Robert Penn Warren’s 1953 book-length narrative poem Brother to Dragons is not well known now. But when Brother to Dragons was published, it was reviewed, mostly sympathetically, by many of the most important poets and critics of its time, from Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell to Leslie Fiedler and Delmore Schwartz.1 These early reviewers focused on what they took to be the book’s dark view of human nature, and on its stylistically irregular and emotionally turbulent verse, which, as Joan Romano Shifflett (2020) has recently shown, Robert Lowell later saw as leading the way towards the stylistic revolution in his own verse that began with Life Studies (1960).2 That the book also had something to say about the long unhappy history of slavery and racism in the U.S. was also understood from the beginning, and recent discussions of the book by Cornel West (2004, 88), and Natasha Trethewey (2015) have shown the place of the book both in the early history of the Civil Rights movement, and in the ongoing public debate about race. My argument here is that the book, which largely took shape between the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and the death of Stalin in 1953, touches, however obliquely, upon many of the major issues of early Cold War culture, and does so in a way that should cause us to reconsider our stereotypes about early Cold War culture.

Brother to Dragons arose from the true story of how Lilburne and Isham Lewis, two nephews of Thomas Jefferson, murdered a seventeen-year-old slave named George with an axe on the night of December 15-16, 1811, on Rocky Hill near Smithland, Kentucky, on the night the Great New Madrid Earthquake, the strongest earthquake in American history, shook the continent from the Rockies to Boston.3 The Lewis brothers attempted to burn George’s dismembered body on the hearth of their kitchen cabin, but at 2:30 A.M. that night the earthquake threw down the chimney on George’s unconsumed remains. Afterwards, Lilburne and Isham bricked the remains into the chimney as they rebuilt it, but a later aftershock threw the chimney down again. A neighbor having discovered a dog (very possibly Lilburne Lewis’s own dog Nero) gnawing on George’s still recognizable skull, indictments were brought, first against Lilburne, then against both brothers, for the murder of George. Before they could be brought to trial, however, Lilburne was killed in a failed suicide plot with Isham, and Isham, escaping from jail, was lost to history, although there is folklore about his being killed at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

A garbled version of the story was known in abolition circles in the nineteenth century through Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), and several different contradictory and unreliable accounts of the crime were published in the 19th century, but it had been largely forgotten by 1953 when Warren’s poem returned it to public consciousness.4 To prepare the poem Warren twice visited the murder site, and examined the dusty legal records in the courthouse in Livingston County, Kentucky, where the Lewis brothers had been indicted. In 1976 Boynton Merrill’s Jefferson’s Nephews finally provided a detailed scholarly account of the tragedy.

Unhappy with the 1953 version of the poem, Warren rewrote it completely, publishing a second version in 1979. The Rocky Hill tragedy occupied Warren on and off for forty-four years, from his groping attempts beginning in 1943 to tell the story as a ballad, as a novel, or as a play, through the two very different versions as book-length poems, some five theatrical productions (including a well-received production directed by Adrian Hall at the Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence in 1975), and a teleplay version broadcast on the PBS television network in 1975 and published in The Georgia Review the following year, to the final changes he made to the 1979 text in 1987 as he was preparing a never completed edition of his collected poems.

Although he probably knew about the tragedy, the historical Jefferson left no record of his thoughts about it. Perhaps, as Warren surmised in the preface to the 1953 edition, Jefferson was unable in life to face the facts Warren has him so obsessively brood upon in death. As Warren tartly remarked in his preface to the poem: “If the moral shock to Jefferson caused by the discovery of what his own blood was capable of should turn out to be somewhat short of what is here represented, subsequent events in the history of America, of which Jefferson is the spiritual father, might still do the job.” In the poem, Warren’s shade of Jefferson is unable to rest in death, not only because Lilburne and Isham’s crime shadows his blood family, but also because that crime seems to repeal Jefferson’s vision of the promise of human nature, as well as his vision of the promise of America. (Somehow for Warren the question of the promise of America and the question of the promise of human nature seem to be the same thing, perhaps because the success of the United States was taken by him to be a test of the possibility of democracy more generally.) What is more, the story confronts Jefferson with his own inability to face his complicity in slavery and racial oppression while he was alive. Warren’s Jefferson is a dark knower, not an Enlightenment reformer and institution-builder, more a character out of Melville’s imagination than a version of the historical Jefferson, although perhaps if the historical Jefferson had been unable to die, trapped in a shadow world for a century and more because of unresolved guilt, he might have become rather like the character as Warren portrays him.

