Poems of Pure Imagination
Author | : Lesa Carnes Corrigan |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 171 |
Release | : 1999 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 9780807124086 |
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When Robert Penn Warren asks, "what / Is man but his passion?" he exemplifies the type of artist that the British Romantics celebrated. Poems of Pure Imagination traces the development of Warren's poetic craft as influenced by that movement's ideals. Accessible and insightful, it is a superlative guide to the work of one of America's most distinguished twentieth-century poets. Lesa Carnes Corrigan, an engaging and articulate scholar, lays out clearly the six-decades-long progression in Warren's Romantic vision -- a combination of Wordsworth's tempered aesthetics and Yeats's awareness of historical violence and modern estrangement. She demonstrates how closely the poet associated his most deeply felt intuitions about art and life with the over-arching philosophies of the Romantics. Warren's early poems, Corrigan shows, though highly imitative of Eliot, Pound, and the Metaphysical poets, nevertheless reveal the urgent questioning that energizes his later poetry and eventually becomes the hallmark of his best work. As early as 1924, Allen Tate recognized Warren's strenuous yearning to explore the truths that allow one to live meaningfully. In the 1940s, the poet's study of the English Romantics led to a "conversion" experience from which Eliotic dissatisfaction and despairing naturalism gave way to the qualified but definable joy in Promises and the hesitant hopefulness of Audubon: A Vision. Though the specter of the ruined garden never disappears from Warren's fictive or poetic world, all verse written after his ten-year drought embodies a Romantic prospect of renewal and capacity for ecstasy. From Warren's Fugitive days until the close of his career, the art of poetry remained thecentral focus of this eminent man of letters. Poems of Pure Imagination explores one of the most powerful inspirations for the complex, diverse work of America's first poet laureate and affords a comprehensive companion to his poems for both new and practiced readers.