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
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 Gut...
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
Until recent years, the popularity of Robert Penn Warren's fiction, crowned by the ascendancy of All the King's Men (1946) to the status of a classic, has somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. ...
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
[This entry was updated by Victor Strandberg (Duke University) from his update in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, of the entries by him in DLB 48: American Poets, 1880...
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 excerpt, Brooks praises Warren's skilled manipulation of irony, contrast, and theme in his poetry.
In Robert Penn Warren's sequence of poems, “Kentucky Mountain F...
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 review of Selected Poems: 1923-1943, originally published in 1944, Ransom briefly appraises the poem “Aubade for Hope” and stresses Warren's theme of Original Sin...
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 Selected Poems: 1923-1943, Fitts comments on Marvellian traces in Warren's poetry, and on the near grotesque, tragicomic quality of “The Ballad of Billie Potts...
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 excerpted review, Deutsch admires Brother to Dragons “as a whole and in its parts.”
The kernel of Robert Penn Warren's “tale in verse and voices,” a...
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 excerpted review, Dickey highlights the intensity of Warren's poetry—despite its occasional unevenness—and its themes of self-definition, self-discovery, and self...
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 excerpted review, Martz acknowledges Warren's “subtle and firm command of his own idiom,” while surveying the poetic works of Incarnations: Poems 1966-1968.
It ha...
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, Yenser considers the enigmatic language, gritty tone, and thematic sweep of Warren's collection Or Else.
Sometimes it is the way the tone changes and sometimes the way ...
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, Smith centers on the moral vision of Warren's Now and Then: Poems 1976-1978 and of his earlier poetic collections.
I
Robert Penn Warren is seventy-three. He has publish...
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 excerpted review, Pritchard describes the verses of Being Here as “poetry of emotions … high-pitched and poignant.”
In his introduction to the recent New Oxford B...
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, Spears remarks on Warren's poetry and critical accounts of Warren's work published in the early 1980s.
An American Hardy? Not exactly. Though we have not had such...
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, Justus details the searching and questioning quality of Warren's nostalgic poems in Being Here, Now and Then, and Rumor Verified.
Our customary expectation when we read ...
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 review, Balla suggests that Warren's collection Rumor Verified is unfocused and overly “genteel,” but describes the dramatic poem Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce as...
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 essay, Bloom probes Warren's place within, and development of, the American poetic tradition.
The beginning is like a god which as long as it dwells among men saves all things....
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 excerpted review, Stitt responds to Harold Bloom's assessment of Warren and his New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985. Stitt goes on to call Warren “the most important Ameri...
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 interview, conducted in 1977, Warren discusses his formative influences, his association with the Fugitive group, the means and development of his poetic composition, and the nature o...
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
In the following review of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, Zawacki briefly encapsulates Warren's poetic accomplishments and his literary status at the end of the twentieth century.
T...
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 Peter Stitt
On the basis of his recent work, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Warren is the best that we now have, the dean of living American poets, occu...
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 Helen Vendler
Robert Penn Warren's poems [in Selected Poems: 1923–1975] are perhaps … best described as those of a man of letters, novelist and critic as well as...
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 David Bromwich
Mr. Warren's poetry has made itself felt, for some five decades, as a moral presence and a moral pressure of an unusual kind, and he is read by people who are g...
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 Richard Jackson
Typically, the voice in Robert Penn Warren's Selected Poems, 1923–75 is situated in a moment, a boundary or threshold, where the meaning of time must be...
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 Denis Donoghue
Lionel Trilling once wrote of E. M. Forster that he refused to be great—by contrast, presumably, with D. H. Lawrence, who insisted upon greatness. I am saying t...
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 Helen Vendler
[John James] Audubon's art is muscular and avid: his birds and his rats alike inhabit a world of beak and claw and fang, of ripped-open bellies and planted talon...
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 Rachel Hadas
[In Now and Then] time is of the essence. One might think of these poems as a series of commentaries on two ideas that run through the book so steadily that they come to...
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 Joseph Parisi
As the title [to Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then] indicates, his priority in this … volume of verse lies with the present. The poems in the first and sh...
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 Irvin Ehrenpreis
In 1953 Robert Penn Warren published Brother to Dragons, a narrative poem based on the crimes [of Lilburne Lewis, Thomas Jefferson's nephew]. He organized it ...
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
Critical Essay by James Dickey
The source of Warren's stunning power is angst, a kind of radiant metaphysical terror, projected outward into the natural world, particularly into its waiting was...
Read more
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
