I began this summer with an ambitious project. In my proposal, I suggested that after eight weeks of intensive reading, I could “find God.” Since that time, I have read intensely, but do not know that I am any closer to finding anything remotely resembling a deity. Instead I have been forced to look at my proposal, where I say that I intend to disperse the moral complications in the unfaltering light of literary analysis. A bold boast, everyone will agree, I’m sure, and one that does not, simply because pure intellectual analysis cannot, encompass the passion, poignancy, and power of Robert Penn Warren’s struggle.
For the sake of emphasizing the intelligence of the man, I present to you an abridged version of his CV. He was born in Guthrie, KY in 1905, graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt at the age of twenty, received a master’s degree from the University of California in 1927, did some graduate work at Yale, and finally received a B. Litt. from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar at the age of 25. He has published, ten novels, sixteen volumes of poetry, a volume of short stories, a play, a collection of essays, one biography, three historical essays, one criticism of Theodore Dreiser and one of Hermann Meville, and two racial studies to say nothing of the books to which he’s contributed or edited. He remains one of the most decorated poets in American history, being the first poet laureate of the United States, the only author to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Poetry, and a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Among other awards, he was honored to be made Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Emerson-Thoreau Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a MacArthur Foundation Award. The man is, to quote R.W.B. Lewis, “the most complete man of letters of our time.”
Though perhaps no longer a part of our twenty-first century time, Warren nonetheless remains one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century; the enduring power of the work cannot be underscored enough nor can the passage of time detract from it, for Warren’s struggle is humanity’s, his despair the modern despondency, his joy the contemporary bliss. Bliss, joy, elation, exhilaration, these are the abstractions for which Warren searches, for which I was searching. I continue to regret the fact that I titled my project “finding God,” because of the various religious notions of that word. What I am looking for transcends the dogma and stricture of religion; I am on Warren’s metaphysical journey. He explores many different ideas of this fulfillment in his work, sometimes rejecting it totally, but always probing the possibility of personal redemption with surgical exactness. The question for readers of Warren is twofold: firstly, why waver at all, exhibiting such reticence to grasp a sublime moment and experience it, and, secondly, what purpose does doubt serve in the larger context of Warren’s work and life?
To answer the first part of this question, I went directly to the text to examine for myself Warren’s poetic journey. And what a journey it is! I have requested that the CURO office provide you with copies of two poems which illustrate perfectly the vacillation between spiritual awareness and nihilistic despair in Warren’s work. From reading these poems, you can tell immediately that Warren’s concern is for human realization, of identity and of the indefinable concept of “joy,” but the first, “Delusion?—No!” describes perfectly a sublime moment, the feeling of exhilaration, and contentment indicative of spiritual fulfillment, while the second, “Covered Bridge,” contains all the elements of regret, anguish, and decay that evoke the “metaphysical chill,” as Warren says in Brother to Dragons, suggestive of a speaker resigned to a desolate spiritual life.
Not to bore you by conjuring up the ghosts of English literature classes past, but I feel it necessary to discuss, however briefly, a few of the key literary elements which contribute to the broader themes of Warren’s oeuvre. In “Delusion?—No!” we begin with a speaker who has climbed a mountain to look out on the sunset. Note the setting. We begin our journey with Warren “at crag-edge,” teetering on the cusp of our shared experience, beyond the “sweat and swink” of quotidian existence. Yet observe how Warren nevertheless fastens his speaker to the earth, not with the trusses of the caged bird, but with the dawning realization that fulfillment may be found there. The first stanza hinges on a single word, almost, in the following line: “atmosphere almost too heavenly/Pure for nourishment of earthbound/Bone.” We have already established that the goal of this poetry is to ascertain a means of obtaining spiritual nourishment, and Warren informs us now that true purity, the purity of clear air, of a “momentous, muscular thrust/Skyward” cannot satisfy humanity’s longing. Observe how “the heart as it downward fled” goes not towards heaven, towards “no sensation but blueness,” but to “cliff, cleft, gorge, chasm, and, far off,/Ravine cut in the flattening but still high glitter/Of earth.” Even flying high, “Hawk-eyed…upon the emptiness of air,” Warren’s imperative is not to gaze raptly heavenward, but to “survey/Each regal contortion/And torturous imagination of rock, wind, and water, and know/Your own the power of creating all.” Warren, in emphasizing the earthbound, has drawn attention to humanity itself. Unable to subsist on the pure air of heaven, but caught up in the rapture of its clarity, the speaker returns to earth to spread the joy of “the fundamental discovery” he has made on the mountaintop.
Where “Delusion?—No!” communicated an immediacy of tone which drove the action from the first word to the climactic, thunderous assertion that the experience was no dream but reality, “Covered Bridge” eschews the experiential urgency for a more measured poem of memory. The action is less defined in this particular poem, but it is primarily a lament for the speaker’s purposelessness. The past tense combined with the rhyme slows the poem down, for sake of nostalgia and of the speaker’s listlessness. Time, often redemptive in Warren’s work for the old, simple adage that a new day brings new opportunity, time and memory here separate the speaker from his youth so much so that it seems “another self.” The precipice found in “Delusion?—No!” serves as a springboard for the spiritual experience; in “Covered Bridge” we have no such precipice, but a sandbar. Instead, Warren considers starlight, an obvious symbol of the “motionless, holy” ideal for which his speaker yearns. But it is no heavenly pure atmosphere here, but merely a reflection of ideals the speaker has long since forsaken. More, reflected in nature, the starlight, ideal purity, and the speaker, a mere member of a fallen humanity, cannot connect to the spiritual experience in the same way the other speaker did. He cannot even come close to the ideal purity, guarded as it is by “the riffle by the sandbar.” And so he bemoans his lost youth and fragmented identity until he has lost even starlight “to prove identity” by holding up his hand “scarcely visible in that gloom.” Unlike the “divine osmosis” in which the speaker gives as much of his identity to the experience as he takes from it in “Delusion?—No!” the speaker here thinks that “Going. Just going.” would be enough. Isolation, separation, and fragmentation characterize the speaker’s failure to give way to the same transcendence as the other.
