Robert Penn Warren’s Experiment in Identity: “Tale of Time” and Audubon: A Vision

EDWARD WRIGHT United States Naval Academy Robert Penn Warren’s Experiment in Identity: “Tale of Time” and Audubon: A Vision DESPITE ROBERT PENN WARREN’S LIFELONG RELIGIOUS SKEPTICISM, naturalist philosophy, and distaste for Emersonian romanticism and transcendentalism, there is a noticeable sympathetic and hopeful shift toward the transcendent and the romantic in the poems “Tale of Time” and Audubon: A Vision. Though these poems have occasionally been compared, critics have not yet adequately explored the extent and significance of their relation in terms of philosophical development and similarity of form. This warrants further investigation specifically because the poems’ similarity of form reflects similarity of theme, revealing a dialectic interaction.1 Indeed, both Audubon and “Tale of Time,” widely acknowledged as two of Warren’s best poems, are dialectic, poetic experiments that investigate Warren’s evolving and conflicted philosophy of inclusive identity and its relation to personal and collective identity.2 “Tale of Time,” through the narrator’s rejection of solipsism and progression toward unity with his dead mother, lays much of the foundation for the more optimistic Audubon, which asserts the desire for, and possibility of, a true unity with nature, humanity, and the transcendent through a fully realized inclusive identity. Warrenuseshispoetrybothtodiscovertheinterior,personalidentity and to seek reconciliation with the external elements of collective identity. As early as 1955, Warren described poetic exploration as a process of reconciliation with the external: 1 Robert S. Koppelman argues that Warren’s later poems were written “dialectically, with poems speaking to one another, and this intertextuality was a vehicle through which he could dramatize the narrative self’s Socratic quest for the Truth” (72). 2 Guy Rotella describes “Tale of Time” as a development that “validate[s] the individual search for meaning as of more than private value,” thereby allowing the later Audubon to “present the real and imagined pattern of one man’s life as a mythic model for all men” (15). Though he acknowledges “Tale of Time” as a necessary progression toward Audubon, he does not mention any direct interaction between the poems. 670 Edward Wright The form is a vision of experience, but of experience fulfilled and redeemed in knowledge, the ugly with the beautiful, the slayer with the slain. . . . It is not a thing detached from the world but a thing springing from the deep engagement of spirit with the world. This engagement may involve not only love for the world, but also fear and disgust, but the conquest, in form, of fear and disgust means such a sublimation that the world which once provoked the fear and disgust may now be totally loved in the fullness of contemplation. . . . And the form is known, by creator or appreciator, only by experiencing it, by submitting to its characteristic rhythm. (“Knowledge” 191-92) Years later, in a 1970 interview given soon after the publication of Audubon, he described poetry’s purpose not as justification for existing beliefs, but as an exploration and discovery of the developing self: [The poet] is not working deductively from a highly articulated image, a careful scheme of values; he is trying to find the values, find the ideas, by a process of trial and error. . . . And the writing is the process in which the imagination takes the place of literal living; by moving toward values and modifying, testing, and exfoliating older values. (Fisher 139-40) For Warren, the ultimate goal of this philosophy of poetic exploration is the achievement of inclusive identity through the reconciliation of one’s personal and collective identities. Questions of identity are a constant concern in Warren’s works, and his obsession can be traced, in part, to his religious beliefs and personal relationships. Warren claimed that our current concept of identity and individuation is “a heritage of Christianity” (“Knowledge” 182). Considering his lifelong struggle with faith, such a claim may also help to explain his struggle with identity. He frequently described himself “as a‘yearner,’onewithareligioustemperamentbutwithoutreligiousfaith” (Blotner 401). Joseph Blotner recounts that Warren was skeptical of God and the afterlife, but admitted that this may have been the result of a “deficiency like his inability to enjoy music” (497). Poetry served as a relief from this deficiency: “I’m a naturalist. I...