(Page 17 of 18) - Robert Penn Warren on Thomas Jefferson on Human Nature authored by Ealy, Steven.

“Robert Penn Warren’s Encounter with Thomas Jefferson”

the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783-1854 (Champaign-Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1962), pp. 467-69, 586-93, 596-98.

Deuteronomy 34: 1-6. On the sin that prevented Moses from entering the promised land, see

Deuteronomy 32: 48-52, and Numbers 20: 1-13 (cf. Exodus 17: 1-7). Also see God’s command to Joshua
after the death of Moses at Joshua 1: 2.

Thomas Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Library of America, 1984),

pp. 845-48. For comparative illustrations of these two buildings see “The Federal Style” at
{http://www.holycross.edu/departments/classics/wziobro/ClassicalAmerica/federalistintro}. See the entry
from Jefferson’s Autobiography contained in Warren’s notes (BD II, p. 133).

See the letter from Jefferson to Madame de Tesse dated March 20, 1787 which begins, “Here I am,

Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison quarée, like a lover at his mistress.” (BD II, p. 133; Thomas
Jefferson: Writings, pp. 891-893).

Speaking of the Minotaur Jefferson says, “He is the infamy of Crete./He is the midnight’s enormity. And

is/Our brother, our darling brother.” (BD II, p. 6) Thus Jefferson—and mankind as well?—is the bother to
Minotaurs as well as to dragons. This knowledge, as the poem shows, comes to Jefferson much later than
the Declaration Congress.

Inferno I.1-3. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume I: Inferno, edited and translated by Robert

M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 26, 27. Compare Jefferson: “Reason? That’s the
word/I sought to live by—but, oh,/We have been lost in the dark, and I/Was lost who had dreamed there
was a light.” (BD II, p. 119)

Publius Vergilius Maro, 70-19 B.C Author of the Aeneid, Eclogues, and Bucolics, Virgil serves as

Dante’s guide through hell and through purgatory. As a pagan, Virgil does not enter paradise with Dante
(see Purgatorio, XXX. 40-75). Note that Vergil’s life overlapped the building of the Maison Quarrée.

I surmise, then, that Brother to Dragons is Warren’s Inferno, and leave open the question of whether

Warren also produces a Purgatory and a Paradise. Or perhaps Brother to Dragons is itself an abbreviated
but complete Divine Comedy, American style. (See Lewis P. Simpson, “Warren and the Father: Robert
Penn Warren and Thomas Jefferson” The Sewanee Review CIV (1996): 52, 65.)

One of the confusing changes that Warren made in the poem involved the name of the murdered slave. In

BD I the slave was named “George,” which was the name of historical slave murdered by Lilburne Lewis,
but in BD II Warren named the slave “John.”

Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 288.

In a letter dated August 1, 1816, Jefferson wrote to Adams, “I like the dreams of the future better than the

history of the past. So good night. I will dream on . . .” (The Adams-Jefferson Letters, edited by Lester J.
Cappon [New York: Simon and Schuster, “A Clarion Book,” 1981], p. 485). For a bloody dream of the
future late in Jefferson’s life see his letter to Adams dated September 4, 1823: “The light which has been
shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world. As yet that light
has dawned on the middling classes only of the men of Europe. The kings and the rabble of equal
ignorance, have not yet received its rays; but it continues to spread. And, while printing is preserved, it can
no more recede than the sun return on his course. A first attempt to recover the right of self-government
may fail . . . some subsequent one of the ever renewed attempts will ultimately succeed . . . all Europe,
Russia excepted, has caught the spirit, and all will attain representative government, more or less perfect.
…To attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over. Yet the object
is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation for what inheritance so valuable can man leave his
posterity? . . . You and I shall look down from another world on these glorious achievements of man, which
will add to the joys even in heaven.” (Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 1478; The Adams-Jefferson Letters,
pp. 596-97)

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, “A Harvest Book,”

1982 [orig. pub. 1946]), p. 435.

This same effect is achieved in the novels Night Rider and All the King’s Men with a slight reversal—an

historical interlude provides some new perspective on the contemporary story.

It is crucial also in that it brings into the open the limits of the poet. He is not an omniscient narrator who

knows all and understands all, but rather a human with the strengths and weaknesses of humans, including
a poor memory at times. R.P.W. makes two trips to Rocky Hill, and on the second he discovers that the
bluff “doesn’t look so high / . . . And never was, perhaps, but in my head./ . . . I had plain
misremembered,/Or dreamed a world appropriate for the tale.” (BD II, p. 128)