Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry Review

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(More customer reviews)Warren's collection of essays is carefully (in every sense) written, wise, and exciting. She begins with a story about how, as a 12-year old child plunked down in a very strict French lycee, she felt rescued by French and Latin poetry. ("I found languages I thought "my own.") Later, she returns to English, that "hospitable, hodgepodge tongue" and includes readings of Hardy and Melville with essays on Virgil, Nerval, and Dante. Her insights could rescue students of literature who are tired of over-politicized critical theory. Warren, herself a poet, loves poetry and her voice is clear as a bell. "When we try to tell truth," she writes, "whoever we are. . . the best we can do, often, is sputter. ... Poetry heals nothing. But ... it can draw us into imaginative relation with truths beyond our own ..."

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A landmark work-part personal narrative,part critical exploration-by a distinguishedAmerican poet.
Fables of the Self traces ideas ofimagined selfhood through the lyric poetry ofclassical Greece and Rome, the modernist poetryof France, and modern and contemporary Englishand American lyrics. Rosanna Warren's workemerges from the tradition of British andAmerican poet-critics such as William Empson,Donald Davie, and Randall Jarrell. Her readingsof Sappho, Virgil, Baudelaire, Melville,Rimbaud, Mark Strand, and Louise Glück, amongothers, combine Helen Vendler's passionateattention to detail and something of HaroldBloom's panoramic view. Warren opposes both the literalizing, autobiographical approach to selfin so-called confessional poetry and the otherextreme of avant-garde erasures of self. Framing her critical studies between a memoir ofchildhood and a concluding journal entry, Warren has composed an occult autobiography, showing the imagination as a transfiguring and potentiallymoral force. 3 illustrations