The Letterly Life of Robert Penn Waren

You see when a person writes a letter it is nearly as much one to himself as to the person who takes it from the postbox.

—Warren to Allen Tate, spring 1924

The sixth and final volume in the series Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren is due to be released by the Louisiana State University Press in 2013, so this seems an appropriate time to say something about the history of the Warren Correspondence Project and to make some observations about its nature and intended significance. Dilsey Gibson, in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, can rightly claim that she has seen "de first en de last," and as sole editor of the first two volumes of Warren's letters and general editor of the final four, I might—I trust with due modesty—appropriate her words in the present context. Robert Penn Warren taught that our engagement with a poem, when we approach it authentically, changes us in fundamental ways; and that is certainly true of the work involved in any long-term scholarly project, which in the course of its playing out comes to resemble a quest, punctuated by a string of unanticipated initiation experiences of a mixed and sometimes daunting nature. (Mining the Merrill Moore papers at the Library of Congress, I was caught up in a bomb scare.) Researchers resemble the travelers in T. S. Eliot's Dry Salvages—they "are not the same people who left [the] station / Or who will arrive at any terminus."

The Warren letters project began in April 1993 with a suggestion, perhaps more kindly than carefully considered, from Joseph Blotner, who was completing work on what would become his indispensable biography of the author. At the annual meeting of the Robert Penn Warren Circle at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, I asked Joe if he planned to follow up his book with a sampling of Warren's correspondence. He had brought out a welcome and influential book of Faulkner's letters in the wake of his two-volume biography of that author decades earlier, but Blotner made it clear he considered his labors effectively at an end. He and his wife, Marnie, were ready to pursue the unencumbered pleasures of a new life in Charlottesville without distraction. He then surprised me by suggesting that I ought to tackle the assignment: "You do it," he said.

Though I had some limited acquaintance with the peculiar rewards and disappointments of archival work, up to that point my own research and writing, in keeping with my graduate-school education, had largely been a matter of carrying out New Critical close readings within an American-studies framework; but I eventually convinced myself that I should at least explore the possibility. My motives were, it goes without saying, hardly free of the taint of personal and professional ambition (previous work on Warren had earned me tenure and promotions, and waggish colleagues already referred to my home in Texas as "The House that Warren Bought"), but I was primarily drawn to the project by my admiration for what I knew (or thought I knew) of Warren the man and my awareness of the crucial debt I owed to his fiction, social and literary criticism, and poetry—major factors in my thinking and living since undergraduate days. I was also mindful of something the late James M. Cox (of most happy memory) once told me. To paraphrase rather freely: we as readers need (in an almost visceral sense) those writers who speak most directly to and for us, but by the same token they need us to keep their legacy alive, especially if we happen to be scholars and critics. An author's literary Nachleben depends upon a critical mass of determined and qualified individuals willing to tend the flame.

As products of his truly protean mind and imagination, Warren's letters constitute intellectual property and are properly regarded as part of his estate—no less than an unpublished novel or a sheaf of poems—so my first obligation was to secure the support of John Burt, his literary executor...