In a 1969 interview with Richard Sale, Robert Penn Warren describes his intentions in writing Audubon: A Vision: "I just finished a long poem, Audubon: A Vision. It's about Audubon's life as a kind of focus for a lot of things about humans. I hope it's the way life is. It's about his heroic solution of his problems and the problems of being a man."(1) Warren elaborates on what attracted him to Audubon in a later interview with Peter Stitt, saying, "I began to see him as a certain kind of man, a man who has finally learned to accept his fate. The poem is about man and his fate - all along, Audubon resisted his fate and thought it was evil man is supposed to support his family, and so forth. But now he accepts his fate" (Talking p. 244).
Critics generally seem to agree that Audubon: A Vision is a watershed moment in Warren's career as a poet. Calvin Bedient goes so far as to say that Warren's "greatness as a writer ... began with Audubon: A Vision."(2) Much of the critical attention has focused on the poem's sources and influences, with a number of critics drawing parallels between the poem and Eudora Welty's portrayal of Audubon in her short story "A Still Moment."(3) But a number of critics have also observed the poem's mythological or archetypal qualities. In an early review, Louis Martz claims that in the poem Warren, "like Aeschylus or Ovid, is re-imagining a myth."(4) Hugh Ruppersburg concurs, stating that the poem "seeks to define Audubon's mythic significance in history and literature."(5) In any case, reviewers and critics alike see the work as the culmination and embodiment of all of Warren's major concerns and themes. ...
(Anthony Szczesiul)
Robert Penn Warren
