Warren's Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices was published in 1953. A quarter century later, he gives us a new version that is, as he says, "a new work."… Reading Brother to Dragons in this new version, side by side with the 1953 text, is an instructive experience, particularly in regard to the vexed problem of poetic revisionism. (p. 30)

Reading Brother to Dragons in 1953, I was made uneasy, acknowledged the poem's vigor, disliked its ideological tendentiousness, and gloomily admired the Jacobean intensity of its more violent passages. The poem seemed then a good enough extension of the tradition of T. S. Eliot…. Warren's quite explicit argument seemed to be another churchwardenly admonition that original sin was indeed the proper moral burden for our poetry. Thus, poor Jefferson received a massive drubbing, for being an Enlightened rationalist, and the drubber, a tough interlocutor named R.P.W., prodded the author of the Declaration of Independence into saying: "… I once tried to contrive / a form I thought fit to hold the purity of man's hope. / But I did not understand the nature of things." The nature of things was that Jefferson's nephew, wielding a meat-axe, had butchered a 16-year-old black slave, in December 1811, for having broken a pitcher belonging to his deceased mother, Jefferson's sister. In his "Foreword" Warren dismissed with polemical gusto the evident fact that Jefferson never referred to this family debacle:

If the moral shock to Jefferson caused by the discovery of what his own blood was capable of should turn out to be somewhat short of what is here represented, subsequent events in the history of America, of which Jefferson is the spiritual father, might still do the job.                                       (pp. 30-1)

A reader more Jeffersonian and Emersonian than Warren was could be forgiven for muttering, back in 1953, that if there was something nasty in the meat-house, there was something pretty nasty in the "Foreword" also. But I too am a quarter century older now, the age indeed that Warren was when he first published the poem. I am not any happier with the implicit theology and overt morality of Brother to Dragons than I was, but subsequent events have done the job all right, to the degree that I am not tempted to mutter my protest anymore. Warren does seem to me the best poet we have now, and the enormous improvement in the poem's rhetorical force is evident upon almost every page. I am never going to love this poem, but I certainly respect it now, and a poem that can overcome one's spiritual distaste probably has its particular value for other readers in my generation besides myself.

The difference in the tale comes in both verse and voices, especially in the voice of R.P.W., which has an authority and resonance that little in the 1953 text prophesied. (pp. 30-1)

In the central poem of Incarnations, "The Leaf," Warren had celebrated being blessed by a new voice "for the only / Gift I have given: teeth set on edge." This grim Biblical trope epitomizes the ethos and the style of Warren in his major phase, and is realized in the new Brother to Dragons. Our teeth are set on edge by the harsh power of this verse.

Warren, in his revised "Foreword," asserts that the dramatic effects of his poem have been sharpened, which is true, particularly in the exchanges between Jefferson and R.P.W., where the poet no longer maintains a rhetorical advantage over the president. That Warren is still dreadfully unjust to Jefferson could go unsaid….

Warren might argue that his sense of Jefferson's greatness is dialectically demonstrated throughout the poem, in much the same way as there is a projection of Emerson's adversary power in the ironic sequence "Homage to Emerson, on Night Flight to New York," which preceded the Incarnations volume. Still uneasy with his ideological ferocity, I content myself here with expressing admiration for the revisionary skill and intellectual persistence he has shown in this new Brother to Dragons. There is a greater Warren, the poet of "Evening Hawk," "Sunset Walk in Thaw-Time in Vermont," "Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth," and scores of other visions of an authentic American sublime, including Audubon…. That greater Warren compels homage, and has transcended his polemics against Jefferson and Emerson. (p. 31)