Brother to Dragons

A Tale in Verse and Voices

Voices of the South

by Robert Penn Warren

148 Pages / 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.40 in / None

Paperback

9780807121238

Published: October 1996

$20.95

BUY

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The significantly revised version of Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, twenty-six years after the original. It is, Warren wrote, “in some important senses, a new work.” Told in the distinct voices of characters long dead and now gathered at an unspecified place and time, the poem recalls events leading to and resulting from the 1811 murder of a young slave by Thomas Jefferson’s nephew. “R.P.W.” is the narrator of the versified tale, whose poignant ending brings not only reconciliation among the ghostly figures but healing for Warren’s persona as well.

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, and attended Vanderbilt University, where he became a member of the Fugitive movement. An acclaimed novelist, poet, critic, and teacher, the author of dozens of books, he was a man of letters in the truest sense. He was the only writer ever to receive Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry, and in 1985 he was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate.

Warren does seem to me the best poet we have now, and the enormous improvement in the poem’s rhetorical force is evident upon almost every page. ~Harold Bloom, The New Republic

[Warren] has brought to bear all his advances and innovations of the past two decades and produced a masterwork. . . . Brother to Dragons is now the major twentieth-century American achievement in the long poem, without rival in the grandeur of its theme or the brilliance of its execution. ~Library Journal