The South’s Past Imperfect

THE appearance now of solid biographies of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks testifies to the continuing importance of both men and calls again to mind the importance of what they thought and did. Though both grew up in the South, they were, in their temperaments, different kinds of Southerners. As Joseph Blotner demonstrates in his Robert Penn Warren (Random House, 585 pp., $35), Warren was the more expansive and tumultuous, extending himself into all areas of literature: short story, novel, poetry, criticism, biography, drama. His subjects, centrally, were history, power, and the depths of the heart.

Yet he also came together often with the more restrained and “classical” Cleanth Brooks. Vanderbilt undergraduates, Rhodes Scholars, men of letters, founders of the important Southern Review, they were often together in an attempt to define “the South”: what it meant to poetry, but also to history, and what it might mean in the continuing present.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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THE appearance now of solid biographies of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks testifies to the continuing importance of both men and calls again to mind the importance of what they thought and did. Though both grew up in the South, they were, in their temperaments, different kinds of Southerners. As Joseph Blotner demonstrates in his Robert Penn Warren (Random House, 585 pp., $35), Warren was the more expansive and tumultuous, extending himself into all areas of literature: short story, novel, poetry, criticism, biography, drama. His subjects, centrally, were history, power, and the depths of the heart.

Yet he also came together often with the more restrained and “classical” Cleanth Brooks. Vanderbilt undergraduates, Rhodes Scholars, men of letters, founders of the important Southern Review, they were often together in an attempt to define “the South”: what it meant to poetry, but also to history, and what it might mean in the continuing present.