These analyses are by no means complete; they serve simply to allow for a few quick contrasts before a conclusion. First, the transcendental experience succeeded when the speaker, though high on a mountain, descended to earth and failed when the speaker began on earth and looked heavenward. Second, the first poem immerses the speaker in the natural world; “Covered Bridge” separates him from it. Third, “Delusion?—No!” shows direct interaction, participation even, in his own transcendence, where in the second there is no such action. Finally, the first poem ignores any personal history or memory the speaker may have collected in his life, the experience is one of those that can be described perfectly by the concept of “carpe diem,” a Latin phrase meaning “seize the day.” The second, weighted by memory and identity crisis, prohibits any such seizing.
What can we conclude? In answer to the first bit of my two-part question, why struggle, we can say that he is insecure because his life—all our lives—are struggles. Vacillation, uncertainty, doubt—these are mainstays of existence. Warren cannot embrace wholeheartedly the optimism found in “Delusion?—No!” all day, every day; more, humanity cannot possibly sustain such an experience. The profundity of that speaker’s faith is ephemeral, the power of his experience once in a lifetime. The evolution of Warren’s work, like the evolution of his life, reflects spiritual highs and lows, shows the actuality of fulfillment and the death of hope. In a larger context, Warren struggles because the struggle reflects reality, a conclusion which allows us to answer our second question: what does Warren’s struggle mean? It means that, because he is human, and however he celebrates humanity’s genius, its depravity, and its power of creation, he recognizes that the struggle often means more than any conclusion at which he arrives. It means that, because he is human, he knows that pure idealism cannot be maintained in context of the vagaries of life, that, because he is human, he knows that wholesale despondency, as in “Covered Bridge,” belittles the meaning of existence. It means that, because he is human, in the soul-wrenching inner conflict he finds the hope that, just once, he may transcend the mortal limit. And that would be enough.
Thank you.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Warren's Penchant for Paradox
Warren’s writing always leaves me feeling slightly inadequate, in a way—his ability to twist words into totally new connotations always surprises me. For a short list of examples, in “Pondy Woods” the vultures’ eyes are “hieratic,” which is a form of writing used primarily for religious texts by the noted mystic St. Clement of Alexandria. In many other instances, Warren imbues nothingness with substance, making nothing something in itself. That particular paradox will undoubtedly prove particularly significant for my discussion of Warren’s work in that he sees nothing as a void, nothing as “nonexistent.” I can’t say that he doesn’t toy with the idea of purposelessness, but I can’t anywhere find a gaping maw waiting to consume humanity—unless it’s History.
I guess for the most part it’s the paradox that leaves me feeling inadequate, no matter how significant I realize it must be. Nothingness as a concept leads me to consider emptiness, a space where nothing exists. And yet Warren discusses how nothingness “roars” about him, how he can hear the sound of reality coming through. If my writing seems confused here, it’s because I myself am absolutely confounded that somewhere in this emptiness Warren finds a justification for life.
Hand in hand with the problem of nothingness is the various speakers’ reaction to it. Alone, Warren’s speakers find themselves longing for human contact. Alone, they need above all else to forge a connection with someone. Alone, they embrace nothingness and discover meaning.
While I would think that a moment like that, alone at night, would leave the individual hungering for human contact for the rest of his life, this is not the case with Warren. In fact, in company in broad daylight, Warren’s speakers often shrink from their fellows. On a personal level, this seems to me perfectly reasonable. I can think of a number of nights alone that I’ve pondered what it means to know someone. On the other hand, logical scrutiny makes this assertion seem absolutely ludicrous. What twist of human nature has it that we as sentient, feeling beings should reject company when we have it and long for it when it is gone?
Even if it’s reflective of true human nature, Warren imbues his melancholy speakers with more regret than most probably feel in similar situations, more, certainly, than I have ever felt. And this, too, is a reason I feel somewhat inadequate—Warren seems more aware than I that this is a true reason for remorse; I think that Warren takes it upon himself to emphasize this failing on my part in the poetry to draw my attention to it.
Confused yet? I am. But at the same time this paradox is so indicative of the true nature of humanity that I feel it necessary to unravel it. In terms of Warren’s concept of individuality, it’s easy to see the need to balance “being your own person” and “being like everyone else.” Why vacillate between two extremes, though? Why not take some sort of middle road? I don’t know yet—but I’m going to try to figure it out.
I guess for the most part it’s the paradox that leaves me feeling inadequate, no matter how significant I realize it must be. Nothingness as a concept leads me to consider emptiness, a space where nothing exists. And yet Warren discusses how nothingness “roars” about him, how he can hear the sound of reality coming through. If my writing seems confused here, it’s because I myself am absolutely confounded that somewhere in this emptiness Warren finds a justification for life.
Hand in hand with the problem of nothingness is the various speakers’ reaction to it. Alone, Warren’s speakers find themselves longing for human contact. Alone, they need above all else to forge a connection with someone. Alone, they embrace nothingness and discover meaning.
While I would think that a moment like that, alone at night, would leave the individual hungering for human contact for the rest of his life, this is not the case with Warren. In fact, in company in broad daylight, Warren’s speakers often shrink from their fellows. On a personal level, this seems to me perfectly reasonable. I can think of a number of nights alone that I’ve pondered what it means to know someone. On the other hand, logical scrutiny makes this assertion seem absolutely ludicrous. What twist of human nature has it that we as sentient, feeling beings should reject company when we have it and long for it when it is gone?
