For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: Biography, Autobiography, Legacy
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
—Robert Penn Warren
What is man but his passion?
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: Passion, Enthusiasm
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: History
I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism—that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: America
History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: History
If, in the middle of World War II, a general could be writing a poem, then maybe I was not so irrelevant after all. Maybe the general was doing more for victory by writing a poem than he would be by commanding an army. At least, he might be doing less harm. By applying the same logic to my own condition consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, I decided that I might be relevant in what I called a negative way. I have clung to this concept ever since negative relevance. In moments of vain-glory I even entertain the possibility that if my concept were more widely accepted, the world might be a better place to live in. There are a lot of people who would make better citizens if they were content to be just negatively relevant.
—Robert Penn Warren
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
Thomas Bailey Aldrich American Writer
Josiah Gilbert Holland American Editor, Novelist
Marge Piercy American Poet
Theodore Roethke American Poet
Robert Frost American Poet
Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
Bayard Taylor American Poet
W. H. Auden British-born American Poet
Vladimir Nabokov Russian-born American Novelist