CALL FOR PAPERS

A Message from Program Chair John Burt

I welcome paper and panel proposals for the next meeting of the RPW, which will be held on the campus of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green on April 22-25, 1999. The topic is open. We will be getting our usual group rate at the Hampton Inn at 233 Three Springs Rd, Bowling Green KY 42104. Call the Hampton Inn directly at (402) 842-4100 for reservations, mentioning the Warren Circle to get the discount.

The Circle will sponsor as well a paper session at the tenth annual meeting of the American Literature Association in Baltimore, Maryland, to be held May 27-30, 1999. For more information visit the ALA web site at http://english.byu.edu/cronin/99AnCon.htm.

Send brief proposals to John Burt, Department of English, MS023, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02254. I may also be contacted by email at burt@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU

The deadline for ALA proposals is January 15: for the Bowling Green meeting, it is February 1.

John Hollander, the Sterling Professor of English at Yale, is the recipient of the 1997 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for his 1997 book, The Work of Poetry (Columbia University Press). The award was presented during a ceremony at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green in April. The Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award was established in 1995 through an endowed fund by the late Eleanor Clark Warren and the estate of Robert Penn Warren. It is given annually by the Advisory Group of the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University for outstanding literary criticism originally published in English in the United States. It is given in those years when a book, or other worthy publication, appears that exemplifies the Warren-Brooks effort in spirit, scope, and integrity. An elected jury of four Advisory Group members, chaired by Randy Runyon, selected the winner.

  Poet, literary critic and scholar, Hollander has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize and the Levinson Prize for Poetry, among other honors. His first poetry collection, A Crackling of Thorns, was selected by W.H. Auden in 1958 for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Since then, 21 collections of Hollander’s poetry have been published to considerable acclaim. He has authored numerous books of criticism, including Rhyme’s Reason, A Guide To English Verse, and The Gazer’s Spirit. Hollander is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hollander is the third recipient of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award. Lewis P. Simpson, the Boyd Professor Emeritus at Louisiana StateUniversity, received the initial award for his book, The Fable of the Southern Writer. Mark Royden Winchell, professor, Clemson University, received the 1996 award for his book, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism.

 Greetings from Our President

 As past program chair and as current Circle President, I have a dual purpose here in writing this column. I have the pleasure of recapping what I believe was a most successful meeting last April, and in reviewing our 1998 conference, I hope, too, that I can work toward achieving one of the goals I have set for myself this year as president of the Circle, that is,to increase participation at future Circle meetings.

As you are probably aware from materials that were sent to you during the last academic year, our 1998 conference was a bit unusual because of our meeting place or, should I say, meeting places. The Circle board decided at our 1997 meeting that in order to allow conference participants more time in Guthrie, Warren’s birthplace, the 1998 meeting should be held closer in proximity to the town. To that end, activities were planned in Todd County, Kentucky, Clarksville, Tennessee, and Bowling Green, Kentucky. Conference activities kicked off with a luncheon in Guthrie sponsored by the Warren Birthplace Committee. As usual, the Birthplace Committee outdid themselves. Chairwoman Jeanne Moore and the members of her committee always provide us with a warm welcome to Warren country and with the best home-cooked meals in town. The afternoon’s activities were held in nearby Clarksville, where Warren attended a year of high school, on the campus of Austin Peay State University. The papers presented by Robert Koppelman, H.R. Stoneback, John P. Langan, and John C. Van Dyke ranged from a study of Warren’s Chief Joseph and oral narrative to a discussion on the pleasures and tribulations of teaching Warren’s Brother to Dragons. Joseph Blotner closed the afternoon session with his keynote address entitled "Writing Robert Penn Warren’s Biography." Well received and highly appreciated by the audience, Blotner’s talk drew a crowd numbering close to 100, with many local people attending from the Austin Peay and Clarksville communities. The evening concluded with a cocktail party at Tip Top, the antebellum home of Circle member Rubye Patch and her husband Elwyn. Sponsored in part by the Regional Writers Committee of Clarksville, which is headed by Steve Ryan of Austin Peay, the party gave Circle members a chance to meet local individuals from Clarksville who are active in the academic community and in efforts to preserve Warren’s local connections.

