American Portrait: Old Style (1976). Content and Description

“American Portrait: Old Style” first appeared in the August 23, 1976, issue of the New Yorker; it was later included in Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978 (1978), which earned Warren his third Pulitzer Prize (his second for poetry). Warren divided Now and Then into two sections: “Nostalgic,” which focuses on Warren’s past, and “Speculative,” in which, as James H. Justus describes in The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren, “the speaker struggles to reconcile rational assessment of the past and the knowledge it brings with more tentative and subliminal assertions of meaning experienced in dream states and near-mystical moments” (100).

The collection often contains powerful, revelatory moments from Warren’s youth—memories or “psychological imprints” that helped develop his imagination and inspired him to write about in late life. As Lesa Carnes Corrigan argues, “In Now and Then, Warren’s desire ‘just to know’ manifests itself not only in the poet’s forays into the realm of memory but also in intense, suspended moments of revelation experienced in the world of nature” (147). Thus, the first poem in the “Nostalgic” section—“American Portrait: Old Style”—recounts Warren’s memories of time spent with his childhood friend Kent Greenfield (referred to in the poem as “K”), about whom he had already written in the short story “Greenwood Comes Back.”

In many ways, however, the poem is more than an autobiographical sketch. It returns to familiar Warren themes: our personal relationship with history, the fictionlike nature of memory, the inevitability of change, and the power of the imagination, represented by the childhood games Warren and K play and in the poem’s subject matter and form. In the third of the poem’s nine sections Warren states that “in that last summer / I was almost ready to learn / What imagination is—it is only the lie we must learn to live by, if ever / We mean to live at all.”

For Warren, childhood is not only an idyllic time to be remembered nostalgically; it is also a time when the imagination—the faculty that gives our lives meaning and enables us to love—develops. But this poem not only records Warren’s early love of the world; it also chronicles his embittered response to aging, to the lost dreams of youth, and to Kent’s habitual drinking that lost him a baseball career. Such a loss parallels the loss of meaning that maturity can often cause. Even though the poem deals with the anger that often accompanies disillusionment and the sorrow we feel with the passing of youth, the poem also looks to the future with hope, reflecting that “even in anger” the speaker loves the world.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The “imagination” Warren describes as “the lie we must learn to live by” can be seen to include the imaginative act of writing poetry. Explore how Warren’s descriptions of his childhood games with K (such as “we had to invent it all,”) can be seen to comment upon Warren’s attempt to “create” his own personal “history” through writing “American Portrait: Old Style.”

2. Though most of the poem is free verse, its final section breaks into rhyme. Explain why this sudden shift in the poem’s form is significant to its content.

3. Read Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” and then compare the way it, as does “American Portrait,” treats youth, maturity, understanding, and love.