Robert Penn Warren, RIP.

Robert Penn Warren, RIP

IN THE AUTUMN of 1921, a thin, red-haired youngster from Kentucky enrolled as a freshman at Vanderbilt University and fell in with a group of instructors and fellow students who would soon constitute one of the most influential literary circles in twentieth-century America. The freshman was Robert Penn Warren, known to his friends as "Red" Warren. The leaders of the group were John Crowe Ransom, a member of the English faculty, and Allen Tate, then a student; they published a short-lived but brilliant journal called The Fugitive. (What they were "fugitive" from was "the high-cast Brahmins of the Old South," magnolias and Walter Scottism. They were moderns, of their own sort.)

There at Vanderbilt, Robert Penn Warren began one of the most remarkable careers in the annals of American letters--poet, novelist, critic, editor of The Southern Review (with Cleanth Brooks), and teacher, last at Yale. The text he co-authored with Brooks, Understanding Poetry (1938), instructed a democratized and raw generation (many of them on the G.I. Bill) how to read. It was the most influential book of its kind ever published. Ironically, Brooks and Warren, working from an essentially aristocratic "New Critical" perspective, had prescribed the how-to manual that made mass higher education plausible after 1965.

As a writer, Penn Warren was not in the very first rank. He wrote no poem as good as the best of his friends Ransom and Tate; one certainly cannot rank him with the greatest of the modernists, Yeats and Eliot. His Huey Long novel, All the King's Men (1946), brought him fame and fortune and is both powerful and melodramatic, this last a vice which often tended to displace his tragic muse. His criticism remains useful.

But the whole was much greater than the sum of its extensive parts, and was repeatedly accorded the highest honors. He gave himself for some six decades to serious literature, and for the most serious of reasons. With Ransom as their conceptual mentor, those Fugitives of the 1920s knew an important thing: that while science delivers an "edited" or reductive version of actuality, literature delivers the whole: nuance, concreteness, intuition, moral reflection, religious faith, passion--matters not reducible to formulae.

Rober Penn Warren held to that truth with all of his considerable powers, providing a civilizing example. He died at 84 in his summer home in Stratton, Vermont.