Robert Penn Warren

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The Long and Short of It

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In 1953 Robert Penn Warren published Brother to Dragons, a narrative poem based on the crimes [of Lilburne Lewis, Thomas Jefferson's nephew]. He organized it as a dialogue of disembodied voices conversing long after the event, in an unspecified place. Instead of making the incidents themselves the substance of his poem, Warren treated those as starting a debate on "the human condition," particularly the extent of men's innate virtue or depravity. To suit his plan, he not only altered some of the facts; he not only added some fictitious characters; but he also planted himself and Thomas Jefferson in the poem, giving these outsiders many long speeches. Warren has now carefully revised and shortened Brother to Dragons for a new publication, altering many details, reassigning speeches, breaking up long lines, and giving the verse a dryer texture.

In Warren's telling, although the sickening episodes emerge gradually from the give and take of the speakers, the element of suspense seems weak; and a reader unfamiliar with the story would not gather it easily from the poet's presentation. Warren diversifies the main line of his narrative with other ingredients….

In the choral commentary of the poet's dialogues with Jefferson, Warren suggests that we are all responsible for the mischief done by any one of us; the victim of evil, however weak and vulnerable he may be, participates in the beastly motivations which lead to his destruction, and so does the righteous denouncer of the crime. Jefferson himself, we are told, shared the potentiality for evil which his nephew realized in action. Unfortunately, this doctrine transpires in such a way as to darken Jefferson's character and to brighten Warren's. It is hard for one not to feel that the author takes advantage of his place as inventor of the fiction when he assigns to Jefferson a less perceptive morality than that of the poet who confronts him.

One may ask as well whether a plain historical account, even in my few words, is not more absorbing than Warren's self-indulgent, highly reflexive work…. Warren composed the poem in flexible, varied free verse, often approximating blank verse. Is the poetic element attractive enough to carry us over the difficulties of Warren's theme?

If we do listen to the verse, we find that the poet's style is more lyrical, descriptive, or reflective than narrative, dramatic, or discursive. When he remembers a landscape or evokes passionate love, Warren's poetic energies seem more deeply engaged than when he rehearses a story or produces moral arguments. His speakers often sound alike, or they talk out of character. They are given to clichés of language or sentiment. Consequently, the ingredients which ought most to please us receive inadequate support from Warren's style….

If the narrative and the verse are open to censure, the scheme of debate becomes peculiarly important; for it could supply the challenge which an audience seeks from a poem of this length. If the disagreement set forth between the poet and Jefferson—the quarrel over the meaning of the Lewis brothers' crime—were handled forcefully, if the reader found himself drawn into the substance of the controversy (regardless of the data which provoked it and regardless of the poet's limitations of style), Brother to Dragons might deserve the attention it invites.

But when an author supports his moral doctrine by a mixture of fact, speculation, and invention, it cannot seem sturdy…. I suspect that the power of Warren's poem when it first appeared sprang from the precipitate decline of American moral optimism, a decline which followed the full disclosure of the German nation's bestiality, made known in the years after 1945. Since that period, the conduct of other nations, including our own, has not reversed the decline. On this issue, history has overtaken poetry.

Warren dwells on the betrayal of the vision of men like Jefferson by the sins of the republic they conceived…. Warren lists the disgraces: the destruction of the Indians, the institution of slavery, and so forth; and he declares that all of us—high and low, Southern aristocrat and humble slave—are, like the rest of the world, caught in history. (p. 27)

Unfortunately, every aspect of Warren's analysis is now over-familiar. The failure of our national character is a favorite theme of the American literary imagination…. Moreover, the appeal to fact, which the poem urges upon us, works against the drift of Warren's argument. Whoever examines the scholarly accounts of Jefferson, the Lewis brothers, or Meriwether Lewis will undermine Warren's case. (pp. 27-8)

I have to wonder whether the enterprise of such a poem as Brother to Dragons does not represent one more desire to equip the United States with a verse epic….

[Warren's] last collection, Now and Then, has at least half a dozen good poems. In them the poet looks at himself from the remoteness of old age eyeing death; and he searches for the meaning of experiences embodied in his identity. The strength of remembered emotions, the montage of past and present, the crescendos and diminuendos of sensation provide satisfactions that almost make up for the carelessness of the language. One wishes that Warren's flights were less effortful and that his earthiness were less commonplace, just as one wishes that his metrics were more purposeful. There is also the lushness which troubles one in Brother to Dragons; but it is undercut here by the critical perspective of memory.

Although the attitude, in these poems, is highly serious, the intensity of the poet's self-consciousness and the sense one has of extremes in time being pressed quickly together infuse irony into the tone. The themes include earthly and spiritual aspiration, the desire for glory; they include the transformation of the self through faith, the need to make a self that will not merely vanish—the possibility of resurrection…. [The egoism] is redeemed by typology, and the poet becomes Everyman….

The poems comment on and reply to one another. They cohere naturally and give the reader a beautiful impression of a brave ancient gathering the resources of intellect and spirit against the challenge of finality. (p. 28)

Irvin Ehrenpreis, "The Long and Short of It," in The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books; copyright © 1980 Nyrev, Inc.), Vol. XXVII, No. 2, February 21, 1980, pp. 27-8.

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