Celebrating Robert Penn Warren's birthday on April 24th

Today is Robert Penn Warren's birthday! Mr. Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, which is a tiny little town that straddles the Kentucky/Tennessee border about six miles from the location of our former family farm in eastern Montgomery County, Tennessee. My grandfather used to trade with Mr. Warren's brother, Thomas, at his feed and seed store in Guthrie. My grandmother took a copy of one of Robert Penn Warren's poetry books to his brother, who transmitted it to the famous poet for his signature. I appreciate the fact that all of those people worked together to get that book signed and back to me. I wonder if he got many requests for autographs on his books over the years.

I like his poetry. The best of his poems, in my opinion, are the ones that tell a story. There was one about a lynching in Guthrie in which a little grey man volunteered to prepare the hangman's noose. Warren always seemed to look at southern icons with a critical eye. Of course, he was one of the creators of the "new criticism" which required one to look at literature on its own merits, and ignore the writer and his personal experiences. I have always had a hard time in doing that. I can't imagine reading the poems of the Fugitives like Warren and Tate and Ransom without placing them in their home region. Think about Faulkner without Mississippi. Think about Hemingway outside of all the places he lived or Steinbeck without the Monterrey peninsula.

I understand that a work of art has to be ultimately universal in its appeal to actually be considered a work of art. The ramblings of an artist are simply that, unless they can touch others emotionally. Otherwise, how would someone from Japan be able to appreciate Shakespeare or Milton? How could the stories of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer appeal to people outside the Mississippi River valley? That is the universality of art.

Of course, poetry has become very different from the poetry that I enjoyed in college. Everything is required to be much more subjective and personal. I remember submitting some poems to a poetry journal in Birmingham. The editor sent them back and suggested that I read some modern poetry and try to be more personal in my writing. He wanted to feel my emotions through my poetry. Sensory images were not important; it was what came from my heart.

So where does that leave us? Do we have a irreconcilable conflict between the new criticism and the style of today's poetry? The new criticism seems to require us to ignore the subjective and the personal, but modern poetry demands it. I remember an argument Dan Kramer and I had in high school in which we discussed the source of literature. I argued that all literature derived from personal experience, but Dan thought that literature came from some "magical" source outside the writer. How could you explain science fiction otherwise? I still think that all art is ultimately personal. It is the subtlety of the expression and the verissimilitude of the sentiment which grabs us and forces us to appreciate the work as art.

Now music is a whole other matter. What is it about the combination of notes in a specific piece which grabs our hearts, while another doesn't? Who knows? Maybe there is some magical connection or combination that the artist grasps and displays for his audience. Perhaps there is some platonic ideal of music and the closer we get to that ideal, the more we appreciate the combination. Is there something inside of us which biologically responds to certain pieces of music? Is it different for different people? How do you explain differences in taste?

If I could figure these questions out, I think I would be a genius.