Robert Penn Warren: An Appreciation  

At the time of his death at the age of 84, Robert Penn Warren had achieved an astounding literary success with a staggering range of work. He gained international acclaim and is best remembered for his 1946 novel, All the King’s Men, but his reputation will most likely grow in the academic community well into this century. As a one-time defender of agrarianism in a century of irreversible industrialization, as a metaphysicist immersed in philosophical and religious speculation in the midst of history's most astonishing technological achievements, as a Southerner defining the consciousness of a new South during decades of social and racial upheaval, as a "new critic" who helped establish revolutionary methods of evaluating literature, as a novelist and poet who combined themes of naturalism, which has its roots in the beginning of this century, and existentialism, which continues to inspire today's writers, Warren's body of work will likely flourish as a portrayal of the moral and intellectual identity of twentieth century America. From the publication of his first book, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929) to his last, 60 years later, New and Selected Essays (1989), Warren wrote tirelessly about modern man's endless struggle to attain knowledge and dignity in a world apparently devoid of redemption. He developed his themes with richly illustrated tales, many of which were drawn from his youth in the South. He once said, "As far as writing is concerned, the basic images that every man has, I suppose, go back to those of his childhood. He has to live on that capital all his life," and spend the rest of his life trying to reconcile the memory of that uncomplicated, youthful past with present visions of loneliness, self-doubt, and imminent death. This is mystically depicted in his poem, "Why Boy Came to Lonely Place":

Did I clamber these miles of distance
Only to quiver now in identity?
You are yourself only by luck, disaster, or chance,
And only alone may believe in your reality.

To describe in brief Warren's remarkable life and work would be to ignore his essence as one of American history's few renaissance men. Among the many honors he received were three Pulitzer prizes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and, in 1986, recognition as the first Poet Laureate of the United States. Besides writing poetry, fiction and nonfiction prolifically on numerous subjects, he was for 45 years a professor of English literature and playwriting at Southwestern, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, Minnesota, and Yale. While in those positions, he helped edit landmark textbooks on fiction, poetry, and writing based on a controversial "new criticism" approach to literature, which would pave the way for generations of scholars to come.

Warren’s Early Years

Warren was born on April 24, 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky, which he described as a small town of 1,500 set in the rolling farmlands, woodlands and streams of the Cumberland Valley, "a country well adapted to the proper pursuits of boyhood." He often spoke of his maternal grandfather, whom he idolized, a Confederate officer during the Civil War and a tobacco farmer. Warren spent his boyhood summers with him and marveled at the old man's literary interests. He enjoyed when his grandfather would read history and poetry to him, moments that would affect him for the rest of his life.

Nevertheless, it was not the writing life that young Warren desired. He dreamed of being a naval officer and, after high school, was accepted by the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. But an accident left him blind in one eye and prevented him from passing the required physical, so he went to Vanderbilt University at the age of 16 to major in chemical engineering.

At Vanderbilt, Warren took an English course taught by Donald Davidson, who assigned his students to write essays and poems which were imitative of the authors studied in class. There he composed his first poems and developed an appreciation of style. His most impressionable undergraduate experiences came from his meetings with poet and professor John Crowe Ransom and poet Allen Tate, at that time an older student and Ransom protégé. They and others formed the legendary Nashville-based literary group called the Fugitives, which read and discussed each other's poetry. Being invited to participate in the Fugitive meetings was the "greatest thrill I'd had in my life," said Warren. I was seventeen, and said, 'this (writing) is what I'm going to do.'" Warren was true to his words: he soon gave up engineering, focused on literature, and was soon contributing his poems to The Fugitive, the group's magazine.