The poem took a unique form, neither a narrative nor a drama but a “Tale for Verse and Voices,” set in “no place” and “any time,” in which the different speakers, all but one of them long dead, engage in a colloquy with each other to make sense of what the principals did and witnessed in a time now in their remote past. At the poem’s center, the tormented shade of Jefferson and “R.P.W.,” the poet’s cynical stand-in for himself, confront each other and argue about the meaning of the murder. Jefferson is half-mad with rage and guilt. He repudiates not only his nephews but also the national ideals (and the vision of human nature) that he had articulated in the Declaration of Independence, as well as his ties to the republic he partly created in that document. R.P.W. badgers him, arguing that repudiating the crime does not free Jefferson from implication in it. But R.P.W. himself is as implicated in America’s racial past as Jefferson is, and his feelings are equally wrought-up; he differs from Jefferson in having adopted, in place of Jefferson’s enraged revulsion against his life’s work, a typical modern’s ironic distance, which stance yields him nothing, because all it does is to substitute self-righteous anomie for guilt and rage.

Warren’s Jefferson, however, does not finally repudiate some of the most important aspects of the Declaration. He does not reject the idea of human equality, as later critics of the Declaration such as John C. Calhoun did. He does not reject, as the social Darwinists (and for that matter the Utilitarians) did, the idea that all people are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” He does not reject the ideal of self-government, as de Maistre did. But Warren’s Jefferson does reject the central conviction of the historical Jefferson, the Enlightenment idea that humans can perfect themselves by means of reflection and choice.

Now Warren does not think of the historical Jefferson as a kind of Pollyanna. When R.P.W. criticizes Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the Roman architecture and culture embodied in the Maison Quarée in Nîmes by reminding him what the Romans were really like, Jefferson responds peevishly that he was never “that ilk of a fool,” (1979, 78) and knows his history, knows what humans are capable of, what societies are capable of (Unless otherwise noted, all references to Brother to Dragons refer to the 1953 edition.).5 But the historical Jefferson had thought of all of these bad things as the consequences of superstition and hierarchy, the work of priests and kings. What Jefferson comes to reject is not the idea that human nature is benevolent but the idea that daylight reason will naturally if gradually lead humanity towards enlightenment. Humans will always find ways to turn their best ideas to bad ends. Worse yet, the inability to recognize the intractability of human darkness itself renders one vulnerable to it, and makes our very values sources of evil, since cruelty so often comes to us in the guise of what we must do to defend what really matters. It is easy to see how crusader morality reckons up the price of its convictions in blood; nothing perhaps provides better evidence for Paul’s idea of original sin than the history of the religion he did so much to shape. But even Enlightenment reason, left to itself, winds up, as Hegel said of the French Revolutionaries, producing only death at the guillotine, “the coldest, shallowest of deaths, with no more significance than cleaving a cabbage head or swallowing a gulp of water” (360).

Jefferson’s error, as he comes to understand it in Brother to Dragons, is not that he does not know that human beings are capable of bad acts. It is that he sees the world as divided between ignorance and enlightenment, vice and virtue, wrong and right. But the world is not divided between wrong and right but between good and evil, and good and evil are so intermixed that evil always comes to us with all the promise of good, and also with all of the stampeding urgency with which mixed, limited, ambivalent human beings always face the absolute demands of good.

What both R.P.W. and Jefferson learn in the course of the poem is not that human nature is dark but that they cannot manage the darkness of human nature by repudiation, and they are made to recognize that the only way forward is through a recognition of complicity in the human darkness which makes shared fallenness the ground for a chastened common humanity, even if it means accepting the likes of Lilburne Lewis as someone ultimately not completely different from themselves. History in Brother to Dragons does not lend itself to clean separations between the innocent and the guilty, partly because the royal road to evil in this book is an enraged revulsion against evil that enables us to serve our ideals only in blood; “the recognition of complicity,” as Warren remarks in the poem, “is the beginning of innocence” (4835) because it chastens us from the habit of recruiting every ideal into the service of murder and requires of us a forbearing habit of mutual forgiveness.

The other principal characters — the Lewis brothers; their parents; Lilburne’s wife Laetitia; Laetitia’s bumpkin brother Billy Rutter; the Lewis’s cousin, the explorer Meriwether Lewis; Lilburne’s ambivalent and darkly possessive African-American Mammy, Aunt Cat; and, in one brief but moving passage, the murdered George himself — interrupt their colloquy as required, and tell their own stories, entering from an outer dark in which, until they speak, Jefferson and R.P.W are not aware of their presence.

In an interview with Ralph Ellison in Paris Review in 1957, Warren made clear that he understood the murdered slave George, at least, to be a silent presence and witness throughout. Other characters materialize and dematerialize, but George, we are to understand, is always present. Although the poem is about the other characters’ guilt, not about George’s anguish, George is as much a witness and judge as a victim, and however curtailed his voice is, George sounds the tonal keynote of the poem. George himself speaks only three lines in the 1953 version, but those lines were the first lines of Brother to Dragons that Warren composed, four years before he began working on the rest of the poem (Watkins, Hiers, and Weaks 1990, 43):

I was lost in the world, and the trees were tall.
I was lost in the world, and the dark swale heaved.
I was lost in my anguish, and I did not know the reason. (4340-42)

In its immediate context in 1953, the book had several principal moral and political aims. Warren spoke first of all as an ethically sensitive white Southerner in the years immediately preceding the repeal of legal racial segregation by the Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954. Brother to Dragons is the most complex and most fraught text about race by any white Southerner. Not Twain, not Cable, not Warren himself in later works such as Band of Angels (1955) and Wilderness (1964), not William Styron, not even Faulkner, presents quite so stark a picture of his region’s and his nation’s guilty racial past as Warren did in Brother to Dragons.

