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Introduction: The Aesthetics of Robert Penn Warren
John C. Van Dyke
“A Critical Sense Worthy of Respect”: John Marston
and the Early Poetics of Robert Penn Warren
Anthony Szczesiul
The Conservative Aesthetic of Warren’s Early Poetry
Sam Prestridge
Walking So His Feet Don’t Touch the Ground: Robert
Penn Warren, the Regional Motive, and “Kentucky Mountain Farm”
C. D. Albin
“Figured in Kinship”: Rock, Hawk, and Dream in Warren’s
“Kentucky Mountain Farm” and Brother to Dragons
Randolph Paul Runyon
Warren’s Poetics of Sequence: The Case of Island
of Summer
John Burt
Warren Reflects on the Discontinuities of His Poetic
Career
Aimee Berger
The Aesthetics of Absence and the Scopophilic Text:
Robert Penn Warren’s Meet Me in the Green Glen
Charlotte H. Beck
Robert Penn Warren and the Poetics of (Im)Purity
Bill McCarron
Warren’s Recondite Vocabulary
Robert Penn Warren’s B.Litt. thesis, completed in 1930 while Warren was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, provides the earliest statement of the young writer’s developing poetics. In the thesis, Warren concludes his literary-textual-historical analysis with an assessment of Marston’s importance and focuses on “the two theoretical matters of criticism [. . . ] touched on in the course of the satires: the place of ‘fiction’ in poetry and the relation of style to content.” Warren’s comments on these two matters bring to light the young poet’s own sense of the contemporary critical climate and reveal his own developing poetics. Warren is not so much interested in the interpretation of Marston as he is in Marston’s contribution to the struggle to understand how texts--specifically poetic texts—mean and achieve a certain effect. While Warren’s comments are set within the specific context of the development of Anglo-American literary modernism, more recent work in literary theory validates the persisting questions raised by Warren. Comparison of Warren’s analysis both to developments in Marston criticism and to Warren’s own development as a critic and poet shows that Warren’s earliest critical work grappled with critical issues that were not only central to literary modernism but have also persisted in the discourse of recent literary theory.
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Anthony Szczesiul, “The Conservative Aesthetic
of Warren’s Early Poetry”
A close, complementary relationship exists between Robert Penn Warren’s
early political and literary ideologies. As a member of the conservative
Southern Agrarians, Warren was suspicious of the changes wrought by modernity
and was committed to maintaining traditional forms of social order, as
seen in his early support of segregation in the South. Warren’s early aesthetic
principles were driven by similar desires. Faced with the disorder of the
modern world, Warren opted to pursue Eliot’s aesthetic program of tradition,
authority, order, and control. Selections from Warren’s early poetry, criticism,
and letters reveal that the boundaries between his political and literary
ideologies were very fluid during this period. But as Warren’s political
perspectives--particularly his views on race--began to change in the late
1930s and early 1940s, he began to question his aesthetic assumptions as
well, leading him into a decade-long impasse during which he published
no new poetry.
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Sam Prestridge, “Walking So His Feet Don’t
Touch the Ground: Robert Penn Warren, the Regional Motive, and ‘Kentucky
Mountain Farm’”
Revisiting biographical evidence and Warren’s early regional poems
and examining his narrative development using the rhetorical theories of
Kenneth Burke suggests that Warren’s adaptation of regional imagery and
emblems had little to do with regionalist polemics. Rather, his motives
seem more related to his need to divorce himself from the provincialism
of his early life and whatever claims it had on him.
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C. D. Albin, “‘Figured in Kinship’: Rock, Hawk,
and Dream in Warren’s ‘Kentucky Mountain Farm” and Brother to Dragons”
The poem “Kentucky Mountain Farm” may be read as an early expression
of Robert Penn Warren’s growing scepticism concerning the roots, specifically
the Jeffersonian roots, of Nashville Agrarianism. Seen in this light, “Kentucky
Mountain Farm” invites comparison to Brother to Dragons, the book-length
poem where Warren develops his probing interrogation of Jefferson’s psyche.
