Robert Warren Biography and List of Works

American novelist, poet, critic, teacher, who became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986. Warren's best-known novel is ALL THE KING'S MEN (1946), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. His poetic style was, at the beginning, tightly controlled in form, unlike his later poems, which are often written in free verse. Warren was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry twice, in 1957 for PROMISES, and 1979 for NOW AND THEN.

"We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for eternity."
(from 'Bearded Oaks')

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. His mother was a schoolteacher and father a banker, a poetry-loving but aloof figure, whose character later appears in several of Warren's poems. The motif of the failed father and the ruthless son also appears in Warren's stories. During his boyhood and adolescence, Warren generally spent summers on the farm of his grandfather. His childhood house was full of books and in an article (The New York Times, May 12, 1985) Warren recalls that on one occasion he found his father's name and picture in an old book entitled Poets of America. "I showed him the book. He took it - what must have been an old vanity publication of some kind -and turned away. I never saw it again. But years later the episode became haunting for me, even in poems, including one long poem about the man, then long dead. By then I had found his old Greek lexicon and his grammar, dating back to his youth when he, having his first job, had hired a professor at the university in Clarksville, Tenn., to tutor him. That, too, got into poetry."

At the age of 17 Warren lost his chance of a naval career at Annapolis, when his younger brother threw a piece of coal over a hedge hitting Warren in the left eye, which he lost to surgery. At college Warren attempted suicide after he had fallen so far behind in his studies. In 1921 he entered Vanderbilt University to study electrical engineering. There he joined the literary group Fugitives (later the Agrarians), named after the poetry magazine they published in the mid-1920s. Among its members were John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate. In 1930 Warren contributed to their manifesto I'LL TAKE MY STAND, a plea for the agrarian way of life in the South. In it Warren attacks the northern industrialisation of America - he saw that black workers from the land were exploited in factories. His first book, JOHN BROWN, about the abolitionist's life and politics, appeared when Warren was 24.

Following graduation in 1925, Warren pursued studies at Berkeley, Yale, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he earned his B.Litt in 1930. During this period he met such writers as Hart Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Katherine Anne Porter was his fellow protester during the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial. As a professor of literature, Warren edited the literary quarterly The Southern Review, which he had founded with Cleanth Brook and Charles W. Pipkin. It published stories and poems by Eudora Welty, Mary McCarthy, Ford Madox Ford and W.H. Auden, among others.

From 1930 Warren held a succession of academic positions, and worked as a teacher at Yale, Vanderbilt University, Southwestern College, Memphis, Louisiana State University. He was professor at the University of Minnesota (1942-1950) and Yale from 1950, and professor emeritus from 1973. Although in the last decades of his life Warren did not live in the South, its history and culture remained central in his works. WHO SPEAKS FOR THE NEGRO? (1965), is based on his interview about the civil rights movement. Other works of non-fictional prose include SEGREGATION: THE INNER CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH (1956) and REMEMBER THE ALAMO! (1958).

In 1939 Warren published his first novel, NIGHT RIDER, a story about the tobacco war (1905-1908) between the independent growers in Kentucky and the large tobacco companies. All the King's Men, based on the career on the Louisiana politician Huey P. Long, also portrays individuals whose moral stand influence the lives of many. The melodramatic tale about idealism corrupted by power gained fame as a play and film, and the book was translated into twenty languages. Broderick Crawford played Willis Stark in the 1949 film adaptation. Robert Rossen received an Oscar for his direction and screenplay. PROMISES (1957) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1958. Among his other works are AT HEAVEN'S GATE (1943), a novel of violence in the South, WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME (1950), a historical novel about a murder trial in Kentucky in the 1820s, FLOOD: A ROMANCE OF OUR TIMES (1964), the story of a Tennessee Valley Authority dam project, and A PLACE TO COME TO (1977), a plunge into erotic themes.

Warren regarded himself as a poet first and a novelist and critic second. He wrote literary criticism including pieces on such authors as Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Coleridge and Melville. Warren's first book of verse, THIRTY-SIX POEMS, appeared in 1935, and shows the influence of Ransom, Thomas Hardy, and the 17th-century metaphysical poets whom he specialized in teaching. His early career as a poet attracted little public attention, and for many years his fame as a writer rested chiefly upon his philosophical novels.

"In separateness only does love learn definition,
Through Bharma smiles beneath the dappled shade,
Through tears, that night, wet the pillow where the boy's head was laid
Dreamless of splendid antipodal agitation..."
(from 'Revelation')

Warren's experimental tendencies, partly inspired by T.S. Eliot's works, marks his collection ELEVEN POEMS ON THE SAME THEME (1942), and culminates in one of his very finest poems, 'The Ballad of Billie Potts,' in SELECTED POEMS, 1923-1943 (1944). The volumes of poetry after BROTHER TO DRAGONS (1953), which centres on a killing of a slave committed by Thomas Jefferson's nephew, feature a number of forms and styles, and range through various subject matter. TO A LITTLE GIRL, ONE YEAR OLD, IN A RUINED FORTRESS (1956), which appeared after his divorce and the start of his new marriage, was inspired by Mediterranean scenes, and began a new period in Warrens career. Warren has called it "dramatic"; there is sense of action, having happened, or being about to happen, and new expectation, significances about to be revealed. RUMOR VERIFIED (1981) received mixed critical attention and was condemned by Donald Hall for abstraction, melodrama, and carelessness. "In one short poem we have love, heart, pastness, hope, despair, doom, future, history, ignorance and experience. The capitalized abstraction Time turns up 14 times, along with Reality, Hope, Eternity, History, Space and Truth. Cliche and abstraction compete with banality: 'Have you ever seen your own child, that first morning, wait/ For the school bus?'" (The New York Times, November 8, 1981)

As one of the leading representatives of the New Criticism, he collaborated with Cleanth Brooks to write UNDERSTANDING POETRY (1938) and UNDERSTANDING FICTION (1943) - these works helped revolutionize the teaching of literature by bringing New Criticism into general practice in America's college classrooms. This approach emphasizes the detailed textual analysis of poetry instead of examining the mind and personality of the poet.

Warren's marriage to Emma Brescia (1930), whose neurasthenic personality forced her to spend most of her time bedridden, ended in divorce in 1950. In 1952 he married the novelist Eleanor Clark; they had a son and a daughter. From the 1950s Warren lived in Connecticut and in rural Vermont, a recurring site for his poetry. Warren suffered from cancer in his last years. He died of cancer on September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. Warren received many honours, including National Medal for Literature in 1970, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and the Prize Fellowship of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1981. He was made Poet Laureate in 1986 and held the post for two years.

For further reading: The Fugitives: A Critical Account by J.A. Bradbury (1958); Warren: The Dark and Bloody Ground by L. Caspar (1960); Robert Penn Warren by C.H. Bohner (1964); Robert Penn Warren by P. West (1964); Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by J.L. Longley (1965): Colder Fire: The Poetry of Warren by V.A. Strandberg (1965); The Novels of Warren by B. Guttenberg (1975); The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren by V. Strandberg (1977); In the Heart's Last Kingdom by C. Bedient (1984); The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren by William Bedford Clark (1991); Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction by J.R. Millichap (1992); Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality by R.S. Koppelman (1995); Robert Penn Warren by Joseph Blotner (1997); Robert Penn Warren: A Biography by J.L. Blotner (1997)

JOHN BROWN: THE MAKING OF MARTYR, (1929)