440 Making It New: 1900–1945might be: the process is dialectical and there is no end to the growth and discovery
of the self, other than that offered to each of us individually by death.
Much of Warren’s finest poetry and fiction is concerned with the failure to realize
this dialectic. His poetry, from Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942) through
such seminal volumes as Promises (1957) and Audubon: A Vision (1969) to New
and Selected Poems (1985), has returned again and again, in lyric, narrative, and
meditative modes, to what one poem, “I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The
Natural History of a Vision” (1974), calls the “process whereby pain of the past in its
pastness / May be converted into the future tense / Of joy.” Like Ransom, Warren has
his own gallery of betrayed idealists, and many of his poems offer secular versions of
the Fall. At its worst, this fall into experience provokes nihilism, surrender to the
brute materiality of things: the so-called “realist” is, in Warren’s eyes at least, no
more adequate – that is, just as blind to the dialectic of past and future – as the
idealist is. But, at its best, it leads on to a kind of redemption, expressed sometimes
in terms of a rediscovery of the father. Seeing his father properly, the narrator/
protagonist of Warren’s poems begins to see himself; accepting and embracing him,
warts and all, he starts to accept his own limitations and embrace the human
community. “Man can return to his lost unity,” Warren insisted in one of his essays,
“Knowledge and the Image of Man,” “and ... if the foliage and flower of the innocent
garden are now somewhat browned by a late season, all is the more precious for the
fact, for what is now achieved has been achieved by a growth of moral awareness.”
The figure of the garden or clearing – “browned by a late season,” perhaps, yet
not without a sense of serenity – recurs throughout Warren’s work, and it brings
together the two patterns of the fall followed by redemption and the return to
the father. For it is at once the familiar home of Adam and the old homestead,
somewhere in western Kentucky, to which Warren and his protagonists, born in just
such a place, dream of returning. Quite apart from that, it also offers a reminder
of that equipoise so vital to Warren’s work, since it is neither utterly savage nor
completely subdued. Just as the human personality, according to Warren, operates
best in the space between fact and idea, tradition and opportunity, so the various
clearings he describes exist in a border territory between forest and town, the
energies of wilderness and the structures of civilization. They are not necessarily
cultivated spots. For example, the place where the protagonist in Audubon: A Vision
has his first mystical experience is simply an open space created by nature. They are
always, though, both outer landscapes and inner ones: they are products partly of
history and Warren’s own experience and partly of myth, his fictive powers.
Given that Warren is so committed, in principle, to the notion of change, it is
hardly surprising that his writing bears witness to some remarkable alterations of
language and tone – and even, to a certain extent, of vision. In his poetry, for example,
the early work tended toward the highly wrought and frigidly impersonal: crabbed,
allusive, and sometimes rather too knowingly ironic, it seemed to be borrowing a
manner – from Ransom and Tate, in particular – instead of shaping one in response
to personal needs. The later work, by contrast, was more expansive and open: a
richer, more variable idiom was combined with fluent, muscular rhythms to createGGray_c04.indd 440ray_c 04 .indd 440 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM