Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989). Biography and Creativity

Best known for his exploration of moral dilemmas and a changing South, the poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, educator, literary critic, and editor Robert Penn Warren was a towering figure in 20th-century American letters, a writer and thinker whose poetry, novels, and critical writings continue to influence the way Americans approach literary studies. As James A. Grimshaw, Jr., noted, Warren “earned every major literary award that this country bestows on its authors, published in every major literary genre, and in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Cleanth Brooks, helped changed the way literature was taught in this country before mid-century” (Understanding Robert Penn Warren 1).

Warren collaborated with Cleanth Brooks on the seminal Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, two volumes that inspired the literary world to reimagine how and why books are read, interpreted, and taught. He authored two Pulitzer Prize-winning collections of poetry and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King’s Men (published in 1946; prize awarded in 1947), a political tale inspired by the career of the Louisiana governor and senator Huey P. Long. This work and its film adaptation gave Warren fame. He changed the way we view literary texts, authored landmark novels, and channeled his passion into 15 volumes of poetry, the most significant of which was written and recognized in his late life, securing his place in the American literary canon.

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905, just 40 years after the Civil War ended, into a middle-class family and a segregated southern society. The first child of Anna Ruth Penn, a schoolteacher, and Robert Franklin Warren, a businessman, Robert Penn Warren grew up on a Kentucky tobacco farm, hearing Civil War tales from his grandfathers, who had fought for the Confederacy. Warren was a precocious child who loved literature and southern history, which he commanded at an early age. As a teenager he had several selections appear in the Purple and the Gold, a monthly collection published at his high school in Clarkesville, Tennessee (1921).

The same year, while reclining in his family’s backyard, he was accidentally struck by a chunk of coal his brother tossed and was blinded in his left eye. This incident ended Warren’s dreams of entering the U.S. Naval Academy. Instead, he entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a 16-year-old; there he had the good fortune of taking a freshman English class with John Crowe Ransom, a well-known literary critic who inspired Warren to become a man of letters.

Ransom invited Warren to take advanced literature classes and asked him to join a group of Vanderbilt teachers and students and local businessmen who had been meeting informally since around 1915 to discuss trends in American life and literature. They called themselves the “Fugitives,” among whose illustrious members were Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, Warren’s Vanderbilt roommate. By 1922, the year Warren joined the group, their discussions focused primarily on poetry and the purpose and use of literature. They also had founded a literary journal, the Fugitive, which featured criticism and poetry heavily influenced by classical verse and metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The Fugitive published 23 of Warren’s poems in the three and one-half years the journal appeared.

After graduating summa cum laude from Vanderbilt in summer 1925, Warren studied at the University of California, Berkeley (M.A. in English, 1927), where he met his future wife, Emma “Cinina” Brescia, then entered the Yale doctoral program before attending the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During this time he published poems in a number of prestigious publications such as Poetry, New Republic, and Saturday Review of Literature and completed a biography, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929).

The biography focuses on a man much like Warren’s later characters and contains themes that can be found in his later writing: Both All the King’s Men (1947) and Brother to Dragons (1953) feature characters who, as did Brown, follow personal ideals to murderous extremes. During this period Warren also produced his first extended piece of prose fiction, a novelette entitled Prime Leaf that would remain unpublished until it appeared in American Caravan IVin 1931. At Ransom’s request Warren also contributed an essay, “The Briar Patch,” to the anthology I’ll Take My Stand (1930), in which he rejected northern industrialism in favor of Old South agrarian values and a “separate but equal” southern society, one in which racial segregation continued.

The essays in I’ll Take My Stand argued for a farm-based southern society, the sort of society that in Warren’s day was becoming a thing of the past. “The Briar Patch” addressed the role of African Americans in the agriculture-based economy. Importantly, he did not support “separate but equal” policies later in life and recanted the position he took in this early essay.

Also in 1930, Warren began his teaching career at Southwestern Presbyterian College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, where he taught for one year before transferring to Vanderbilt (1931), where he served as an assistant professor for three years. In 1934 Warren accepted an assistant professorship at the Louisiana State University (LSU), where his good friend Cleanth Brooks taught and with whom he helped found the Southern Review. The two coauthored An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Modern Rhetoric (1949), all of which played a major role in the institutionalization of the New Criticism, an approach to interpreting literature that sees literary works as artifacts whose structure and substance should be analyzed without respect to social, biographical, and political details.

This approach revolutionized the way literature was taught, emphasizing the form of literary works and close reading of texts. Even though current university scholars tend to scoff at the New Critical method, opting to view literature from the perspective of race, class, and gender issues, Warren’s methodology became the norm for generations of scholars and is still often the first approach taught children from grade school through high school and demanded on standardized college-placement tests. While at LSU, Warren also published the collection Thirty-six Poems (1936), containing such significant early works as “The Return: An Elegy,” “To a Face in the Crowd,” and the cycle “Kentucky Mountain Farm.”

