Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), American man of letters, was dedicated to art as a way of exploring the meaning of contemporary existence.

Writer and poet Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky on April 24, 1905. He twice received the Pulitzer Prize: one for fiction in 1947 and another for poetry in 1958. He earned his baccalaureate at Vanderbilt University in 1925 where he knew John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and other Southern Agrarian poets who published the Fugitive magazine (1922-1925). His essay, I'll Take My Stand, published by Fugitive in 1930, was among the most persuasive and reasonable defenses of the South's cultural and social heritage to that date.

After receiving his master's in 1927 from the University of California, Warren attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and took his doctorate in 1930. Pondy Woods and Other Poems (1930) was his first published volume of verse. During the 1930s, he was managing editor with Cleanth Brooks of the Southern Review. Warren taught at Southwestern College, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State University, University of Minnesota, and Yale University after 1950.

Warren's fiction, usually historically based, considers the implications of man's initiation into awareness of the potential evil in himself and the world. It has much in common with the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

His pre-eminent work was All the King's Men (1946), ostensibly a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Louisiana demagogue Huey Long. Warren's central theme throughout the book was man's capacity for evil. This book garnered the first of his two Pulitzer Prize awards. World Enough and Time (1950), based on a famous 19th-century murder case, examines the conjunctions between idealism and evil, innocence and guilt. Wilderness (1961), a Civil War tale, describes a youth's acceptance of moral responsibility.

Although Warren's early poems were examples of the so-called New Critical school (as presented in his text book, Understanding Poetry, written with Cleanth Brooks in 1938), his later verse was more romantic and transcendental, reflecting the influence of American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. "The Ballad of Billie Potts" retells a folk legend involving the unwitting murder of a child by his parents. Brother to Dragons (1953), a book-length "tale in verse and voices, " tells of the wanton murder of an African American slave by Thomas Jefferson's two nephews in 1811. Jefferson represents the idealist enmeshed in evil and the institution of slavery. Warren himself appears as the seeker of some solution to universal moral complicity that slavery needed to survive. Promises: Poems 1954 to 1956 (1957) won for Warren his second Pulitzer Prize.

Warren's Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) argued that only by coming to terms with the common humanity of the African Americans could the South ever realize its ideals. The new poems in New and Selected Poems (1966) provide conclusive evidence that Warren's concerns changed considerably after his New Critical period. Homage to Emerson: On a Night Flight to New York entertains the possibility that Emerson's faith may still be relevant. Other works by Warren include the novels Night Rider (1939), Band of Angels (1955), The Cave (1959), and Flood (1964). He also published Selected Essays (1958) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965). Later works by Warren include such volumes of poetry as Selected Poems, 1923-1975 (1976), Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 (1980), Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), and New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985 (1985); works of fiction include MeetMe in the Green Glen (1971) and A Place to Come Home To (1977). His nonfiction pieces include Democracy and Poetry (1975), Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980), Portrait of a Father (1988), and New and Selected Essays (1989). Warren also wrote the play Ballad of a Sweet Dream of Peace: An Easter Charade (produced in 1981).

Warren died of cancer September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. During his long and respected career, he was the recipient of many awards, including his two Pulitzer Prizes; Caroline Sinkler Prize, Poetry Society of America (1936, 1937, and 1938); Shelley Memorial Prize for Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942); National Book Award for Promises: Poems 1954 to 1956 (1958); Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Yale University, 1967 for Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966 (1967); National Medal for Literature for Audubon: A Vision (1970); Copernicus Prize, American Academy of Poets (1976); Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1980; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for Being Here: Poetry, 1977-1980 (1980); named first Poet Laureate of the United States (1986); National Medal of Arts (1987); and numerous honorary degrees from such institutions as University of Louisville (1949), Swarthmore College (1958), Yale University (1959), Harvard University (1973), Johns Hopkins University (1977), Oxford University (1983), and Arizona State University.

Further Reading

An excellent critical study is Victor H. Strandberg, A Colder Fire: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren (1965). Other studies include Leonard Casper, Robert Penn Warren (1960); Charles H. Bohner, Robert Penn Warren (1965); and the section on Warren in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets, from the Puritans to the Present (1968). A useful critical anthology is John Lewis Longley, Jr., ed., Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays (1965); Connelly, Thomas L., et al., A Southern Renascence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren, Louisiana State University Press (1984); Koppelman, Robert S., Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality, University of Missouri Press (1995). □

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–89), born in Kentucky, by heritage had deep associations with the issues and traditions of the South, early indicated by his affiliation with the regionalist group that published The Fugitive while he was a student at Vanderbilt University (B.A., 1925). After receiving an M.A. at the University of California (1927) and further study at Yale and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Warren, while establishing himself as an author, began an academic career that included posts as a professor at Louisiana State University (1934–42), Minnesota (1942–50), and Yale (1950–73). The range and variety of his talents as well as a continuing concern with his regional background are evident in his early works: John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), a biographical study; Thirty‐Six Poems (1935); and Night Rider (1939), a novel treating moral issues relating to the fight between tobacco growers and manufacturers in Kentucky at the opening of the 20th century. At this time he was also a founder and editor of The Southern Review(1935–42).

