“Last Night Train”: Warren Criticism Departs the 20th Century

In the quarter century since Robert Penn Warren’s death, study of his work has blossomed and matured. The crossroads now faced by his legacy is a spot well worn by other writers’ corpuses: that is, will RPW criticism continue to find fresh meaning, not only in Warren’s poems and novels, but also in the ways he engaged with the twentieth century? Two new books in the Warren critical canon, Joseph Millichap’s Robert Penn Warren After Audubon and Randy Hendricks and James Perkins’s fifth volume of the Selected Letters, mark, not a new direction per se, but perhaps the final achievement of the first phase of Warren criticism, the place from which scholars step back and begin to reassess.

Millichap, like many of the Warren faithful, has retired from decades of teaching RPW’s poetry. Not surprisingly, given his own stage in life, he is drawn to the later stage of the master’s work. Relying on neo-Freudian psychological theories, especially the work of Erik Erikson, Robert N. Butler, and Lars Tornstam, he addresses Warren’s late oeuvre—from Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968–1974 through Altitudes and Extensions: 1980–1984—from the standpoint of “age-work and life review.” The result is a fine example of close reading and synthesis, despite a somewhat strained framework in which Millichap incorporates themes like “gerotranscendence,” the practices of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and the notion of the “senile sublime.”

In his attention to the first two volumes of the study, Or Else and Can I See Arcturus From Where I Stand?, Millichap wrestles with poetic references to Warren’s autobiography, just as he implies Warren himself wrestled with the balance between “life review” and more philosophical speculations on age and mortality. He writes, for instance, that “snowfall became an important image in Warren’s later poetry, perhaps because of his long residence in New England. . . . Warren often invests his snowfalls, especially those of yesteryear, with an ambivalent burden of obliteration and transformation” (emphasis added). The movement Millichap charts, “through age-work and life review toward transcendence”—that is, from those New England snowfalls to the “burden of transformation”—does not actually hold up through the many poems he discusses. He elects, for instance, to include Warren’s long historical poem “Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce,” whose struggles with nostalgia are of the distinctly non-autobiographical sort. And the discussion of Altitude and Extensions (titled “Sublimity and Transcendence”) ends up referencing autobiography for some of its best insights.

Nonetheless, the discussions of individual poems, particularly the gems of Warren’s last three volumes, point up their strengths in convincing ways. Following other critics who have pointed to dialectical imagery in Altitudes and Extensions, Millichap goes a step further and presents the major poems in that volume as a series of pairings, setting off West vs. East, one darkness against another, mortality against intimations of immortality. This ground has been trod by other critics, but not so methodically and not with the emphasis on the poet’s facing death that Millichap employs. Similarly, the discussion of Being Here recalls many tropes familiar to Warren readers and critics—snow, animals (especially birds), the intersection of identity with history. But by focusing on the volume’s organization, Millichap picks up on thematic echoes that clarify both the poems themselves and what he terms the “mortal uncertainties and their sublime formulations” that mark the poet’s most mature achievements.

Finally, although Millichap repeats the phrase “age-work and life review” so often that it sheds meaning, the interplay between the two emphases proves important in the latter part of his study. The structural tension “between the poet...