The next morning, conference activities opened at the Birthplace with a panel discussion on the topic of Warren and Race. Moderator John Burt and panel members William Bedford Clark, Tony Szczesiul, and Mark Miller presented a lively session that involved audience members in quite an engaging discussion. The success of the session was, no doubt, the result of an increased interest in the topic of Warren and Race among Circle members. Warren and Race was also the subject of our ALA session in San Diego last May, and currently, at least three Circle members are at work on projects related to the topic. The morning continued with brief walking tours of Guthrie and a trip to Fairview, Kentucky, to see the monument to Jefferson Davis that left the twelve-year-old Warren "trying to focus some meaning, however hard to define, on the relation of past and present, old pain and glory and new pain and glory." After a barbecue lunch on the grounds, conference participants headed back to APSU for the last session of papers. Patricia L. Bradley, Joseph R. Millichap and Felicia S. Pattison all read papers on Warren writings set in Kentucky. Pattison’s paper, entitled "Fugal Patterns in The Cave: Individual Voices and Community Identity," was announced as this year’s winner of the Eleanor Clark Prize for Best Graduate Paper. Following the session, Mark Miller showed the group a video recording of a brief interview with Warren recorded by CNN not long after Warren was named poet laureate. After a full day of activities, the group met at a local restaurant for dinner and conversation. The next morning, conference participants made their way to Bowling Green for the annual fund-raising brunch for the Warren Center. Following the brunch, Victor Strandberg, founder of the Circle ,gave a talk entitled "Robert Penn Warren and the Poetic Afterlife."

Although I certainly have a bias because of my role in planning our last meeting, I do believe it was a successful one, and I wish, too, that more people had had the chance to attend. I know that I keep coming back to Circle meetings every year because of some of the same reasons I was first drawn to the writings of Robert Penn Warren. Returning to the Kentucky-Tennessee border area from my current home in the Upper Midwest obviously helps me to feel reconnected with a place that Warren used as the focal point of his literature, that is, the American South. But even more so, I find that in attending Circle meetings I return home to Illinois with a renewed sense of my connection to the life and works of Robert Penn Warren. Not only is the meeting a chance for me to discuss my research with individuals with similar interests, but the friendships that I have developed over the years with members of the group attest to the true role of academia as a community of scholars.

If you haven’t attended a meeting of the Circle in the last few years, or if you have never attended, I’d like to invite you to consider participating this academic year by joining us at our next gathering. The Circle board is in the process of considering some changes to our programming that should make our meetings a viable possibility for more of our membership. In the past, we have met each year, usually in Bowling Green, Kentucky, at Western Kentucky University. At our last meeting, board members discussed a proposal that we meet every other year in Bowling Green and that we sponsor a special session on Warren at the meeting of the American Literature Association in Baltimore on the "off" years. Thus, if we approve the proposal, our schedule for the next several years will be as follows: 1999 in Bowling Green, 2000 in Bowling Green, 2001 in Baltimore for ALA, and 2002 in Bowling Green. This proposal will officially come before the board for a vote at our 1999 meeting. I do believe, however, that this decision would be a wise one. Scheduling our conference every other year would give our program chairs more time to plan our meetings in Bowling Green and our members more opportunities for participation at other conferences that tend to conflict with our Circle meetings. The board also decided at our last meeting that in order to build and to keep a strong membership, we should make every effort to organize sessions on Warren at conferences such as SAMLA and MLA, and to update our membership records.

If you have any comments about the proposed change in our programming or any other suggestions concerning future programming or Circle communications, then please let me know, and I’ll pass along the information to our board before our next meeting. I would also encourage you to pass along word to your students, colleagues and friends about the Circle and its activities. Finally, I sincerely hope that you’ll consider joining us in Bowling Green for the 1999 meeting. You’ll find additional information concerning the meeting in John Burt’s column in this newsletter and in the program that will be mailed to you next spring.

Best wishes for a pleasant academic year,

Mary Louise Weaks, Circle President

   General Announcements from the Eighth Annual Robert Penn Warren Circle Board Meeting, 24 April 1998, Clarksville, Tennessee submitted by Tony Szczesiul, Secretary-Treasurer

