SOURCE: Deutsch, Babette. “Poetry Chronicle.” The Yale Review 43, no. 2 (December 1953): 276-81.

In the following excerpted review, Deutsch admires Brother to Dragons “as a whole and in its parts.”

The kernel of Robert Penn Warren's “tale in verse and voices,” as Brother to Dragons is subtitled, is the brutal murder of a Negro slave by Lilburn Lewis, elder son of Thomas Jefferson's only sister. The crime was a matter of public knowledge and record, but was never referred to by the man who prided himself less on his presidency than on having been the author of the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and having fathered the University of Virginia.

Warren tells the story of the murder in living dialogue, and explores not only the motives of the murderer in committing the act but also those of his great kinsman in seeming to ignore...