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The massive "documentary volume" edited by James A. Grimshaw, Jr., is equivalent to a trip to Grandma's attic, complete with a couple of footlockers full of interesting stuff—letters, memorabilia, report cards, and school assignments—collected over a lifetime. At one level this volume provides a convenient one-stop shopping trip for anyone interested in an overview of Warren's life and career, for it contains personal materials along with professional. At another level this volume helps to put Warren's career as novelist and poet into perspective, for the collection provides some balance in that it contains critical as well as favorable reviews of Warren's work.
While many topics could be singled out to illustrate the value of these two volumes—Warren's changing views on race as a reflection of the revolutionary American landscape of the 20th century, his influence on the teaching of literature through the textbooks he coauthored with Cleanth Brooks, or the dramatic impact of the Fugitives and Agrarians on the state of American letters—I will focus briefly on what these collections show us about Warren's religious position. His novels are peppered with characters for whom questions of faith and religious experience are crucial (Cass Mastern in All the King's Men and Ashby Wyndham in At Heaven's Gate for example), and his poetry contains reflections on man's relation to the universe, and, perhaps, God or the absolute. In a 1936 review, Morton Zabel identified two sources of Warren's poetic strength, both of which relate to this issue. The first reflected Warren's agrarian background and southern roots: Warren was grounded in "a tragic vision that defines a faith without dictating it." This, however, may be little more than atmospherics, for as Flannery O'Connor reminds us, the South is a Christ-haunted land. The second source of Warren's strength, Zabel suggested, is his "emphasis on his own conflict of spirit." While this conflict is related to the tragic vision embraced by other southern writers, it suggests that the vision of Warren's poetry is the outgrowth of personal struggle rather than a mere reflection of heritage.
These concerns surfaced at various points throughout the remainder of Warren's life, as documented in these volumes. Alfred Kazin, in a 1959 review of Warren's Selected Essays, sees Warren as participating in the effort "to reclaim the Christian, sacramental vision of the world destroyed by scientific materialism." While linking Warren to this particularly southern movement through his connections with Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks, Kazin simultaneously distances Warren from what he calls "the Southern 'school'" by arguing that Warren—presumably unlike his agrarian colleagues—is "much more various and subtle in practice than he is in theory." But Warren does share the general southern view that sees "the experience of modern man as one that cries out for the Christian vision of the world as sacramental, not accidental or meaningless." Kazin then shrewdly points to Joseph Conrad as reflective of Warren's own views on the nature of the world and the writer's place in the world.
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