Warren, Robert Penn. (1905 - 1989).
L i f e
- spent his boyhood in the South, on his grandfather’s tobacco farm, and with his memories of the Civil War (fought for the Confederate cause) > a sense of history of the American South
- met John Crowe Ransom: got involved him the Fugitives-Agrarians – co-authored I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) and Understanding Poetry (1938)
- met Cleanth Brooks and Charles W. Pipkin: co-founded The Southern Review (1935 – 42) = the most influential literary quarterly publishing interpretative essays by the ‘New Critics’ (John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Burke, & others), and the best fiction by the emerging Southern Writers (Eudora Welty)
W o r k
- frequently uses violent subjects with a historical and psychological resonance
P o e t r y :
- often expresses his love twd the physical world, and his passion toward the knowledge of truth
(a) early poetry: < influenced by J. C. Ransom’s formal control, and his elegant, well-mannered rationality
(b) mature poetry: loosens up his poetic line to move with new vigour, raw energy, and rhythm
Promises (1957)
Audubon: A Vision (1969):
- a book-length poem
- presents his own version of the historical figure and creates an heroic selfhood at the centre of poetry
- John James Audubon (1785 - 1851), an ornithologist and painter, artist and scientist, solitary searcher and classifier consumed by his task: encounters violence, and narrowly escapes being robbed and murdered => must reconcile in himself the need for both passion and reverence toward existence
Now and Then: Poems 1976 - 1978 (1978):
- the symbol of his central concern = the struggle of memory to overcome the passage of time and make then into now
P r o s e :
John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1919):
- the danger of blind idealism
All the King’s Men (1946):
- originally conceived as a verse play x but: became a novel
- the rise and fall of a southern depression governor and demagogue: leads a regime both corrupt x progressive in its social policies
- won him the Pulitzer Prize
World Enough and Time (1950):
- a study of/a response to the history of the South
Basics
(Warren in 1968. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Robert Penn Warren. (1905 - 1989). American. -
Work
Poet. Novelist. Advocate of New Criticism. -
Genres
Modern poetry and fiction. Southern Renaissance.
Literature
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994.
McQuade, Donald, gen.ed. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper & Collins, 1996.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.
Quote
"My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical".
From All the King's Men (1946).