Robert Penn Warren and the poetics of purity - im

Robert Penn Warren's attacks on the notion of pure poetry began in his earliest critical writings but came into focus during the 1940s when his major critical essays were written and his own poetic practice was in transition. "Pure and Impure Poetry," first delivered as a lecture entitled "Pure Poetry and the Structure of Poems" in 1942 and first published in the Kenyon Review in Spring 1943, sets forth the issue that was clearly uppermost in Warren's thinking during the decade of the 1940s. Along with his equally influential essay "A Poem of Pure Imagination," on Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Pure and Impure Poetry" defines Warren's belief, persisting throughout his creative life, in the necessary tension between the ideal and the real, the abstract and the relative--his belief in the poetics of (im)purity.

On September 6, 1936, Warren wrote to Seward Collins, editor of the American Review:

A poet always has the problem of making a resolution of the forces of, as it were, two poles of force, which we might call the absolute and the relative. The demand of the absolute is that his works embody the primary aesthetic fact that makes us call all sorts of different kinds of work poetry; the demand of the relative is that the machinery for the embodiment of this effect, the central artistic fact, be conditioned by the flux of his immediate time and environment. (Clark 73)

This statement was Warren's "starting point" for "Pure and Impure Poetry," the essay of Warren's William Bedford Clark has designated "seminal" (73-74). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines "pure poetry" as a prescriptive rather than a descriptive term," applying to "any theory of poetry which seeks to isolate one or more properties as essential and proceeds to exclude material considered to be nonessential." The entry gives Warren credit, in "Pure and Impure Poetry," for "demonstrat[ing] that the doctrine of pure poetry is hardly tenable in practice" (682-83).

In the essay and elsewhere, however, Warren's sense of "pure" is ambiguous. Webster's International Dictionary lists fourteen meanings of "pure," with synonyms including "untainted," "perfect," or "chaste," and antonyms including "adulterated," "impure," "mixed," "soiled," and "corrupt." As applied to poetry, "pure" may indicate not only "perfection" but also "abstraction"; and to a "contributor to I'll Take My Stand," which Warren later preferred to "Agrarian," abstraction was the bete noire, the very antithesis of artistic creativity, and was associated with science, which John Crowe Ransom and his Agrarian cohort had made the antithesis to poetry.

Hatred of abstraction was part of Warren's legacy from Ransom and the Agrarians. In 1935, Warren had published "John Crowe Ransom, A Study in Irony," an essay that related Ransom's essay "God Without Thunder" to his mature poetry. In it, Warren writes that Ransom "has merely been concerned to defend man against a revolution which, by a dogma of unadulterated reason, has endangered his sensibility." Warren contends that in Ransom's mature poetry, the admixture of such "impurities" as wit and irony effects "harmonious adjustment, or rather unified function, of thought and feeling" (100). In the numerous reviews and several essays Warren wrote in the 1930s, Warren took Ransom's position against the "pure" and abstract idea as his own, continually inveighing against the threat that all forms of abstract thought posed for the artist.

This note is most consistently sounded in those essays Warren published in The American Review, a publication, under the editorship of Seward Collins, that focused on the Agrarian point of view. In "T.S. Stribling, A Paragraph in American Realism," Warren positions Stribling, author of such novels as Teeftallow, The Forge, and The Store, as a factor in the "decline, of what is called critical realism in fiction" (I). Whereas, according to Warren, "the naturalistic novelist took science as the source of his method and his philosophy," wherein motivation of human conduct was to be understood in terms of 'biology, bio-chemistry, and such," Stribling and other self-professed realists base their novels on a "pseudoscience, sociology," with claims of objective truth that are "never purely realistic." Warren declared that Stribling's novels were given over to the pseudoscientific "study" of aspects of society he disliked and wished to reform. The effect, says Warren, is that "the mayhem of abstraction rests lightly on the aesthetic consciousness" (ts. 2-3, Warren papers Beinecke); i.e., the propagandist cancels out the artist, for, as Warren concludes,

Propagandist art is necessarily incomplete [...] because the emotional reference, and in fact all reference except for matters of techniques, is external. Character appears as a long-hand for a social proposition. Event appears as a sort of allegory, a morality play of "social forces." The whole is a documentation in dramatic form of a social proposition which, presumably, the author wants to see realized in actuality.

(ts. 17, Warren papers, Beinecke)

For Warren, Stribling's novels rise above pure propaganda, however, when his aesthetic inclinations mitigate his sociological purposes to make his fiction less purely abstract and more concrete: "Propagandist art is never pure propaganda in the first place, for something other than social conscience forces the choice of the art form, but the purity in this respect depends on the degree in which the author desires to see the practical triumph of his critical ideas and obtrudes that desire" (ts. 17, Warren papers, Beinecke). In other words, whenever Stribling's artistic inclinations overcome the "purity" of his sociological thesis, they rise from pure propaganda to something resembling art-but not often enough, in Warren's opinion. What troubled Warren most, however, was that Stribling's abstract, untested thesis was that the rural South was crude, illiterate, and in need of reform that could only come through the missionary efforts of Northern industrialization, and so Warren's essay was directed, as were all Agrarian writings, toward a defense of the Southern agrarian way of life.

Increasingly, however, Warren was in the process of refining his own beliefs about the essential impurity of art. In the February 1937 issue of The American Review, Warren published, with Cleanth Brooks, an essay entitled "The Reading of Modern Poetry" that proposed to explore "the relation of modern poetry to its audience-if an audience exists" (435). As they explore a list of objections frequently raised against modern poetry, the authors focus, not on sociological but on aesthetic notions of literary purity. One target, this time, is Max Eastman, author of a book entitled The Literary Mind, who, say the authors, "sees all past literature, except for a few purple passages, which he calls 'pure poetry,' as irretrievably damned by the presence of unscientific statements and assumptions foisted off on the reader as 'truths'" (436). Brooks and Warren describe Eastman's book as a somewhat impressionistic history of literature," wherein he "is looking for a poetry without statement, a poetry that gives the moment of pure realization" (437, emphasis added). When Eastman describes a passage from T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" ("If the lost word is lost [...]") as "an oily puddle of emotional noises," the authors counter that Eastman has actually foundered on "the presence of logic, rather than its absence," and failed to recognize that Eliot's "passage is built about a set of opposites" (445). With Brooks, Warren had by this time become convinced that opposite elements like poetic and unpoetic diction, or logical and emotional statement, coexist in the best poetry of all ages, from Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Eliot. Brooks and Warren conclude that "the unity which the poet has attempted to attain is not an easily won unity, but one wrested from recalcitrant and discordant materials. Consequently such a poetry has been characterized by ironical devices, wrenched rhythms, abrupt transitions, apparent discords, nondecorative materials, deficiency of statement, and when successful has attained its unity only in terms of a total intention" (448). Successful poetry, thus characterized as impure poetry, is, say the authors, "not an easy poetry, but it can claim to take its charter from Coleridge himself, who saw the imagination at work 'in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities'" (448-49). The stage was set, in Warren's critical thinking, for "Pure and Impure Poetry" and "A Poem of Pure Imagination."

The decade of the 1940s was a complicated one in Warren's personal and creative life. Warren's first volume of poetry, Thirty-Six Poems, had been published in 1936; and in 1942, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme was released by New Directions. This latter collection included some of Warren's most imaginative and enduring poems: "Monologue at Midnight," "Picnic Remembered," "Love's Parable," "Crime," "Terror," "Question and Answer," "Revelation," "End of Season,' "Original Sin," and "Bearded Oaks." These eleven poems, which had appeared first in magazines between 1936 and 1942, were closely followed, in 1943, by "Mexico is a Foreign Country: Four [Five] Studies in Naturalism." "The Ballad of Billy Potts," in 1944, proved to be the last poem published before Warren's much-discussed poetic drought between 1944 and 1954. All, in one way or another, concern humankind's constant reenactment of the fall from innocence to guilt, from purity to impurity. In "Picnic Remembered," the speaker recollects how "That day, so in nocent appeared/ The leaf, the hill, the sky, to us,/ Their structures so harmonious/ And Pure [...]" until "darkness on the landscape grew/ As in our bosoms darkness, too;/ And that was what we took away" (Collected Poems 66-67, hereafter CP). In "Original Sin: A Short Story," the relentless but familiar figure has pursued the speaker "from Omaha to Harvard Yard," and for all his efforts to discover "a new innocence for us to be stayed by," still hangs around "in the crepuscular clatter of always, always, or perhaps" (69). The boy in "Revelation," "Because he had spoken harshly to his mother," wanders through an overly brilliant landscape of "hairy, fat-petaled" flowers and "peacock scream[s]," to learn that "in separateness only does love know definition" (71). The lovers of "Bearded Oaks," in their mossy afterglow, find that "all that light once gave/ The graduate dark should now revoke" (66). In his fated and fateful homecoming, Billie Potts discovers that "the beginning is death and the end may be life,/ For the beginning was definition and the end may be definition,/ And our innocence needs, perhaps, new definition." Even in a "foreign country" like Mexico, there is no new Eden, for the speaker and "the mango on the mango tree [...] share our guilt in decent secrecy" (98). Unlike many of Warren's earlier poems, such as "The Face in the Crowd," that convey a haunted, depressing image of their speakers' inner landscapes, these poems dramatize a creative and energizing debate between darkness and light, guilt and innocence, purity and impurity; for Warren was in the act of defining the necessary tension that would lie at the basis of all his future poetry.

But first Warren had to write his best critical essays. To the many explanations of Warren's failure, for ten years, to finish a poem, one may add that after his apprenticeship in the company of Ransom and Tate and his eight years in Baton Rouge with Cleanth Brooks, the critical calling was claiming more and more of Warren's attention. Criticism, particularly the "New Criticism," was in. In his new job at the University of Minnesota, Warren was often the unwilling spokesperson for this new and exciting method of attacking a poem, although he would characteristically give most of the credit to Ransom or Brooks. As a consequence of spending most of his time on criticism and fiction, Warren completed only one poem there, one he described in a 1942 letter to Cleanth Brooks as "a long poem, which is now drawing toward a close. It is about the Billie Potts story--you may remember it, the man who killed his son with the tomahawk? It is a sort of ballad with inset stuff in other styles" (Grimshaw 76). "The Ballad of Billie Potts" was, in essence, an "impure" poem that mixes narration, in the style of a medieval ballad with the poet's commentary on the ironic twists of fate. In the subsequent years when Warren was unable to finish a poem, his criticism, focused on the poetics of purity versus impurity, perhaps pointed the way out of his own creative impasse.