In 1995 the board had decided that the Robert Penn Warren Circle should sometimes meet at sites other than Bowling Green and Western Kentucky University’s Robert Penn Warren Center. It was also decided that when the annual meeting took place at another site, it should not meet at the same time as the Center’s annual meetings. The 1998 board meeting continued this discussion, paying particular attention to the following issues. After discussing the immense amount of time and planning it takes to host such a meeting, it was suggested that it may be better to institute a plan of alternating regularly between meeting in Bowling Green and meeting at a national or regional convention. It was pointed out that holding our meetings at such a convention would free us from many of the more mundane planning issues and may also help us reach a more diverse audience and hopefully attract new members. Conventions mentioned as possibilities were SAMLA (South Atlantic MLA), SSSL (Society for the Study of Southern Literature), and ALA (American Literature Association). Of these, it was suggested that ALA may provide the best complement with the Bowling Green meetings. It was pointed out that SAMLA meets in the fall and would follow too closely on the heels of the previous April meeting, while SSSL usually meets in April and would possibly conflict with the Center meeting. ALA, on the other hand, meets in late May, so it would never conflict with the Center meeting. It was also suggested that ALA could provide interesting opportunities for collaborative sessions with other author societies, and it was noted that ALA sets times aside in its program for author society board meetings, which would provide an added convenience. Following this discussion, Charlotte Beck requested that Tony Szczesiul pursue this matter further and draw up a formal proposal to be considered and voted on at the next board meeting. Circle members are encouraged to send any suggestions regarding the annual meeting site to either Tony Szczesiul or Mary Weaks.

—RPW Circle Officers and Board Members:

The following appointments were made at April’s board meeting:

A.--Since Lucy Ferriss will be in Europe for 1998-99, Mary Weaks was named President of the RPW Circle, by-passing the usual year of service as Vice-President.

B.--Lucy Ferriss will continue as Vice President in absentia.

C.--Bedford Clark was nominated as the new member of the Program Committee.

D.--Three new board members were nominated for 1999-2001: Felicia Pattison,

Victoria Miller, and Victor Strandberg. Mary Ellen Miller was nominated as an

Alternate.

E.--Tony Szczesiul will continue as Secretary/Treasurer.

—MLA Affiliation:

In order to achieve official MLA affiliation, the Circle’s program chair needs to have a special session accepted for the annual MLA convention. We need approximately three consecutive years of strong attendance at affiliated sessions before we can petition for MLA affiliation. Rob Koppelman volunteered to work on a proposal for a 1999 special session.

—Record-Keeping:

Tony Szczesiul is currently compiling old newsletters so that a Circle history can be compiled on disk, to which the minutes of future meetings will be added. John Burt has volunteered to act as Circle archivist.

—Warren Commemorative Stamp:

Please continue to send requests for a Robert Penn Warren commemorative stamp to: Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, c/o Stamp Market Development Branch, U.S. Postal Service, Washington, DC 20260-6756. Warren will be eligible for consideration in 1999.

The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren

edited by John Burt

 "This extraordinary volume, magnificently edited by John Burt, should establish the permanent place of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry in this nation’s literary achievement," writes Harold Bloom in the Foreward to this collection of every poem Warren ever published, now available from Louisiana State University Press. "John Burt’s devoted edition," Bloom continues, "gives us the definitive text of all of Warren’s poetry and thus restores an American masterwork, one that will be read, studied and absorbed so long as the love for, and understanding of , great poetry survives among us." Warren had been primarily known, according to Bloom, as the novelist of All the King’s Men and World Enough and Time. But in "his long major phase" as a poet, "Warren wrestled with the angel of the poetic sublime and carried away the victory of a new name.... These major fictions endure, but I believe that Warren’s name will be more associated with his Collected Poems, because scores of them transcend even his finest narratives. This book is Warren’s center, and his lasting glory."

Reviewing the Collected Poems in Booklist, Ray Olson finds himself "agreeing with Bloom—strongly." Olson calls attention to Warren's "innate rhythmic capability" and his "love of the music--both the sounds and the silences--that written speech connotes." Warren seeks to "answer the question, What is life?... Even if he finds no final answers to the question, he does find the world and helps readers cherish it more fervently."

There are two ways to go about assembling such a collection, Burt writes in the introduction to his nearly two hundred pages of notes. One could view the author’s career from its conclusion, as if the final intention were the most authoritative, and leave out the "blind alleys and false turns." Or one could reveal the poet’s "intellectual life as it unfolded, with no certainty, but with many provisional intuitions, about how each event will fit into the big picture." Burt has chosen the second path, realizing that the author in this instance was not clearly "able to the end to retain special access to the intentions… entertained earlier in life." Such is the conclusion, for example, to which a consideration of the New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 would lead, for while Warren prepared the 1966 Selected Poems with great care, and for the 1976 one made few changes, "the 1985 volume cannot be relied upon." Burt goes so far as to say that it is "as if the poet no longer quite understood his earlier poems." Thus some interesting questions concerning authorial intent, an issue that continues to define the differences between various schools of literary criticism, arise even in an edition whose editor is merely trying to do his best to respect the author’s intent.

