Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (review)

Rosanna Warren's excellent collection of literary criticism is divided into three sections: the first presents essays on classical authors and their inheritors; the second, essays on French poetry along with several translations; and the third, essays on "poetry as an art in quest of a difficult knowledge." Although her stated theme is "the nature of literary selfhood," Warren also pays special attention to the ethical and moral attributes of poetry, form and its classical resonances, poetic genre, and the paradoxes of religious poetry. Her methodology combines scholarly explication with the personal response of a poet passionately engaged in the act of reading, and it is precisely when she allows autobiographical elements to enter her work most explicitly that her essays achieve the most poignancy. Warren addresses larger poetic issues with as much skill as she addresses the subtle mechanics of line breaks and sonic patterns, always demonstrating an ample range of reference across a large period of literary history.

Warren's meditations on the linguistic intricacies of Sappho are especially informative, and this attention to language(s)—Greek, Latin, French, English—continues throughout the book. Her discussion of alcaics in Auden's "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" convincingly links prosodic structure with multiple thematic resonances appropriate to Auden's aesthetic and biography, with particular emphasis on exile. "Negative Idylls: Mark Strand and Contemporary Pastoral" casts Strand as a dark pastoralist working on the fringes of the tradition: Warren identifies at least three "categorical resemblances"—"an idealized and artificial landscape," "a principle of exclusion" that seems to banish all reminders of grief but in fact recalls them through their artificial absence, and "an archaic myth of sacrifice"—that Strand shares with the pastoral tradition; and her subsequent argument culminates in an illuminating reading of the patterns of landscape, sacrifice, and song in Dark Harbor. Her reading of John Hollander's engagement with classical stanzas is meticulous without being fussy, and her review of Figurehead bespeaks her wholehearted engagement with the poems beyond the questions of prosody. In each essay, Warren exhibits an appreciation for poetry that encompasses everything from mechanics to metaphysics.

Although all of the essays collected in this volume have much to commend them, I was most delighted with one of the last, "Adventures of the 'I': The Poetry of Pronouns in Geoffrey Hill." Here Warren's theme of literary selfhood found its best expression in the exploration of three of Hill's most recent books: The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, and The Orchards of Syon. Warren writes,

Poetry is neither philosophy, nor psychology, nor theology; it arrives at its truths through a musical-verbal process, cadence leading to cadence, clause to clause, in the compromised, slipshod medium of language. Hill's process is more exacting than most, more purgatorial, dragging through pain, obscenity, curse, question, argument, solecism, and deliberate misprision to prayer and guarded blessing. In this labor, his pronouns do much of the heavy lifting, and it is the pronouns we will try to watch in action.

Something in me resists the first sentence. I want to assert that poetry is in fact all of those things—philosophy, psychology, and theology—and that metaphor is a sacrament, a visible sign of an invisible grace. (In her essay on Dante, in fact, Warren concludes with much the same suggestion, albeit secularly phrased.) Warren elaborates on the "empty" nature of the words "you" and "I" with references to linguists, philosophers, and theologians that once again exhibit both the depth and breadth of her reading. She notes that "in these long poems, Hill uses polyphony, multiple voices, as a discipline, and a method of inquiry and transformation. Part of the discipline is the task of integrating a poetry of private confession and quest for absolution within a poetry of public, ethical discourse." Warren proceeds with her close reading, and Hill's poetry—known for its difficulty and hermeticism—becomes more comprehensible. Her articulation of pronominal categories is masterful:

A scan of the...