I. "Pure and Impure Poetry"

The first important essay of Warren's decade of criticism was "Pure and Impure Poetry," first delivered at Princeton, as one of the Mesures series of lectures, at the invitation of Allen Tate, who was on the faculty at the time. Still at LSU, on March 23, 1942, he wrote to Tate,

just a note in answer to your request for a title. Actually, I am floundering around a good deal about the subject.[...] I have also been thinking some about the matter you proposed--the dramatic context business. But I don't seem to get far with it. So could you be satisfied for the moment with something pretty vague? Some title which would give me leeway? The questions I've mentioned above would hinge on imagery for the most part. How about this: "Imagery and Structure." Almost anything could happen to that, (Clark 356)

The speech, entitled "Pure Poetry and the Structure of Poems," was delivered in the spring 1942. By the next Fall, Warren had left LSU for Minnesota, and the essay, with its new title, was published in the Spring 1943 issue of The Kenyon Review. In its final form, "Pure and Impure Poetry" was, if not what James Justus has called the only Warren essay worthy of the canon (119), surely his most original and theoretical in more than fifteen years of writing literary criticism.

Because a close reading of "Pure and Impure Poetry" is far beyond the scope of this discussion, I will instead focus on Warren's struggle, in this essay on struggle, to clarify his convictions about the nature of poetry as a synthesis of pure and impure elements. It begins with a curiously arresting metaphor that compares the criticism of poetry to an epic duel between a hero, the critic, and a monster, the poem:

For the poem is like the monstrous Orillo in Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato. When the sword lops off any member of the monster, that member is immediately rejoined to the body, and the monster is even more formidable. But the poem is even more formidable than the monster.[...] The critic who vaingloriously trusts his method to account for the poem, to exhaust the poem, is trying to emulate this dexterity: he thinks that he, too, can win by throwing the lopped-off arms in the river. But he is doomed to failure. Neither fire nor water will suffice to prevent the rejoining of the mutilated members to the monstrous torso. (3-4)

The critic's strategies--psychological, moralistic, formalistic, or historical--are weapons for attacking the text; but the truly great poem, in its powerful synthesis of elements, overcomes any single critical theory and remains intact despite them all. At the time when Warren wrote the essay, poetry, especially modern poetry, and criticism, especially the New Criticism, were engaged in a frustrating battle that so resembled the world war then in progress that Warren concluded an early version of the essay by remarking that "perhaps we shall discover, after all, that the 'irresponsibles' helped us to win a war, and that the Nazi theory of pure poetry helped them to lose it" (ts. 26, "Pure Poetry and the Structure of Poems," Warren Collection, UK-Lexington). The so-called "irresponsibles" were those difficult "poets of the 1920s," presumably Eliot and Pound, who, instead of stating what they meant plainly and simply, made their poetry opaque with irony and obscure allusions. Although Warren would often dare t o comment on the problematic relationship between politics and poetry, he wisely eliminated this political remark from his essay and contented himself with defending the poet's right to include complexities that invite critics and enlightened readers to participate with the poet in the act of creation. The strong poem could survive the struggle, and the reader would thereby be a stronger reader.

Early in the essay, Warren teases the reader with a paradox:

Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least most of them do not want to be too pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements of the poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end. Are we then to conclude that neutral or recalcitrant elements are simply an index to human frailty, and that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems, which would, then, be perfectly pure? No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would appear necessary. [...] They mar themselves with cacophonies, jagged rhythms, ugly words and ugly thoughts, colloquialisms, cliches, clevernesses, irony, realism-all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection. (4-5)

Warren's examples are chosen from poets-Dante, Shakespeare, an anonymous medieval balladeer, and Ransom-whose poetry functions through the blending of discordant elements. Referring to Romeo and Juliet, Warren declares that when Juliet enjoins Romeo to "Swear not by the moon," she does so because "the lady distrusts 'pure' poems, nature spiritualized into forgetfulness.[...] She injects the impurity of an intellectual style into the lover's pure poem" (7). Warren asks, rhetorically, whether, "if the celebrated poetry of this scene, which as poetry is pure, exists despite the impurities of the total composition," and whether, if these "impurities were eliminated, "the effect would be more purely poetic." For Warren, the impure elements provide a context necessary for comprehending the pure; and "the poetry arises from a recalcitrant and contradictory context, and finally involves that context" (7). Though the simple medieval lyric "Western Wind" would seem to be pure poetry because of its "apparent innocence a nd simple lyric cry," its speaker's pleas, for the "small rain" and for the physical presence of his beloved, are both "romantic and general" and "realistic and specific" (8-9). The resulting tension between purity and impurity adds substance to the poem. Ransom's "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" threatens to contain pure ("savage") irony, but that purity is "modified" and "modulated" by contrasting, gentler effects. With these clear examples of "impure" poetry, Warren contrasts passages from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Princess" and Walter Savage Landor's "Rose Alymer," poems celebrated for their purely poetic effects. In these examples, although the poets have striven to express "the purity of the moment"/the "purity of effect," where poetry is "as pure as possible," impure elements intrude to "mar the purity of the moment" (5-6). In passages depicting idealized love, purity is attributed to that which is uncorrupted because it is otherworldly, but, in every case, the perfect moment is tainted by sugg estions of sexuality or separation. In the final analysis, it becomes obvious that the notion of purity is meaningless without its opposite, impurity, and that the "Romantic and general," are impossible to grasp without the "realistic and specific" (9). Poems can therefore succeed only when their dissonant elements achieve fusion in context.

