Robert Penn Warren: A Life Full Of Stories

“Regarded as one of the best poets of his generation” Robert Penn Warren has changed the way we look at poetry today (poets.org).  Warren wrote mainly wrote about the hard times and obstacles in life, sometimes a glimpse of hope shining through, sometimes just leading into a deep black hole.  A lot of his poems relate to the time period he was raised in and the civil war.  Being one of the first southern writers to express his opinions on the way of northerner’s lifestyles.  The first important book he published, All The King’s Men, was a novel about the Louisiana politic the “Kingfish,” followed by Promises: Poems, and Now and Then: Poems (1978). 

Warren was born on a tobacco farm in Guthrie, Kentucky in 1905.  He spent all of his childhood there listening to his grandfather’s tales of the civil war. His prosperous southern upbringing later influenced the depth and views of his writings.  When he was fifteen a misaimed rock, thrown by his younger brother, hit him in the eye, causing him to lose site.  Warren did not want to get his brother in trouble so he didn’t tell anyone about this incident until it was too late to for the eye to be cured.  Warren lost all site in that eye.  Being maimed in a certain way therefore made Warren decide not to go into a Naval career as he planned, but decided instead to go to Vanderbilt University for engineering.  Little did he know he had other plans.  When he got to Vanderbilt he was asked to join The Fugitives, a group of writers who were all of southern background and opposed the northern changes, therefore writing about it in the presses.  His college roommate, Allen Tate who also was an aspiring writer, inspired him, under the direction or John Crowe Ransom, to write.  Warren found this as a good way to express his feelings about being maimed and feeling different from others, his southern lifestyle, the lives of politics, and the tales he had heard of the Civil War. 

Named “the first Poet Laureate of the United States (Gale-Net.com)”, Robert Penn Warren shows his true southern colors through his writing. After his third novel, All The King’s Men, a novel thinly disguising it’s modeling after the Louisiana politician the “Kingfish”, was published in 1946, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.  In 1957 he published a collection of poems called Promises: Poems which  won the Sidney Hillman Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.  Warren won his third Pulitzer Prize for his work in Now and Then: Poems (1978), during the time he was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets (1972-1988).  Robert Penn Warren died from cancer on September 15, 1989.

---Camryn Ripley

Writings By Robert Penn Warren:

·         John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (nonfiction) 1929

• Thirty-Six Poems (poetry) 1935
• Night Rider (novel) 1939
• Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (poetry) 1942
• At Heaven's Gate (novel) 1943
• Selected Poems: 1923-1943 (poetry) 1944
• All the King's Men (novel) 1946
• World Enough and Time (novel) 1950
• Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (poetry) 1953
• Band of Angels (novel) 1955
• Promises: Poems, 1957 (poetry) 1957
• You, Emperors and Others: Poems, 1957-1960 (poetry) 1960
• The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (nonfiction) 1961
• Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966 (poetry) 1966
• Incarnations: Poems, 19661968 (poetry) 1968
• Audubon: A Vision (poetry) 1969
• Or Else: Poems, 19681974 (poetry) 1974
• Democracy and Poetry (nonfiction) 1975
• Selected Poems, 19231975 (poetry) 1976
• A Place to Come To (novel) 1977
• Now and Then: Poems, 19761978 (poetry) 1978
• Being Here; Poetry, 1977-1980 (poetry) 1980
• Rumor Verified: Poems, 1979-1980 (poetry) 1981

Taken from Gale-Net Online Library Criticism