969.

. Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices. New York: Random House, 1953.

. Homage to Theodore Dreiser: On the Centennial of His Birth. New York: Random House, 1971.

. Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968. New York: Random House, 1968.

. "Knowledge and the Image of Man." In Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. John Lewis Longley, Jr. New York: New York UP, 1965. 237-246.

. Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978. New York: Random House,1978.

. "A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading." In Selected Essays, pp. 198-305.

. "Poetry Is a Kind of Unconscious Autobiography." New York Times Book Review 12 May 1985: 9-10.

. "Pure and Impure Poetry." In Selected Essays, pp. 3-31.

. Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1958.

Watkins, Floyd C., John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, eds. Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. (Contains detailed bibliographic information on each of the individual interviews it includes.)

Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Riverside Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

Yeats, William Butler. "Adam's Curse." The Collected Poems of W. B.

Mark Daniel Miller teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He has published several articles on the life and work of Robert Penn Warren, and recently served as president of The Robert Penn Warren Circle. His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, The Pawn Review, and elsewhere. From Texas, Professor Miller joined the English and Communications Department in 1986.