Midway through "Pure and Impure Poetry," Warren comes to the real point of his argument: the refutation of any and all theories of pure poetry. After admitting that he has "used the words 'pure' and 'impure' often and rather loosely," he offers a more precise definition of terms: "the pure poem tries to be pure by excluding, more or less rigidly, certain elements which might qualify or contradict its original impulse. In other words, the pure poems want to be, and desperately, all of a piece. [...T]here is not one doctrine of 'pure poetry'--but many" (15). Warren then surveys in historical sequence the principal but untenable notions of pure poetry. Beginning with Sir Philip Sidney's criticism of tragicomedy, Ben Jonson's attack on Donne's irregular accents, and Dryden's protest against "metaphysical perplexities in amorous poems" (16), Warren moves to some more "modern doctrine[s] of pure poetry from Poe, Shelley, the Symbolists, Abbe Bremond, Pater, George Moore and the Imagists," to foreground their essent ial contradictions. Whereas Poe wanted poetry to consist entirely of "an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure" and inveighed against allowing "Truth" and "Passions" (i.e., ideas and moral sentiments) into poems, Shelley "has an enormous appetite for 'Truth' and the 'Passions," which are, except for purposes of contrast, excluded by Poe." George Moore wanted a poem to be "something which the poet creates outside his own personality," but he, "like the imagists, would exclude ideas" (18).

For contemporary examples, Warren reaches back into "The Reading of Modern Poetry," to repeat his attack on Max Eastman and Frederick Pottle. Eastman's aestheticist doctrine insists that "pure poetry is the pure effect to heighten consciousness," and that ideas should, if possible, be excluded from poetry. As Warren irreverently summarizes:

Poe would kick out the ideas because the ideas hurt the poem, and Mr. Eastman would kick out the ideas because the poetry hurts the ideas. Only the scientist, he tells us, is entitled to have ideas on any subject. [...] Literary truth, he says, is "truth" which "is uncertain or comparatively unimportant." [...Thus, according to Eastman] pure poetry is the pure effort to heighten consciousness, but the consciousness which is heightened must not have any connection with ideas, must involve no attitude toward any ideas. (18)

Turning his attention to Pottle, whom he respected and admired, Warren locates, in Pottle's recent book The Idiom of Poetry, a doctrine of pure poetry implying that "the effect would be more powerful if we could somehow manage to feel the images fully and accurately without the effect diluted by any words put in to give us a 'meaning'-that is, if we could expel all talk about the imaginative realization and have the pure realization itself' (18) Concerned with the question of "how pure poetry needs to be," Pottle would admit certain "innocent" impure elements, which he calls "prose," if the element, be it background or narrative, in Pottle's words, "serves a structural purpose. Prose in a poem seems offensive to me when [...] the prosaisms are sharp, obvious, individual, and ranked coordinately with the images" (The Idiom of Poetry, qtd. in "Pure and Impure Poetry" 19). Calling this distinction "mechanical," Warren designates Pottle as "an exponent of pure poetry who locates the poetry simply in the images, t he nodes of 'pure realization"' and would exclude "definition of situation, movement of narrative, logical transition, factual description, generalization" (20). Warren thanks Pottle, however, for having helped refine his notion of pure poetry as "an essence that is to be located at some particular place in the poem, or in some particular element" and the "exponent of pure poetry [as one who] persuades himself that he has determined the particular something in which the poetry inheres, and then proceeds to decree that poems shall be composed, as nearly as possible, of that element and of nothing else" (20-21). In light of this rather sharp attack, it is interesting that Warren would later seek Pottle's opinion of "A Poem of Pure Imagination" and receive an appraisal that was essentially positive.

After listing those elements that various poetic purists would omit, Warren observes the obvious, that "if all of these items were excluded, we might not have any poem at all," and that, for his part, "nothing that is available in human experience is to be legislated out of poetry" (24). Adding that poems must involve "resistances at various levels," Warren concludes that "a poem, to be good, must earn itself. It is motion toward a point of rest, but if it is not a resisted motion, it is a motion of no consequence" (24). Foreshadowing his next important essay, "A Poem of Pure Imagination," Warren observes that "a good poem involves the participation of the reader; it must, as Coleridge puts it, make the reader into 'an active creative being"' (25).

