Though Rosanna Warren bills her new collection of essays as “an occult autobiography,” the reader picking up Fables of the Self should not expect a self-indulgent tour through the author’s life and legacy. Instead, her “investigation into the nature of literary selfhood” is just that: literary and investigative in true scholarly manner. In sleuthing through the complexities of how the self is depicted in poetry, Warren provides an adumbrated walking tour of poetry from Sappho to the present day. This itinerary also maps the landscape of the author’s own self and sensibility, for Warren’s pursuit of her various subjects is more personal than programmatic. Were the book intended as an exhaustive, academic study of the self in poetry, whole chunks would seem missing, whether the Romantics, the Metaphysicals, or even Shakespeare. Considered as a collection of essays, however, culled from twenty-five years of work, Fables of the Self is a sustained set of linked preoccupations, the fertile residue of a literary mind worrying its subject over time’s jagged course.

That said, one wishes that the collection had a more coherent structure. Warren attempts an overall organization by collecting the essays in three sections that move in a vague chronological order that aligns them under the rubrics “Antiquity at Present” (which ranges from the Greeks and Romans to Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, and Mark Strand), the “‘I’ as Another” in French poetry, and the relationship of “Poetry and Conscience” in Dante, Melville,