Burt’s enormous work of assembling and annotating Warren’s poems will give scholars work for ages to come. "Using these notes, the reader can reconstruct every version of every poem Warren published." Excluded are poems Warren did not publish (and which can be consulted in Yale’s Beinecke Library)--with one exception, "Love’s Voice," which was to have appeared in his Problem of Knowledge in the early 1940s. Burt’s volume offers us some seventy-five poems that did not appear in any of Warren’s published collections, fifty-three from before Thirty-Six Poems (which itself has been generally unavailable until its reappearance here), and twenty-two of more recent vintage.

A Personal Note

Actually, "Love’s Voice" is not the only unpublished poem Burt includes. In the notes to "Altitudes and Extensions" he gives us "With or Without Compass?", a never-published poem that up until the last moment was to have come between "Whistle of the 3 A.M." and "Last Night Train" in that collection. Having written a book (The Braided Dream: Robert Penn Warren’s Late Poetry [Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1991]) arguing for the integrity of sequence in this and the three other last poetic volumes, it was with some uneasiness that I discovered this missing poem. Would its existence--in Warren’s penultimate intention, at least--disprove my argument? "Last Night Train" had seemed to recycle images from "Whistle of the 3 A.M." But how would the intervening "With or Without Compass?" have fit in the sequence?

Both "Whistle of the 3 A.M." and "Late Night Train" are about a train, in the former one whose whistle waked the poet when he was a boy, in the latter one in which he travels and gazes at a sleeping fellow passenger, a black woman whose feet draw his particular attention: "They / Have walked so far." "With or Without Compass?", however, is not about trains. However, as in "Whistle of the 3 A.M.", here too the poet lies in his bed at night, "Just before night-fold of eyelids… beneath the ineluctable weight / Of darkness."

In "Whistle of the 3 A.M." after the train passes through his little town all that remains is "moonlight / defining the structure of night--and your feet / Cold on boards." The poet’s feet were to occupy center stage in "With or Without Compass?", where all the steps he’s taken, the ‘"footprints that lead / To you now are matter for reflection. "What tracks have led to this moment...? Looking back, could you count / Footprints, one by one, here made?" Feet aside, "‘Whistle of the 3 A.M.", too, is a meditation on the distance between past and present, how the poet may now be "the boy / Who last remembers the 3 A.M."

‘"Last Night Train," in the sequential string the rejected intervening poem would have formed, would have picked up on the image of the great distance one’s feet travel in the course of a lifetime, but now it is someone else’s feet, the black woman’s. Like the poet’s own, "They / Have walked ... far." More striking, in a literal sense, is the echo the last word in this poem’s first line makes--"In that slick and new-fangled coach we go slam-banging"--with the middle (the word at the mid-point of the eleventh of twenty-one lines) of "With or Without Compass?": "Red iron caught in the slam-bang of hammer and anvil."

With or without "With or Without Compass?", the sequential resonances are there. This missing poem, incidentally, addresses the very issue John Burt confronted in his decision to include Warren’s "blind alleys and false turns" in the Collected Works. Among the footprints of the past the poet there ponders are those that seemed to have led nowhere: "But what of footprints of years long before, invisible now, / That had wandered on thistle, strayed among stones?" These lost and strayed footsteps can be traced once more, thanks to Burt’s devoted scholarship.

A Review of Recent Articles

By Sue Laslie Kimball

Cowan, Louise. "Brooks and Warren: Understanding Poetry in the New Age."Southern Review, Autumn 1997:827+.

The school of thought that is called "New Criticism" grew out of the polyphony among Ransom, Davidson, and Tate at Vanderbilt. Their Fugitive group of sixteen members included Warren. Warren and Brooks brought the new method of literary study to the academic world with Approach to Literature in 1936 and Understanding Poetry in 1938.