Overall, Warren's exploration of pure and impure poetry is an attack on any and all arrogant efforts to define "pure poetry" by exclusion. The notion of "Poetry," with a capital "P," is one of those idealized abstractions that cannot live in the real world. Ridiculing his transcendental nemesis, Warren would later write that "At 38,000 feet Emerson is dead right"-but not at ground zero. In Warren's naturalistic vision, synthesis and resulting wisdom, in and out of poetry and its criticism, must involve inclusion of unsavory elements. His advice to the critic out to conquer the aforementioned poetic monster Orillo, "you must eat it, bones, blood, skin, pelt, and gristle" (4), foreshadows his prescription for dealing with grief in a later poem, "A Tale of Time": "You must eat the dead./You must eat them completely, bone, blood, flesh, gristle, even/Such hair as can be forced" (CP 190).

II. "A Poem of Pure Imagination"

After 1942 and Warren's exit from Baton Rouge, separation from Cleanth Brooks seemed paradoxically to stimulate Warren's output of literary criticism. With Warren at the University of Minnesota and Brooks still at LSU, the two friends and collaborators began to exchange ideas for and drafts of critical essays, and requests of each for evaluation and advice always provoked prompt and conscientious responses. In the same December 6, 1943, letter in which Warren praised Brooks's essay "The Naked Babe and Cloak of Manhood," on clothes imagery in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Warren floated an idea of his own:

On the side, I've worked out a new reading of the Ancient Mariner which I hope to commit to paper before too long. Boy, that thing is built like the Swiss watch, I assure you. I've been reading a lot of criticism on it, and the fashionable view (Griggs, for example) that it is a pleasant journey into a realm of imagination which mean[s] nothing makes me want to call for the old granite slop jar. And on the other hand, there are the allegory boys. But more of this later.

(Grimshaw 81)

Not only was Warren engaged in his most carefully researched critical project since his Marston thesis, but he was also "working on a new novel," continuing to revise and promote the Brooks and Warren literary textbooks, and composing review essays for various periodicals. In his next letter to Brooks, Warren, after complimenting Brooks on the finished version of the Macbeth essay, reported that he had "a review of Welty to do," as well as "an article on Faulkner, [...] and the novel. In that order."

Warren added that he had "been trying to define Welty's basic theme" but was still "fumbling" with words like "alienation" or "cut-off' to describe her eclectic but somehow similar protagonists (Grimshaw 82). The essay entitled "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," undoubtedly helped to solidify Warren's position that "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is in a very serious sense a "poem of pure imagination." Warren's critics have only recently begun to appreciate fully the role "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty," first published in 1944, played in his writing of "A Poem of Pure Imagination," first published in 1945, and, in turn, how much his writing of that essay shaped his future poetry, from Audubon, A Vision onward. Both Lesa Carnes Corrigan, in her book Poems of Pure Imagination: Robert Penn Warren and the Romantic Tradition, and John Van Dyke, in Saying the Unsayable: Language and the Tension of the World in the Late Poetry of Robert Penn Warren, emphasize the centrality of "'A Poem of Pure Imagi nation" to Warren's poetic renaissance in the 1950s in general and to his composition of Audubon, A Vision, in particular. As Corrigan puts it, "Warren focuses on the theme of isolation, a subject he compares to the primary motif of Rime of the Ancient Mariner: 'the story of a man who, having committed a crime, must try to reestablish his connection with humanity"'(119, quoting Warren, "A Poem of Pure Imagination").

Among the Beinecke's extensive archive of Warren papers, there is an entire box devoted to Warren's essay on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," from preliminary notes, to drafts, to the finished essay as published in a charming book along with Coleridge's poem and line drawings by Alexander Calder. Taken together, these papers speak to more than one aspect of Warren's store of knowledge and intellectual resources. More than Ransom or Brooks, Warren reveals that he was deeply learned in and temperamentally attuned to the English Romantic poets and that he took their aesthetic theories seriously. Contrary to the popular image of Warren the New Critic, he was clearly willing to read and consider every piece of historical and biographical scholarship available on "The Rime" before formulating his own theories. One of the folders labeled "Sources" even contains an essay by a student, one Esther Schular, is such a greatly simplified version of Warren's essay that one wonders which came first and what role it played in Warren's critical process. Folders of "notes" contain page after page of unlined paper, on which, in Warren's unmistakable handwriting, his irreverent wit crackles along with the now-yellowed pages. Warren quotes and comments on sources ranging from Greek philosophers Plato and Plotinus to English Romantic poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne and to every scholar who ever wrote about the poem. Those notes concerning what Coleridge meant by the "imagination" and how he used the term "moral" outnumber all other topics and draw extensively from Coleridge's prose writings as well as his poetry. Warren's preparation for the essay also included investigating the views of John Livingston Lowes, for whom "pure imagination" meant being devoid of meaning; Newton P. Stallneckt, who argued that the imaginative content of the poem, including the narrative, can be separated from Coleridge's moral philosophy as contained in his later writings such as the Statesman papers and The Destiny of Nat ions; and R. C. Bald, who used Coleridge's notebooks to argue that the poem may be attributed to a combination of Coleridge's opium trips and his travel observations (Warren papers).