Even if it’s reflective of true human nature, Warren imbues his melancholy speakers with more regret than most probably feel in similar situations, more, certainly, than I have ever felt. And this, too, is a reason I feel somewhat inadequate—Warren seems more aware than I that this is a true reason for remorse; I think that Warren takes it upon himself to emphasize this failing on my part in the poetry to draw my attention to it.
Confused yet? I am. But at the same time this paradox is so indicative of the true nature of humanity that I feel it necessary to unravel it. In terms of Warren’s concept of individuality, it’s easy to see the need to balance “being your own person” and “being like everyone else.” Why vacillate between two extremes, though? Why not take some sort of middle road? I don’t know yet—but I’m going to try to figure it out.
Friday, July 3, 2009
A Slightly Premature Picture of a Paper
With the upcoming presentation, I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the paper. I must confess that I started the summer with the supposition that I knew ahead of time what I would write on; now, having invested no small amount of time in reading, I am completely unsure. I resort here to outline form, as this idea (which is admittedly in its infancy) is vague at best and incomprehensible at worst. I include a few other points that I would like to make about structure and form of the paper to give a better sense of what I’m going for here. I feel it necessary to thank my elementary school teachers, without whom I would never have drawn the web that led to the reasoning I’ve outlined below.
1. Identity—I’ve recently begun to feel that Warren’s sought after spirituality may, in fact, be simply an extension of the self into nature and humanity. I have begun assembling a list of examples and contextualizing them to get a better feel on this; however, the major pattern that led me to this conclusion is Warren’ treatment of History, with a capital “h.”
2. History—Warren obviously deals in two kinds, his own personal history and the history of the nation (or world, as the case may be). National history deals in mythic figures and events, like the annus mirabilis of Brother to Dragons and the stiff, idealistic Founding Fathers in the poem of the same title. Personal history, as in Court Martial, is something more along the lines of a lyric retrieved from Warren’s memory. Personal history seems to me to be the more important of the two, as it is directly involved in shaping individual identity as separate from history’s communal humanity.
3. Memory—As the only primary source for most personal history, memory, for all its faults and failings, appears frequently in the poetry. This is where I am least sure, as Warren treats memory abstractly. It is obviously related to his notion of History and Time, but in what way I remain unsure. I can assert Warren’s mistrust of memory, since it cannot ever reveal truth. Yet, I can equally assert that Warren finds memory to be the fountainhead of Truth, the distorted version of reality that can be remembered.
4. Guilt—Another extension of memory (in addition to Truth), I think guilt may represent to Warren the human disappointment in being singularly incapable of being true to the nature of its ideals. He thinks it better to forget failings of that sort, as in Crime when he orders the reader to envy a murderer for his forgetting. I was reminded of Donne’s Holy Sonnet IX where Donne calls on God to forget rather than forgive his sins. Rather than asking God to forget, Warren begs the self to forget. Warren sees something cleansing (maybe even cathartic) about forgetting transgressions rather than tormenting himself with them.
5. Fear—This one is partly my own intuition, partly scrutiny of Warren’s tone. I feel one reason he could not fully give over to the Transcendental school of thought was his inability to give all of himself blindly to any ideology. He wanted so desperately to be original and to retain a sense of self as separate from the literary giants who came before him that he could not accept it wholesale. I think there’s also a fear that he could be wrong about everything he’s putting forth in his writing—he certainly doesn’t buy into the idea that he should believe in something for the simple act of belief, whether true or not—so he communicates some of that through his speakers’ failures.
6. 1st person—I’ve thought a great deal as well about how I plan to communicate my ideas. I feel that writing in the first person will remove some of the pretension from my essay, as I am, after all, nothing more than an undergraduate. I also think that I can lift the tone from a purely academic piece to one where I can communicate my own self-discovery from this summer, laying side by side what I have learned from Warren with what I want the academic community to observe in his poetry.
7. Evolution—All that being said, particularly the part about my own journey this summer, I think it’s important to note that Warren’s poetry and life are bound up in the same History and Time. The obvious changes in style, thematic elements, and ideals across his entire literary corpus show how he constantly remade himself, an important observation if I plan to focus on identity and the self in context of spirituality.
I understand that the above is ambitious and perhaps even overwhelming. I also understand that this is incredibly premature, because no matter how developed that idea may be I’ve still got several weeks to work everything out and read more critical interpretations of Warren. At the same time, this manner of looking at Warren struck me heavily while re-reading Promises, and I thought it important to record it lest I forget.
1. Identity—I’ve recently begun to feel that Warren’s sought after spirituality may, in fact, be simply an extension of the self into nature and humanity. I have begun assembling a list of examples and contextualizing them to get a better feel on this; however, the major pattern that led me to this conclusion is Warren’ treatment of History, with a capital “h.”
2. History—Warren obviously deals in two kinds, his own personal history and the history of the nation (or world, as the case may be). National history deals in mythic figures and events, like the annus mirabilis of Brother to Dragons and the stiff, idealistic Founding Fathers in the poem of the same title. Personal history, as in Court Martial, is something more along the lines of a lyric retrieved from Warren’s memory. Personal history seems to me to be the more important of the two, as it is directly involved in shaping individual identity as separate from history’s communal humanity.
3. Memory—As the only primary source for most personal history, memory, for all its faults and failings, appears frequently in the poetry. This is where I am least sure, as Warren treats memory abstractly. It is obviously related to his notion of History and Time, but in what way I remain unsure. I can assert Warren’s mistrust of memory, since it cannot ever reveal truth. Yet, I can equally assert that Warren finds memory to be the fountainhead of Truth, the distorted version of reality that can be remembered.
