Final CURO Presentation Speech

I began this summer with an ambitious project. In my proposal, I suggested that after eight weeks of intensive reading, I could “find God.” Since that time, I have read intensely, but do not know that I am any closer to finding anything remotely resembling a deity. Instead I have been forced to look at my proposal, where I say that I intend to disperse the moral complications in the unfaltering light of literary analysis. A bold boast, everyone will agree, I’m sure, and one that does not, simply because pure intellectual analysis cannot, encompass the passion, poignancy, and power of Robert Penn Warren’s struggle.
For the sake of emphasizing the intelligence of the man, I present to you an abridged version of his CV. He was born in Guthrie, KY in 1905, graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt at the age of twenty, received a master’s degree from the University of California in 1927, did some graduate work at Yale, and finally received a B. Litt. from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar at the age of 25. He has published, ten novels, sixteen volumes of poetry, a volume of short stories, a play, a collection of essays, one biography, three historical essays, one criticism of Theodore Dreiser and one of Hermann Meville, and two racial studies to say nothing of the books to which he’s contributed or edited. He remains one of the most decorated poets in American history, being the first poet laureate of the United States, the only author to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Poetry, and a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Among other awards, he was honored to be made Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Emerson-Thoreau Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a MacArthur Foundation Award. The man is, to quote R.W.B. Lewis, “the most complete man of letters of our time.”
Though perhaps no longer a part of our twenty-first century time, Warren nonetheless remains one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century; the enduring power of the work cannot be underscored enough nor can the passage of time detract from it, for Warren’s struggle is humanity’s, his despair the modern despondency, his joy the contemporary bliss. Bliss, joy, elation, exhilaration, these are the abstractions for which Warren searches, for which I was searching. I continue to regret the fact that I titled my project “finding God,” because of the various religious notions of that word. What I am looking for transcends the dogma and stricture of religion; I am on Warren’s metaphysical journey. He explores many different ideas of this fulfillment in his work, sometimes rejecting it totally, but always probing the possibility of personal redemption with surgical exactness. The question for readers of Warren is twofold: firstly, why waver at all, exhibiting such reticence to grasp a sublime moment and experience it, and, secondly, what purpose does doubt serve in the larger context of Warren’s work and life?
To answer the first part of this question, I went directly to the text to examine for myself Warren’s poetic journey. And what a journey it is! I have requested that the CURO office provide you with copies of two poems which illustrate perfectly the vacillation between spiritual awareness and nihilistic despair in Warren’s work. From reading these poems, you can tell immediately that Warren’s concern is for human realization, of identity and of the indefinable concept of “joy,” but the first, “Delusion?—No!” describes perfectly a sublime moment, the feeling of exhilaration, and contentment indicative of spiritual fulfillment, while the second, “Covered Bridge,” contains all the elements of regret, anguish, and decay that evoke the “metaphysical chill,” as Warren says in Brother to Dragons, suggestive of a speaker resigned to a desolate spiritual life.
Not to bore you by conjuring up the ghosts of English literature classes past, but I feel it necessary to discuss, however briefly, a few of the key literary elements which contribute to the broader themes of Warren’s oeuvre. In “Delusion?—No!” we begin with a speaker who has climbed a mountain to look out on the sunset. Note the setting. We begin our journey with Warren “at crag-edge,” teetering on the cusp of our shared experience, beyond the “sweat and swink” of quotidian existence. Yet observe how Warren nevertheless fastens his speaker to the earth, not with the trusses of the caged bird, but with the dawning realization that fulfillment may be found there. The first stanza hinges on a single word, almost, in the following line: “atmosphere almost too heavenly/Pure for nourishment of earthbound/Bone.” We have already established that the goal of this poetry is to ascertain a means of obtaining spiritual nourishment, and Warren informs us now that true purity, the purity of clear air, of a “momentous, muscular thrust/Skyward” cannot satisfy humanity’s longing. Observe how “the heart as it downward fled” goes not towards heaven, towards “no sensation but blueness,” but to “cliff, cleft, gorge, chasm, and, far off,/Ravine cut in the flattening but still high glitter/Of earth.” Even flying high, “Hawk-eyed…upon the emptiness of air,” Warren’s imperative is not to gaze raptly heavenward, but to “survey/Each regal contortion/And torturous imagination of rock, wind, and water, and know/Your own the power of creating all.” Warren, in emphasizing the earthbound, has drawn attention to humanity itself. Unable to subsist on the pure air of heaven, but caught up in the rapture of its clarity, the speaker returns to earth to spread the joy of “the fundamental discovery” he has made on the mountaintop.
