Arts and Letters

Robert Penn Warren was a literary giant. He was the complete man of letters. He did everything—poetry, fiction, drama, biography, essays, even textbooks—and he did them all magnificently well. What can one properly say about such a person in a few short minutes? I might recite the long list of medals and awards that he won. But this audience already knows his incomparable record. In his lifetime he won practically all that were ever offered.

I count myself most fortunate to have met him early, as early as 1924. Moreover, I had some of the best opportunities to get to know him well, for we overlapped at four different universities. We did a great deal of hard work together and we sat side by side for eight years in the same little dingy office at Louisiana State University. We also had plenty of fine convivial evenings for laughter and talk. Strenuous work and delightful relaxation provide excellent ways to get to know any person. But Warren had his silences and his mysteries. Several important events of his early life I learned about only forty years later on. But I can fairly claim to have come early to appreciate the things with which he was always passionately concerned.

He deeply loved America including an affection for the region in which he was born and grew up. He was fascinated that young Sam Houston who went out to live with the Cherokee Indians took with him not only a Bowie knife but a copy of the Iliad. Warren's first book was a life of Old John Brown, whose "soul goes marching on." Warren agreed with Oliver Wendell Holmes that Brown was a homicidal maniac, but he genuinely admired Brown's gift for oratory and his dauntless courage. Warren wrote an account of the great novelist Herman Melville, remarking that Melville also just missed being a great poet as well as a great novelist. Warren was searchingly interested in another of his heroes, that complex American statesman, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote and then later carefully rewrote a long poem about Jefferson. He also wrote a fine narrative poem about one of the natives of Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, Chief Joseph, who fought bravely and skillfully against the white men who had broken the treaty that protected the tribe's native lands.

Warren did love his country's various heroes but he knew that the history of America the beautiful did include a number of incidents that were quite unbeautiful. It was important to know these also. He was relentlessly honest in his pursuit of truth. That search for the truth manifests itself throughout his work. It is the dominating theme of all his novels, not merely that of All the King's Men, but of all his novels. Let me observe that those other novels have been undervalued, but I predict that eventually their true worth will be rediscovered.

Their place in Warren's love of truth was not limited to comfortably inert historical documents. In the disturbed years of our mid-century, Warren published three books, The Legacy of the Civil War, Segregation, and Who Speaks for the Negro, books that dealt directly with the burning issues of the time. History for Warren was alive and compellingly personal.

The other day I picked up a copy of his Selected Poems and started counting the occurrences of words like history, time, and truth. I was astonished at their sheer number and the variety of definitions Warren assigned to them. Time could be "the howling orthodoxy of darkness"¹ but it could also be as "quiet and lifeless" as the "silken and yellow perfection" of the dust.² History "being born" could sound like bootheels banging in some far off city like Berlin, but it could also be as close to you as the other side of the mirror into which you are looking as you shave.³ There history "Gathers, condenses, crouches, breathes, waits…."⁴

Most interesting and exciting of all was Warren's association of knowledge with love. Over and over, Warren suggests that you cannot genuinely love anything which you do not completely know and that to know something in its fullness means that you love it. In one of his poems, he asks: "What is Love?" and answers: "One name for it is knowledge."⁵

Did Warren ever attain that final knowledge of his life-long search? If he did, he was too modest to claim it. He called himself a seeker, a yearner, no more than that. But the very questions that Warren kept asking brush upon and rustle with wisdom. They have all the resonance of a serious meditation on the nature of mankind.

Warren-loved epigraphs: he drew them from Job, Isaiah, St. Augustine, and the Psalms. But one of the most striking of his epigraphs is apparently of his own making. It reads, "Time is the dimension in which God strives to define His own Being."⁶ For Warren, God remains remote and mysterious but the import of this declaration is clear enough. Yet how modern Warren is. His meditative poems are great but how powerful are also his anecdotal poems, the works that draw on Kentucky folklore and that are filled with the very idiom of the countryside.

He was a warmhearted and generous man. In his death a number of us here present have lost a cherished friend. But a great literary artist doesn't perish. He leaves with us something preciously alive: the powerful books that still speak to us.

1. Warren, Robert Penn, "Ballad of Mister Dutcher" from Selected Poems: 1923-1975 (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 38.

2. Ibid., "I am Dreaming of a White Christmas," p. 27.

3. Ibid., "A Way to Love God," p. 3.

4. Ibid., "The Interim," p. 148.

5. Ibid., "Love and Knowledge," p. 99.

6. Warren, Robert Penn, from New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985 (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 113.