4. Guilt—Another extension of memory (in addition to Truth), I think guilt may represent to Warren the human disappointment in being singularly incapable of being true to the nature of its ideals. He thinks it better to forget failings of that sort, as in Crime when he orders the reader to envy a murderer for his forgetting. I was reminded of Donne’s Holy Sonnet IX where Donne calls on God to forget rather than forgive his sins. Rather than asking God to forget, Warren begs the self to forget. Warren sees something cleansing (maybe even cathartic) about forgetting transgressions rather than tormenting himself with them.
5. Fear—This one is partly my own intuition, partly scrutiny of Warren’s tone. I feel one reason he could not fully give over to the Transcendental school of thought was his inability to give all of himself blindly to any ideology. He wanted so desperately to be original and to retain a sense of self as separate from the literary giants who came before him that he could not accept it wholesale. I think there’s also a fear that he could be wrong about everything he’s putting forth in his writing—he certainly doesn’t buy into the idea that he should believe in something for the simple act of belief, whether true or not—so he communicates some of that through his speakers’ failures.
6. 1st person—I’ve thought a great deal as well about how I plan to communicate my ideas. I feel that writing in the first person will remove some of the pretension from my essay, as I am, after all, nothing more than an undergraduate. I also think that I can lift the tone from a purely academic piece to one where I can communicate my own self-discovery from this summer, laying side by side what I have learned from Warren with what I want the academic community to observe in his poetry.
7. Evolution—All that being said, particularly the part about my own journey this summer, I think it’s important to note that Warren’s poetry and life are bound up in the same History and Time. The obvious changes in style, thematic elements, and ideals across his entire literary corpus show how he constantly remade himself, an important observation if I plan to focus on identity and the self in context of spirituality.
I understand that the above is ambitious and perhaps even overwhelming. I also understand that this is incredibly premature, because no matter how developed that idea may be I’ve still got several weeks to work everything out and read more critical interpretations of Warren. At the same time, this manner of looking at Warren struck me heavily while re-reading Promises, and I thought it important to record it lest I forget.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The Two Versions of Brother to Dragons and Why I Think 1979 Is Better
The constant evolution of Warren’s system of ideals led, in the case of the two versions of Brother to Dragons, to a revision of his earlier works. I had many problems with the original edition as far as Warren’s writing is concerned. Similar to Warren’s issues in his earlier volumes of poetry, I felt that Warren spent much of his time philosophizing and moralizing. His rhetorical waffling feels more like a sermon than an exploration of the darkness in men’s hearts; the pastoral scenes are exemplary in their depiction of nature, but Warren fails to communicate the same inspiration, the same serenity he draws from the natural world in his later poems.
In the series of essays on the differences between the two editions of the poem, critics note the differences in diction and, by extension, tone, rhythm, and meter. Though my study does not deal specifically with the two editions of the poem, the significance of Warren’s growing maturity between the two pieces is important to interpreting his brand of spirituality. The most notable structural differences include the division of the poem into numbered sections and the redistributions of voices. The holistic text is somewhat disrupted by the numbered sections in my opinion; whereas before the action flowed easily from RPW’s climb up to the Lewis property into the murder of the slave boy, now specific actions serve as the focal point for a section. The less ordered poem better linked the importance of the events from the past, i.e. the earthquake and murder, with the present. In short, I felt that the lack of division better emphasized the setting and time as “nowhere” and “anytime.” By placing the murder as distinctly separate from the climb up the mountain, Warren allows the two events to exist separately when I feel that his intention is that they should coexist side by side in history.
As for the redistribution of voices, I feel that Warren does far better to cut back on the long, moralistic passages that characterize RPW’s lines and instead focus on the historical figures’ role in the events. The problem with RPW’s rhetorically elevated monologues stems from a complexity of phrasing and a pomposity of tone that makes them difficult to understand. Worse, RPW appears boring compared to the horrific action in which the historical figures take part. In the boredom, if by no other fault of the writing, Warren lost my attention. I found myself much more engaged in the 1979 edition where the action took precedence. Moreover, the thematic elements of guilt and the human capacity for evil come across more strongly when mourned by an ex-President and founding father.
With regard to said ex-President’s “conversion,” in the 1953 edition I originally found Jefferson’s turnabout inauthentic on many levels. The first being that, as a founding father, I maybe had some feeling that he should remain idealistic no matter the evidence against his idealism, for the sake of the nation he founded if for no other reason. Now that I’m in a better position to evaluate the choice to use Jefferson, having read a great deal more about Warren’s vision of history, I can better understand that Warren was doing everything he could to make Jefferson more human. I can appreciate the need to humanize men that history places on pedestals, even if it conflicts with my instinctive view of these men. With that problem aside, I still cannot accept Jefferson’s conversion, even if he’s less a marble statue and more human. Warren, I feel sure, understood how difficult it must be for a man to abandon the hope that his nature transcends, for whatever reason, the evil that haunts the rest of mankind. The ease with which Jefferson abandoned his hope felt unnatural. In the 1979 edition, Warren made the scene much more believable for several reasons, the most notable of which is that Meriwether Lewis’ role is much expanded. Lewis, the only other character who discusses the moment his idealism melted and he learned to be at peace with himself, speaks much more about his situation and takes several of the lines Jefferson spoke in 1953. Coming from one who has long accepted his fate, they do not ring false. Warren also uses an interesting technique he ignored in his earlier work where all the voices speak in unison, a sort of gestalt representation of humanity. Again, Jefferson loses some of his lines to this mass voice and, in joining it, illustrates physically that he has changed his opinion of humanity and of himself. The re-voicing of the poem feels like the most significant change because the work is ultimately concerned with the state of humanity and the problem of rejecting that humanity; re-voicing it lends a more plausible feel to Jefferson’s conversion.
