"The Lust of the Eye": Landscape in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren

Before the first European explorers set sail for the New World, they must have fallen in love with the distance of the sea. It was an expanse that held the promise of discovery, whatever the landscape that would eventually emerge. Tangled in the jungles and rivers of the imagination, glittering with the riches the sailors anticipated in the Far East they hoped to reach, that landscape would have existed first as a dream of the unknown. This is the original vision that William Carlos Williams presents in the second essay of In the American Grain, depicting the penetration of the virgin American wilderness: "The New World, existing in those times beyond the sphere of all things known to history, lay in the fifteenth century as the middle of the desert or the sea lies now and must lie forever, marked with its own dark life which goes on to an immaculate fulfillment in which we have no part." The explorers were drawn to the blank spots on the map. And, situated as they were on the other side of the Atlantic, the direction of their longing would have been west.

When the settlers finally arrived in the coastland that would become the colonies, and later when they began to move inland, the West opened onto even more dramatic vistas—the fields and plains and canyons that would define the American frontier; and with them would come more hope for expansion. The European impulse to establish colonies in the New World begot the American impulse to claim an entire continent. Cast as the backdrop to romantic paintings and written accounts, this vast landscape began to shape the national consciousness. Just as the original explorers were drawn to the openness of the sea, the land they settled engendered a poetry that is deeply watchful of the place in which it is written.

As early as 1844, with Emerson still hard-pressed to name any true American poet, it was the land itself that offered hope for a poetry yet to be articulated. "America is a poem in our eyes," he declares in "The Poet": "Its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres." Whitman answered him, in both correspondence and verse, with sprawling lines that reached far into the American continent, as far as the West, "where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie." In 1879 the poet and critic Lucy Larcom published a poetry reader called Landscape in American Poetry, which, according to Harper's Monthly a year later, "consists of selections of passages from American poets descriptive of various landscape scenes and aspects in various seasons and under various skies." Shut inside her attic bedroom in Amherst, Emily Dickinson composed the suitably confined "rooms" of her ballad stanzas, a counterpoint to Whitman. But the poetry inside those tiny verses isn't cramped: it defies containment. In her mind the long narrow hallway outside her door became the Northwest Passage. The optimism of the explorer appears later in the American West as Robert Penn Warren saw it. "There is always West," his narrator Jack Burden claims in escaping a troubled personal and political life in All the King's Men. More recently, in How Poets See the World, the critic Willard Spiegelman has explored the pastoral world that American poets continue to imagine. "American culture has been permeated by the notion of landscape since the beginning," he writes. This is not to say that landscapes in American poetry are always mimetic reproductions of actual places. But in Dickinson, as in Warren and many other poets moved by her vision, the cramped room of the mind widens into the enduring and limitless vision of the American panorama.

The poetry of Robert Penn Warren provides a particularly complex illustration of this geographical dimension, relying on landscape, in America and abroad—especially Italy—to dramatize American ideals and their shortcomings. In the twentieth century, as Warren and other American writers began to confront an increasingly disorienting cultural milieu, they often cultivated imagery resistant to the romantic...