Poetry Criticism | Warren, Robert Penn - F. Cudworth Flint (review date 1954)

F. Cudworth Flint (review date 1954)

SOURCE: Flint, F. Cudworth. “Search for a Meaning.” The Virginia Quarterly Review XXX, no. 1 (Winter 1954): 143-48.

[In the following review, Flint favorably assesses Warren's narrative poem Brother to Dragons.]

To a bluff in Livingston County in western Kentucky overlooking the Ohio river Dr. Charles Lewis, a planter and physician of Albemarle County, Virginia, early in the nineteenth century moved with his wife, Lucy Jefferson, sister of Thomas Jefferson, his grown sons Lilburn and Isham, and some slaves. Lucy soon died, and Dr. Lewis returned to Virginia, leaving his sons in Kentucky. On the night of December 15, 1811, just before the first of a series of earthquakes struck the Mississippi valley, Lilburn with the not quite whole-hearted assistance of Isham, in the presence of his other slaves, bound his slave George to a meat block and chopped his living body to pieces because the slave...

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