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.

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.

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.

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.