Warren graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt in 1925 and went to study at the University of California on a teaching fellowship, where he received a master's degree in literature in 1927. His graduate studies continued as did his knowledge of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets and the moderns, including Yeats, Hardy, Eliot, and Hart Crane. He would spend the next year studying at Yale and, from 1928 to 1930, at Oxford, England on a Rhodes Scholarship. Beginnings of a Publishing and Academic Career

While overseas, Warren completed his biography of John Brown, the first of over 50 books that he would author. It was praised by critic Allan Nevins as a "capable volume" for offering a "theory [which] gives to the last great coup of John Brown a breadth and daring that lifts it to a new dignity." After receiving a Bachelors of Literature from Oxford, Warren returned to the U.S. in 1930, married Emma Brescia, and began his teaching career, first at Southwestern (1930- 1931), then at Vanderbilt (1931-1934), his alma mater. But writing would be his first passion. "I always thought of myself as a writer and not a teacher," Warren said. He had the opportunity to complete his doctorate at Yale, but "in the end, it was clear I wanted to write." Still, he edited with Cleanth Brooks several widely used textbooks, the most famous of which were Understanding Poetry in 1938 and Understanding Fiction in 1943. They would both be reprinted for university classrooms 30 years after their original publication.

These texts were successful because of the editors' innovative style of presenting the literature, known by scholars as the "new criticism." Warren, however, rejected being identified with such a school of criticism because he said his roots were in a group of writers with tastes so diverse that it defied labeling. In a 1978 televised interview, he said, "There was no such thing as the new criticism. That is, there was no church with a dogma, a doctrine. … But there was a thing common to a whole age, a whole generation, anyway. Which was, looking at a poem as an object made by a man for purpose different from those of the daily newspaper. It was not going to inform. It was to give an experience by having a certain shape, the way a vase or a picture has a certain shape, certain tonalities, or a piece of music that means certain things to an open listener or viewer. See, poetry is an art, too. It has the same general principles as the other arts. We say literature and art. Well, they (the new critics) wo uld say literature is an art."

A Ground-Breaking Essayist

Warren would break ground in the 1930s and 1940s with his incisive critical studies of many of his contemporaries while their careers were still thriving, notably Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and Ransom, his mentor. He also contributed essays to the literature on established masters like Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, John Greenleaf Whittier, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Theodore Dreiser, the latter the subject of Warren's 1971 book, Homage top Theodore Dreiser. Many of these essays sprung forth from lectures he prepared for his literature students and appeared in two collections, Selected Essays (1958) and New and Selected Essays (1989). His criticism occasionally appeared in The Southern Review, a periodical he founded and edited during his eight years as an associate professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (1934-1942), and later in The Kenyon Review, for which he was an advisory editor (1942-1963). His essays also appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Sewanee Review, and Saturday Evening Post, among other widely read periodicals. Warren shifted frequently and effortlessly between poetry and nonfiction during the 1920s and 1930s because, while he viewed a poem as a work of art requiring many revisions, he felt that criticism was more a diversion from his creative endeavors. He said criticism was "part of my social life, talking about books I have read to somebody, or writing about them and usually the books that I've written … sort of come out of talking, out of classes." A Social and Historical Philosopher Warren did not limit his nonfiction to literary criticism, biography, and academic instruction. He wrote two books on race relations, Segregations: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), during the genesis of the civil rights movement. These exposés followed Warren's controversial and highly criticized 1930 essay, "The Briar Patch," published in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. In it Warren defended segregation as a necessary institution of a Southern agrarian society and drew parallels between all blacks and poor whites. However, he correctly predicted the black exodus from the South to the more industrialized cities of the North and the blacks' search for identity. Twenty-seven years later, Warren expressed regret about having written the essay. "I remember . . . some kind of discomfort in it, some sense of evasion, I guess, in writing it." Segregation, according to Warren scholar James H. Justus, represented an awakened consciousness in the author. The inner conflicts in the South Warren writes about are not learning to live with Negroes but with ourselves, and that desegregation is but one episode in the long battle for justice. For Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren traveled to Southern rural areas and Northern cities throughout the nation and interviewed black leaders and writers, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Ralph Ellison, Carl Rowan, and James Baldwin, and many other blacks, young and old, poor and middle class, educated and uneducated, to record the black viewpoint on racial integration—and to offer his own. The book was lauded for its objectivity in dealing with the most a sensitive sociopolitical subject in American history. Among Warren's many conclusions were that, regarding past discrimination against blacks, "the whole notion of untangling the 'debts' of history smacks of fantasy" and that "the w hite man cannot afford to feel that he is going to redeem the Negro … and it would be a vicious illusion for the white man to think that he, by acting alone, can reach a solution and pass it down to gratefully lifted black hands."