What seems to have provoked Warren to undertake this project in the first place, however, was once again his aversion to the poetics of purity. For, like all who had previously written on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Warren had to commence not with the poem but with an opaque comment its author made long after he wrote it. In Table Talk, Coleridge's collection of random experiences and reactions, he reported an incident involving a Presbyterian lady named Mrs. Barbauld who objected to the poem partly because, in her opinion, it had no moral. Coleridge replied that "as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination" (qtd. in "A Poem of Pure Imagination" [hereafter "Pure"]). After composing his immortal poem in about 1797, Coleridge had been unable to let it alone but had, in effect, de constructed it, in 1817, by adding explanatory glosses, and again, in 1830, as a "weak and lisping old man" (Warren, "Pure" 335) by his unfortunate reply to the Presbyterian lady. Unlike the majority of Coleridge's scholars and critics, Warren was unwilling to accept the notion that the poet's remark should be taken as a devaluation of the poem. Taking seriously the phrase "pure imagination," Warren set out to prove that Coleridge's poem was, as he remarked to Brooks, "built like the Swiss watch," that is to say, a thematically complex and artistically satisfying unity.

Warren begins his essay with a chivalrous bow to Mrs. Barbauld. Far from "sneering" at her pietistic objection, Warren professes to be "inclined to sympathize with the lady's desire that poetry have some significant relationship to the world, some meaning" (336). In fact, he greatly prefers her attitude to that of certain "hyper-aesthetical and super-finicking criticism," that "does not, to my knowledge, occur in the purlieus of bohemianism and in the shimmering pages of the fin de siecle, but rather in the very citadels of academic respectability, and in the works of some of our most eminent and sober students of Coleridge." Accusing these academic critics of equating "pure imagination" with a pleasant "journey into the realm of the supernatural," Warren asserts that "if the passage affirms anything, it affirms that Coleridge intended the poem to have a 'moral sentiment,' but felt that he had been a trifle unsubtle in fulfilling his intention" (336-37). Warren's primary targets are John Livingston Lowes, who se 1927 book The Road to Xanadu was the most respected study of the poem in Warren's day, and Earl Leslie Griggs, whose more recent book, The Best of Coleridge, had provoked Warren's nauseated request for the slop jar. Like Poe and Eastman, these Coleridge scholars made themselves appear ridiculously simplistic to Warren by espousing exclusionary theories of poetry. Warren attributes Griggs's remark to

some theory of "pure poetry"-some notion that a poem should not "mean" but "be," and that the "be-ing" of a poem does not "mean." The actual statement he makes, however, does not concern his own, but Coleridge's theory of poetry: Coleridge, he says, had no "moral intention" and the poem has no theme. It may be that Griggs has stated his views a little unclearly and holds that special variant of the general theory of pure poetry which says that poetry (which is pure realization--however that may be interpreted) does make comments on life but that the truths it offers us are not worth listening to. But even that is a very different thing from asserting that a poet, Coleridge in this case, is not even undertaking to deliver an utterance about life. His theme may be a statement of error but it is a statement. My first purpose in this essay is to establish that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner does embody a statement, and to define the nature of that statement, the theme, as nearly as I can. (337-38)

By employing the phrase "pure realization," Warren equates Griggs with Max Eastman, whom be and Brooks had attacked, along with Frederick Pottle, in "The Reading of Modern Poetry." Lowes, whom Warren took more seriously, is placed in the company of Swinburne, DeQuincey, and Lamb, who dismissed Coleridge, in his own century, as a drug-muddled dreamer. To these readers of Coleridge, in Warren's words, the poem is an illusion for the sake of illusion [... and] nothing more than a pleasant but meaningless dream" (338).

It was inconceivable to Warren that Coleridge could on this occasion use the word "imagination" in the sense of "fantasy," when he had so clearly separated the two terms in his major critical text the Biographic Literaria. In Warren's opinion, Lowes's book should have been subtitled not Coleridge and the Imagination but Coleridge and the Fancy since he "explicitly repudiates Coleridge's distinct separation of the two terms" (400 n.2). In the remainder of the essay, Warren sets out to prove not only that the poem has a moral theme, which he calls the "one life" or "sacramental" theme, but also that "the phrase 'pure imagination' as applied to The Ancient Mariner gives us little excuse to read the poem as an agreeable but scarcely meaningful effusion" (346). Warren finds the primary moral theme, of "crime and punishment and reconciliation" (348) relatively easy to defend, although Lowes and others had dismissed the notion of the mariner's lifelong penance for slaying one of God's innocent creatures, the albatro ss, as absurdly out of proportion to his offense. A much more difficult task for Warren is to reconcile Coleridge's coupling of the adjective "pure" with "imagination" to create what Warren considered an oxymoron. Warren argues that Coleridge's phrase "pure imagination" must be viewed in light of the poet's very serious writings on the creative imagination, wherein, to Warren, the phrase "was [...1 freighted with a burden of speculation and technical meaning." Coleridge's theory of the imagination, upon which his art-philosophy hinges, "was primarily the vindication of a particular attitude to life and reality"(341). As such, Coleridge's sense of "imagination" was far too complex and multifaceted to be considered "pure" if the adjective pejoratively signifies "only" or "mere."

