In spite of its Plutarchan decor, Brother to Dragons is a brutal, perverse melodrama that makes the flesh crawl. On a chopping block in a meat house in West Kentucky, “on the night of December 15, 1811—the night when the New Madrid earthquake first struck the Mississippi Valley—” Lilburn and Isham Lewis, nephews of Thomas Jefferson, in the presence of their Negroes, “butchered a slave named George, whose offense had been to break a pitcher prized by their dead mother, Lucy Lewis.” Coming upon this preface, the reader is warned that he will not find Monticello and Jefferson with his letters from John Adams, his barometers and portable music stands, but Lizzie Borden braining the family portraits with her axe. This incongruity, which dislocates nearly everyone's sense of Jeffersonian possibility, was fully appreciated by Thomas Jefferson himself, who, so far as we know, never permitted his nephews' accomplishment to be mentioned in conversation. Yet the Lewis brothers are as much in the Southern tradition as their Uncle, rather more in the literary tradition which has developed, and so it is workaday that their furies should pursue them with homicidal chivalry, the pomp of Vestal Virgins—and the murk of Warren's four novels. Indeed these monstrous heroes are so extremely literary that their actual lives seem to have been imagined by anti-Romantic Southern moderns, and we are tempted to suppose that only gratuitous caprice caused Warren to blame their bestiality on the Deist idealism of their detached relative, Thomas, the first Democratic president. Portentous in their living characters, when Lilburn and Isham Lewis reach in 1953 their first artistic existence, they draw upon a long line of conventions established by their imaginary counterparts: it is as true inheritors that they speak a mixture of Faulkner's iron courtesies, country dialect, and Booth's sic semper. Like their ancestor Cain, these late-comers were prior to their poetic fulfillment. The disharmony between the brothers' high connections and their low conduct, however, is less astonishing than Warren's ability to make all his characters speak in unfaltering, unstilted blank verse. (I trust it is this Jeffersonian and noble technical feat, and not the lurid prose melodrama, which has three times caused me to read Brother to Dragons from cover to cover without stopping.)

The generals' war between the specialized arts and the specialized sciences is over. We have accepted our traumatically self-conscious and expert modern poetry, just as we have accepted our other perilous technological methods. Eternal providence has warned us that our world lies all before us and nowhere else. Only the fissured atoms which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki can build our New Atlantis. This is what Paul Valéry meant when he wrote with cruel optimism that poetry before Mallarmé was as arithmetic to algebra. Valéry's education was more diversified than ours, and he wrote in a time when men still remembered the old Newtonian universe. We cannot be certain that we even understand the terms of his equation, but as poets and pragmatists we approve. Back in the palmy, imperialist days of Victoria, Napoleon's nephew, and Baudelaire, a kind of literary concordat was reached: the ephemeral was ceded to prose. Since then the new poetry has been so scrupulous and electrical, its authors seem seldom to have regretted this Mary and Martha division of labor. Poetry became all that was not prose. Under this dying-to-the-world discipline the stiffest and most matter of fact items were repoeticized—quotations from John of the Cross, usury, statistics, conversations and newspaper clippings. These amazing new poems could absorb everything—everything, that is, except plot and characters, just those things long poems have usually relied upon. When modern poets have tried to write dramatic and narrative works, neither genius, shrewdness, nor the most defiant good will have prevented most of the attempts from being puffy, paralysed and pretentious. Outside of Browning, what 19th Century story poems do we still read? What poetical drams since Dryden and Milton? Are Eliot's three plays, Auden's Age of Anxiety, Robinson's narratives, or Hardy's Dynasts much better? Yeats's later plays and Frost's monologues are short. Shorter still and more fragmentary are the moments of action and dialogue in The Waste Land and Pound's Cantos. Here stubborn parsimony is life-preserving tact. But Brother to Dragons, though tactless and voluminous, is also alive. That Warren, one of the bosses of the New Criticism, is the author is as though Professor Babbitt had begotten Rousseau or a black Minerva dancing in Congo masks. Warren has written his best book, a big book; he has crossed the Alps and, like Napoleon's shoeless army, entered the fat, populated riverbottom of the novel.