Warren’s stake in this story was a personal one. When he was 24, as his contribution to the Agrarian collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand (1930), Warren had written “The Briar Patch,” which defended the status quo of racial segregation, on condition that Southern Whites take seriously the “equal” part of the segregationist slogan “separate but equal.” The main argument of the essay was that industrial development in the South would not end race hatred because factory owners would play up racism to fight unionization. This wasn’t precisely the tack a thoroughly committed racist would have taken (even the title seems to be a tribute to the ability of Southern Black people to withstand whatever the Whites threw at them), but Warren always later described the essay as a defense of segregation, and felt considerable shame about having written it. Warren’s first book, John Brown: The Making of Martyr (1929), a savagely ironic biography of its title character, was in most ways a conventional neo-Confederate work inclined to underestimate both the ugliness of slavery and the centrality of its role in the coming of the Civil War. The poems of Warren’s early period, most especially his much-criticized “Pondy Woods,” sometimes take conventional racist stereotypes about black people for granted. (Later works continue to play with these stereotypes too, but usually at White people’s expense.)

At some point in the late 1930s or early 1940s Warren changed his mind about segregation, and by 1948 had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (The reader can view Warren’s 1948 membership card at http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/media/rpw-naacp-card.) In his 1957 interview with Ellison, and again in more detail in a 1969 interview with Marshall Walker, Warren argued that his uneasiness with segregation began to take shape rather earlier than this, as he worked on his first novella, Prime Leaf (1931), the germ of what became the novel Night Rider (1939).

Warren wrote Prime Leaf immediately after writing “The Briar Patch,” during his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. While he was writing “The Briar Patch,” Warren later said, he was obscurely aware of what he called to Ralph Ellison “some kind of discomfort in it, some sense of evasion” in the “tangle and jangle” of writing it. The imaginative effort of writing Prime Leaf forced him to see what he had evaded while writing “The Briar Patch”; indeed, it forced him to see what he had evaded in his own experience of the South of his youth. Far from home, Warren had the distance to be able to see his region more clearly, but only when he set himself the task of rendering it imaginatively. Warren discovered that it was one thing to compose an abstract defense of segregation, and another to try to render the felt life of a region in realistic fiction, and the emotional experience of the latter began to transform Warren’s thinking about racial inequality when he returned to the United States.

Now immediately after this, within six months, I was back in the South, and the Depression was coming on. I was living in the country a great deal—not in town—and you’d see more acutely than ever: first, from having been away from it for so long; second, from having to think about it during the years of absence, and then seeing this starvation-poverty that was coming on for whites and black and also certain aspects of the brutality of the system in its psychological way, which I’d been too young when I’d lived there before, or too stupid, to be aware of. (Watkins, Hiers, and Weaks 1990, 159)

Brother to Dragons was the first of a series of books about slavery and race Warren published during the Civil Rights era, including Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965). Themes of slavery, racial inequality, and racial reconciliation play a major role in Warren’s fiction of this period as well, in such works as Band of Angels (1955) and Wilderness (1961).

Brother to Dragons was Warren’s breakthrough volume on racial issues, and it captures his transition in all its ambivalence and complexity. It is characteristic of Warren to insist that nobody ever makes a completely clean break with the habits and complicities that shaped his identity, because identity and complicity are so tied to each other that one never has one without the other. Certainly what Ellison called Warren’s “combat with the past” was lifelong, with Warren even in quite late texts about racial reconciliation almost going out of his way to put ugly racist terms and thoughts in the reader’s face. (The research literature about Warren bristles with articles pointing out just how tangled and unresolved this quarrel with himself is. See for instance recent writings on the subject by William Bedford Clark, Sean Heuston, T. R. Hummer, Michael Kreyling, James A. Perkins, Forrest Robinson, and Anthony Szczesiul.)

Brother to Dragons registers the poet’s struggle with his own racism in an extremely candid way. Cornel West singled out the bluntness of Brother to Dragons in Democracy Matters (2004). More recently, the historian David Blight, in American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011), has called attention to Brother to Dragons as a key text in the tangled history of racial conflict in America. And Natasha Trethewey, Warren’s successor as Poet Laureate of the United States, in her Laureate lecture in 2014, not only treated Brother to Dragons as an important precursor of her own work, but saw the poet’s lifelong struggle with himself, embodied not only in the author’s quarrel with R.P.W., his own representative in the poem, but also in his restless rewriting of the poem over almost thirty-five years, as emblematic of ways poetry can grapple with difficult moral and political problems and with unresolved issues of identity and complicity.