Warren sets out to "redeem works of pure imagination from the charge, amiable or otherwise, of being in themselves meaningless and nothing but refined and ingenious toys for an idle hour" (342). His argument is based on the famous passage in the Biographia wherein Coleridge distinguishes between the primary and secondary imagination. Whereas the primary imagination is "the living power and prime agent of all human perception" and "a repetition of the finite mind of the eternal act of creation," the secondary imagination is the agent that "'dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate"' ("Pure" 342, quoting Coleridge). As Warren paraphrases, primary imagination "produces the world of the senses," while the secondary imagination, in conjunction with "the conscious will [...] operates as a function of that freedom which is the essential attribute of spirit" (343). Warren agrees with Coleridge that creativity, as in the composition of poetry, is a function of the secondary imagination. The poet may not, h owever, be fully aware of "the particular plan or intention of a particular poem"; thus its composition may be the result of subconscious activity, i.e., action by the primary imagination. For Coleridge, as Warren reads him, human creativity, "both in terms of the primary and in terms of the secondary imagination, is an analogue of Divine creation" (345). Thus taken, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is not on][y a fable illustrating the "sacramental vision" of One Life, Warren's primary theme but is also a paradigm of the workings of the secondary imagination. The shooting of the albatross is not merely a transgression against God and nature but also "a crime against the imagination" (370). Warren concludes his argument by stating that "the truth is implicit in the poetic act as such, that the moral concern and the aesthetic. concern are aspects of the same activity, the creative activity, and that his activity is expressive of the whole mind," and that "The Ancient Mariner is, first, written out of this ge neral belief, and, second, written about this general belief" (382).

To establish these ambitious claims for Coleridge's poem, Warren constructs a symbolic reading of the poem that comes dangerously close to the sort of allegorizing he had strenuously attacked in some precursor critics. Warren assigns moral equivalences to images of sunlight (evil), moonlight (good), and wind (creative imagination) on the grounds that, for Coleridge, a poem of "pure imagination" would almost by definition employ symbolism rather than allegory, since "a symbol [...1 always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living party in that unity of which it is the representative" (403, quoting Coleridge's Statesman's Manual 437). For Coleridge, as Warren interprets him, "allegory, is [...] the product of the understanding, symbol of the imagination" (351). Therefore, as John Van Dyke pointed out in his lecture, "Robert Penn Warren and the Question of Symbolism," "Warren's reading of The Ancient Mariner is finally about poetry and the poet," and his argument is primarily about "the way in which the poet might speak in the act of poetic creation" (7). Through symbols such as the sun, moon, and wind, Warren argues, Coleridge is able to fuse his moral and aesthetic themes. For the New Critic, thematic unity was the primary criterion for artistic excellence (two themes therefore had to achieve fusion), and Coleridge was alone among the high Romantics in articulating a tenable doctrine of what Warren calls "internal consistency." As Warren argues late in the essay, "If the elements of a poem operate together toward one end, we are entitled to interpret the poem according to that end" (397).

Warren's essay on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" soon became the focus of considerable attention, both positive and negative. The most vigorous opposition came years later, however, from William Empson. Moreover, Empson's article, "The Ancient Mariner: an Answer to Warren," lay unpublished among his papers until 1993, when it finally appeared in the Kenyon Review. John Haffenden, who edited the paper, writes that Empson, who had studied "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for more than forty years, had failed to acknowledge Warren's "mighty revisionist essay on the poet and the poem" until he was challenged, by a questioner at one of his lectures, to dispute Warren's symbolic reading of it. Empson, who was averse to all symbolic interpretations, branding them both "determinedly anti-intellectual" and "irrational" (155), claimed that Warren's "pietistic" interpretation of the "symbolism of the sun and the moon," though undertaken to "express the doctrines about Nature and Imagination," violated Coleridge's dr amatic and poetic structure. Empson charged Warren with arguing "from a juxtaposition forward instead of backward" that all the disastrous events occur in full sunlight; moreover, Empson maintained that Warren was unjustified in basing his moon symbolism on the allegedly redemptive water-snake scene that is, according to Empson, "the only case in the poem where moonlight presides over a wholly good event" (162). Although Empson's essay takes a decidedly sarcastic tone toward much of Warren's reading of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," he takes no serious issue with Warren's basic assumptions about the essential seriousness of the poem. In fact, as editor Haffenden remarks, Empson's essay is "a tremendous compliment to Robert Penn Warren" (155). Empson joins Warren in rejecting the purists' trivialization of "Rime," agreeing that what Warren designated as "primary" and "secondary" themes "were certainly in the mind of the poet while composing the first draft" of the poem as well as "when preparing the all-but fi nal text (published in 1817)" (156). Empson correctly attributes Warren's "pietistic" reading of the poem to Coleridge's 1817 glosses that, Empson argues, are "misleading," result in "the corruption of the poem," and "need to be removed" (157). It is indeed likely that Coleridge's "impure" mixing of prose gloss with poetic ballad actually made the 1817 version of the poem more interesting to Warren and influenced his use of similar strategies in "The Ballad of Billie Potts" and Brother to Dragons.

After his initial reading of the manuscript, Brooks wrote, on June 5, 1945, "I have gone over the A.M. paper several times and with a growing admiration. It is easily the finest thing that has ever been done on that poem--and probably the only essay on it that makes entire sense." Brooks, as usual, qualified his high praise with "a few quite trivial comments on the margins." He expressed some "regret [...] that you did not bring in the Industrial Revolution as you did once in conversation with me" even though to do so "might put off the reader by making him think that your argument was to prove Coleridge an Agrarian" (Grimshaw 93). Both Brooks and Warren would be quite willing to call Coleridge an "Agrarian" in so far as his poem is a defense of the sanctity of nature against human desecration and a covert attack on the advent of modern technology. For neither Brooks nor Warren could the poem, in Coleridge's sense of the term, be called a poem of meaningless fantasy.