Where “Delusion?—No!” communicated an immediacy of tone which drove the action from the first word to the climactic, thunderous assertion that the experience was no dream but reality, “Covered Bridge” eschews the experiential urgency for a more measured poem of memory. The action is less defined in this particular poem, but it is primarily a lament for the speaker’s purposelessness. The past tense combined with the rhyme slows the poem down, for sake of nostalgia and of the speaker’s listlessness. Time, often redemptive in Warren’s work for the old, simple adage that a new day brings new opportunity, time and memory here separate the speaker from his youth so much so that it seems “another self.” The precipice found in “Delusion?—No!” serves as a springboard for the spiritual experience; in “Covered Bridge” we have no such precipice, but a sandbar. Instead, Warren considers starlight, an obvious symbol of the “motionless, holy” ideal for which his speaker yearns. But it is no heavenly pure atmosphere here, but merely a reflection of ideals the speaker has long since forsaken. More, reflected in nature, the starlight, ideal purity, and the speaker, a mere member of a fallen humanity, cannot connect to the spiritual experience in the same way the other speaker did. He cannot even come close to the ideal purity, guarded as it is by “the riffle by the sandbar.” And so he bemoans his lost youth and fragmented identity until he has lost even starlight “to prove identity” by holding up his hand “scarcely visible in that gloom.” Unlike the “divine osmosis” in which the speaker gives as much of his identity to the experience as he takes from it in “Delusion?—No!” the speaker here thinks that “Going. Just going.” would be enough. Isolation, separation, and fragmentation characterize the speaker’s failure to give way to the same transcendence as the other.
These analyses are by no means complete; they serve simply to allow for a few quick contrasts before a conclusion. First, the transcendental experience succeeded when the speaker, though high on a mountain, descended to earth and failed when the speaker began on earth and looked heavenward. Second, the first poem immerses the speaker in the natural world; “Covered Bridge” separates him from it. Third, “Delusion?—No!” shows direct interaction, participation even, in his own transcendence, where in the second there is no such action. Finally, the first poem ignores any personal history or memory the speaker may have collected in his life, the experience is one of those that can be described perfectly by the concept of “carpe diem,” a Latin phrase meaning “seize the day.” The second, weighted by memory and identity crisis, prohibits any such seizing.
What can we conclude? In answer to the first bit of my two-part question, why struggle, we can say that he is insecure because his life—all our lives—are struggles. Vacillation, uncertainty, doubt—these are mainstays of existence. Warren cannot embrace wholeheartedly the optimism found in “Delusion?—No!” all day, every day; more, humanity cannot possibly sustain such an experience. The profundity of that speaker’s faith is ephemeral, the power of his experience once in a lifetime. The evolution of Warren’s work, like the evolution of his life, reflects spiritual highs and lows, shows the actuality of fulfillment and the death of hope. In a larger context, Warren struggles because the struggle reflects reality, a conclusion which allows us to answer our second question: what does Warren’s struggle mean? It means that, because he is human, and however he celebrates humanity’s genius, its depravity, and its power of creation, he recognizes that the struggle often means more than any conclusion at which he arrives. It means that, because he is human, he knows that pure idealism cannot be maintained in context of the vagaries of life, that, because he is human, he knows that wholesale despondency, as in “Covered Bridge,” belittles the meaning of existence. It means that, because he is human, in the soul-wrenching inner conflict he finds the hope that, just once, he may transcend the mortal limit. And that would be enough.
Thank you.