A Slightly Premature Picture of a Paper

With the upcoming presentation, I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the paper. I must confess that I started the summer with the supposition that I knew ahead of time what I would write on; now, having invested no small amount of time in reading, I am completely unsure. I resort here to outline form, as this idea (which is admittedly in its infancy) is vague at best and incomprehensible at worst. I include a few other points that I would like to make about structure and form of the paper to give a better sense of what I’m going for here. I feel it necessary to thank my elementary school teachers, without whom I would never have drawn the web that led to the reasoning I’ve outlined below.

1. Identity—I’ve recently begun to feel that Warren’s sought after spirituality may, in fact, be simply an extension of the self into nature and humanity. I have begun assembling a list of examples and contextualizing them to get a better feel on this; however, the major pattern that led me to this conclusion is Warren’ treatment of History, with a capital “h.”

2. History—Warren obviously deals in two kinds, his own personal history and the history of the nation (or world, as the case may be). National history deals in mythic figures and events, like the annus mirabilis of Brother to Dragons and the stiff, idealistic Founding Fathers in the poem of the same title. Personal history, as in Court Martial, is something more along the lines of a lyric retrieved from Warren’s memory. Personal history seems to me to be the more important of the two, as it is directly involved in shaping individual identity as separate from history’s communal humanity.

3. Memory—As the only primary source for most personal history, memory, for all its faults and failings, appears frequently in the poetry. This is where I am least sure, as Warren treats memory abstractly. It is obviously related to his notion of History and Time, but in what way I remain unsure. I can assert Warren’s mistrust of memory, since it cannot ever reveal truth. Yet, I can equally assert that Warren finds memory to be the fountainhead of Truth, the distorted version of reality that can be remembered.

4. Guilt—Another extension of memory (in addition to Truth), I think guilt may represent to Warren the human disappointment in being singularly incapable of being true to the nature of its ideals. He thinks it better to forget failings of that sort, as in Crime when he orders the reader to envy a murderer for his forgetting. I was reminded of Donne’s Holy Sonnet IX where Donne calls on God to forget rather than forgive his sins. Rather than asking God to forget, Warren begs the self to forget. Warren sees something cleansing (maybe even cathartic) about forgetting transgressions rather than tormenting himself with them.

5. Fear—This one is partly my own intuition, partly scrutiny of Warren’s tone. I feel one reason he could not fully give over to the Transcendental school of thought was his inability to give all of himself blindly to any ideology. He wanted so desperately to be original and to retain a sense of self as separate from the literary giants who came before him that he could not accept it wholesale. I think there’s also a fear that he could be wrong about everything he’s putting forth in his writing—he certainly doesn’t buy into the idea that he should believe in something for the simple act of belief, whether true or not—so he communicates some of that through his speakers’ failures.

6. 1st person—I’ve thought a great deal as well about how I plan to communicate my ideas. I feel that writing in the first person will remove some of the pretension from my essay, as I am, after all, nothing more than an undergraduate. I also think that I can lift the tone from a purely academic piece to one where I can communicate my own self-discovery from this summer, laying side by side what I have learned from Warren with what I want the academic community to observe in his poetry.

7. Evolution—All that being said, particularly the part about my own journey this summer, I think it’s important to note that Warren’s poetry and life are bound up in the same History and Time. The obvious changes in style, thematic elements, and ideals across his entire literary corpus show how he constantly remade himself, an important observation if I plan to focus on identity and the self in context of spirituality.

I understand that the above is ambitious and perhaps even overwhelming. I also understand that this is incredibly premature, because no matter how developed that idea may be I’ve still got several weeks to work everything out and read more critical interpretations of Warren. At the same time, this manner of looking at Warren struck me heavily while re-reading Promises, and I thought it important to record it lest I forget.