Patrick Walker 
The poem “Secrecy” by G.O. Warren appears in the March 1919 edition of Poetry Magazine. Judging by a quick google of G.O. Warren, he is not relevant to the current poetic canon. He is lost, despite Google’s best efforts, forever to the likes of football player Warren Sapp, businessman Warren Buffet and fellow poet Robert Penn Warren. In the year 1919, according to our class readings, there were more pressing issues concerning poets. Yeats wrote about the Bolshevik Revolution in his poem “The Second Coming.” Ivor Gurney was drawing sharp contrast between life in the trench and life in idyllic England in “To His Love” and a French village in “Laventie.” So why have we forgotten “Secrecy” by G.O. Warren? Its form, four quatrains rhyming in the second and fourth lines, is not particularly remarkable. Neither is its subject matter: worrying about what the addressee is keeping secret from the speaker is not particularly innovative. It is a lack of innovation in its craft. The poem could have been written fifty years before or after its actual creation.
It is also because Warren’s poem does not capture its epoch as well as the more widely read poems do. His theme is more universal. The poem doesn’t concern itself with world
events. It doesn’t concern itself with the Red Scare or the aftermath of World War One. On a redemptive note, there may be some psychoanalytic elements to the poem. The door that is “apart, close-barred and rusted in” sounds like a repressed memory, possibly from childhood that the addressee refuses to acknowledge (6). The door is “shrouded by years” and the addressee’s “hand has never moved to open it,” implying that the speaker knows that the trauma exists and wants the addressee to confront it (7-8). This reading, if valid, gives some renewed vigor to a forgotten poem. While technically familiar, the poem does have a redemptive quality in its contemporary knowledge of psychoanalysis. But it has been forgotten, none the less, because of the historical materials to which other contemporary poets addressed their attention. Their epochal, innovative poems that we now call Modern made Warren’s quaint style even more forgettable.
You make a generous attempt to find something revealing in the poem, but it doesn’t break from the trope of secrecy quite enough to signal the kind of Freudian anxiety and repression that we get just about everywhere in Eliot. This is, like most poems published at any time, forgettable. We place a high price on entrance to the canon: a blend of universality and timeliness, a sense that the poem could not have been written 50 years ago or 50 years from now, as you say. The canon’s machinations are often opaque, but it seems endlessly interesting to go back an imagine the how and the why of it all. Great archival post–and thanks for linking over to the poem at the Poetry website.