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Authors
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
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An edition of Warren’s Collected Poems, edited by John Burt, appeared in 1998. It includes work from Warren’s volumes Incarnations (1968), Audubon: A Vision (1969), Or Else: Poem[hmp1]/[hmp1]Poems 1968–1974, Now and Then (1978), Being Here (1980), Rumor Verified (1981), Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), and New and Selected Poems 1925– 1985 (1985). Burt has also edited a volume of Warren’s Selected Poems (2001). Warren’s bestknown novels are All the King’s Men (1946) and World Enough and Time (1950). His Thomas Jefferson Lectures, Democracy and Poetry, appeared in 1975. Also available is a collection of interviews, Robert Penn Warren Talking (1980), edited by Floyd Watkins and John Tiers. The best critical studies of Warren’s poetry are Calvin Bedient’s In the Heart’s Last Kingdom (1986), James H. Justus’s The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren (1981), and Victor Stranberg’s The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren. More-recent critical studies include Lesa Carnes Corrigan’s Poem of Pure Imagination: Robert Penn Warren and the Romantic Tradition (1999) and The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren (2000), edited by David Madden, which gathers essays from various hands.
Born in southern Kentucky, Robert Penn Warren was educated at Vanderbilt, the University of California, Yale, and Oxford. He taught English at Louisiana State University and there co-founded the Southern Review, which published provocative essays by the "New Critics," passionate advocates of "close reading," as well as fiction by emerging southern writers such as Eudora Welty. Much of Warren's own prose and poetry grows out of his critical engagement with the history of the American South. His novel All the King's Men, which chronicles the rise and fall of a southern politician, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1946. The mid-fifties onward were fruitful years for Warren the poet. His long poem Audubon (1969), one of his most significant works, reveals a writer who celebrates the necessity that humans must face the darkness in their natures and forge ahead. Among Warren's prose publications are the novel World Enough and Time (1950) and the lecture Democracy and Poetry (1975); his volumes of poetry include Incarnations (1968), Now and Then (1978), Being Here (1980), Rumor Verified (1981), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
An accomplished scholar and teacher as well as a novelist and poet, Warren had an encyclopedic knowledge of British and American poetry; during his career, he experimented with many forms without associating himself with any single "school" of verse. To watch Warren shift from form to form, as theme and mood call for changes in prosody, is to see an artist with extraordinary liberality of range and taste.
1. Bearded Oaks (1942) and After the Dinner Party (1985), written nearly half a century apart, are in rhymed quatrains, reminiscent of Longfellow, Robinson, Frost, and others in a long tradition of highly formal poets. American Portrait: Old Style (1978) is a long poem with unrhymed lines of varying lengths. However, the final stanza of American Portrait rhymes and scans. Why? Describe how these poems might be about achieving "form" or identity in life and how the prosody might reflect the development of that theme.
2. Several of the Warren poems in the NAAL selection refer to "time." Is there a pattern to the way that time is addressed in these works? Is time spoken to as an adversary? As a destroyer? As an ally? Choose two poems by Warren, and compare the way in which they talk about the passing of years or ages.
