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Theme and Metaphor in Brother to Dragons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Victor H. Strandberg
Victor H. Strandberg*
Affiliation:
University of Vermont Burlington University of Wisconsin W. T. Bandy
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Extract

When Brother to Dragons came out ten years ago, its reviewers were inclined to show deep admiration. “An event, a great one,” was Randall Jarrell's opinion, as he sought to substantiate his judgment that “this is Robert Penn Warren's best book.” Another of Warren's fellow poets, Delmore Schwartz, likewise evinced high enthusiasm, calling Brother to Dragons “a work which is most remarkable as a sustained whole,” a work having “perfect proportion throughout.” Both these reviewers, furthermore, placed Warren in some very distinguished company on the basis of this work, Jarrell by finding echoes of Milton, Shakespeare, and Eliot, and Schwartz by observing “Warren's resemblance to Melville.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1964 , pp. 498 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

1 Randall Jarrell, “On the Underside of the Stone,” New York Times Book Review, 23 August 1953, p. 6.

2 Delmore Schwartz, “The Dragon of Guilt,” New Republic. cxxix (14 September 1953), 17.

3 Mr. Garrett quotes this passage from McDowell as the starting point for his “The Function of the Pasiphae Myth in Brother to Dragons” MLN, lxxiv (April 1959), 311–313.

4 Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (New York: Random House, 1953), pp. 32–33. Hereafter I shall note the page references to this book in parentheses within my main text.

5 Carl Gustav Jung, The Undiscovered Self (New York: Mentor Books, 1959), p. 101.

6 In his study of archetypyes, Joseph Campbell, like Warren, follows Jung's lead in declaring the cleavage within the self to be modern man's most serious problem. In The Hero with the Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953, p. 388), Campbell says:“The lines of communication between the conscious and unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.”