Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Background
Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, which is very near the Tennessee-Kentucky border, to Robert Warren and Anna Penn. Warren's mother's family had roots in Virginia, having given their name to the community of Penn's Store in Patrick County, Virginia, and was a descendant of Revolutionary War soldier Colonel Abram Penn.
Education
Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee
Career
Besides his teaching career, Warren became associated with the group of poets there known as the Fugitives, and somewhat later, during the early 1930s, Warren and some of the same writers formed a group known as the Southern Agrarians. He contributed "The Briar Patch" to the Agrarian manifesto "I'll Take My Stand" along with 11 other Southern writers and poets (including fellow Vanderbilt poet/critics John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson). In "The Briar Patch" the young Warren defends racial segregation, in line with the traditionalist conservative political leanings of the Agrarian group, although Davidson deemed Warren's stances in the essay so progressive that he argued for excluding it from the collection. However, Warren recanted these views in an article on the Civil Rights Movement, "Divided South Searches Its Soul", which appeared in the July 9, 1956 issue of Life magazine. A month later, Warren published an expanded version of the article as a small book titled Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. He subsequently adopted a high profile as a supporter of racial integration. In 1965, he published "Who Speaks for the Negro?", a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, thus further distinguishing his political leanings from the more conservative philosophies associated with fellow Agrarians such as Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and particularly Davidson. Warren's interviews with civil rights leaders are at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky.
John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929) Thirty-six Poems (1936) An Approach to Literature (1938), with Cleanth Brooks and John Thibaut Purser Understanding Poetry (1939), with Cleanth Brooks Night Rider (1939). Novel Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942) At Heaven's Gate (1943). Novel Understanding Fiction (1943), with Cleanth Brooks Selected Poems, 1923 – 1943 (1944) All the King's Men (1946). Novel Blackberry Winter: A Story Illustrated by Wightman Williams (1946) The Circus in the Attic, and Other Stories (1947) Fundamentals of Good Writing: A Handbook of Modern Rhetoric (1950), with Cleanth Brooks World Enough and Time (1950). Novel Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (1953) Band of Angels (1955). Novel Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) Promises: Poems: 1954 – 1956 (1957) Selected Essays (1958) The Cave (1959). Novel Remember the Alamo! (1958). For children The Gods of Mount Olympus (1959). For children How Texas Won Her Freedom (1959). For children All the King's Men: A Play (1960) You, Emperors, and Others: Poems 1957 – 1960 (1960) The Legacy of the Civil War (1961) Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961). Novel Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964). Novel Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) Selected Poems: New and Old 1923 – 1966 (1966) Incarnations: Poems 1966 – 1968 (1968) Audubon: A Vision (1969). Book-length poem Homage to Theodor Dreiser (1971) John Greenleaf Whittier's Poetry: An Appraisal and a Selection (1971) Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971). Novel American Literature: The Makers and the Making (1974), with Cleanth Brooks and R.W.B. Lewis Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968 – 1974 (1974) Democracy and Poetry (1975) Selected Poems: 1923 – 1976 (1977) A Place to Come to (1977). Novel Now and Then: Poems 1976 – 1978 (1978) Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Vorces - A New Version (1979) Being Here: Poetry 1977 – 1980 (1980) Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980) Rumor Verified: Poems 1979 – 1980 (1981) Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983). Book-length poem New and Selected Poems: 1923 – 1985 (1985) Portrait of a Father (1988) New and Selected Essays (1989) The Collected Poems (1998), edited by John Burt All the King's Men: Three Stage Versions (2000), edited by James A. Grimshaw, Jr. and James A. Perkins All the King's Men: Restored Edition (2002), edited by Noel Polk The Poets Laureate Anthology (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010)
Although Warren was not a Christian—he called himself a “non-believer” and a “yearner” —he had a religious temperament and utilized Christian concepts in his imaginative literature. His South is not Christ-centered, but it is haunted by a memory of the moral and spiritual teachings of the Christian faith. This is especially evident in the role sin (Original Sin and actual sin) plays in his work. He based many of his dramas on the bedrock of Original Sin, and images and symbols of Original Sin and characters haunted by sin abound in his poetry and fiction.
Politics
His political views are clearly seen in his works.“Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.”
Robert Penn Warren often wrote explicitly about politics. If one were to label him, he could accurately be called a pragmatic democratic pluralist. In his lecture "Democrasy and Poetry" he describes what he is "old fashioned enough to take to be thebasis of liberty: a variety of character and the chance for human nature to expand in different and even contradictory directions", yet at the same time " a community of individual selves bound together by common feelings, ideals, and conceptions of responsibility".
Views
Robert Penn Warren's belief in a fallen, imperfect humanity.
Quotations:
"A man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them."
"A young man’s ambition — to get along in the world and make a place for himself — half your life goes that way, till you’re 45 or 50. Then, if you’re lucky, you make terms with life, you get released."
"If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting."
Membership
Board directors Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast, 1975-1979, 1984-1990. Fellow Royal Historical Society, Royal Society Literature, Royal Irish Academy.
Academy Arts and Letters
Connections
His first marriage was to Emma Brescia Warren. His second marriage was in 1952 to Eleanor Clark, with whom he had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (born 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (born 1955). During his tenure at Louisiana State University he resided at Twin Oaks (Otherwise known as the Robert Penn Warren House) in Prairieville, Louisiana. He lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Stratton, Vermont where he died of complications from bone cancer. He is buried at Stratton, Vermont, and, at his request, a memorial marker is situated in the Warren family gravesite in Guthrie, Kentucky.