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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