The Civil War was also a subject that fascinated Warren. In 1961, he authored The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial and, in 1980, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back, each a meditation on a period in American history which he said, "removed the paradox from the notion of America, the land of freedom, which (was) also the land of slavery" and "made modern America much faster than modern America would have come."

The Legacy of the Civil War garnered accolades from historians impressed with the range of subject matter that Warren had mastered. In a review of the work, essayist Cushing Stout wrote, "Warren points out that the Civil War was a clash between two absolutistic ways of thinking, 'the higher law' of the Abolitionists and the 'legalism' of the defenders of slavery and states rights, and this conflict paved the way, he suggests, for the development of pragmatism," which symbolized the spirit of industrialization.

The Jefferson Davis essay, written when Warren was 75, is a retrospective on the Confederate leader's character and allegiance to the South. Warren was inspired to write it when Davis's American citizenship was restored by an act of Congress, a century after he was stripped of it.

In 1974, Warren's Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities was published as Democracy and Poetry. The book, divided into two essays, "America and the Diminished Self" and "Poetry and Selfhood," discusses the "connection between poetry and our basic notion of democracy. The central point of the review is that the decay of the concept of self has been, consciously or unconsciously, a developing and fundamental theme of our writers, and I try to indicate some connection between that fact and the course of our general history. In the second essay I endeavor to document the decay of the concept of self in relation to our present society and its ideals." Warren the Poet

Such cerebral abstractions were often contemplated with stunning clarity in Warren's poetry, as exemplified in his own venture into confronting mortality and the diminished self in "After the Dinner Party:"

Soon the old stairs
Will creak with your grave and synchronized tread as each mounts
To a briefness of light, then true weight of darkness, and then
That heart-dimness in which neither joy nor sorrow counts.
Even so, one hand gropes out for another, again.

Such intellectual yet passionate inquiries into the human condition replete with trance-like sequences were the hallmark of Warren's verse, even though he knew such intense flights of the imagination would have a limited appeal to readers of his best-selling novels, to academics, or even to poets less inclined than he to metaphysical rhetoric.

Nevertheless, scholars have said that Warren relied heavily on traditional poetic forms in his work. Wrote Victor Strandberg, author of several books on Warren's poetry, "From first to last, Warren's verse comprises a virtual catalogue of modified conventions, from the epic grasp of Brother to Dragons (1953) to the nursery rhymes in You Emperor, and Others (1960). Sonnets, terza-rima, iambic couplets, rhyming quatrains, sestina, quasi-Spenserian stanzas, and various combinations thereof characterize Warren's style in virtually all his volumes of poetry."

A noticeable change in Warren's poetry occurred in Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, when his own persona became a presence in his work. His previous three books of poems were impersonal with little sense of the poet as autobiographer. But, with Brother to Dragons, published nine years after his Selected Poems, 1923-1943 (there would never again be as long a span between volumes of his verse), Warren the man became synonymous with Warren the poet. There were perhaps three reasons for this. First, Brother to Dragons was his first book of verse since he had quit full-time academic work in 1946, enabling him to channel his creative energies more completely to his poetic voice. Second, was Warren's natural maturation process and the recognition of his belief about journeying through life with the inescapable images of one's youth. His poetry, therefore, became more introspective, and the memory of his youth from where he now stood as a man became a major theme in many of his poems. Third, was his response to what he surely viewed as his greatest achievement: fatherhood. His second marriage was to Connecticut writer Eleanor Clark in 1952, with whom he had his only two children, Rosanna, in 1953, and Gabriel, in 1955. He would live thereafter in the North, finally settling in Connecticut, where he held his last professorship at Yale (1950-1956 and 1962-1973). Warren would continue writing about the South, but now as an expatriate, physically disconnected from his roots, yet more capable and willing to identify with them.

