Robert Penn Warren Summary

Biography EssayRobert Penn Warren's reputation as one of the most versatile and talented of America's men of letters has grown steadily since the publication of his first work in 1929. Although he ach... Read more

Warren has spent his entire professional career associated with institutions of higher education. After graduation from Oxford, he joined the faculty, as an assistant professor, at Southwestern Colleg... Read more

The importance of Robert Penn Warren has made itself felt in almost equal measure in American literary criticism, poetry, and fiction. Expounding a home-grown New Criticism, Warren and Cleanth Brook... Read more

In the following essay, Watkins evaluates Warren's vacillation between skepticism and a religious view of mortality in his last two collections of poetry, Rumor Verified and New and Selected Po... Read more

In the following essay, Forgotson evaluates Warren's poetic technique, concentrating on the poet's use of symbolism and compression in an extended explication of “Eidolon,”... Read more

In the following excerpted review, Matthiessen observes the influence of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell evident in Warren's Selected Poems: 1923-1943, the dense suggestive... Read more

In the following review of Brother to Dragons, Lowell confers stylistically qualified praise on Warren's “brutal, perverse melodrama” in blank verse. In spite of its Plutarchan de... Read more

In the following review, Flint favorably assesses Warren's narrative poem Brother to Dragons. To a bluff in Livingston County in western Kentucky overlooking the Ohio river Dr. Charles Lewis, a... Read more

In the following review, originally published in 1958, Wright calls Warren “unpredictable” as a poet and focuses on “distortions of language” in his collection Promises: Po... Read more

In the following review, Spears notes the heightened personal reference of Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966 and explores the themes, imagery, and language of Incarnations. When Robert Penn Warren began w... Read more

In the following review of Selected Poems: 1923-1975, McClatchy surveys Warren's poetic career and lauds his poetry of the 1970s. Robert Penn Warren last made selection of his poetry just over ... Read more

In the following review of Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980, Lieberman analyzes Warren's poem “Globe of Gneiss,” commenting on its experimental prosody and thematic grandeur. At seven... Read more

In the following essay, Bohner summarizes thematic and stylistic developments in Warren's poetry of 1923 to 1944. In the spring of 1943 Robert Penn Warren published in the Kenyon Review an essa... Read more

In the following essay, Strandberg studies the relationship between Warren's early poetic themes—“the fall from innocence, the search for the lost self, and the redeeming pantheis... Read more

In the following essay, Watkins summarizes Warren's poetry on American subjects and emphasizes Warren's depiction of the human capacity for evil in Brother to Dragons. In a period of abo... Read more

In the following essay, Bedient speaks of Warren's transition to poetic greatness with the publication of Audubon: A Vision. Nothing in Robert Penn Warren's long career as a man of lette... Read more

In the following review, Bloom surveys Warren's life and literary career, concentrating on later developments in his poetry as reflected in New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. 1. Robert Penn War... Read more

In the following review of Warren's New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985, Smith focuses on the new poems in this collection, collectively called “Altitudes and Extensions,” which he ... Read more

In the following essay, Strandberg traces enduring themes and images from Warren's poetic career illustrated in the “Altitudes and Extensions” pieces of his New and Selected Poems... Read more

Critical Essay by Dennis M. Dooley Through the three [long, personal digressions in Brother to Dragons], Warren gives us the spiritual history of RPW, a spiritual history which parallels in many respe... Read more

Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient With [Selected Poems 1923–1975] and his … novel A Place to Come to Robert Penn Warren continues to run both poetry and fiction toward the ring of Truth (... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Law Warren associated the acceptance of scientific determinism as a philosophy with the rise of totalitarianism—partly, one supposes, because that philosophy appears t... Read more

Critical Essay by Victor H. Strandberg A fundamental coherence unifies Warren's whole body of poetry, as though it constituted a single poem drawn out in a fugal pattern…. Ultimately, in... Read more

Critical Essay by Mark Royden Winchell In The American Adam R.W.B. Lewis reminds us that during the nineteenth century many serious writers pictured America as a new Garden of Eden and saw the America... Read more

Critical Essay by Dave Smith Warren has spoken often of Randall Jarrell's admonition that the true poet stays out in the rain and waits to be struck by the lightning. In poems that range from e... Read more

Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then … is about the possibility of joy…. Warren shows … romantic credulity,… and he writes in a genuine... Read more

Critical Essay by Harold Bloom Warren's Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices was published in 1953. A quarter century later, he gives us a new version that is, as he says, "a n... Read more

Critical Essay by Radcliffe Squires Over the years Warren has, I believe, tended to refine a particularly "classical" vision. That is to say, he has eschewed most hasty views of contempo... Read more

Critical Essay by Calvin Bedient At its most self-indulgent Robert Penn Warren's sensibility may be mournfully flowery, rhetorically compassionate, windily speculative; but it's a big hu... Read more