The Cold War and Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons

Abstract

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. 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). 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), 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.