In the series of essays on the differences between the two editions of the poem, critics note the differences in diction and, by extension, tone, rhythm, and meter. Though my study does not deal specifically with the two editions of the poem, the significance of Warren’s growing maturity between the two pieces is important to interpreting his brand of spirituality. The most notable structural differences include the division of the poem into numbered sections and the redistributions of voices. The holistic text is somewhat disrupted by the numbered sections in my opinion; whereas before the action flowed easily from RPW’s climb up to the Lewis property into the murder of the slave boy, now specific actions serve as the focal point for a section. The less ordered poem better linked the importance of the events from the past, i.e. the earthquake and murder, with the present. In short, I felt that the lack of division better emphasized the setting and time as “nowhere” and “anytime.” By placing the murder as distinctly separate from the climb up the mountain, Warren allows the two events to exist separately when I feel that his intention is that they should coexist side by side in history.
As for the redistribution of voices, I feel that Warren does far better to cut back on the long, moralistic passages that characterize RPW’s lines and instead focus on the historical figures’ role in the events. The problem with RPW’s rhetorically elevated monologues stems from a complexity of phrasing and a pomposity of tone that makes them difficult to understand. Worse, RPW appears boring compared to the horrific action in which the historical figures take part. In the boredom, if by no other fault of the writing, Warren lost my attention. I found myself much more engaged in the 1979 edition where the action took precedence. Moreover, the thematic elements of guilt and the human capacity for evil come across more strongly when mourned by an ex-President and founding father.
With regard to said ex-President’s “conversion,” in the 1953 edition I originally found Jefferson’s turnabout inauthentic on many levels. The first being that, as a founding father, I maybe had some feeling that he should remain idealistic no matter the evidence against his idealism, for the sake of the nation he founded if for no other reason. Now that I’m in a better position to evaluate the choice to use Jefferson, having read a great deal more about Warren’s vision of history, I can better understand that Warren was doing everything he could to make Jefferson more human. I can appreciate the need to humanize men that history places on pedestals, even if it conflicts with my instinctive view of these men. With that problem aside, I still cannot accept Jefferson’s conversion, even if he’s less a marble statue and more human. Warren, I feel sure, understood how difficult it must be for a man to abandon the hope that his nature transcends, for whatever reason, the evil that haunts the rest of mankind. The ease with which Jefferson abandoned his hope felt unnatural. In the 1979 edition, Warren made the scene much more believable for several reasons, the most notable of which is that Meriwether Lewis’ role is much expanded. Lewis, the only other character who discusses the moment his idealism melted and he learned to be at peace with himself, speaks much more about his situation and takes several of the lines Jefferson spoke in 1953. Coming from one who has long accepted his fate, they do not ring false. Warren also uses an interesting technique he ignored in his earlier work where all the voices speak in unison, a sort of gestalt representation of humanity. Again, Jefferson loses some of his lines to this mass voice and, in joining it, illustrates physically that he has changed his opinion of humanity and of himself. The re-voicing of the poem feels like the most significant change because the work is ultimately concerned with the state of humanity and the problem of rejecting that humanity; re-voicing it lends a more plausible feel to Jefferson’s conversion.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Warren's History and Identity
One of Robert Penn Warren’s many interests includes history, specifically the history of the United States. Events like the Revolutionary and Civil Wars provide fodder for his writing; people like Civil War heroes and the Founding Fathers give voice to Warren’s poetry. Thomas Jefferson, the noted author of the Declaration of Independence, narrates much of the 1953 novel length poem Brother to Dragons for example.
Warren is devoted to the idea of American myth. For a country so (comparatively) young, working without the shadow cast by history on Europe and Asia, the lack of tradition comes as no surprise. Warren, however, sees the void created by this lack as an opportunity to create a new folklore. Certainly his allusions indicate his role as a bard in the sense that Homer was a bard, telling the tales of his people and time. In Founding Fathers, Nineteenth Century Style Warren calls the great men of American history “Nestor by pigpen” and describes how some in bar fights “played Achilles.” In Brother to Dragon’s, Warren likens the town near the Lewis house to Ithaca; the poem itself is epic in proportion and theme. The allusions work more significantly in the context they are used; however, the references work together to elevate Warren’s work as a whole. What better way to make his poem epic than to compare to the standard for epic poems everywhere, The Odyssey?
In addition to associating his writing with the epic tradition, Warren links his characters with honor and glory, with Odysseus and Hector, with all of the distinguishing features of the epic hero. Joseph Campbell, the noted critic who gave the world archetypes, says in Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) that a hero “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” There is something incredibly romantic about Lewis exploring Louisiana or Grant meeting Lee at Appomattox because these heroes have commonalities with contemporary Americans; Warren gives them the opportunity to undergo their heroic journey through his poetry with great American heroes.
This epic feeling of history draws on Warren’s belief that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Warren certainly agrees with that stance, he spends much of his time in The Legacy of the Civil War emphasizing that the war must remain an integral part of American consciousness if for no other reason than because otherwise it might happen again. In one memorable line, Warren calls the “then and now” each others’ cenotaph. That the past should be memorialized by the present agrees with the ideas above. That the present should be memorialized in the past takes a different angle to the fear that history will repeat itself. The memorial tribute to the present in the past indicates that Warren believes our contemporary morality alters the factual events of the past, meaning that the present is the child of a mixture of fact, modernity, and interpretation.
Warren’s view of the past does not limit itself to heroic figures, quite the contrary. Warren speaks for the unnamed soldiers of the Civil War, the slaves of Lilburn Lewis, and his own ancestors. To him, history has very personal meaning, aside from the grandiose history shared by the nation. His personal history, particularly evident in a poem where he discusses an afternoon spent with his grandfather, means as much to him as the nation’s. This pattern appears again in Brother to Dragons. Jefferson, who can hear of horrendous acts of injustice without sacrificing his idealism, cannot bear to hear of what his own nephew could do to a defenseless slave. Warren presents two sorts of history in his poetry: the personal sort, which haunts his characters and creates an individual identity, and the national sort, which has slightly grander ideals and contributes to the national identity. The personal history remains bound up in the national history, of course—Warren tells of his grandfather fighting in the Civil War, and that is only one instance when the personal and national histories become entwined.
