Warren, Eliot, Dante, and the Promises of Tradition

Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.

—Vergil, Georgica iii, 284–85

In the mid-to-late 1950s a number of young American poets published major books that departed aesthetically from the poetry of high modernism. These well-known books—Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), Ashbery’s Some Trees (1957), Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959)—established the individuality of the poets and marked a significant break with the poetry of the previous few decades. In this period, which saw the rise of beat poetry and confessional poetry as well as the ascendancy of the New York and Black Mountain schools, questions about what poetry was, and about what it could be, incited a goodly amount of debate. And while—amidst debates about “Pale-Faces” and “Redskins,” or about the “Cooked” and the “Raw”—a number of poets from the old guard, such as Eliot, Ransom, and Tate, all but abandoned writing poetry, Ransom’s and Tate’s former Vanderbilt colleague, Robert Penn Warren, published a collection of poems, Promises (1957), his best to date and perhaps the most complete and unified of all his collections. While the books by Lowell, Snodgrass, Ginsberg, and Ashbery are very fine indeed, one might argue that, of all the books published in this period, Promises is the one that best serves young poets of our time as an example of how to negotiate the past and the present, the tradition and the individual.

After the publication of his Selected Poems in 1943, in which Warren published “The Ballad of Billie Potts”—a long, brilliant, and sometimes cumbersome poem attempting to blend the frontier dialect of Kentucky, a folk-tale, and lofty philosophical ruminations—he ceased to write poetry for nearly a decade. And then the poems returned, as Warren recounts in the New York Times Book Review:

Suddenly, came a long joyous period in which the very air seemed full of promise. I found myself living in a stunningly beautiful spot, a great, not really ruinous, deeply moated Renaissance fortress, on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean on three sides, with a mountain in the distance, and there, on those ages-old bloody-soaked stones stood my beautiful golden-haired baby daughter and her mother. So poems began again—a different kind, of the glittering present and of, often, vivid moments of the past newly discovered. And the core rhythms were different. Even aimless mutterings with which a poem might first stir sounded different.

Building on the technical innovations of “The Ballad of Billie Potts,” and on the philosophical conclusions drawn in the early novels like Night Rider and All the King’s Men, Promises appeared in 1957 as a significant departure for the already established poet. Anthony Hecht claimed in the Kenyon Review that the work was “different in intention and effect from the work of any poet [he] could think of.” In a contemporaneous review James Wright claimed Warren’s new book “deliberately shed the armor of competence—a finely meshed and expensive armor, forged at heaven knows how many bitter intellectual fires—and [went] out to fight with the ungovernable tide.” Indeed both the initial fanfare surrounding the book and the subsequent critical discussions of it have focused on what Charles Bohner describes as the book’s “variance with the crabbed intellectuality” of Warren’s previous volumes, and on Warren’s turn against what Louis Rubin called the “lapidary techniques that would avoid all flaws and imperfections.”

Rightly so. The poems are different: the meters looser, the content overtly autobiographical. Moreover we should emphasize that the poetry’s blend of autobiography and allegory preceded and adumbrated Lowell’s Life Studies and subsequent volumes from Plath, Sexton, etc. No doubt, then, critical comments like those made by Hecht and Wright are valuable for their recognition of Warren’s technical, and perhaps spiritual, breakthroughs. Such criticism, however, is very much of its time in its focus on the new and different. What it fails to address, or does not address satisfactorily, is the significance of what Promises retains from the...