His second novel was At Heaven's Gate (1943), depicting an unscrupulous financier who, though he controls his Southern state, loses his daughter, who commits suicide; followed by All the King's Men (1946, Pulitzer Prize), treating a corrupt Southern governor like Huey Long but having a moral significance extending far beyond its topical subject; World Enough and Time (1950), a version of the notorious Kentucky Tragedy; Band of Angels (1955), a lush, full‐bodied Civil War story about a Kentucky plantation owner's daughter sold into slavery whose fight becomes an inquiry into the nature of freedom and the quest for individual identity; The Cave (1959), a labyrinthine study of the way in which diverse people, affected by the plight of a young Tennessee hillbilly immured in a cave, reveal in thought and action their basic natures; Wilderness (1961), the portrait of a Bavarian Jew who comes to the U.S. to fight for freedom with the Union army; Flood (1964), presenting people in a small western Tennessee town that is to be obliterated by the building of a dam and who are thereby forced to face their essential natures; Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), about the tragic romance of a young Italian‐American and a middle‐aged farm wife of western Tennessee; and A Place To Come To (1977), the reminiscences of a 60‐year‐old classics scholar from his youth in Alabama. The Circus in the Attic (1947) collects stories.

Warren's poetry, first marked by metaphysical influences but later simpler, more regional, and more narrative in character, is published in Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942); Selected Poems, 1923–1943 (1944); Brother to Dragons (1953, revised 1979), a “tale in verse and voices” of the lurid early‐19th‐century Kentucky frontier murder of a black by nephews of Jefferson, and also an inquiry into the nature of evil and the quest of the individual for order; Promises (1957, Pulitzer Prize); You, Emperors, and Others (1960); Incarnations (1968); Audubon: A Vision (1969); Or Else‐Poem (1975); Now and Then (1978); Being Here (1980); Rumor Verified (1981); and Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé (1983). His New and Selected Poems since 1923 was published in 1985. Two brief nonfictional works are Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) and The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), on the ways the war shaped American society and sensibilities. Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) treats problems of integration, in large part through interviews with black leaders. A volume of New and Selected Essays (1989) gathers 13 literary studies dating back to the 1940s.

Warren's literary essays associate him with the New Criticism, as do several works, written with Cleanth Brooks, that served as influential college texts, including Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943). His other critical writings include Homage to Theodore Dreiser (1971), John Greenleaf Whittier (1971), and Democracy and Poetry (1975). He was the nation's first Poet Laureate (1986–87). He was married to Eleanor Clark.

Robert Penn Warren 1905–89, American novelist, poet, and critic, b. Guthrie, Ky., grad. Vanderbilt Univ. 1925; M.A., Univ. of California 1927; B.Litt., Oxford 1930. At Vanderbilt he became associated with John Crowe Ransom and the group of Southern agrarian poets who made the Fugitive (1922–25) an important literary magazine. He was managing editor with Cleanth Brooks of the Southern Review. Warren first gained recognition as a poet. His early verse was much influenced by the metaphysical poets , but his later poetry is simpler and more regional. Among his volumes of poetry are Thirty-six Poems (1935); Brother to Dragons (1953; Pulitzer), a long, dramatic poem; Promises (1957; Pulitzer), Selected Poems: New and Old (1966), Incarnations (1968), Audubon: A Vision (1969), Or Else (1974), and New and Selected Poems 1923–1985 (1985). Warren's most famous novel is All the King's Men (1946; Pulitzer), which concerns the rise to power of a political demagogue resembling Huey Long . Among his other novels are World Enough and Time (1950), The Cave (1959), Wilderness (1961), Flood (1964), Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), and A Place to Come To (1977). His other works include a collection of short stories, The Circus in the Attic (1948), and Selected Essays (1958). In 1986 he became the first poet laureate of the United States.

Bibliography: See biography by J. Blotner (1997); correspondence with C. Brooks (1998), ed. by J. A. Grimshaw, Jr.; studies by C. Bohner (1964, rev. ed. 1981), J. Justus (1981), and K. Snipes (1984).

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–89), American poet, novelist, and critic. His novels include All the King's Men (1946), a study of a power-crazed, corrupt Southern politician, Willie Stark; Band of Angels (1955); The Cave (1959); and Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971). His volumes of poetry include Selected Poems 1923–43 (1944), Promises (1957), Now and Then: Poems 1976–1978 (1978), and Portrait of a Father (1988). His critical works are associated with the New Criticism, and include two anthologies-with-commentaries, compiled in collaboration with Cleanth Brooks, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943).

Warren, Robert Penn (1905–89) US poet, novelist, and critic. In his fiction, which includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men (1946), Warren concentrated on Southern themes and characters. He received the Pulitzer Prize twice more, for the poetry collections Promises (1957), and Now and Then (1978). He became the first American poet laureate in 1986.