Robert Penn Warren Studies Volume 1 Article 5 2001 Robert Penn Warren: The Anxiety of Critical Influence Charlotte H. Beck Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Beck, Charlotte H. (2001) "Robert Penn Warren: The Anxiety of Critical Influence," Robert Penn Warren Studies: Vol. 1 , Article 5. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies/vol1/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Robert Penn Warren Studies by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Robert Penn Warren: The Anxiety of Critical Influence CHARLOTTE H. BECK Although he was the author of more than ninety-one essays, two volumes of collected essays, sixty-two reviews, and critical introduc­ tions in numerous textbook anthologies of literature, Robert Penn Warren consistently denied that he was a literary critic.As Leonard Casper and others have accurately stated, Warren "belittled" his crit­ ical persona, considering himself a poet first, fiction writer second, and a sort of critical hack last of all. Likewise, in a 1978 TV inter­ view with Dick Cavett, Wmrnn equivocated: "I write a lot of criti­ cism, and I've done some teaching, which is a form of criticism, but I don't feel that is a profession. I feel that is pmt of my social life, talking about books I have read to somebody, or writing about them, and usually the books that I've written ... sort of come out of talk­ ing, out of classes." From his Vanderbilt days, when he wrote poetry, but not criticism, for The Fugitive and later at Oxford, WaITen thought of himself as a developing poet and reluctant scholar and dis­ tinguished himself from Cleanth Brooks, who was even then working out his own critical position. Warren later wrote that at Oxford, Brooks made available to him "the opening world of poetry and poet­ ic criticism and theory," while he was "so hot at the immediate task of trying to writ� poems that I had missed a certain enrichment for that practical task" of critical analysis, although he had listened, at Vanderbilt, to "a lot of subtle and learned talk" from Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom.' When he was forced to produce a scholarly thesis in order to satisfy requirements for the Oxford B.Lit., Warren had a great deal of difficulty finding a subject, and when he finally decided to write on Marston's satires, he pursued the task with less than scholarly enthusiasm, although the final result was more than satisfactory from a scholar's viewpoint.' 25 Robert Penn Warren neve1iheless wrote criticism, beginning as "Interchapter, A Manifesto for Antithetical Criticism," in which he early as 1927 and continuing until the end of his life, for a variety of finds it possible, with but a slight adjustment, to make room for crit­ pragmatic reasons, chiefly for much-needed money. As he remarked ics: "Poets' misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics' in a 1970 interview with Ruth Fisher, writing criticism was for him, misinterpretations of criticism, but this is only a difference in degree at best, a teaching strategy or, at worst, "busy-work and nothing and not at all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinter­ more-and a job, sometimes with a pay check."' From Vanderbilt on, pretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry ... For just as a poet however, WmTen functioned as part of an expanding circle of writers must be found by the opening in a precursor poet, so must the critic. whose nucleus was the former Fugitive group and which later became The difference is that a critic has more parents .. poets and critics." known as the New Critics. Why, then, was Robert Penn Warren so For Warren, as a junior member of the Fugitive circle, the most for­ reluctant to own up to being a literary critic? midable father-figure was John Crowe Ransom, from whose over­ Beyond his stronger desire to make a name for himself as a poet bearing presence there was no easy escape. Although Warren attend­ and writer of fiction, there was also a certain humility toward the crit­ ed the Fugitive meetings during his student days, his reason for doing ic's task that seemed to limit his pride in making formal pronounce­ so was to learn how to write poetry. He served for a year as editor of !i'' ments about literature. He consistently separated himself from the The Fugitive but published no criticism following the examples of "real" critics, those who "are systematic, want to force the thing Ransom and Tate. After publishing his essay "The Briar Patch" in I'll through to its ultimates. I. A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, or Ransom, Take My Stand, Warren, along with Brooks, began to distance himself they are people who must