Thus, Warren became a father at the age of 48, and the joy it brought him had a significant impact on his work, for when his children were still young, he wrote his only two children's books, Remember the Alamo!, in 1958, which he dedicated to his son, and The Gods of Mount Olympus, in 1959, for his daughter. Both books remain recommended reading for elementary school students. Also, in You, Emperor, and Others (1960), his sixth volume of poems, Warren included a section of children's poems, variations of traditional nursery rhymes.

Warren became increasingly prolific as a poet in his later years. Or Else (1974) was released when he was 69, Selected Poems, 1923-1975 when he was 72, and Now and Then, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in the following year. (He had won his first for Promises, a 1957 volume.) In 1979 came a revised version of Brother to Dragons and then four more books of poems in the next six years, concluding with New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985, published by Random House on his eightieth birthday. Incidentally, Warren's interest in history and social justice shows up in his two epic poems. Brother to Dragons is a dramatized account of the actual case when a black slave was senselessly murdered by Thomas Jefferson's nephew. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983) concerns the brutal massacre of the Nez Perce Indians by the U.S. Cavalry.

Warren won many honors for his poetry besides the two Pulitzers, including the Shelley Memorial Award, Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, National Book Award, Bollingen Prize, Van Wyck Brooks Award, National Medal for Literature, Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets, Harriet Monroe Award, grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and American Philosophical Society, and honorary doctorates from a host of universities.

The illusory powers and intelligence of Warren's poetry was never more evident than in his last book of poems. His "Mortal Limit," in which he describes a hawk in soaring flight, was one of 50 new poems collected under the title Altitudes and Extensions: 1980-1984:

There—west—were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be
In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height
Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see
New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?

Warren the Novelist

Despite his achievement as a poet, Warren was best known as a novelist. During the early 1930's, he wrote two novels, but publishers rejected each. Success finally came in 1936 when he received a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, enabling him to write Night Rider, first published in 1939. Of his beginnings as a novelist, Warren reflected, "I stumbled into fiction rather late" because of his interest in poetry. Warren drew upon his Kentucky childhood for the setting of Night Rider, centered around the 1906 tobacco war. In a review of the book, critic Christopher Isherwood noted it as "a very brilliant, powerful and profound novel." Historical events and Southern settings would continue to dominate the Warren repertoire. At Heaven’s Gate (1943) was about the coming of the industrial age to Nashville in the 1920s. All the King’s Men (1946) was a fictitious account of Governor Huey Long, who presided over Louisiana during the Depression. (More than a decade later, Warren would transform the novel into a play.) World Enough and Time (1950) centered on a nineteenth century murder trial in Kentucky. Band of Angels (1955) and Wilderness (1961) had the Civil War as their settings. Of Warren's fiction James Justus wrote that while "some efforts have of course fallen short of their conception," Warren's fiction is praiseworthy because he "never rested in the security of a single realized form: each novel, whatever its thematic connections with all others, has its own formal integrity arising from the inner demands of each narrative."

After his tenth and final novel, A Place to Come To (1977), Warren said, "I may never start another novel. … A poem's a different thing … a more intimate thing." And poetry was where he expended his creative energies until he died of cancer in his Stratton, Vermont summer home on September 15, 1989. With his passing came the end of the neoromantic realism of the new, post-industrial South and a shining link in our own memory of this century's beginnings.

In an assessment of Warren, Richard Gray wrote, "Robert Penn Warren has yet to be given the recognition he deserves. Much has been written about him, and he has received his fair share of awards; yet despite this acclaim there seems to be a reluctance, in critical and academic circles and (to a lesser extent) among the public at large, to see him for what he is, a writer—not specifically a poet or a novelist, but a writer—of major stature."

Warren should also be remembered as a great educator who found the college classroom as a haven for intellectual pursuits and who challenged his students with lectures, essays, and textbooks imbued with original and timeless meditations on man's struggle with himself and his world. His vision of our quest for inner peace in the battle against time and death was so lucidly illustrated in "Little Girl Wakes Early":

So you ran outdoors, bare feet from the dew wet,
And climbed the fence to the house of your dearest friend,
And opened your lips and twisted your tongue, all set
To call her name—but the sound wouldn’t come in the end.