Word: warren
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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AUDUBON: A VISION by Robert Penn Warren. 32 pages. Random House...
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...
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...
...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...