Warren’s engagement with racism in Brother to Dragons is tied not only to his increasing personal awareness of the problem but to his sense of the meaning of the two great international crises that frame the book, the Second World War and the Cold War. Brother to Dragons is not only an intervention in Southern thinking during the early years of the struggle over desegregation, but is also an intervention in American thinking about the international crises of midcentury.

That an increased urgency about confronting racism should have been a feature of Cold War politics would seem axiomatic: a thoroughly racist society can hardly claim a secure advantage over even a repressive culture that promises to make all of the prisoners of starvation arise. Racism in the United States would seem to hand Stalin a weapon, not only in the fight for hearts and minds in the United States, but also in the contest for influence in the rapidly decolonizing parts of the world.6

That the experience of the Second World War should sharpen America’s awareness of the problem of racism also seems obvious. How could a confrontation with Nazi racism not force Americans to reckon with their own, especially since the early Nazi racist measures were modeled on American ones, and Hitler himself professed admiration for American racism?

But Warren’s engagement with these themes in Brother to Dragons is actually a bit deeper than this. All the King’s Men is often (mistakenly) taken to be Warren’s book about totalitarianism, his version of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. It is fair to say that All the King’s Men does show Warren’s understanding of how populism might destabilize democracy, and shows something about how democracies become unglued, lessons we Americans are in the midst of painfully learning all over again.

But neither All the King’s Men nor It Can’t Happen Here really grasped the essence of totalitarianism, because neither book examines how people might come to surrender themselves to something both transformative and demonic, how they might embrace a dark charisma which promises both self-transcendence and self-destruction. The attraction of a darkly charismatic and transformative idea of human nature was a feature of both of the great tyrannical ideologies, Communism and Nazism, that threatened to subdue the world during the 20th century. Only in Brother to Dragons does Warren fully elaborate how it is that human nature might embrace an annihilating dark charisma that promises to unite meaning and death.

This point is made most clearly, if most startlingly, in Jefferson’s early tirade about the Declaration of Independence. To see the Declaration in this way, as something which offers the temptation of its dark charisma, is an especially daring thing to do in the early 1950s, and the way in which Warren rescues the Declaration from the promise of charismatic self-immolation at the end of the poem is equally daring.

To insist that American history and contemporary American culture are not free from their own specific forms of horrifying darkness served an important moral and political function in the post-Holocaust era. For one thing, it demanded of American readers that they do not see themselves as morally different in kind from their recently defeated enemies. Brother to Dragons is not in any explicit way a Holocaust book, but its argument that an angry insistence upon settling moral scores leaves one open to evils rather like those one wished to extirpate, and the lesson that the royal road to evil is the enraged attempt to restore one’s moral purity, is a pointed one in the wake of the Holocaust. And the extremity of the book’s horror at what human beings are capable of also demands to be seen in the context of post-Holocaust skepticism about human nature. Anthony Szczesiul has shown that Warren studied Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism deeply during the composition of Brother to Dragons, and that he extracted passages from that book to help him clarify his own thoughts about the outbreak of metaphysical evil in political life. To insist, as Brother to Dragons does, that all persons have a share in human depravity and must work out a forbearing habit of living based upon mutual acknowledgement of that fact is one way of coming to terms with the horrible events of the twentieth century.

As the poem was being written, conflicts in Greece, Berlin, and Korea, up to the death of Stalin in the year of its publication, kept threatening to set off a global nuclear war. The poem was intended as a critique of the American sense of national innocence, which Warren fears may lead America into a self-righteousness for which there is a high moral price to be paid in unreflecting brutality and in ends-justify-the-means expedience. The poem’s critique of an idealized view of American history in Brother to Dragons is very direct: it broods on the conquest and extermination of the Native American peoples (there is a long excursus on the Ghost Dance movement, and Jefferson discusses the expulsion of the Cherokees as well), the corruption and exploitation of the West (about which Meriwether Lewis has a nightmare vision), and the repression of labor from the Haymarket bombing through the Detroit strikes of the Depression years. I don’t think even Ginsberg’s Howl makes quite so thorough and passionate a case against American Exceptionalism.7 The critique is particularly striking given the stereotype about early Cold War literature (with the usual exceptions of the Beats and what was left of the Popular Front) as rife with defensive and self-righteous jingoism of the kind Bob Dylan would later make fun of in “With God On Our Side.”8

That Brother to Dragons might have some bearing on contemporary Cold War politics was not lost on early readers. In his 1959 article “Robert Penn Warren and the Knot of History,” John L. Stewart asks, apropos of outlaw idealists like Warren’s Thomas Jefferson and (in Stewart’s account) Lilburne Lewis, “Is not Mr. Dulles an outlaw-idealist?” (134). Warren’s friend, the historian C. Vann Woodward, pointedly cited Brother to Dragons in his 1981 attack on American Exceptionalism, “The Fall of the American Adam.”

