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.