After publishing his first version of the essay, Warren sought the opinion of one of the purists whom he and Brooks had attacked in "The Reading of Modern Poetry." In his seven-page response, Frederick Pottle stated that he had "learned a good deal" from Warren's essay and, indeed, accepted his "main conclusions" (Warren papers Beinecke 6). He nonetheless advised Warren to "shorten and simplify the essay" and to "omit the dubious parts of the exegesis or put them in notes." He further recommended that Warren "avoid gratuitous comment or explications" and that the 168 notes would have to be "radically reduced" (7). Warren did, in fact reduce the number of notes to 31, mainly by combining and simplifying them.

In the end, although Warren accomplishes his purpose, to dignify Coleridge's poem and refute those critics who used the phrase "pure imagination" to trivialize it, he may have fallen into the same trap as those same critics by taking too seriously a remark made by an aging and loquacious poet. In any event, Warren's ambitious "experiment in reading," as he subtitled his essay, was not his last word on the poetics of (im)purity. The preoccupation continued, not only in his criticism but, indirectly, in his fiction and poetry. As John Van Dyke observes, concerning Warren's introduction to the poetry of Herman Melville, "Warren observes "the same sense of polarity in Melville's work as he does in that of Coleridge" ("Warren and Symbolism" 11). Moreover, the novels Warren composed during the 1940s--At Heaven's Gate, All the King's Men, and World Enough and Time--all oppose holistic views of reality to the pure principle of "the will in abstraction." Warren had attributed the same spiritual sin, in "A Poem of Pure Imagination," to the mariner and his shipmates as well as to all "the masters of mischief, the liberticides, the mighty hunters of mankind, from Nimrod to Bonaparte" ("Pure" 360).

Warren in fact remained, throughout his creative life, an adversary of all untenable notions of pure poetry, pure style, and pure criticism--of all schismatic interpretations of literature that would segregate the aesthetic from the rational. As he proclaims at the very end of "A Poem of Pure Imagination," "If poetry does anything for us, it reconciles, by its symbolical reading of experience, the self-divisive internecine malices which arise at the superficial level on which we conduct most of our living. And The Ancient Mariner is a poem on this subject" (399). Warren would, until the end of his long writing career, remain the poet of the pure ideal in tension with the "ruck of the world's wind." In "The Child Next Door," from Warren's 1954-56 volume Promises, the sister, "beautiful like a saint/ Sits with the monster other all day" (CP 104). In "Myth on Mediterranean Beach," from Incarnations, the modern eminence of Aphrodite is an "old hunchback in bikini" (CP 228). In "Audubon: A Vision," the face of the hanged woman is suddenly "beautiful as stone" (CP 259). And in Warren's "Vita Nuova," "True Love," from his last volume Altitudes and Extensions, apprehension of ideal beauty coexists with carnal appetite:

[...]There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart. It
Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It
Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.

(CP 558)

Works Cited

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. "The Reading of Modern Poetry." The American Review 8 (February 1937): 435-49.

Clark, William Bedford. Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren. Vol. 2. The Southern Review Years, 1935-1942. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001.

Corrigan, Lesa Games. Poems of Pure Imagination: Robert Penn Warren and the Romantic Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999.

Empson. William. "The Ancient Mariner: An Answer to Robert Penn Warren." Ed. John Haffenden. The Kenyon Review ns 15 (Winter 1993): 155-77.

Grimshaw, James A. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998.

Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

Pottle, Frederick. Letter to Robert Penn Warren. June 19, 1945, New Haven, CT. The Robert Penn Warren papers. YCAL 51, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Preminger, Alex, Frank J. Warnke, and 0. B. Hardison Jr., eds. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1965.

Van Dyke, John. "Robert Penn Warren and the Question of Symbolism." Robert Penn Warren Session, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Atlanta, Georgia, 15 Nov. 1997.

_____. Saying the Unsayable: Language and the Tension of the World in the Late Poetry of Robert Penn Warren. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, in press.

Warren, Robert Penn. The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Ed. John Burt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998.

_____. "John Crowe Ransom, A Study in Irony." Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (1935): 93-112.

_____. "Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty." Robert Penn Warren: Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1958. 156-69.

_____. New and Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1989.

_____. "A Poem of Pure Imagination." New and Selected Essays 335-423.

_____. "Pure Poetry and the Structure of Poems." ts. The Robert Penn Warren Collection. University of Kentucky, Lexington.

_____. "Pure and Impure Poetry." New and Selected Essays 3-28.

_____."T. S. Stribling: A Paragraph in American Realism." ts., the Robert Penn Warren papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Charlotte H. Beck (CANDRBECK@prodigy.net), professor emerita at Maryville College, Tennessee, has published articles on Randall Jarrell, Cleanth Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Penn Warren. Former president of the Robert Penn Warren Circle, she guest-edited the special issue of The Mississippi Quarterly on Warren (47.4, Fall 1994-1995). Her most recent book is The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History (Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

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