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THE POETIC VISION OF ROBERT PENN WARREN BY VICTOR STRANDBERG (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1977. 292 pages, $9.95.) ROBERT PENN WARREN: A REFERENCE GUIDE BY NEIL NAKADATE (Boston : G.K. Hall & Co., 1977. 396 pages, $30.00.) Victor Strandberg writes in The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren that "More than any other writer in American literature, it now appears, Warren has suffered neglect as a poet because of his greater fame as a novelist." But Neil Nakadate's new Robert Penn Warren: A Reference Guide indicates a good deal of attention has been paid Warren as poet, if one considers the comparatively little attention any poetry receives. Of Warren, even Harold Bloom now says that he "alone ranks with the foremost American poets of the century: Frost, Stevens, Hart Crane, Williams, Pound, Eliot."1 In spite of such significance, there are only two book-length studies of Warren 's poetry, both by Strandberg. Strandberg's new study updates and narrows the focus of his A Colder Fire2 and is the only book to consider Warren's most recent work. One might well hope that the new book would enhance Warren's position as poet, but regrettably it may not. In fact, Warren partisans may find the book cause for despair. "I, of course, do not mean to psychoanalyze the poet," Strandberg says. This starding remark appears in the middle of a book which is all but pure psychological criticism. He adds, "Jungian psychology should not be considered a source for Warren's poetry. Publication dates alone refute that possibility." This is disingenuous indeed. True, Jung's The Undiscovered Self was published in 1959, and Warren had been publishing for thirty years. But had not Jung begun publishing in 1902 and had not his Terry Lectures been given, in English, at Yale in 1938? I am, however, haggling with Strandberg's word source, for we are both talking about influence. Strandberg does not say that Warren cannibalized Jung, but he certainly bases his study of Warren's poetry on psychological investigation informed by Jung, Freud, and William James. His thesis is that Warren's poems divide 1 "The Sunset Hawk," The New Leader (January 31, 1977), p. 19. * Victor Strandberg, A Colder Fire (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press). ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW135 into diree compelling themes: poems of passage, poems of the undiscovered self, and poems of mystical unity. Strandberg argues that Warren's inevitable process is an inward voyage toward die waiting unconscious self, through conflict and resolution by acceptance of man's dark side, to the knowledge of dialectical experience which alone is the felt reality of being. He calls this "resolution" a conversion experience, made possible by a mystical epiphany, which leads to a vision of die Coleridgean One Life or, in Warren's terminology , die Interpénétration (Osmosis) of Being. Indeed, Strandberg's diesis is so lucid, syndietic, neat, and plainly helpful, one wonders why it hadn't been done before. His work here is going to be indispensable to serious students of Warren. But it is a terribly limited criticism, which may explain partially why it hasn't been done before. It may also explain somediing of Warren's equivocal reputation as poet. Strandberg is a thesis-monger and accordingly distorts as much as he reveals. If Warren is to be read as poet, good readers will wish Strandberg's angle of vision had not been so myopic. Granting Strandberg originality and value in his interior exploration, as we should, we must note his mythical criticism is inexplicably limited. A larger study of Warren's mythical structures would have been a next and appropriate step. For example, he repeatedly cites "The Ballad of Billie Potts" as Warren's best poem, especially for its close weaving of the thematic trinity and its establishment of the vital symbol of "One Flesh." But Strandberg does not discuss die poem's employment of the Prodigal Son myth. He does not examine die monomythical journey of the Hero. He scants the paradigmatic "westering" motif which Warren himself addresses at length in his Democracy & Poetry. Ignoring these and other ways of looking at the poem, Strandberg wants to prove the...

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