Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

“Christ, Start Again”: Robert Penn Warren, a Poet of the South?

183 “Christ, Start Again” Robert Penn Warren, a Poet of the South? In 1995, while living in Oregon, I was contacted by the editors of the Southern Review, founded by Robert Penn Warren when he was on the faculty at Louisiana State University. The university and the journal, I was told, were hosting a conference in honor of Warren, who had died in 1989. Would I be willing to come to Baton Rouge to deliver a paper on Mr. Warren’s legacy? I agreed immediately. Warren’s work—the poetry especially—had been of great importance to me for a long time, and the opportunity to write about him was welcome. I spent a happy week or so thinking of the many very interesting facets of Warren’s enormous body of work one might want to explore. Then I received a letter from LSU. I had an assignment: It was my job, I was told, to write about Warren as a southern poet. My enthusiasm was immediately deflated. Although I understood the conference planners’ strategy—my talk was to be paired with one by John Burt called “Robert Penn Warren as a Poet of New England,” thus slyly bracketing Warren’s flexibility and breadth—I was simply not interested in this subject. I felt typecast, for one thing: May a poet born in the South write only about “Southernness”? 184 The Muse in the Machine Well, then, the perverse side of my nature answered, so be it; I will do the job and do it with a vengeance. As I warmed to my task, I became, to my own surprise, grateful for the assignment . My relationship with “Southernness” has been lifelong and always agonistic ; I had gone on record about it many times, in poetry as well as prose. Still, in this instance, thanks to what I saw at first as an imposition, I discovered that I had one more thing to say on the subject. find it interesting and strange that I (of all people) should be called upon to explore the southernness (of all things) of Robert Penn Warren (of all poets). In the first place, Warren’s southernness may at first glance appear—as it did to me when I first began thinking about this subject—so self-evident that any discussion along these lines would be tautological and therefore boring. It’s certainly no problem, for anyone interested in doing so, to claim Warren as a southern poet. He may not be from the South, exactly, Kentucky being a border state (and I for one am not eager to get into any argument, especially with Kentuckians, over whether Kentucky is or is not southern in fact or in spirit), but his connection with the Fugitives and his founding of the Southern Review would appear immediately to certify him. One of the uninteresting ways to frame this discussion would be to rehearse those well-known facts and be done with it. Another would be to approach the poetry itself in a more or less statistical way and prove that 51.24 percent of Warren’s poetry is of, for, or about the South. Yet another would be to put forward a number of themes, techniques, images, tonalities, or what have you as belonging specifically to southern poetry and go on to demonstrate that 51.24 percent of Warren’s poetry possesses those qualities. Then we could spend all day arguing about whether those “Christ, Start Again” 185 themes, techniques, images, tonalities, or what have you are really southern, or are only southern, and whether Warren’s poetry really possesses them. This might be amusing, but my experience tells me that in the end it would get us nowhere. My first impulse, in all honesty, is to wonder just how much the “Southernness” of Robert Penn Warren really matters. It’s tempting simply to say that it doesn’t matter at all and then pass on. But this response, no matter how much it appeals to me personally, is as bad as baldly saying “Of course Warren is Southern.” The only intellectually decent way to solve the problem “Robert Penn Warren is/is not a Southern poet” is to define the terms. “What is the South?” is a familiar enough question at conferences on regional writing. But if we ask this question, are we not equally obliged to ask, “Well, but what is...