Audubon: A Vision (1969). Content and Description

A creative reimagining of the painter and ornithologist John James Audubon’s life, Audubon: A Vision, perhaps one of Warren’s most celebrated poems, first appeared as a single volume in 1969. Warren based the poem on Audubon’s five-volume Ornithological Biography (1831-39), though Warren departs from that work at several points. One of his longest verse works, Audubon contains seven free verse poems (each with lettered subsections) totaling roughly 440 lines, in which Warren explores the way identity, time, history, perception, knowledge, and creativity are related.

In the preface Warren provides general information on John James (Jean-Jacques) Audubon and recounts the apocryphal legend that Audubon was the “Dauphin,” the son of the dethroned Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (although Warren does not mention it, a con man calls himself “The Dauphin” in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). As Grimshaw points out, the opening poem, “I. Was Not the Lost Dauphin,” details one of Audubon’s many contradictions: “Audubon’s ethical quandary involves the necessity of killing birds so that he can study and paint them.

His moral sentiments against destroying the birds are pitted against his aesthetic impulse to represent their beauty in art” (Understanding Robert Penn Warren 147). This stanza closes with a key rhetorical question, one that is reminiscent of the chorus’s “Ode to Man” in Sophocles’ Antigone. While in Sophocles’ play man is the chief wonder of the world, in Warren’s the central wonder is man’s passion (“what / Is man but his passion?”), a force that inspires creativity, discovery, but also a driving, blind force like evolution, enabling Audubon to justify death as a part of the creative process.

Yet, the poem also depicts Audubon’s conflicted self, which weighs ethics and aesthetics: the sanctity of life and the impulse to create art. Thus, this first poem in the cycle deals with ethical issues in the creation of art and the pursuit of passion at a great cost: the loss of the very subject being explored. A creative and destructive force, art becomes Audubon’s way of negotiating the world and of creating a sense of self.

The second poem functions as the narrative and thematic heart of Audubon. Audubon happens upon a cabin, whose owner, an old woman, resolves to kill him with the help of her two sons after Audubon flashes a gold watch to prove he can afford a room. A one-eyed Indian alerts Audubon to the owner’s plot, and three travelers appear just as Audubon is about to be murdered, saving him.

The woman and her sons are sentenced to death; just before she is hanged, Audubon has a mystical vision, an epiphany about the connectedness of all things. The next two poems chronicle Audubon’s continued artistic endeavors and death before shifting in the fifth poem to philosophical ruminations that persist until Audubon's conclusion. The last of Audubon's seven poems records thoughts of Warren’s childhood and ends as the poem’s speaker asks an unnamed audience, “Tell me a story of deep delight,” a command that invites us to connect Warren’s writing and Audubon’s art.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Choose at least two themes from the following list and discuss how Warren addresses them in Audubon: A Vision: the search for knowledge, the need to understand history, the passage of time and its effects, the formation of individual identity, and the Fall and its reversal. Now describe how the themes you chose are themselves interrelated in Audubon.

2. Warren expresses a desire in both Audubon: A Vision and “American Portrait: Old Style” to learn “the name of the world” (II.G.5). Explore the significance of this question in relation to similarities (thematic or otherwise) between the two poems.