The final movement of Brother to Dragons is particularly resonant since
its setting is a Kentucky mountain farm once owned by Lilburne Lewis, Jefferson’s
nephew and the murderer of a slave. Warren finds Jefferson’s struggle to
respond to this murder ineffectual since Jefferson cannot reconcile it
with his cherished optimism. As a result, the growing mistrust of Agrarian
philosophy that Warren originally expressed in “Kentucky Mountain Farm”
reaches its culmination in Brother to Dragons.
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Randolph Paul Runyon, “Warren’s Poetics of Sequence:
The Case of Island of Summer”
Island of Summer, the sequence of fifteen poems that forms the first
part of Warren’s Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968, is “one beautifully interlaced
and very rich, massive long poem”—as Cleanth Brooks described it in a letter
to the poet. The poems are so tightly interwoven that “there is a not a
weak link in the chain.” Brooks did not elaborate, but when read with his
comments in mind the sequence reveals its secrets: each poem repeats elements
of the immediately preceding poem, often through self-referential themes
such as inwardness (relating to the inwardness of each poem considered
separately) versus outwardness (the poem’s connections to the rest of the
sequence), and left-to-right transits (a bullet passing through a Nazi
helmet, a bikinied hunchback crossing one’s line of vision) that replicate
the reader’s experience of reading a text from left to right and the sequence
from beginning to end. At the same time, the sequence enriches our understanding
of Warren’s persistent retelling of the Perseus myth, already evident in
other poems and in the novels, in particular the hero’s golden-showered
conception and his slaying of the Medusa.
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John Burt, “Warren Reflects on the Discontinuities
of his Poetic Career”
In several late poems such as “Red-Tail Hawk and Pyre of Youth” and
“Vision,” Robert Penn Warren considers the changes in the style and ethos
of his poetry over his sixty-year career. In them, Warren reflects not
only about the role of such biographical events as the collapse of his
first marriage and about such stylistic changes as the loosening of his
style after the ten years of poetic silence in the late 1940s and early
1950s, but also about such political changes as the gradual movement of
his convictions from right to left over the same years and about his changing
relationship to poetry itself, to the poetic sublime. The deepest issue
one faces when one faces the shape of one’s poetic career is how one stands
towards those things that make poetry poetry. The always urgent and never
answerable question is how poetry differs from ordinary discursive uses
of language, what poetry’s object is, and, most of all, how it stands in
the face of the ineffability of its ultimate objects and the incapacity
of the instrument—language—with which it attempts to come to terms with
what cannot be come to terms with in the first place.
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Aimee Berger, “The Aesthetics of Absence and
the Scopophilic Text: Robert Penn Warren’s Meet Me in the Green Glen”
Though Cassie Spottwood’s attempts to come into being are at the center
of Meet Me in the Green Glen, she is largely ignored as a speaking subject
not only by the other characters but also by many of the novel’s critics
as well. Her silence and invisibility are framed on all sides by men like
Cy, Sunder, and Murray, all of whom objectify women throughout most of
the text. Running counter to this overt pattern of scopophilic objectification
is Warren’s subtle aesthetic manipulation of a textual absence that places
Cassie at the center of the text and highlights that her failure to gain
a voice in the intratextual world of the novel is the fault of those who
refuse to hear her and not indicative of her own failure to come into being.
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Charlotte H. Beck, “Robert Penn Warren and the
Poetics of (Im)Purity”
Robert Penn Warren’s attacks on the notion of pure poetry began in
his earliest critical writings but came into focus during the 1940s when
his major critical essays were written and his own poetic practice was
in transition . Warren’s two most influential critical essays, “Pure and
Impure Poetry” (1943) and “A Poem of Pure Imagination,” on Coleridge’s
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1946), define Warren’s belief, persisting
throughout his creative life, in the necessary tension between the ideal
and the real, the abstract and the relative— his belief in the poetics
of (im)purity.
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Bill McCarron, “Warren’s Recondite Vocabulary”
Robert Penn Warren has a propensity for including highly unusual words
in his poetry. Although any list of such words is a subjective one, the
compilation displays the breadth of Warren’s learning: from medical terminology
to historical esoterica to strange geological vocabulary. Whereas in lesser
poets unusual words often simply call attention to themselves, in Warren’s
poetry all such words are remarkably suited to their poetic contexts and
enhance the quality of the poems in which they appear;
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