Word: audubons
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...AUDUBON: A VISION by Robert Penn Warren. 32 pages. Random House...
...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...
...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...