SOURCE: Lowell, Robert. “Prose Genius in Verse.” The Kenyon Review XV, no. 4 (Autumn 1953): 619-25.

In the following review of Brother to Dragons, Lowell confers stylistically qualified praise on Warren's “brutal, perverse melodrama” in blank verse.

In spite of its Plutarchan decor, Brother to Dragons is a brutal, perverse melodrama that makes the flesh crawl. On a chopping block in a meat house in West Kentucky, “on the night of December 15, 1811—the night when the New Madrid earthquake first struck the Mississippi Valley—” Lilburn and Isham Lewis, nephews of Thomas Jefferson, in the presence of their Negroes, “butchered a slave named George, whose offense had been to break a pitcher prized by their dead mother, Lucy Lewis.” Coming upon this preface, the reader is warned that he will not find Monticello and Jefferson with his letters from John Adams, his barometers and portable music stands, but Lizzie Borden braining...