Warren’s understanding about the simultaneous fallenness and promise of human nature is somehow linked to his sense of the fallenness and promise of America. In his poetry the political theme of racial reconciliation is always, as Ralph Ellison noted, somehow also a version of the moral theme of self-knowledge, acknowledgment, and redemption. To “have a history” is to have a moral predicament one cannot expect to resolve or escape but which one can, with an effort, become sadder and wiser about; Warren is, as William Bedford Clark, Jonathan Cullick, and Hugh Ruppersburg have all argued, the bard of that rueful sense of the phrase “to have a history.”

Brother to Dragons was also meant to be an intervention in the development of poetic style. Readers who know Robert Penn Warren chiefly as the “Warren” of “Brooks and Warren,” expect to find in him poetry of a buttoned-down, orderly, ironic cast such as the New Critics (in the reigning stereotype about them now) were supposed to have favored. Such readers will be unprepared for Brother to Dragons. It takes an effort, after confessionalism, after the Beat movement, after the dark political poetry of the Vietnam era, to remember how original a poem Brother to Dragons was on its first appearance in 1953. Auden was then perhaps the leading spirit of contemporary poetry, and reaching past Auden to Eliot, poets strove to attain an ideal of impersonality defended by Eliot but never seriously practiced by him. Brother to Dragons seems closer in spirit to Life Studies (or even to Howl) than to Four Quartets or The Age of Anxiety. How startling to find in the year before Brown v. Board and in the year of the Rosenberg trial, a poem beside which many of the most transgressive volumes of the next decade or so — Ariel, For the Union Dead, or for that matter Howl — seem to be anticipated by one of the authors of Understanding Poetry.

The early 1950s did have a taste for ambitious, historically charged, personally anguished poetry like Brother to Dragons, and most of the early reviews of Brother to Dragons were very positive, with such critics as Randall Jarrell in the New York Times and Robert Lowell in the Kenyon Review treating it not only as a considerable book, and as possibly Warren’s best, but as also pointing out a new way for poetry.

John Crowe Ransom, in a letter to Albert Erskine of March 16, 1953 now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, had talked the poem over with Robert Lowell, saying of it “Red’s [Robert Penn Warren’s] poem is not an intricate piece of language, like the poems generally gone-for by the New Critics, as Cal [Lowell] recognizes unerringly.” Ransom, this is to say, recognized and appreciated immediately how novel the poem was in its context. (It’s also a little surprising to hear Ransom say this kind of thing about the “New Critics,” since he is usually included in their number, and the views he criticized here are views often attributed to him. It’s fair to say that most actual people, Ransom included, are a little larger than the labels others apply to them for convenience.)

Even the negative reviews were aware of the stylistic novelty of the poem. Parker Tyler, in Poetry, was taken aback by the unruliness of the style, but was interested (although not persuaded) by the ideas, finding the poem to be “not a masterpiece, but it moves as a living thing, a scarred thing, something whose voice are all too unversed in the supreme articulateness that Mr. Warren has sought to strike, out of the blue, from the red secrets of human life.” Orville Prescott, in the New York Times, found the verse “stiff, twisted, dry, and artificially intellectualized.” Hugh Kenner, writing in the Hudson Review, called the book “Something Nasty in the Meathouse,” criticizing its idiom as “strained and declamatory,” and its habit of thought as mere blood-saturated skepticism.9 But nobody thought of Brother to Dragons as an ornate New Critical puzzle.

In its day, Brother to Dragons was received as a breakthrough volume, presenting a new way to handle long narratives in verse, and a new willingness to engage fraught political and personal issues. Its lesson was not lost on the next generation of poets, particularly as exemplified in Robert Lowell’s own breakthrough volumes, Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964). Lowell had studied with Warren, and had reviewed Brother to Dragons, and Joan Romano Shifflett has shown that the influence of Warren’s poem is strong in both of these books. Brother to Dragons played a crucial role in the turn toward a looser poetics, a more personal style, and a more frank presence of politics that Lowell made in the last years of the 1950s, opening a new path for the entire next generation of poets in the United States. (A similar point is made by Norma Procopiow in Robert Lowell, The Poet and His Critics (1984).)

Although the preceding ten years had been a period of great fame for Warren, and indeed were his greatest period as a fiction writer, yielding At Heaven’s Gate (1943), World Enough and Time (1950), and, most of all, All the King’s Men (1946), Warren remembered those years as a dark time. Partly it was a dark time because these were the years of the dissolution of his turbulent first marriage. But it was also, Warren repeatedly says, a period during which he was unable to complete a single poem, short or long. Brother to Dragons ended the poetic dry spell, and Warren was reborn as a poet with a different style, a different point of view, and different subject matter.