History shapes the identity of the individual for Warren. Besides being doomed to make the mistakes of his ancestors, Warren feels that without it he would also fail to achieve their triumphs. His association with American history comes through his family; in short, Warren needs his heritage to connect on any level with the very fact of being American, a distinction he touts very highly. It follows then that all his poetic ideas, including his spirituality, unite on some level with Warren’s sense of history and, through that history, identity.
Warren is devoted to the idea of American myth. For a country so (comparatively) young, working without the shadow cast by history on Europe and Asia, the lack of tradition comes as no surprise. Warren, however, sees the void created by this lack as an opportunity to create a new folklore. Certainly his allusions indicate his role as a bard in the sense that Homer was a bard, telling the tales of his people and time. In Founding Fathers, Nineteenth Century Style Warren calls the great men of American history “Nestor by pigpen” and describes how some in bar fights “played Achilles.” In Brother to Dragon’s, Warren likens the town near the Lewis house to Ithaca; the poem itself is epic in proportion and theme. The allusions work more significantly in the context they are used; however, the references work together to elevate Warren’s work as a whole. What better way to make his poem epic than to compare to the standard for epic poems everywhere, The Odyssey?
In addition to associating his writing with the epic tradition, Warren links his characters with honor and glory, with Odysseus and Hector, with all of the distinguishing features of the epic hero. Joseph Campbell, the noted critic who gave the world archetypes, says in Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) that a hero “ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” There is something incredibly romantic about Lewis exploring Louisiana or Grant meeting Lee at Appomattox because these heroes have commonalities with contemporary Americans; Warren gives them the opportunity to undergo their heroic journey through his poetry with great American heroes.
This epic feeling of history draws on Warren’s belief that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Warren certainly agrees with that stance, he spends much of his time in The Legacy of the Civil War emphasizing that the war must remain an integral part of American consciousness if for no other reason than because otherwise it might happen again. In one memorable line, Warren calls the “then and now” each others’ cenotaph. That the past should be memorialized by the present agrees with the ideas above. That the present should be memorialized in the past takes a different angle to the fear that history will repeat itself. The memorial tribute to the present in the past indicates that Warren believes our contemporary morality alters the factual events of the past, meaning that the present is the child of a mixture of fact, modernity, and interpretation.
Warren’s view of the past does not limit itself to heroic figures, quite the contrary. Warren speaks for the unnamed soldiers of the Civil War, the slaves of Lilburn Lewis, and his own ancestors. To him, history has very personal meaning, aside from the grandiose history shared by the nation. His personal history, particularly evident in a poem where he discusses an afternoon spent with his grandfather, means as much to him as the nation’s. This pattern appears again in Brother to Dragons. Jefferson, who can hear of horrendous acts of injustice without sacrificing his idealism, cannot bear to hear of what his own nephew could do to a defenseless slave. Warren presents two sorts of history in his poetry: the personal sort, which haunts his characters and creates an individual identity, and the national sort, which has slightly grander ideals and contributes to the national identity. The personal history remains bound up in the national history, of course—Warren tells of his grandfather fighting in the Civil War, and that is only one instance when the personal and national histories become entwined.
History shapes the identity of the individual for Warren. Besides being doomed to make the mistakes of his ancestors, Warren feels that without it he would also fail to achieve their triumphs. His association with American history comes through his family; in short, Warren needs his heritage to connect on any level with the very fact of being American, a distinction he touts very highly. It follows then that all his poetic ideas, including his spirituality, unite on some level with Warren’s sense of history and, through that history, identity.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Memory and Guilt in 11 Poems on the Same Theme
Feeling it necessary to really familiarize myself with Warren’s early work, I re-read Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, Thirty Six Poems, and the anthology which includes a few extra poems from this period over again.
I’ve already stated my objection to the vast majority of Thirty Six Poems. That is, Warren grounds his later work, the work with which I am most familiar, in experience. He epitomizes the phrase “show, don’t tell.” Here, however, he channels much of his energy into long poems moralizing or philosophizing into nothingness. From the preachy paradigmatic lines comes a sense of Warren’s immaturity in writing. In fact, when he edited Brother to Dragons in 1979, he removed many of the long tangential passages.
Much more effective is “Pondy Woods” where Warren shows Big Jim Todd’s struggle against inevitable death. The vultures, the mouthpiece of death, replace Warren’s familiar hawk in flying off into the sunset. Here Warren mocks Horace’s confident assertion, “Non omnis moriar” a Latin phrase meaning “not all of me dies.” The croaking vulture who says it, called “pedantic” by Warren, provides only cold instruction to Big Jim Todd. What good that he will live on afterwards? He will still be dead. It’s interesting that it seems almost more terrifying not that death is inevitable, but that some essential part lives on. The feeling arises again in Crime, a poem from Eleven Poems about a killer who cannot remember what crime has left him lying in a ditch cold and alone. Warren suggests that the impact of guilt—the human memory’s tendency to torture the mind with guilt—outweighs any punitive measures the justice system may take. Again in Original Sin: A Short Story, Warren treats remembrance as punishment as the embodiment of the speaker’s past regret returns again and again to haunt him, so much so that he rejoices at hearing of the death of old friends who might remember his transgressions.
Though a comfort to most, the opportunity to live after death frightens Warren. Guilt in all its many forms, the recurring motif of 11 Poems, weighs so heavily that death seems as a release. The fact that the killer forgot what he did freed him from the burden of re-living his crime. Life, then, always recognized as a trial, becomes a sort of punishment, restitution for bearing the yoke of humanity. I’ll have to look to see if the same feeling appears in his later work, if memory is still the punishment for being human.