Brother to Dragons is the fourth remarkable long poem to have been published in the last ten or twelve years. The Four Quartets, Paterson, and The Pisan Cantos are originals and probably the masterpieces of their authors. Warren's poem is slighter, lighter and less in earnest. This judgment, however, is ungrateful and misleading. Brother to Dragons is a model and an opportunity. It can be imitated without plagiarism, and one hopes its matter and its method will become common property. In a sense they are already, and anyone who has read Elizabethan drama and Browning will quickly have opinions on what he likes and dislikes in this new work.

There are faults in this work. Warren writes in his preface, “I have tried to make my poem make, in a thematic way, historical sense along with whatever other kind of sense it may be happy enough to make.” And more emphatically, “… a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the spirit of his history than it is at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the nature of the human heart.” Obviously the kind of historical sense claimed here is something more serious and subtle than the mere documentary accuracy required for a tableau of Waterloo or a romance set in 1812. The incidents in Brother to Dragons are so ferocious and subnormal they make Macbeth or Racine's Britannicus seem informal interludes in Castiglione's Courtier. Warren's tale is fact, but it is too good melodramatically to be true. To make sense out of such material he uses an arrangement of actors and commentators, a method he perhaps derived from Delmore Schwartz's Coriolanus in which Freud, Aristotle, and I believe Marx, sit and discuss a performance of Shakespeare's play. Warren's spirit of history has a rough time: occasionally it maunders in a void, sometimes it sounds like the spirit of Seneca's rhetoric, again it just enjoys the show. The difficulties are great, yet the commentary often increases one's feelings of pathetic sympathy.

As for the characters, nothing limits the length of their speeches except the not very importunate necessity of eventually completing the story. Warren improves immensely upon that grotesque inspiration which compels Browning to tell the plot of the Ring twelve times and each time in sections longer than Macbeth. Structurally, however, Browning's characters have the queer compositional advantage of knowing they are outrageously called to sustain set-pieces of a given length.

A few small points: Warren's bawdy lines—I sometimes think these are pious gestures, a sort of fraternity initiation, demanded, given, to establish the writer firmly outside the genteel tradition. Secondly, the word “definition” is used some fifty times. This appears to be a neo-Calvinist pun, meaning defined, finite and perhaps definitive and final, or “know thyself for thou art but dust.” Warren used this word in his short poems and fiction and in an obsessive way I'm not quite able to follow. Time and History: the poet addresses these ogres with ritualistic regularity, reminding us a bit of a Roman pro-consul imposing the Greek gods on the provinces, those gods which have already renounced the world in Eliot's Four Quartets.

Some stylistic matters: the hollow bell-sound repetition of

I think of another bluff and another river.
I think of another year and another winter.
I think of snow on the brown leaves, and below
That other bluff, how cold and far was light on that northern river.
I think of how her mouth and mine together
Were cold on the first kiss. Sparsely, snow
Descended among the black trees. We kissed in the cold
Logic of hope and need.

Passages of stage-direction blank verse, not bad in themselves (squeamishness in absorbing prose would have been crippling) but sometimes “sinking,” like a suddenly audible command from the prompter's pit:

From an undifferentiated impulse I leaned
Above the ruin and in my hand picked up
Some two or three pig-nuts, with the husk yet on.
I put them in my pocket. I went down.

And these Thersites screams which modern writing channels on its readers like televised wrestlers:

                                                                                and in that simultaneous outrage
The sunlight screamed, while urine splattered the parched soil.

Brother to Dragons triumphs through its characters, most of all through two women. Lucy and Laetitia Lewis, Lilburn's mother and wife, charm and overwhelm. They are as lovingly and subtly drawn as anything in Browning. Laetitia, the more baffled and pathetic, uses homely frontier expressions, and her speeches beautifully counterpoint those of the intelligent and merciful Lucy. Unlike the heroines in Warren's novels, those schizophrenic creatures more unflattering to womankind than anything in Pope, Lucy Lewis is both wise and good and proves Warren's point that neither quality can flourish without the other. Both women speak simple and straightforward blank verse, which is wonderfully emphasized by the messy rhetorical violence of the other speakers. As for Lilburn and Isham Lewis, Warren takes them as he finds them: ruins. Lilburn, the villain-protagonist, is a lobotomized Coriolanus, or, rather, that hollow, diabolic, Byron-Cain character who is so familiar to us from Warren's novels. He speaks few lines and is seen through the other speakers, because he is almost pure evil and therefore unreal. He sheds a sinister, absorbing glitter, which is probably all he was intended to do. Neither Ahab nor Satan, Lilburn is simply Lilburn—a histrionic void. Isham, Lilburn's younger brother and the subordinate villain, is a cowed imbecile. He is a sturdy, evil, stupified Laetitia. Unlike Lilburn, he is pure Kentucky and has no Virginian memories. (In Brother to Dragons, when the characters pass from Virginia to Kentucky they experience an immense social decline, as if this latter state were a “bad address.” The Kentuckians are Elizabethan rustics, all a bit clownish and amazed to be speaking in meter.) Isham is drawn with amusement and horror, although as a key witness he needs a great deal of help from Warren's superior understanding of his own actions. The minor characters are quickly summarized: Dr. Lewis, the father, is shadowy; Aunt Cat is a mask; Laetitia's brother is a mildly amusing “humor,” the sort of appendage who stands about, scratching his head, and saying, “I'm a simple country fellow.” Meriwether Lewis seems altogether out of place in the work.

Jefferson! An original—mean, pale, sour, spoon-riverish! Hardy's Sinister Spirit. In the end, this Robespierre in a tub is converted by Lucy to a higher idealism, to “definition.” (The Democrats are out of office and so perhaps Warren will not suffer public assault because of this black apotheosis.)

Finally there is R. P. W., the author, who speaks at greater length than any of the other characters and with greater imagination, power and intelligence. He is Pilgrim, Everyman, Chorus and Warren, the real person, who like everyone has his own birthplace, parents, personal memories, taste, etc. It is his problem to face, understand, and even to justify a world which includes moronic violence. As with Hugo at the beginning of Le Fin de Satan, the crucial catastrophic act is not the eating of the apple but the murder of Abel. Warren suggests that the pursuit of knowledge leads to a split in body and spirit, and consequently to “idealism,” and consequently to an inability to face or control the whole of life, and consequently to murder. He is concerned with evil and with the finiteness of man. I'm not sure of Warren's position but it is often close to neo-Humanism and neo-Thomism, and so deliberately close that he frequently suffers from hardness. Yet sometimes you feel he is taking the opposite position and is merely a commonsense, secular observer. The character R. P. W., as we see him in the poem, is himself split between a love for abstractions and an insatiable appetite for sordid detail, as though Allen Tate were rewriting Stavrogin's “Confession.” R. P. W., has his own troubles with “definition.” The two halves embarrass each other: the character is at once unreal and again irresistibly energetic. I quote a passage—for its power rather than as an expression of character:

Well, standing there, I'd felt, I guess, the first
Faint tremor of that natural chill, but then
In some black aperture among the stones
I saw the eyes, their glitter in that dark,
And suddenly the head thrust forth, and the fat, black
Body molten flowed, as though those stones
Bled forth earth's inner darkness to the day,
As though the bung had broke on that intolerable inwardness,
And now divulged, thus focused and compacted,
What haunts beneath earth's primal, soldered sill,
And in its slow and merciless ease, sleepless, lolls
Below that threshold where the prime waters sleep.
Thus it flowed forth, and the scaled belly of abomination
Rustled on stone, rose, rose up
And reared in regal indolence and swag.
I saw it rise, saw the soiled white of the belly bulge,
And in that muscular distention I saw the black side scales
Show their faint flange and tracery of white.
And so it rose and climbed the paralysed light.
On those heaped stones it was taller than I, taller
Than any man, and the swollen head hung
Haloed and high in light; when in that splendid
Nimb the hog-snout parted, and with girlish
Fastidiousness the faint tongue flicked to finick in the sun.

Of course Warren is a remarkable novelist, yet I cannot help feeling that this strange metrical novel is his true medium. It has kept the unique readability of fiction, a charm which is almost always absent from long poems. In this, at least, Brother to Dragons is superior to any of the larger works of Browning. And yet Warren almost is Browning. What this may mean is suggested by an observation by Gide. “Browning and Dostoevsky seem to me to bring the monologue straightway to perfection, in all the diversity and subtlety to which this literary form lends itself. Perhaps I shock the literary sense of some of my audience by coupling these two names, but I can do no other, nor help being struck by the profound resemblance, not merely in form, but in substance.” After reading Brother to Dragons, I feel not only that Warren has written a successful poem but that in this work he most truly seems to approach the power of those writers one has always felt hovering about him, those poetic geniuses in prose, Melville and Faulkner. In Warren's case, it is the prose genius in verse which is so startling.