Many of the key values of Warren’s early poems continued beyond these years of crisis: early and late, Warren always had a deep skepticism about human nature and a sense of the tragic ironies of politics. But Brother to Dragons is personal, even autobiographical, in ways that none of Warren’s earlier poetry is; its investment in the poet’s particular experiences ties it to later volumes such as Promises (1957) or Incarnations (1968). The excursus in which the poet remembers emotionally breaking down when a friend asks him about his father (who Warren felt had sacrificed his own ambitions as a poet in order to raise his family); the digression about how amoral a thing “glory” is (which is brought on by an intrusive memory of the moment when the poet’s childhood friend Kent Greenfield shot a goose out of the sky); the somewhat puzzling memory of the moment when R.P.W.’s father had him drink a glass of something called “percoon,” a folk medicine supposed to keep young boys’ minds off of devilment; and the oblique references in the closing pages of the poem to the collapse of Warren’s first marriage, to a moment of infidelity during his years in Minnesota, and to the promise of his second marriage (which took place during the composition of the poem), all look forward to the Confessionalist poetry of the following decade.

Brother to Dragons is also characterized by the very wide stylistic range of Warren’s mature poetry, abandoning the stylistic fastidiousness of early poems like “Bearded Oaks” or the “Kentucky Mountain Farm” sequence, and instead careering, as Warren poems often do, between high propriety and visceral earthiness in the space of a single line. Sometimes he interrupts a passage of lyric, almost musical reflection with an outburst of startling prosodic roughness, with stresses jammed together on alliterating syllables, unsettling line breaks and enjambments, or passages that seem to stutter over an increasingly enraged list of synonyms. Warren often makes a jarring leap between Latinate and Anglo-Saxon diction registers (often turning the usual valences of those registers upside down). Sometimes he defiantly flourishes capitalized abstract words of the kind that even novices in creative writing workshops are taught to cross out. In such passages Warren seems, as Helen Vendler once said, to be attempting to wrestle the English language into submission. Warren had experimented with this jagged style earlier in his career, in such poems as “The Return: An Elegy.” But these tough knots of bone-fragment, gristle, and sinew wrung together, so characteristic of what Calvin Bedient calls Warren’s sublime style, first come to full prominence in Brother to Dragons.

If Brother to Dragons was the volume that resolved Warren’s poetic crisis of the late ’40s and early ’50s, it was also a volume marked with all of the turbulence that marked that crisis. Speaking with Richard Sale in 1969, Warren described the poetic impasse as a consequence of the distanced, ironic style of his earlier poetry, he had “too abstract an idea of what constituted the germ of a poem,” and had had to learn to write poems that were “closer to me, closer to my observed and felt life” (Watkins, Hiers, and Weaks 1990, 130). The embrace of his personal past, James A. Perkins has argued, itself made possible a deeper apprehension of racial conflict (Perkins 1994). This recourse to the details of his own experience and history changed the style and the tone of his poetry as well, replacing the hard, chilly style of Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942) with a more urgent and more direct sound. The shift corresponds also to a shift in poetic precursors: as in different ways Lesa Carnes Corrigan (1999) and Anthony Szczesiul (2002) have noted, before 1953 Warren’s poetry was strongly modernist in flavor, and very much under the influence of T. S. Eliot, but after 1953 Warren’s poetry can be seen as a contribution to a romantic tradition in poetry, and was written under the influence of Coleridge, about whom Warren wrote an influential study during this period. (That said, a Hardyan ethos, and a Hardyan roughness of texture, by contrast, is characteristic of Warren from beginning to end.)

Nowhere is the stylistic and thematic novelty of Brother to Dragons more evident than in Jefferson’s opening tirade about the night he wrote his draft of the Declaration of Independence, a passage that is itself a comprehensive violation of every stereotype about Cold War poetry. Jefferson begins by describing how the sense of human promise, “That life had spoken and I’d heard it speak,” (10) had split his heart the way the germ of an oak tree splits the husk of the acorn, bringing with it the possibility of “joy.” “Joy” is always in Warren an ambiguous term, radiant with charismatic possibility, but also with a Dionysiac whiff of transgression and sometimes even horror. If that moment of disclosure of human possibility brought him pride, it was not the pride of selfish ambition (“That flame in the personal darkness, sucking / Heart-fat, heart-hope, all, like grease from a grease-lamp”) but a “pride past pride, / In my identity with the definition of man.” (21-4)

This moment of “definition” came to Jefferson during that night in which he penned the Declaration of Independence, not only securing the political separation of the united colonies from the British Empire, but also articulating at the same time a vision of the meaning and purpose of human life in politics and history, and a promise of the liberating mission he believed that America would pursue in the world. “Definition” is, like “joy” always an ambiguous word in Warren’s poetry. Coming to a definition is always a moment of thrilling insight into the order of being within which everything one does suddenly seems radiant with meaning; but the term refers at the same time to an almost demonic exaltation in which one might be capable of just about anything.

