Despite nearly universal critical acclaim for Robert Penn
Warren’s later poetry, much about this large body of
work remains unexplored, especially the psychological sources
of these poems’ remarkable energy. In this groundbreaking
work, Warren scholar Joseph R. Millichap takes advantage of
current research on developmental psychology, gerontology,
and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings
of Warren’s later poems, which he defines as those published
after Audubon: A Vision (1969). In these often intricate
poems, Millichap sees something like an autobiographical epic
focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death,
and the possibility of transcendence. Thus Warren’s
later poetry reviews an individual life seen whole, contemplates
mortality and dissolution, and aspires to the literary sublime.
Millichap locates the beginning of Warren’s late period
in the extraordinary collection Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968–1974,
basing his contention on the book’s complex, indeed
obsessive sequencing of new, previously published, and previously
collected poems unified by themes of time, memory, age, and
death. Millichap offers innovative readings of Or Else
and Warren’s five other late gatherings of poems—Can
I See Arcturus from Where I Stand?: Poems 1975; Now and Then:
Poems 1976–1978, winner of the Pulitzer Prize;
Being Here: Poetry 1977–1980; Rumor Verified: Poems
1979–1980; and Altitudes and Extensions 1980–1984.
Among the autobiographical elements Millichap brings into
his careful readings are Warren’s loneliness in these
later years, especially after the deaths of family members
and friends; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction
and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and his sense
of the power, and at times the impotence, of memory. Millichap’s
analysis explores how Warren often returned to images and
themes of his earlier poems, especially those involving youth
and midlife, with the new perspective given by advancing age
and time’s passage. Millichap also relates Warren’s
work to that of other poets who have dealt profoundly with
memory and age, including Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, and, at times, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and
the whole English and American nineteenth-century Romantic
tradition.
An epilogue traces Warren’s changing reputation as
a poet from the publication of his last volume in 1985 through
his death in 1989 and the centennial of his birth in 2005,
concluding persuasively that the finest of all of Warren’s
literary efforts can be found in his later poetry, concerned
as it is with the work of aging and the quest for transcendence.
Joseph R. Millichap is Professor Emeritus
of English at Western Kentucky University. He is the author
of five other books, including Robert Penn Warren: A Study
of the Short Fiction and A Backward Glance: The Southern
Renaissance, the Autobiographical Epic, and the Classical
Legacy. |