Joseph Blotner’s biography of Warren and Mark Winchell’s study of Brooks have set forth the contributions the two men made over nearly seven decades. Both books are models of the biographer’s art. The two men were opposites in many ways, "Red" often in trouble, hard-drinking, and unpredictable; Brooks the son of a Methodist minister, dignified, courtly, and scholarly. Yet they worked well together.

Brooks wrote to Warren, ‘"The happiest recollections I have are of our long sessions of work on Understanding Poetry.’’

For Warren, criticism was a subsidiary role. Brooks was the most influential literary critic of the century. Both received many honors, but they knew they did not accomplish everything they set out to do. They wanted to create a good society and a humane and gracious order wherein taste, courtesy, joy, and the art of conversation would prevail.

Cullick, Jonathan S. "The Making of a Historian: Robert Penn Warren’s Biography of John Brown." Mississippi Quarterly, Winter 1997-98:33+.

In his John Brown biography, we see the earliest step toward history taken by Warren, who would spend a lifetime striving to create an understanding of the past. The biography anticipates Warren’s theme in later works: the conflict between individual idealism and social complexities, the problem of identity and self knowledge, and the seductions of power. The early experiment in biography was not only about the making of a martyr, but also about the making of the historian himself.

In all of Warren’s work, the most significant protagonist is the historian-narrator, and the most essential theme is how he constructs the historical figure. Brown existed for Warren as an embedded myth whose layers he had to peel back.

Warren discovered that he had to create a version of John Brown that would be accessible to modern readers. Despite his efforts, the book sold poorly because of the effects of the Great Depression on the publishing industry. Critics deplored Warren's attempts at a fashionably ironic, witty style and said that he had failed to appreciate the complexity of his subject.

Warren examines how the heroic Brown had been "made" by looking at previous biographies and by noting how Brown had manipulated the historical record to create himself. In censuring earlier biographers, Warren justifies his own authorial intrusion into Brown’s mind.

The genre of conventional nonfiction biography may not have been the best vehicle for Warren. Yet he attempts to go beyond what happed to include the how and the why. In later works, he reflects more on the nature of time, is more empathetic to the historical figures, and is more willing to acknowledge the presence of individuals who do not compromise principle or discourse.

King, Vincent A. "Robert Penn Warren, the Reader, and the Reconciliation of Opposites in ‘The Ballad of Billie Potts,’ Brother to Dragons, and Audubon."Southern Literary Journal, Spring 1997:61+.

"The Ballad of Billie Potts" was the first evidence of Warren’s poetic bent; a more mature poet who delineated the failures of Jeffersonian optimism wrote Brother to Dragons, and Audubon is his masterpiece. All of these are family dramas where children must come to terms with the knowledge that their parents are imperfect. This knowledge allows them to find their "places" in the universe. Unlike the knife in the Biblical story of Isaac, in these poems the knife always falls, literally or metaphorically, allowing the children to attain identity and vision.

The structures of the poems reflect Warren’s notion of the divided self that must be fused into a whole. Opposites, including tales and teller, are embedded in them. By disrupting the structure of "Billie Potts" Warren incorporates the theme of the divided self into the poem’s form. In Brother, Warren attempts to identify the moral failure of our entire nation. Jefferson, the standard-bearer for human perfectibility, must accept the hand of Lilburne Lewis, who represents human depravity. Warren disrupts the narrative three times to emphasize the fact that it is fiction. In both poems, the "Warren person" has the final word.

Audubon, who had sacrificed thousands of birds to satisfy his art, learns that we all play the roles of sacrificial lamb, as well as life-taker. This knowledge enables him to love; he learns that ‘"to walk in the world" is to accept one’s own mortality and the proximity of evil.

King, William E. "Tragedy in the Techtronic Age: Robert Penn Warren’s ‘New Dawn."’ Mississippi Quarterly, Winter 1996-97: 85+.

Warren’s last narrative poem, "New Dawn," is concerned with America’s astounding success; yet it questions the viability of democracy and charges America with a global responsibility.

Warren asks what effect technology has had on the individual, though he does not reject technology. We should have it, but how we use it is what is important. Machines alter our consciousness because we have an unmitigated faith in democracy. The nuclear bomb, capable of mass destruction, also depersonalizes the human subject. "New Dawn" tells of a state-sanctioned desensitization of body and mind that prevents communal and individual redemption. It is a re-vision of tragedy in the post-war world that is still reeling from the Enola Gay mission.

