Making It New: 1900–1945 439Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), and The Long Street (1961), and in
prose works, one collection of which carries the characteristic title Still Rebels, Still
Yankees, and Other Essays (1957). If Davidson developed at all, it was only to the
extent that his opinions hardened into prejudices, so that he became more of a reac-
tionary than a traditionalist. Warren, on the other hand, changed in the course of an
enormously productive career. Unlike Davidson, too, who confined himself mostly to
poetry and essays, Warren was a genuine and various man of letters. His literary
criticism, identifying him as one of the founders of the New Criticism, won him enor-
mous influence: along with Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, critical
works written on his own include Homage to Theodore Dreiser (1971), John Greenleaf
Whittier (1971), and the studies collected in New and Selected Essays (1989). An early
biographical study exploring the dangers of idealism, John Brown: The Making of a
Martyr (1929), betrays the conservative stance that aligned the younger Warren with
the Agrarians. Even here, though, he took a more interrogative stance than most of
his colleagues: his essay in I’ll Take My Stand may be a defense of segregation but at
least it is honest enough to confront the racial issue. Two later works of social and
historical meditation, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) and Who
Speaks for the Negro? (1965), measure Warren’s progress toward a more liberal
position and a dispassionate advocacy of civil rights. The Legacy of the Civil War
(1956), in turn, reveals its author’s lifelong interest in history as a subject and moral
discipline and his particular concern with how the war has shaped American society
and sensibilities. As one of the speakers in Warren’s long dramatic poem, Brother to
Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (1953; revised edition, 1979) puts it: “without the
fact of the past, no matter how terrible, / We cannot dream the future.”
As a poet and novelist, above all, Warren has been constantly concerned with the
indelible fact of the past: the necessity to return to the place where “the father waits
for the son” because, without that return, no meaningful development, personal or
social, is possible. “History,” says Warren in one of his later poems, “Shoes in Rain
Jungle” (1966), “is what you can’t / Resign from”; nor should you try, since what
the fact of the past can develop is a healthy awareness of human limits – a sense of
the sheer “massiveness of experience” bearing down on the human personality and
drastically circumscribing the capacity for action. Looking at what has gone before,
people can learn from their mistakes and also begin to understand the nature of the
fallible human community to which they belong. That is not the entire story, though:
as Warren indicates, there is the dream of the future as well as the fact of the past. “Of
the brute creation” people may be, but they are also, potentially, “a little lower than
the angels.” Consequently, while they require an adequate definition of terror to
remind them of their monstrous origins, they need at the same time to find some
way of “accommodating flesh to idea” so as “to be able to frame a definition of
joy.” Tradition, the stored wisdom of the past, is certainly crucial in suggesting
appropriate values, principles by which to live. But values, according to Warren, are
actually formulated by individuals out of the experience of living and, as they
develop, qualify and enrich that experience. Past and future, fact and idea, father
and son, the traditionalist sense of what has been and the utopian feeling for whatGGray_c04.indd 439ray_c 04 .indd 439 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM