University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Masters Theses Graduate School 5-2005 Their Old Kentucky Home: The Phenomenon of the Kentucky Burden in the Writing of James Still, Jesse Stuart, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren Christian Leigh Faught University of Tennessee, Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Faught, Christian Leigh, "Their Old Kentucky Home: The Phenomenon of the Kentucky Burden in the Writing of James Still, Jesse Stuart, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2005. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/4557 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Christian Leigh Faught entitled "Their Old Kentucky Home: The Phenomenon of the Kentucky Burden in the Writing of James Still, Jesse Stuart, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in English. Allison R. Ensor, Major Professor We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: Mary E. Papke, Thomas Haddox Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Christian Leigh Faught entitled "Their Old Kentucky Home: The Phenomenon of the Kentucky Burden in the Writing of James Still, Jesse Stuart, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren." I have examined the final paper copy of this thesis forform and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major in English. � rt . £...... � Allison R. Ensor, Major Professor We have read this thesis andrecommend its acceptance: �k�� �rt�Thomas Haddox Accepted for the Council: THEIR OLD KENTUCKY HOME: THE PHENOMENON OF THE KENTUCKY BURDEN IN THE WRITING OF JAMES STILL, JESSE STUART, ALLEN TATE AND ROBERT PENN WARREN A Thesis Presented forthe Master of Arts Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Christian Leigh Faught May 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Christian Leigh Faught All rights Reserved. 11 Dedication I dedicate this project to my husband, Kenny, who has taught me to live strong andlaugh often. You will forever be my soul mate and my sweetest friend. 111 Acknowledgements I have been very fortunateduring my graduatecareer to have the privilege of working with some of the finestliterary scholars in the field,most specifically those who graciously agreed to be on my committee. This project would not have been possible without the kind patience and steady guidanceof Dr. Allison R. Ensor. He allowed me to maintain ownership of this project while also providing sound advice and challenging me to think beyond the surface. Dr. Mary E. Papke and Dr. Thomas Haddox guided me to clearer expression and pushed me to greater levels of critical scholarship. I amindebted to them both foralways making my project seem worthwhile. My experience with this committee could not have been better. Also, I would like to thank my husband and greatest supporter, Kenny Faught, who during this project kept me supplied in caffeine, made the necessary late night fast foodruns, and, most importantly, encouraged me to persevere and challenged me to never settle foranything less than my best. Without him, I might very well still be staring at a blank screen. V Abstract The focusof this project is to investigate the phenomenon of the Kentucky burden, andto explore the impact of that burden on fourVanderbilt-educated Kentucky authors of the earlytwentieth century. The works of James Still, Jesse Stuart,Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren reveal not only characteristicscommon to Southernregionalism in general but also traits radically particularto Kentucky. Throughan exploration of the poetry andprose of these prominent Kentucky writers, we can gain a better understanding of the significanceof their identities as Kentuckians and recognize the many obstacles and challenges the Kentucky burden posed foreach of the fourwriters. I posit that the individual reactions of Still, Stuart, Tate, and Warren to the Kentucky burden dramatically affected their critical and popular success, thus deciding their place, or lack thereof, in the canon of American literature. By investigating this phenomenon, this project enters the debate concerning the existence of subregions within regionalism and further emphasizes the importanceof the literature of the individual regions of this country which make up the whole of American literature. vu Table of Contents Introduction .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1 I. Kentucky Mountain Regionalism: James Still's Escape ........... ..... 21 II. Kentucky Is My Land: The RomanticQuality of Jesse Stuart's Kentucky ............... ...... .................................. 45 III. Kentucky's Best Kept Secret: Allen Tate's Biographical Burden ... 65 IV. Kentucky's Sage: The Enduranceof Robert Penn Warren ........... 89 Conclusion ........................................... .............................121 Works Cited ................................. : .................................... 131 Vita ........................... ........................... .......................... 141 IX Introduction In the introduction to Good Poems, Garrison Keillor observes, "If you read a lot, labels startto seem meaningless.'Regional,' for example, which only means writers whose work might include referencesto farming, is a useless term" (xxiv). When misunderstood as merely a referenceto the pastoral or agrarian,the term regional may be of no use. However, when recognizedas a phenomenon not limited to such stereotypes, regionalism represents much more than a particularphysical location. In actuality, regionalism is an attempt to articulate therelatively vague and problematic relationship that nearlyall people have with place-notjust the physical relationship withlocale, but thesense of emotional and spiritual belonging or connectedness to a region and its history. Though seemingly simple, the acknowledgement of a regionalism as opposed to the cataloguing of basic eccentricitieswithin differentparts of the country has become a wellspring forscholarly debate, and literary regionalism has been no exception. This project enters that debate by investigating the relationship between regionalism andboth scholarlyand popularacclaim among fourprominent Kentucky writers of prose and poetry: JamesStill, Jesse Stuart, Allen Tate, and RobertPenn Warren. More specifically, I will investigate the existence of an innate Kentucky regionalism in selected poems and prose of each of the writers. While it is apparentin the writings of Still, Stuart, Tate, and Warren that they are undeniably Southern regionalists, theyalso display a distinct Kentucky regionalism in at least some of their works. This phenomenon does not necessarilyexist in the works of these writers by choice; in fact, I contend that it is an inescapable partof their identity and thus seeps both consciously. and 1 inadvertently into their writing. It is the manner in which each of the fourwriters reacted to what will be called forthe remainder of this paper the Kentucky burden that has led to their popularand critical reputations as either enduring or forgottenSouthern writers. Beforeinvestigating furtherthe concept of a Kentucky burden, acknowledgment must be made that similarliterary burdens may exist for other geographical or cultural "regions" of the country. These may include northernand Southern,urban and rural, race and gender, or educational and economic subgroups. While the purpose of this project is to explore exclusively whether and to what extent a specifically Kentucky burden exists, embracing this concept suggests the need to explore the existence of other literary subregions as well. It should also be noted here that there are other important authors fromKentucky during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century whose works could be explored as potential reflectionsof the Kentucky burden: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, James Lane Allen, John Fox, Jr., CarolineGordon, HarrietteArnow. However, I have chosen to focuson Still, Stuart,Tate, and Warren primarily because they each leftKentucky to attend Vanderbilt University and were there at a time when it was rising to fame as the cutting edge school of the literarySouth. These fourwriters were instrumental in the progression of the literary revolutionof the South to higher levels of popular and critical acclaim. Accordingly, they were each exposed to virtually the sameliterary environment at Vanderbilt, including the Fugitives and Agrarians, and their differingresponses to this literaryrevolution can serve as precursors to understanding their respective reactions to the Kentucky burden. While these writers reflectvastly differentviews of and reactions 2 to their various backgrounds, the evidence of the Kentucky burden in their writing