Robert Penn Warren’s Guthrie: Selections from Native Ground

Todd County, Kentucky, bordering Tennessee to the southwest, is part of a rich agricultural region where generations of farmers have tended fertile, well-drained soil to grow livestock, corn, wheat, and—for most of its history—tobacco. The county’s southernmost city is Guthrie, just over the state line from Clarksville, Tennessee. Guthrie was named for an early president of the L&N Railroad, who routed tracks through the city, and into the early part of the twentieth century, many called it the “Crossroads of the South” because of its importance as hub for rail transportation. Guthrie also bears some historical significance as the point where Native Americans entered Kentucky on the Trail of Tears (1838-1839) and as the site of a military encampment during the Black Patch Wars (circa 1905-1908), when the governor called up the state militia to protect area farms against vigilante bands of tobacco growers who were angry about price-fixing by the American Tobacco Company trust (Schwartz; “Trail”; Newman).

The 2010 US Census lists the population of Guthrie as 1419. This is a couple hundred souls more than lived there on April 25, 1905, when Robert Penn Warren—three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Fellow, and poet laureate of the United States—was born in a rented brick house at the corner of Third and Cherry Streets.

Warren lived in Guthrie until the age of fifteen, when, having skipped three grades in school, he left to spend a final transitional year at Clarksville High School. He had to turn sixteen before he would be eligible to take up a coveted appointment as a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy. The plan for Annapolis was thwarted, however, when a chunk of coal hurled by his ten-year-old brother caused permanent damage to Warren’s vision. So instead, the precocious country boy with passions for both science and poetry found himself a fully matriculated freshman at Vanderbilt University in September 1921. Ambitious, motivated, and innately anxious about his scholarly pursuits, Warren was also young and naïve and fell quickly to making the mistakes that college freshmen have always made in balancing social life with academic requirements. He drank too much, stayed out too late, fell in love too easily and often. Overwhelmed by the stresses of competing interests and impulses, he even made a somewhat melodramatic attempt at suicide during his second year.

Despite all the messiness, from a distance, Warren’s time at Vanderbilt seems charmed. Destiny placed him in a first-year English class co-taught by the estimable department head, Edwin Mims, and consummate scholar-poet John Crowe Ransom. Recognizing the young man’s gift for language as well as his intellectual and aesthetic inclinations, Ransom ushered Warren into a circle of faculty and students who met regularly to discuss literature and philosophy as matters of vital importance. Of course, in literary history, we know this group as The Fugitives, and in a later form as The Agrarians, and Warren’s friendships with these brilliant and equally idealistic fellows, including Ransom, Donald Davidson, and especially Allen Tate, formed perhaps the most sustaining relationships of his life.

Guthrie’s “Rob’ Penn” or “Red” Warren lived an unpredictably worldly existence after Vanderbilt. He spent a miserable but formative year earning a master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley and then moved to Yale to begin work on a doctorate in English. After just a year in New Haven, however, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, writing his essay for the Agrarian “manifesto” I’ll Take My Stand (1930) while he was in residence at Oxford. Yet as Warren himself came to realize, his life’s work could be traced back to his origins in rural Kentucky—to the small community that had exposed him to a sense of time and history and the vernacular, to the virtues of contemplation, to the consequences of human ambition. In many respects, his had been an idyllic boyhood. His mother doted on him, and his father—perhaps a frustrated poet himself—maintained an impressive library...