As NEHS celebrates its 20th anniversary, chapters across the country are embracing the 20 for 20 Social Service Project, using their passion for literature and language to make a lasting impact in their communities. At Clarksville High School, the Robert Penn Warren Society (RPWS) Chapter of NEHS is taking up this challenge with a mission rooted in preservation—ensuring that the legacy of one of America’s greatest literary figures is not lost to time.
RPWS is launching a community service project to raise awareness of Warren’s work and establish a digital presence that will allow future generations to engage with his writing. Read on to find out why Salem Malotte believes NEHS student members from around the world should join that effort.
Will You Tell Me a Story?
Today, technology is a part of life we often take for granted. From checking our phones to digital schoolwork, it is integrated into every aspect of our life and, as a society, we tend to continually look toward the future. However, we often forget what has been left behind in the wake of this technological age. Many valuable literary works remain absent from the internet, despite digital formatting being the primary information source for knowledge attainment. But often I wonder, whose responsibility is it to upload works from the past into these digital databases? The digital revolution has created a cultural travesty by abandoning authors such as Robert Penn Warren, the United States’ first poet laureate, who are left to fade into obscurity—much like the “hooting of great geese northward in the night.”
Born in Guthrie, KY, in 1905, Warren attended the school I currently attend, Clarksville High School, in Clarksville, TN, which is home to the Robert Penn Warren Society (RPWS), our chapter of the National English Honor Society formed in his namesake. As the only person to win a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry, in addition to many other awards and honors, Warren should have left a lasting literary legacy. However, since the time of his passing in 1989, much of his work has fallen out of print and never been digitized, leaving his writing largely inaccessible except for a few archives with minimal traffic. Most people in my own generation, born into an era of high technological innovation, often overlook print-only sources. This loss of his work is a tragedy for both literary scholars and ordinary people, as his novels and poems hold valuable truths that are important even in this “century and moment of mania.”
To preserve his legacy, the RPWS has launched a community service initiative to raise awareness of his work. Collaborating with the Robert Penn Warren Birthplace Museum in Guthrie—which is a nonprofit at risk of closing due to low public interest and engagement—we are undertaking the mission of creating a digital presence to revive interest in Warren’s legacy. Our objective is to encourage the public, especially younger generations, to engage with Warren’s works, allowing his contributions to be recognized across time and “great distances.”
We are beginning by creating an initial digital footprint for #RobertPennWarren by using his poem Tell Me a Story to inspire others to join our cause and tell the world a story in response to Warren’s 1969 poetic appeal. We need your help. We need you to bring Robert Penn Warren to the internet. We need to do as he urged us to do and not let the beauty of storytelling pass us by. We need to tell the world a story about “Time [without] pronouncing its name.”
So, let’s do it. Let’s use every social media platform that we can think of: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, even Pinterest. Let’s find every poem, story, or inspirational quote that Warren left behind and illuminate it with the light of every digital screen worldwide. Let’s link our content with hashtags such as #RobertPennWarren, #RPW, #RobertPennWarrenBirthplaceMuseum, and #RobertPennWarrenSociety. Follow our society @RobertPennWarren to celebrate the process of elevating Warren’s presence globally using the power of the internet for the greater good.
With all of us involved, we can ensure that the legacy and timeless work of a remarkable American literary figure does not go unnoticed. We can create a sound that reverberates universally instead of one that turns into silence in the “dark forest” of a world that is continuously moving toward future progress.
Salem Malotte is a junior at Clarksville High School in Clarksville, TN. She is very involved in her school community and active in many groups, including being President-Elect of the Robert Penn Warren Society Chapter of the National English Honor Society and secretary of the school’s Science National Honor Society chapter. In her free time, she enjoys creating works of art, reading and writing novels and poetry, playing music, and taking care of her three animals. She is passionate about the preservation of history and plans to have a future career as a lawyer.
National English Honor Society
The National English Honor Society (NEHS), founded and sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, is the only international organization exclusively for secondary students and faculty who, in the field of English, merit special note for past and current accomplishments. Individual secondary schools are invited to petition for a local chapter, through which individuals may be inducted into Society membership. Immediate benefits of affiliation include academic recognition, scholarship and award eligibility, and opportunities for networking with others who share enthusiasm for, and accomplishment in, the language arts.
America’s first honor society was founded in 1776, but high school students didn’t have access to such organizations for another 150 years. Since then, high school honor societies have been developed in leadership, drama, journalism, French, Spanish, mathematics, the sciences, and in various other fields, but not in English. In 2005, National English Honor Society launched and has been growing steadily since, becoming one of the largest academic societies for secondary schools.
As Joyce Carol Oates writes, “This is the time for which we have been waiting.” Or perhaps it was Shakespeare: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer . . .” we celebrate English studies through NEHS.
National English Honor Society accepts submissions to our blog, NEHS Museletter, from all membership categories (students, Advisors, and alumni). If you are interested in submitting a blog, please read the Suggested Guidelines on our website. Email any questions and all submissions to: submit@nehsmuseletter.us.
