Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) was an American novelist, poet, and critic. He is best known for exploring the meaning of contemporary existence in a Southern Agrarian America plagued by the erosion of its traditional, rural values. He is the only person to have received Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry (for which he won it twice.) He became the first poet laureate of the United States in 1986.
Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, Warren was educated at Vanderbilt, Berkeley, and Yale universities, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He held various academic positions as Professor of English at Louisiana State University 1934–42 and at University of Minnesota 1942–50, and professor of drama 1951–56 and of English 1962–73 at Yale.
Warren established an international reputation with his Pulitzer Prize-winning political novel All the King’s Men (1946, All the King’s Men film 1949) based on the rise and fall of Louisiana Governor Huey Long.
Warren’s other works include John Brown, the Making of a Martyr (1929,) Night Rider (1939,) The Cave (1959,) Wilderness (1961,) the story of a Jew in the Civil War, and Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971.)
Warren also published some volumes of short stories, and verse including Promises (1957, Pulitzer,) Selected Poems, Old and New, 1923–66 (1966,) Or Else (1974,) and Rumour Verified (1981.)
Warren collaborated with the critic Cleanth Brooks and wrote such critical works as Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert Penn Warren
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
—Robert Penn Warren
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
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: History
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
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
What is man but his passion?
—Robert Penn Warren
Topics: Enthusiasm
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
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