I’m also feeling that this concept of memory might contribute very much to his sense of history as well. What is history but the collective memory of a civilization, a nation, or a family? With Warren, the “storehouse of our alibis” is not a static thing of the past, but a vital part of daily life. Linking memory and history has many implications, not the least of which is that humanity must learn to live with its past. I hope to discuss this further in my next post where I’m going to consider the role of history in Warren’s early poetry.
I’ve already stated my objection to the vast majority of Thirty Six Poems. That is, Warren grounds his later work, the work with which I am most familiar, in experience. He epitomizes the phrase “show, don’t tell.” Here, however, he channels much of his energy into long poems moralizing or philosophizing into nothingness. From the preachy paradigmatic lines comes a sense of Warren’s immaturity in writing. In fact, when he edited Brother to Dragons in 1979, he removed many of the long tangential passages.
Much more effective is “Pondy Woods” where Warren shows Big Jim Todd’s struggle against inevitable death. The vultures, the mouthpiece of death, replace Warren’s familiar hawk in flying off into the sunset. Here Warren mocks Horace’s confident assertion, “Non omnis moriar” a Latin phrase meaning “not all of me dies.” The croaking vulture who says it, called “pedantic” by Warren, provides only cold instruction to Big Jim Todd. What good that he will live on afterwards? He will still be dead. It’s interesting that it seems almost more terrifying not that death is inevitable, but that some essential part lives on. The feeling arises again in Crime, a poem from Eleven Poems about a killer who cannot remember what crime has left him lying in a ditch cold and alone. Warren suggests that the impact of guilt—the human memory’s tendency to torture the mind with guilt—outweighs any punitive measures the justice system may take. Again in Original Sin: A Short Story, Warren treats remembrance as punishment as the embodiment of the speaker’s past regret returns again and again to haunt him, so much so that he rejoices at hearing of the death of old friends who might remember his transgressions.
Though a comfort to most, the opportunity to live after death frightens Warren. Guilt in all its many forms, the recurring motif of 11 Poems, weighs so heavily that death seems as a release. The fact that the killer forgot what he did freed him from the burden of re-living his crime. Life, then, always recognized as a trial, becomes a sort of punishment, restitution for bearing the yoke of humanity. I’ll have to look to see if the same feeling appears in his later work, if memory is still the punishment for being human.
I’m also feeling that this concept of memory might contribute very much to his sense of history as well. What is history but the collective memory of a civilization, a nation, or a family? With Warren, the “storehouse of our alibis” is not a static thing of the past, but a vital part of daily life. Linking memory and history has many implications, not the least of which is that humanity must learn to live with its past. I hope to discuss this further in my next post where I’m going to consider the role of history in Warren’s early poetry.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Weekend Reading Part 2
The other non-fiction work of Warren’s I read this weekend is Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956). Originally an article written for a magazine reading audience, the work in its entirety includes Warren’s interviews with Southerners from Tennessee to Mississippi. The writing is informal and personal, a gritty look at the true feelings of everyone from the black community in Tennessee to the much maligned Southern planter. Warren’s diligence in collecting the view of every facet of society, black and white, male and female, old and young indicates his true concern with finding the real importance of segregation to the average citizen, be it bigotry or fear of large governments.
Warren’s sample population indicates what common sense dictates—the young people are generally more accepting than their older counterparts. Black Americans find that their position is generally improving with the advent of racial reform; white people feel in general that they ought to live and let live. The feelings of the vast majority of the populace indicate that they fear the court becoming a legislative body and dislike being told what their local governments can and cannot do; some cannot comprehend the possibility of mingling with the other race, others feel that racial amalgamation could potentially be a problem.
While Warren’s reporting provides interesting insight into contemporary attitudes toward segregation, the most interesting aspects of his piece from a literary standpoint include Warren’s self-identification as a Southerner. Despite having studied, travelled, and lived all over, his sense of his identity places him solidly in the South; he says that he understands a girl when she says that there is something indescribable about being Southern. Clearly, then, Warren comes with all the Southern “baggage” he discusses in his longer essay on the Civil War, the tendency towards pragmatism and the “Great Alibi.” I intend to keep his heritage in mind when reading his other works and to examine the influence Warren’s view of the South has on his work. He seems quite devoted to the idea of the South’s cultural and social independence, even if it has no economic strength.
He ends his piece with an interview with himself, as if to justify with the voice of a scholar the opinions of the people he interviewed. Here he takes the opportunity again to remind himself and readers that he is a product of the South as surely as the Citizen Council officers and integrationist college professors. He broadens the scope of his article to include the entire nation; he indicates his disgust with the contemporary evaporation of morality, finally suggesting that the South, if it grows into integration, is uniquely placed to lead the return of morality. Given that it alone among the regions of the United States has a truly moral problem to face and overcome, Warren postulates that the South will rise again, not the Old South, but a South capable of guiding the nation. This proves particularly interesting in light of my search for Warren’s spirituality—as he has already named himself Southern and boasted of the morality the South has to offer, Warren is perfectly placed to codify his conception of Southern ethics.
How strange then that he should evince relief upon leaving his “roots” to fly back north. Warren’s relationship with the legacy of his home seems that of an observer. Perhaps, like the Yankees he lives among, Warren’s creative faculties are best stimulated when he plays the role of observer. Or perhaps, and I think this more likely, Warren himself struggles with exactly what the South means to him and to his work.
Warren’s sample population indicates what common sense dictates—the young people are generally more accepting than their older counterparts. Black Americans find that their position is generally improving with the advent of racial reform; white people feel in general that they ought to live and let live. The feelings of the vast majority of the populace indicate that they fear the court becoming a legislative body and dislike being told what their local governments can and cannot do; some cannot comprehend the possibility of mingling with the other race, others feel that racial amalgamation could potentially be a problem.
