The Need to Re-evaluate: Identity in Robert Penn Warren's Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1974

In the first poem of Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968-1974, Robert Penn Warren presents a riddle for his readers. In particular, "The Nature of a Mirror" offers a confident understanding of the relationship between time and the individual: "Time / is the mirror into which you stare" (16-17). The conclusion, however, is undercut immediately by the collection's first interjection, in which "Time / is only a mirror in the fun-house" (Warren, "Interjection 1" 1-2). This dichotomy frames the question, "Is this really me?" ("Interjection 1" 1), a question which initiates the quest for identity that runs throughout the collection.¹ However, the structure of the collection is problematic: how can Or Else attempt to answer the question of human identity when its own identity as a poem is in doubt? "The Nature of a Mirror" was written years before "Interjection #1: The Need for Re-evaluation," (Millichap 27) and yet the two are not clearly presented as separate poems—they are both listed under the same Roman numeral, and the interjection by definition as well as by content necessarily relies upon "Nature of a Mirror." While they could be considered two separate poems, the two could also be considered parts of the same poem. This dichotomy is a problem in the collection itself, which, according to its subtitle, is "poem/poems." Therefore, the problem of the speaker becomes the problem of the collection, and both seem unsure of their own identity. This riddle of the poem/poems' structure must be resolved—or at least explored—before the question of the speaker's identity can be addressed, for the structure of Or Else is tied up in Warren's search for identity. This essay will argue that the structure of Or Else enables the collection to become a dramatic enactment of the process of discovering one's identity. The first few poems of the collection provide the necessary framework for both the collection's speaker and readers, with the heart of the collection's structure contained within the imagery of the crushed rock in "Interjection #2: Caveat."

Several critics have already noted the problematic structure of Or Else. James Justus, for one, accepts that it is both a poem and poems. He argues that the collection is an internal dialogue, in which the "governing tone is set by its weakest poems, those nakedly structured as premises, conclusions, objections, second thoughts, stripped of much specific context and dominated by unconciliating skepticism" (Justus 97). Charles Bohner suggests that the interjections' presence is "as if to point up the underlying unity of the poem as a whole" (127). However, regarding this unity, he similarly reads the collection's subtitle, "Poem/Poems" as "call[ing] attention to [Warren's] ambivalence about the ultimate coherence of the total work" (127). By contrast, Dave Smith emphasizes what he sees as a paneled structure in the collection, "which form[s] a loose sequential movement, a tale both in and of time/space/history" (40). While these and other critics agree that there is a dialectic structure, the question still remains how exactly to utilize this structure while reading Or Else. Warren himself comments on the collection's structure: "it can be considered a long poem, or it can be considered a group of short poems. Some of the poems were written with my being unaware of their place in the sequence. It wasn't undertaken as a planned sequence; the true sequence grew. This kind of structure is related to how you feel your experience—I couldn't tell you exactly how, but is related" (Talking 236). However ambiguous that true structure might be, Warren does link the structure to experience. Thus, in order to understand the structure, one must understand the place of experience in the quest for identity.

According to Warren, man gains his identity through knowledge, which has both a "foreground and a background" ("Knowledge" 186), for man does not exist in a fixed state. Rather, his identity is "a continually emerging, an unfolding, a self-affirming, and we...