Those who came to Philadelphia to articulate this definition of the more than human vocation of the human race seem in retrospect to Jefferson to be at least as much bestial as angelic, mixed in the ways all humans are. Jefferson’s alliterations are laden with disgust and rage, the disgust and rage that reflects his ultimate disappointment with human nature:

In Philadelphia first it came, my heart
Shook, shamefast in glory, and I saw, I saw—
But I’ll tell you quietly, in order, what I saw.
To Philadelphia we came, delegates by accident, in essence men:
Marmosets in mantles, beasts in boots, parrots in pantaloons.
That is to say, men. Like other men.
No worse, no better. Only ourselves, in the end. (25-31)

Here, not for the last time, Jefferson’s imagination spontaneously and suddenly careens into extremity. He cannot imagine human beings, the objects of his Definition of Man, without at the same time imagining the scene, at once ridiculous and disgusting, of their sexual begetting. The digression feels almost involuntary, as if Jefferson is imprisoned by the unpredictable twists and turns of his train of thought. But no sooner does this humiliating thought break loose, than Jefferson rebukes the thought, as if the real truth is not that the gross sexuality of our begetting is not worthy of us, but that we are not worthy of it (since it at least is natural). Finally Jefferson rebukes the enraged irony of the train of thought he has just been pursuing, which is not to say that he actually escapes from the tangles of that thought:

Only ourselves, and what we then happened to be—
Offal of history, tangents of our fathers’ pitiful lust
At midnight heat or dawn-bed ease.
Why should our fathers’ long-lost lust
Seem pitiful? The twitch and gasp that was
The fuddling glory of our begetting seem
So pitiful? Is it not worthy of us?
Or we of it?—Too much crowds in
To break the thread of discourse and make me forget
That irony is always, and only, a trick of light on the late landscape. (32-41)

Jefferson seems to have shaken himself forcibly awake in those last few lines, but the whirlpool of his own thought immediately sucks him down again, first in an obscenely luscious alliteration on the letter l, then on an increasingly enraged, and increasingly metrically jagged, list of places where the self may lose track of itself in its inner labyrinth, each of them violently alliterating on a hard c. Then Jefferson is captured by his metaphor of the mind as a labyrinth in which we lose ourselves, until that metaphorical labyrinth seems to transform itself into the mythical labyrinth of Crete, in which the self is at once Theseus, feeling his way in the dark, and the Minotaur, who finally is the image of Theseus’s own innermost nature:

But what I had meant to say, we were only ourselves,
Packed with our own lusts and languors, lost,
Each man lost, in some blind lobby, hall, enclave,
Crank cul-de-sac, couloir, or corridor of Time.
Of Time. Or self: and in that dark no thread,
Airy as breath by Ariadne’s fingers forged.
No thread, and beyond some groped-at corner, hulked
In the blind dark, hock-deep in ordure, its beard
And shag foul-scabbed, and when the hoof heaves—
Listen!—the foulness sucks like mire. (42-51)

This image, of the Minotaur’s foot slewed and spurned and slimed with ordure, is one that Jefferson returns to repeatedly in the poem, in every event referring to what the moment is like when one discovers despite one’s self what human nature really is and how historical events actually happen.

The logic of Jefferson’s metaphor seems to lead him, almost against his will, into a horrified but fascinated vision of Pasiphaë and the bull engaged in the copulation that created the Minotaur. In combining the heroic and the horrible, the human self is at once Theseus and Minotaur, and both somehow are Pasiphaë “huddled and hutched in the cow’s hide, / Laced, latched, thonged up, and humped for joy":

The beast waits. He is the infamy of Crete.
He is the midnight’s enormity. He is
Our brother, our darling brother. And Pasiphaë—
Pasiphaë, huddled and hutched in the cow’s hide,
Laced, latched, thonged up, and humped for joy,
What was the silence then before the stroke?
And then your scream.
And through the pain then, like a curtain rent,
In your mind you saw some meadow green, or some grove,
Some childhood haven, water and birdsong, and you a child.
The bull plunged. You screamed like a girl, and strove.
But the infatuate machine of your invention held.
Later, they lifted you out and wiped your lips in the dark palace.
We have not loved you less, poor Pasiphaë. (52-65)

Ultimately for Warren’s Jefferson the enlightenment culture from which the Declaration of Independence emerged is just another version of the “infatuate machine of her invention” in which Pasiphaë awaited the bull’s ecstatic stroke. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying way to describe the origin of the Declaration of Independence:

I had not meant to speak thus. Language betrays.
What I mean is, words are always the truth, and always the lie,
For what I say of Philadelphia now
Is true, but true now only, not true then.
But this much then: We knew we were only men
Caught in our errors and interests. But I, a man,
Suddenly saw in every face, face after face,
The bleared, the puffed, the lank, the lean, all,
On all saw the brightness blaze, and I knew my own days,
Times, hopes, books, horsemanship, the praise of peers,
Delight, desire, and even my love, but straw
Fit for the flame, and in that fierce combustion I—
Why, I was dead, I was nothing, nothing but joy,
And my heart cried out, “Oh, this is Man!”