While Warren’s reporting provides interesting insight into contemporary attitudes toward segregation, the most interesting aspects of his piece from a literary standpoint include Warren’s self-identification as a Southerner. Despite having studied, travelled, and lived all over, his sense of his identity places him solidly in the South; he says that he understands a girl when she says that there is something indescribable about being Southern. Clearly, then, Warren comes with all the Southern “baggage” he discusses in his longer essay on the Civil War, the tendency towards pragmatism and the “Great Alibi.” I intend to keep his heritage in mind when reading his other works and to examine the influence Warren’s view of the South has on his work. He seems quite devoted to the idea of the South’s cultural and social independence, even if it has no economic strength.
He ends his piece with an interview with himself, as if to justify with the voice of a scholar the opinions of the people he interviewed. Here he takes the opportunity again to remind himself and readers that he is a product of the South as surely as the Citizen Council officers and integrationist college professors. He broadens the scope of his article to include the entire nation; he indicates his disgust with the contemporary evaporation of morality, finally suggesting that the South, if it grows into integration, is uniquely placed to lead the return of morality. Given that it alone among the regions of the United States has a truly moral problem to face and overcome, Warren postulates that the South will rise again, not the Old South, but a South capable of guiding the nation. This proves particularly interesting in light of my search for Warren’s spirituality—as he has already named himself Southern and boasted of the morality the South has to offer, Warren is perfectly placed to codify his conception of Southern ethics.
How strange then that he should evince relief upon leaving his “roots” to fly back north. Warren’s relationship with the legacy of his home seems that of an observer. Perhaps, like the Yankees he lives among, Warren’s creative faculties are best stimulated when he plays the role of observer. Or perhaps, and I think this more likely, Warren himself struggles with exactly what the South means to him and to his work.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Weekend Reading Part 1
I devoted my weekend to two of Warren’s essays, The Legacy of the Civil War (1961) and Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1957), on the recommendation of my mentor. I encountered Warren’s interest with history in Brother to Dragons (1953) and early poetic works. Couched in the complicated rhetoric of his verse, Warren’s concept of history becomes difficult to understand on its most basic level. In his two non-fiction works, however, he thoroughly explores the fact of history and, more importantly, the sense of history which pervades and shapes the American psyche.
In Legacy of the Civil War, Warren argues that the Civil War creates national—and regional—identity, the unique American philosophy known as pragmatism, and a new sense of Union. Put simply, he believes that the Civil War represents not only the single greatest and most tragic event of our nation, but also the fountainhead of all subsequent intellectual, economic, social, and moral stimulus, the focal point of American fantasy and shame. Warren argues that the geographically divided nation’s ostensibly divided ideals in fact seek the same end, to assure those who hold such ideals dear that they have an excuse for their crimes and a justified assurance of their actions, regardless of how contemporary morality views them. Moreover, the “Treasury of Virtue” of the North and the “Great Alibi” of the South, Warren suggests, do not merely seek to expunge guilt, but to suggest that life retains a certain “grandeur” in spite of its transience and confused uncertainty.
Warren makes many other arguments in his paper, not the least of which says that the Transcendentalists, the intellectuals most empowered to become the critics of the time, “gave up” society because of their fear of becoming bound up in the issues facing the North. For a man called the “last poet of the sublime,” a man whose literary work often shares with Emerson and Thoreau the transcendental human need to engage his spirituality, his criticism seems harsh. Yet his tone, though remorseful for the regrettably misguided fanaticism of his literary forbears, cannot underscore enough the atrocity these men condoned. For Warren, a true child of pragmatism, such partisan thinking endangers the ideal of “Union;” moderation, common sense, becomes Warren’s watchword. As my interest in Warren lies in his spiritual struggles, I hope to discuss in further detail the extent of his pragmatism and the reasons Warren could not embrace the uniquely American transcendentalism handed him by history.
Warren’s prose also offers a good base for comparing his literary portrayal of mythic figures to his historical, common-sense understanding of them as men. Warren acknowledges that the Civil War provides America with men and women tested by the tenuous moral times in which they lived, tempest tossed by the hardness of war’s reality; however, he insists that Lincoln, Lee, Grant, Forrest, and all the hosts of Civil War heroes remain just short of godhood, and all the better for modern students of history. If he were to figure as a god in American myth, Lincoln would be irreproachable, almighty, and completely distant. A man engaged in an internal struggle featuring his conscience, his perception of natural law, and the needs of his nation provides a far more readily romanticized hero, one whose personal battle serves to justify all personal battles over problems of nebulous morality. Warren himself exploits the past many times in his work to lend them both recognition, in that a founding father or Civil War general conjures instantly all the preconceived notions of any American, and validity, in that a tormented interior monologue sounds all the more convincing coming from one whose reasons for torment seem so much weightier than the average man’s. Whether Warren abstains from forging god-heroes from the men of American heritage in his work has yet to be seen.
Another particularly memorable phrase from The Legacy of the Civil War, one which Warren seems as yet singularly unable to grasp in his poetry, is his assertion that historians and history remain separate from metaphysicians and metaphysics. History, at least in these few early poems, is an almost metaphysical discipline for Warren (when I re-read 11 Poems I’ll give more specific examples of where I noted this). I see no reason why he insists they be separate, at least in the case of personal reflection and literary significance. For a historian, for whom the fact of the past is the goal, metaphysics would serve only to obfuscate the issue, whereas, for grappling with morality as the poet or common man must, history offers the warnings and counsels, the successes and failures of the past. After seeing his scholarly view of history, I intend to read more carefully for his poetic allusions to the past in order to better understand what I will call now, for lack of a better term, his “metaphysical” view of it.
Finally, I intend to finish my reflection on these two essays tomorrow by writing on Segregation.
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