AUDUBON: A VISION by Robert Penn Warren. 32 pages. Random House. $4.
Youthful, but already elegantly disillusioned, Poet-Critic Allen Tate once dedicated a poem to a more zestful fellow poet. Its title was To a Romantic. Its two most significant lines:
You think the dead arise/Westward and fabulous.
That was over 40 years ago. But the poet, Robert Penn Warren, now 64, a double Pulitzer winner for poetry (Promises) and prose (All the King’s Men), is still a believer in the resurrected, the Westward and the fabulous.
Audubon: A Vision is the mature fruit of Warren’s triple poetic preoccupation—and a little masterpiece. In it Warren defiantly turns his back on this grubby century, on what he calls this “moment of mania,” and plunges back into the wilderness—America’s Garden of Eden—to retell a primal myth. In a sequel of seven comparatively short poems, he takes Naturalist and Bird Painter John James Audubon as a kind of frontier Adam, sketching in his 19th century life as a drama of innocence, guilt and final redemption.
“What is man but his passion?” the opening poem asks, and Audubon first materializes spellbound by a white heron —as innocent in his passion as the proverbial noble savage. But even in the pure heart of the wilderness, Audubon runs across a romantic poet’s notion of evil: other men. And Audubon’s passion evolves toward a second level of meaning as Christian suffering.
Robert Penn Warren makes the melodramatic most of a bird-beaked Kentucky-frontier mother and her two sons who in 1811 actually gave refuge to Audubon, then plotted to murder him for his gold watch. The three rogues are thwarted and promptly hanged. As they choke on their ropes—bunglers at death as at life—Warren’s Audubon unsentimentally identifies with them. In the all-embracing fraternity of failure, Audubon in some sense shares their guilt and their punishment. Now as reconciled to man as he has all along been to nature, Audubon goes on to his own fulfillment, to his “glory”—a favorite Warren word. Truly “Westward and fabulous,” the painter’s vision is shadowed only by the poet’s darkly romantic hindsight on what was to follow: the Civil War and that other bugaboo of the Southern soul, industrialization.
Audubon is a superbly sensuous poem, full of dawns “redder than meat,” and chimney smoke that “bellies the ridgepole.” The language is plain-grits as a folk song without being folksy. A be-ginning-of-the-world awe broods over the work: silence, solitude, finally the violence that ruptures both. Above the wilderness soar Audubon’s birds, transcendent angels of life and death.
In a dazzling ode to the birds, Warren manages to compress a poetic epitaph for Audubon as well as a capsule apologia for the endlessly seeking, destroying and atoning destiny of all artists, of man himself:
Their footless dance
Is of the beautiful liability
of their nature.
Their eyes are round, boldly convex,
bright as a jewel,
And merciless. They do not know Compassion, and if they did, We should not be worthy of it. . .
He slew them, at surprising distances,
with his gun.
Over a body held in his hand, his
head was bowed low, But not in grief.
He put them where they are, and
there we see them:
In our imagination.
What is love?
One name for it is knowledge.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com