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THEY MET IN 1924 in Nashville: Robert Penn Warren was nineteen; Cleanth Brooks, a freshman, was almost eighteen. For sixty-five years their friendship grew as they collaborated on five textbooks and an anthology--An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), Modern Rhetoric (1949), American Literature: The Makers and the Making (1973), and An Anthology of Stories from "The Southern Review" (1953)--and founded one of the best-regarded literary journals in the first half of this century. In retrospect the pairing seems inspired: Brooks, a versatile critic who was meticulous and persuasively lucid in his reading of literature; and Warren, a versatile writer who, as R. W. B. Lewis has noted, published in every genre except travel. Both Brooks and Warren were also superb teachers.
They were together on four campuses--Vanderbilt in the 1920s;
one-year overlap at Oxford in 1930; LSU from 1934 to 1942; and Yale from the 1950s until their retirements in the 1970s. Even when they were on the same campus, they were not often together. Both traveled frequently, Warren perhaps more than Brooks--and so it was Brooks, therefore, to whom many publication details fell. There are approximately 380 pieces of correspondence between the two in their collections at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and those letters reveal a most remarkable friendship and contribution to the study and understanding of American literature.
Readers of the correspondence between Brooks and Warren will come away with an enhanced appreciation of the value of the textbooks as entrees into their literary criticism and into Warren's creative works. Such a bold statement bears substantiation. Understanding Poetry exercised an enormous influence, so much so that John Michael Walsh, Brooks's bibliographer, has written that it "revolutionized the way poetry is taught in this country"; and John Crowe Ransom's 1939 review of the volume identified it as the first textbook of its kind. Brooks and Warren's insistence on "the inwardness of poetry," on the necessity of concentrating on the work itself and not on biographical backdrop or critical precedent, made their textbooks (especially Understanding Poetry) immensely influential. In their collaborations an unusually clear and strong-minded theory of literature is laid out and refined--one that casts light on their other, individual works of criticism and of art.
On July...