Rekindling what would be a lifelong interest in historical fiction and what he perceived to be the corrupt, fallen nature of our lives, Warren published his first novel, Night Rider (1939), a story set during the tobacco wars in western Kentucky at the beginning of the 20th century. Eleven Poems on the Same Theme appeared in April of that year; the collection included one of Warren’s most often anthologized poems, the Andrew Marvell-influenced “Bearded Oaks,” as well as “Original Sin: A Short Story,” a key work in understanding Warren’s view of humanity and our need for redemption. In the poem Warren describes original sin as a nightmare, one that accompanies us in our sleeping and waking hours.

For Warren, original sin is not a terminal disease brought about by a lone, distant biblical ancestor (progenitor) but rather an internal reality: a weakness or sickness threatening to overcome us at any moment. This ominous, archetypal presence lurks in the shadows, residing in our subconscious and infecting our day-to-day lives. It is a primal force that must be dealt with, one that can only be combated by the often pained-filled journey within: the journey to understand the self. Original sin appears as a tragic flaw, woven into our lives. For Warren, we are single threads in a complex web; everything we do and touch ripples through the universe, affecting all of creation. This “web of being” is the central metaphor in his best-known text, the novel All the King’s Men (1946), a reworking of Proud Flesh, a play Warren had published seven years prior (1939).

The year 1946 also marked the publication of “Blackberry Winter,” the often-anthologized work considered by many to be one of the finest short stories in American literature. The story describes a boy’s coming of age and his encounter with, as in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, a shadowy figure who acquaints him with evil for the first time. “Blackberry Winter,” a classic initiation story like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” chronicles the movement from innocence to experience and focuses on the same themes and worldview that pervade “Original Sin” and All the King’s Men. Thus, “Original Sin,” All the King’s Men, and “Blackberry Winter” provide an excellent introduction to Warren’s oeuvre, demonstrating his command of divergent literary forms and the thematic continuity for which he is known.

After occupying a brief post at the University of Minnesota and publishing another ambitious historical novel, World Enough and Time (1950), based on the 1825 murder of Colonel Solomon Sharp by Jereboam O. Beauchamp in Frankfort, Kentucky, Warren accepted a professorship at Yale, which he held until 1955. Warren and Cinina divorced on June 28, 1951. Warren remarried in 1952, this time to the writer Eleanor Crook, with whom he had a daughter, Rosanna Phelps Warren, in July 1953. In August 1953 Warren published the book-length verse drama Brother to Dragons, a work that chronicles a Kentucky slave owner’s brutal murder of his slave for a trivial offense. The work also marks a major turning point from Warren’s early concern for poetic form, as prescribed by Ransom, toward Warren’s later poetry, which uses a freer approach to both rhyme and meter.

Warren continued to be prolific in the 1950s, publishing the novel Band of Angels (1955), the nonfiction work Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), and Promises: Poems, 1954—1956 (1957), for which Warren received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (1958). In 1965 Warren published a collection of interviews with African Americans entitled Who Speaks for the Negro, a collection that reflects a significant change in his views on race. In 1969 Warren published perhaps his most celebrated poem, Audubon: A Vision, in a single volume. Based on the five-volume Ornithological Biography of the painter and ornithologist John James Audubon, Audubon incorporates many of Warren’s favorite themes into a singularly powerful poetic vision.

In September 1978 a new collection of poetry, Now and Then: Poems 1976-1979, appeared, for which Warren received his third Pulitzer Prize, his second for poetry. This trend of late-blooming creativity continued in Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980 (1980), Rumor Verified: Poems 1979-1980 (1981), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983). Even the 1985 edition of his New and Selected Poems: 19231985 contained a section of new poems entitled Altitudes and Extensions: 1980-1984, which features two of Warren’s best poems, “Mortal Limit,” a brief but powerful meditation on mortality and perception using Warren’s familiar hawk imagery, and “After the Dinner Party,” a portrait of two lovers seeking solace in each other. In February 1986 the Library of Congress appointed Warren the first official poet laureate of the United States. A volume of New and Selected Essays appeared in March 1989. Warren’s death of cancer on September 15, 1989, in West Wardsboro, Vermont, occurred less than a month after the birth of his grandson, Noah Penn Warren.

According to James Grimshaw, “In his sixty- eight years of productivity, Warren wrote ten novels, sixteen short stories, seventeen volumes of poetry, seven plays and television dramas, five textbooks, eight books of nonfiction, two children’s books, and more than one hundred essays”—an extraordinarily prolific oeuvre that earned him “every major literary award that this country bestows upon its authors” (Understanding Robert Penn Warren 1). The prominent literary critic Harold Bloom argues that Warren is one of the “modern American poets who will be permanent in our literature,” and All the King’s Men remains one of the most highly regarded American novels of the 20th century (“Introduction” Collected Poems xxv-xxvi).

As the works of this preeminent man of American letters continue to be read and his critical ideas continue to be debated, Warren’s singular literary voice refuses to be silenced. It rings out loud and clear for those who live what Socrates called the “examined life,” those seeking to understand the world, come to terms with the past, make sense of the present, and peer into their selves.