McCarron, Bill, and James Grimshaw. "Cicero’s De Senectute and Warren’s Night Rider." Mississippi Quarterly, Winter 1996-97: 115+.

Professor Ball in Night Rider describes the Roman farmer Cincinnatus as the ideal leader. Ball, who quotes Cicero without attribution, wants to call the commander of the Association of Dark Fired Tobacco a centurion.

The association leaders, however, fail to achieve heroic stature. Senator Tolliver becomes a recluse, Mr. Christian has a stroke and dies, and Professor Ball is about to die. Percy Munn loses his wife, his house, and his mistress, and does not "have the seed of the future in himself." Willie Proudfit alone displays the will to endure and conquer. Cicero praises old men who become tillers of the soil. With his young wife and his concern for others, Proudfit is such a man.

Nicolaisen, Peter. "The Southern Agrarian and European Agrarianism."Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 1996: 683+.

The Southern Agrarians were part of an international movement of anti-industrialism. The plea for the dignity and simple life of the farmer, for resistance to machines, and for the urbanization of the country could be heard in most European countries in the early decades of this century.

While agrarianism in Germany became a popular political cause, the Southern agrarians disbanded and followed other pursuits. They wanted to preserve the old Southern regional identity rather than change or adopt a new one.

Many of the fears of the Vanderbilt group and the European agrarians were more than justified. As we look for answers to the threats of industrial waste and the moral confusion created by a consumerism growth-oriented society, we realize that the agrarians’ questions deserve our respect.

Suarez, Ernest. "Toward a New Southern Poetry: Southern Poetry in Contemporary American Literary History." Southern Review, Winter1997:181+.

The poetry of Warren and Dickey published since the mid-1950s provides a basis for evaluating the history of southern poetry and of contemporary American poetry.

A consideration of the tensions between the romantic and naturalistic tendencies in Warren’s and Dickey’s later verse suggests how they altered assumptions about the Southern Renascence and created a foundation for new southern poetry.

Warren, associated with the Fugitives and New Criticism, was considered a part of the generation against which contemporary poets have rebelled. Dickey has been regarded as "excessively macho" and "sensationalistic." Despite Warren’s 1957 and 1959 Pulitzers in poetry, critics associate him with the old order, but he has exercised a formative influence on contemporary poets, southern and otherwise.

Both Warren and Dickey were raised in provincial, conservative surroundings in segregated communities, but both developed liberal convictions about social issues. Both declared support for the Civil Rights Movement, and both viewed the New Left counterculture (the Beats’ romantic idealism) with suspicion.

Warren dedicated "Rattlesnake Country" to Dickey, and Dickey dedicated ‘"Under Buzzards" to Warren. Their profoundest influence on young Southern poets was their disposition against ideology. The poetry of both men met the desire of the younger poets for poetry connected to the South but speaking to the complexities of individual experience.

Recent Books on Warren

By Randolph Paul Runyon

In addition to John Burt’s edition of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, there have been several fine books on Warren to appear in the last year or so. James A. Grimshaw, Jr.’s Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998) provides a gold mine of information on the various collaborations of this extraordinary pair of literary scholars, as well as glimpses into Warren’s personal life that supplement Joseph Blotner’s magisterial Robert Penn Warren: A Biography (Random House, 1997). Thus, for example, in a letter to Brooks on September 21, 1942, we find Warren in Minneapolis explaining that he had indeed paid his Faculty Club bill (back at LSU, I suppose), though a month late. "I imagine," he writes, perhaps with a touch of anger at the way the university had treated him, "that if they started firing members who did that they would have to give the sumptuous halls over to the bats and owls and thereby deprive the jackals and the wild asses of their favorite haunts." In her New York Times review of June 28, 1998, Renee Tursi writes that ‘"a lively exchange in 1971 [between Brooks and Warren] on what might have happened had the South won the Civil War lends insight to their critical evolution"--Warren’s letters of October 6 and 15, 1972, are fascinating on this subject.

Blotner’s Biography is a must for all Warren readers. No one can read it without gaining immense insight into the shaping of his career, into the living that was taking place when his masterpieces were being created. As the New Criticism Warren and Brooks brought into being was in part a response to scholars who relied overmuch on biography to explain poems, there’s now a nice irony in this long-awaited revelation of the biographical details "behind" this New Critic’s poems and novels. But I think we can live with it.

