THE BIG MYTHS WE LIVE: ROBERT PENN WARREN'S CIVIL WAR

3 3 R T H E B I G M Y T H S W E L I V E R O B E R T P E N N W A R R E N ’ S C I V I L W A R D A V I D W . B L I G H T Few American writers ever thought more thoroughly and provocatively about the relationship of poetry to history, of the artistic imagination to the demands of historical research, as Robert Penn Warren. Few have matched Warren’s deep fascination with and endless probing of the nature and meaning of history itself. And, indeed, none has provided a more telling sense of the meaning of the Civil War as the central pivot of the whole of American history than Warren, in fiction and nonfiction. In the foreword to Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (1953), his first of three epic historical poems, which included footnotes to his sources, Warren mused about mixing poetry with history. A poem, he declared, ‘‘could be totally accurate as history but still not worth a dime as a poem.’’ But he demanded that poetry be ‘‘more than fantasy’’ and ‘‘say something about the human condition.’’ Warren left this oftquoted passage through which we can comprehend his use of the past: ‘‘Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.’’ That statement is alone as good a definition of how we forge collective historical memories as we will ever get. And Warren loved to 3 4 B L I G H T Y wrestle with the big myths, sometimes exploding their pieties and sometimes reinforcing them. Warren first heard the music of poetry and storytelling as a small boy at this grandfather’s feet, sitting on the unkempt lawn in front of a farmhouse in Christian County, Kentucky, in about 1911. He probably did not know that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War that year, but his grandfather Gabriel Thomas Penn, a Confederate veteran who had ridden with Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry, did not let him forget that war. Warren’s grandfather lived on the isolated farmstead some thirty-five miles from the town of Guthrie, in southern Kentucky, where Robert Penn was born in 1905 and where he grew up. It was with his grandfather on long summer days that Warren ingested and cultivated a child’s wondrous sense of the past and a passion for the Civil War. Later in his writing career, Warren was always asked whether he was still a ‘‘southern’’ writer and, even more, how he had come by such an enduring interest in the Civil War. He would often fall into a haze of remembrance laced with remarkable honesty, as in this response from 1961: ‘‘It [the Civil War] was very much alive – not as an issue, but as a reality of life. It wasn’t a matter of argument; it touched everybody’s life. In this very static society everyone you knew over a certain age had been in it . . . and it was just a part of the emotional furniture of life . . . just part of the faith as it were, and the drama of it.’’ Anthropologists might take such language as a near perfect description of how a deep mythology takes root in any community. Warren grew up knowing that, somehow, the Civil War was the great, mysterious, romantic event – the self-a≈rming myth – that made the world around him. His ‘‘emotional furniture’’ indeed. Sitting in a wicker chair under a cedar tree, corncob pipe in his mouth, Warren’s grandfather would regale the boy with stories of the Civil War. Grandpa Penn loved to recite poetry and even to sing for the boy in a ‘‘cracked voice.’’ The old man’s head was ‘‘full of poems,’’ Warren remembered. Byron and Burns served up in the grandfather’s version of a ‘‘Scots tongue’’ were annual July treats. In this romantic, ‘‘backward-looking’’ world of ‘‘changelessness ,’’ said Warren, he found an...