Robert Penn Warren Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Robert Penn Warren

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 Brooks, through their textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), changed the way poetry was taught in American universities. Warren's characteristic yoking of high and low diction in his early poems, of the tragic and the risible, the English metaphysical and the southern down-home, constituted a new and influential poetic voice; the sublimity of his later poetry, its direct appeal to the human heart, brought him fresh recognition. Perhaps no better novel of American politics has been written than All the King's Men (1946). Yet Warren wrote nine others between 1939 and 1977, none as openly political but all of them deeply rooted in the American experience. His importance as a novelist has perhaps not been fully recognized, having been overshadowed by both the enormous popular and critical success of his most well-known efforts and the more recent high regard his late poetry enjoyed.

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