And thus my minotaur. There at the blind
Blank labyrinthine turn of my personal time,
I met the beast. And the time I met it was—
At least, it seems so now—that first moment
When the alacrity of blood stumbles and all natural joy
Sees Nature but as mirror for its fear,
And therefore, to be joy, must deny Nature
And leap beyond man’s natural bourne and constriction
To find some justification for the natural.
Yes, then I met the beast. Well, better, indeed,
Had it been the manifest beast and the circumstantial
Avatar of destruction. But no beast then: the towering
Definition, angelic, arrogant, abstract,
Greaved in glory, thewed with light, the bright
Brow tall as dawn. I could not see the eyes.

So seized the pen, and in the upper room,
With the excited consciousness that I was somehow
Purged, rectified, and annealed, and my past annulled
And fate confirmed, wrote. And the bell struck
Far off in darkness, and the watch called out.
Time came, we signed the document, went home.
Slept, and I woke to the new self, and new doom.
I had not seen the eyes of that bright apparition.
I had been blind with light. That was my doom.
I did not know its eyes were blind.

Therefore all followed: the fat was in the fire.
Therefore all followed: and I who once had said
All liberty is bought with blood, now must say
All truth is bought with blood, and the blood is ours
Or we shall have no truth, and only the truth can make us free,
And doom is always domestic, it purrs like a cat,
And the only traitor lurks in some sweet corner of the blood.
Therefore I walk and wake, and I cannot die. (68-114)

One is tempted to ask, after reading these lines “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" But Brother to Dragons ultimately is, despite every appearance to the contrary, a poem about forgiveness, although it is always a forgiveness which takes place in the face of impossibility. Late in the poem the shade of Lucy rebukes Jefferson, arguing that his repudiation of Lilburne, and of his share in Lilburne’s crime, is just Lilburne’s crime in another form, except what Lilburne did in anguish and desperation Jefferson does in vanity and fear. She insists that Jefferson must not only acknowledge Lilburne but take his hand, smeared with blood as it still is:

For whatever hope we have is not by repudiation,
And whatever health we have is not by denial,
But in confronting the terror of our condition.
All else is a lie. (4294-4297)

At length persuaded of the logic of Lucy’s argument, Jefferson comes to see in the acknowledgement of the human darkness how the future “will be forged beneath the hammer of truth / On the anvil of our anguish” (4136). This remark prompt’s George’s one speech in the poem, the three lines I quoted at the beginning of the paper:

I was lost in the world, and the trees were tall.
I was lost in the world, and the dark swale heaved.
I was lost in my anguish, and I did not know the reason. (4340-4342)

George’s intervention prompts Jefferson’s recognition of him:

Reason? My son, we have been lost in the dark.
And I was lost, who had dreamed there was a light.
How could I show to you now the light of reason
When I had lost it when your blood ran out,
And the flame thirsted?
But we are condemned to reach yet for a reason.
We are condemned to some hope. (4143-4149)

This rather abject acknowledgment prompts an ecstatic moment, one which (although George doesn’t say anything about it) George and Jefferson share. (In the 1975 play version, George and Jefferson do dance these next lines out.)

Dance back the buffalo, the shining land!
Our grander Ghost Dance dance now, and shake the feather.
Dance back the morning and the eagle’s cry.
Dance back the Shining Mountains, let them shine!
Dance into morning and the lifted eye.
Dance into morning past the morning star,
And dance the heart by which we have lived and died.
My Louisiana, I would dance you, though afar!

For nothing we had,
Nothing we were,
Is lost.
All is redeemed,
In knowledge. (4367-4379)

The Ghost Dance, which Jefferson refers to here, was a millenarian, apocalyptic religious movement which promised a redeemed world for Native Americans. It was first introduced by the prophet Wovoka among the Northern Paiute in Mason Valley, Nevada, in 1890, but spread quickly all over the west. One indirect consequence of White response to the movement was the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, which drove the movement underground. Exactly how Jefferson’s invocation of the Ghost Dance works towards the redemption of all concerned is not completely clear, but it should be clear that the redemption it offers is at best aspirational and is anyway beset by a host of complications.

I think the key to the moment is Jefferson’s line that “all is redeemed in knowledge.” “Knowledge,” in Warren’s poems, like “joy" and “definition,” is a richly loaded word. Knowledge is always in a way “knowledge of good and evil,” but it is not quite the knowledge that the serpent promised, because it is always a knowledge freighted with sadness as much as with possibility, a knowledge that is rueful and chastened and always aware of the ten thousand ways it can go wrong. “Knowledge” is what makes a society sadder but wiser, and it is the lack of knowledge in that sense that Warren most fears about Cold War America.

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