Robert Penn Warren

Gilead by Marilyn Robinson.

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren.

And finally, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré.

It is a staggering collection of literature, and primarily because of the extreme friction between these titles.

So you have this very heavy structural institutional block of reading on the one hand.

Exactly.

Yes, Le Carré and Warren serve as the macro mechanical texts.

They dissect the machinery of power.

But she's best known for Ariel, a collection of poems written in something of a poetic frenzy in the months before she died and published in 1965.

Robert Penn Warren called Ariel a unique book.

It scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as though somebody had knocked out a windowpane on a brilliant night.

In the introduction to Ariel, Robert Lowell says that in this book, Plath becomes herself.

You got to make it out of badness because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

And apparently Robert Penn Warren said that.

But yeah, it does talk about this idea of being good out of a bad universe that is actively harming you.

And even the end part is like... is a human soul good or not? And I don't know if it totally lands somewhere or not.

Or Marlowe, or Keats, or Shaw, Tennyson.

We understand that they're, Oscar Wilde, that they're great writers, and we love their, or if you want the more modern, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren.

But then, but can you name a poet today? it odd to you that we have great poets throughout history going back a thousand years but not today and then and then because we want to seem cultural that's a culture we we bring someone in and we we bring them to the white house and the kennedy center and we say oh this is a great poet and then that person usually a lesbian gets up and reads and what they read has no appeal to me, and I would argue probably anybody else.

It is always an angst-ridden, long-suffering, I'm strong, I'm the proud victim-survivor, and that's what we call now poetry.

Yeah.

Uh, speaking of things that are elite, Jill Lepore on "All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren.

"All the King's Men" which I just picked as one of mine-

Mm-hmm

"The Fire Next Time" is what? The '50s? Maybe '60s.

'50s, early '60s.

"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren I believe is 1947.

Um, so yeah, the, it's, we're, we're a good 30 years on, which is, which is fine.

Anyway, since Appomattox 65, you know what that is? That's more than one per day have been published in this country on this event.

Why? What does Robert Penn Warren mean when he said the Civil War darkly unriddled and portentous of our personal and our national fate." That's pretty grandiose language, but what did Warren mean? What did Gertrude Stein mean when she said, there never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War? Of all people, Gertrude Stein was There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War," she said.

Why are so many people into this? Why do people want to read about it, reenact it, go play it, go visit it? Is it just heritage tourism? Is it just the attraction of military history? What is it that compels us to remember the most divisive, the most bloody, the most tragic event in our national history? And how do we remember it? Have we sometimes cleaned it up with such pleasing mythology that we've just made it fun? Why is the Confederate flag a problem? Why doesn't it just go away? It's the second most ubiquitous American symbol across the world, especially since Michael Jordan quit playing.

Other than the U.S. flag, the Confederate flag is the most ubiquitous symbol of the United States, maybe Coca-Cola, okay, but Coca-Cola is an international symbol.

There are people like like there are some of the you know, these figures that we call the Southern agrarians.

Many of them were like prominent advocates for segregation, some of them like Robert Penn Warren.

sort of came around towards the end of their lives and were like, Oh no, this is actually a bad thing.

And then like what you're describing, same thing.

All right, Jeff.

Oh, where do I wanna go next? Um, I don't know that I have a good segue from you, Sharyn, but I was thinking about All the King's Men recently by Robert Penn Warren, um, which is a...

It's been a while since I've read it, but it's a loose but serious historical fiction, sort of, but it's, it's the story of Huey Long, who's a real person.

In the book, the character's name is Willie Stark, a populist governor who rises through the ranks in the '30s, riding a wave of populism and quasi-nationalism, um, and how that works and what happens.

... where you've got Gatsby and Carraway right at the same time with Willie Stark and Jack Burden.

He's sort of watching them and learning from them, inspired and horrified by them.

But at the same time, Sharyn, I think one thing Robert Penn Warren is interested in is the specifics of these people, right? Th- these movements, these big movements can feel like a mob, but they're made up of specific people, and who's at the head of them matters for the shape, uh, and direction that they take, and what happens when they go sideways, and how do they go sideways, and how does everyone sort of just start going along, and why does the throng get caught up in these, um, kinds of movements? And, you know, when I was in high school and college, like, this was on all of the reading lists.

I don't think it is anymore, but I've gotta tell you, going back, I picked up my coffee off the sh- copy off the shelf the other day and looked at my notes, and this stuff about the will and just wanting power, this happens, this comes around and goes around from time to time, and it's one of those helpful reminders of while any specific current event is specific and unique in its own way, it's also related to other underlying dynamics in America and around the world about power, about populism, um, and how th- what kinds of things can go wrong in these certain situations.