try to drive the thing through, you know, from the Agrarian cause. A much more pervasive "father" was the and whose way of study is in that direction." Warren added that for same poet-critic who influenced much of Warren's early poetry, T. S. him, "it's a very different thing, whether it's reading criticism or an Eliot. Harold Bloom has stated quite forcefully that Eliot was essay I'd written. Because it's usually ad hoc, came out of the class­ Warren's strong precursor both "as poet and as critic."' So strong room, or it's come out of my interests."4 were Ransom's and Eliot's influences that they may have caused Warren never maintained that he had the last word on any liter­ Wairnn's failure to accept the title of critic even as he caITied out its ary text, always insisting that he was a progressivist in regard to inter­ function. pretation. Contrary to the commonly held definition of the New In all applications of his theory, Bloom has outlined what he calls Critic, Wmrnn believed that however objective the critic might try to six "revisionary ratios"-Clinamen, Tessera, Kenosis, Daemonization, be, how personally removed from the task of interpretation, he or she Askesis, and Apophrades�to describe how the anxious writer deals will be identified intellectually, and therefore personally, with his or with the specter of his stronger precursor. Three ofthese -ke11osis, cli- her reading of a text and must take personal responsibi I ity for it. 11ame11, and tessera,'' are applicable to Wmrnn's anxiety of critical There is a strong possibility, also, that Warren was afflicted with influence. Warren's criticism exhibits kenosis first, as he empties his a multiple case of what Harold Bloom has called the "anxiety of criticism of his own original concepts and structures in order to give influence." Although Bloom's terminology refers specifically to expression to those of his critical fathers, unless or until he can adopt poets, he has inserted into his book 71,e Anxiety of Influence an the more fruitful strategy of clinamen, swerving away from his pre- 26 27 cursor in criticism in order to find an approach more particular to his irony is constant, based on an "objectification of this little interior temperament and genius. Finally, after the death of Eliot and the drama," i.e., the conflict between thought and feeling. Both Davidson aging of Ransom left him free from their pressure, WatTen could, and Ransom have dealt with "the relation of the artist to the ordered, through tessera, enlarge and extend the scope of his precursors' crit­ or disordered, society in which he happens to live," but Ransom's ical vision in synthesis with his own. poetry "has been less local in materials." Ransom's main focus "is the Over a period of more than thirty years, Warren published three disruption of sensibility," an issue that "has two aspects: man is a essays on Ransom, his former teacher and mentor. Ransom is among creature little lower than the angels and, at the same time, of the brute the poets discussed in "A Note on Three Southern Poets," published creation; again, there is a conflict between the scientific vision of in May 1932, while two other articles, published in 1935 and 1968, quantity and the poetic vision concerned with quality." This disasso­ treat Ransom alone. All three of the essays have more to say about ciation brings about the tensions which produce Ransomian irony: Ransom's poetry than his criticism and imply regret that in Ransom's "the poet cannot solve his problem by an act of will, but he can career criticism replaced poetry. Early in his own poetic career, attempt to work out some smt of equilibrium that may permit him, Warren must have feared that he would mimic Ransom, as well as even though at odds with himself, to continue the practice of his art." Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, by mutating early from poetry, his The similarity between Ransom's "disruption" and Eliot's "dissocia­ work fueled by imagination, to criticism, fed on the dried crusts of tion" of sensibility allows Warren to privilege Ransom and Eliot over other writers' work. Fletcher and Davidson, although he distinguishes Ransom's situa­ fn "A Note on Three Southern Poets," Ransom comes off better tional irony from Eliot's "irony of historical basis, the juxtaposition than his two Agrarian brethren, John Gould Fletcher and Donald of a degenerate present with the noble past."" At this juncture, Davidson. Warren attributes to each of the three poets legitimate WmTen, the fledgling critic, could safely live under the sheltering claim to "the debatable distinction of being a Southern poet" as aegises of Eliot and Ransom and still develop as a poet and critic.