For a fresh new approach to Warren, try Lucy Ferriss’s Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren (LSU Press, 1997). "The feminist critique having passed it by," Ferriss says at the outset, "Warren’s work is far more available to a gynocritical approach than it would otherwise be" (p. 8). Later, among her conclusions, she will write that "Through voice, as much as through event, Warren’s female personae begin to transcend bondage and achieve both selfhood and narrative authority.... It is in his depiction of the self-manacled character that Warren finds his greatest achievement; it is in his articulation of female voice that he most closely conjoins self-bondage and the workings of the social and historical world which women, as well as men, cannot escape" (p. 137). Ferriss, while not afraid to criticize Warren’s novelistic technique, nevertheless reveals qualities in his work we hadn’t realized were there. Her study is conversant in contemporary criticism, making particularly good use of the structuralist (such an old-fashioned word by now!) Gerard Genette. She thus helps bring Warren into current critical discourse, and for that we should all be grateful.

Leonard Casper, author of the pioneering study Robert Penn Warren: The Dark and Bloody Ground (1960), offers us lyrically poetic readings of Warren’s last five novels--The Cave, Wilderness, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, A Place to Come To--in The Blood-Marriage of Earth and Sky: Robert Penn Warren’s Later Novels (LSU Press, 1997). These are readings to be savored, slowly.

As an instance of his densely evocative style and argumentation, I could quote what he says in a concluding essay on Warren as reader. Drawing on imagery from World Enough and Time and Warren’s boyhood in Kentucky cave country, Casper writes that Warren’s response to a literary text (or to, I think, the world itself) "is that of the expert spelunker: to try whatever handhold, wriggle, intuitive change of pace that permits movements through whatever crawl-space beckons. The hope--not expectation--is to coordinate simultaneity (strata viewed vertically) with sequency (the twisting horizontals), the cosmic quotidian with the masses of shadowy matter that apparently dominate the cosmos" (p. 76). So much echoes here, not only the cave imagery already noted but also "Simultaneity" and "sequency," which evoke Warren’s poem "New Dawn," and the concerns of his last poetic sequences.

Casper concludes his first chapter with a salute to the Robert Penn Warren Circle, which may be a first for our organization. "It is to these voices of sound counsel"---the studies by Guttenberg, Justus, and myself that find value in the novels beyond All the King's Men---"and to those still rising from the Warren Circle founded in 1989, that the present text dares to add its commentary"(p. 6). We are honored by the gesture.

 Warren at Harvard

 John Burt sends us word that there will be a public reading of poems by Robert Penn Warren in celebration of the new Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum Lecture Hall at Harvard University on December 1, 1998 at 8 p.m. Readers will include Frank Bidart, Peter Davison, Marilyn Nelson, Peter Sacks, and Rosanna Warren.

Tommie Lou and Robert Frey are hard at work setting up a web site devoted to Robert Penn Warren. The address is not yet available because the site is still under construction, but if you wish to get in touch with them their email address is webmaster321@bellsouth.net .

 The RPW Circle Newsletter welcomes notes, queries, news, remarks, complaints, and other contributions to the ongoing discussion of Robert Penn Warren and his works. Please address them to the Editor, Randy Runyon, 302 Ryan Drive, Oxford, OH 45056; email <runyonr@muohio.edu>.

Warren Critical Study Available for Practically Nothing

 Ohio State University Press having decided to delete my book The Taciturn Text: The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren (1990) from their catalog, I have come into possession of some fifty copies from which I will be glad to make one available to anyone who requests it. Just send me your name and address with $5.00 to cover postage and handling. Lucy Ferriss writes in her new book Sleeping with the Boss that "Although my discussions should provoke a radical rethinking of some of the plot elements that Runyon, like others, takes for granted, I recommend The Taciturn Text for those unfamiliar or out of touch with Warren's fiction" (p. 14). So if you're feeling a little out of touch…….

 Dues for membership in the Robert Penn Warren Circle are $15 a year, $5 for graduate students, free for retirees--although emeritus contributions are always appreciated. Membership, which is valid from April to April, includes an annual newsletter and notices of upcoming conferences, calls for papers, panels, and publications. At last spring’s meeting of the Circle Board, it was reported that of the 228 members on the Circle mailing list, only 36 were listed as paid for the 1997-98 year! Please help support the work of the Circle by mailing in your payment immediately. You may wish to use the tear-sheet below:

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Lowell, MA 01854 

Year 2000 Newsletter