The blood-marriage of earth and sky

Leonard Casper focuses here on Warren's five later novels published between 1959 and 1977, a period just before and during the decades when his poetry flourished. Customarily neglected by critics, those novels, Casper shows, sustained and expanded the philosophical and formal themes central to Warren's poetry and early novels, and therefore are essential to comprehending Warren's total vision. That vision - what Warren's poetry called "One Flesh" and All the King's Men referred to as the "Web Theory" of life - continued to be put to the test in the later novels, according to Casper. Through experiments with multiple narrators, stories within a story, and characters seeking a balance between self-knowledge and community, Warren enacted his own yearning for elusive wholeness. While emphasizing the metaphysical intersection of flesh and spirit that links the novels, Casper also gives a rigorously detailed reading of each text - The Cave, Wilderness, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To.